FAQs

Why Offtoa?

1. We generate financial statements from business assumptions
   1. Benefit: Saves time; let's you spend your time running your business
   2. Benefit: Eliminates errors caused by spreadsheets
   3. Benefit: You get all the financial statements that investors expect
2. We analyze your financial statements
   1. Benefit: You learn about problems with your business strategy
   2. Benefit: You can hone your business strategy
   3. Benefit: You can feel more confident when approaching investors
3. We allow you to analyze your financial statements
   1. Benefit: You can see when you will be profitable
   2. Benefit: You can determine how much cash you will need
   3. Benefit: You can determine your breakeven point
4. We provide step-by-step guidance to complete your assumptions
   1. Benefit: Easy to use (Every software says this! But we bet you'll agree!)
   2. Benefit: You can determine which assumptions you should validate during early stages of your company
   3. Benefit: No gotchas; you'll have a list of all your business assumptions (just like TurboTax ensures you have all your deductions)
5. We facilitate quick changes to financial statements via simple edits to assumptions
   1. Benefit: You can compare multiple scenarios when starting a company (so you can select the best one)
   2. Benefit: You can compare multiple pivot alternatives (so you can select the best one)
6. We provide free access to “.$conf['comp_name'].”
   1. Benefit: If you refer your friends, we'll add 3 free months to your subscription
   2. Benefit: If you are in an accelerator that has joined our family, all member companies enjoy 3 free months

What is Offtoa?

For taxpayers, TurboTax® asks questions in a simple, orderly fashion about your earnings, expenses, etc. and generates a tax return.
For someone considering starting a new business, Offtoa:

1. Generates pro forma financial statements for the business, based on the assumptions of how you expect to run the business. It makes the otherwise arduous task (which you would pay an accounting firm $2000 or more to perform) into a simple and quick “TurboTax®-like” procedure. The pro forma financial statements are designed to present your business in a professional way to prospective investors.
2. Performs an exhaustive analysis of the business plan, especially of those things that a potential investor would focus on - and points out potential problems - complete with advice on how to address problems - so that the business plan is solid and defensible BEFORE you enter the shark tank.
3. Generates a Capitalization Table and Expected Rates of Return for investors but they are for your eyes, so you can adjust things prior to taking your plan to those investors.

Who needs Offtoa?

• Entrepreneurs with or without accounting and/or finance skills
  • If you lack accounting and/or finance skills, Offtoa generates all your pro forma financial statements for you, and explains everything it is doing in plain English.
  • If you have accounting and/or finance skills, Offtoa saves you hours of labor by generating all your pro forma financial statements for you, so you can spend your time crafting your strategy instead of playing with Excel formulae.
• Advisors to entrepreneurs (mentors, educators, incubators) can use Offtoa to help aspiring entrepreneurs understand their own companies.
• Investors (VCs, angels) can use Offtoa to verify that candidate portfolio companies make financial sense.

What does Offtoa do?

Offtoa:

• Provides step-by-step guidance to craft your business strategy and capture your business strategy as a set of assumptions.
• Automatically creates your pro forma financial statements from your business strategy assumptions.
• Provides detailed analysis of your pro formas, just like a potential investor would. And we recommend what you need to change in your strategy to fix any problems.

Is Offtoa compatible with lean startups?

Offtoa supports lean startup processes in four ways:

1. Lean entrepreneurs need to iterate rapidly. Offtoa allows individuals to create professional-looking financial plans in as quickly as 15 minutes. Then as they repeatedly hone their products, they can simultaneously hone their financials.
2. Lean entrepreneurs are driven to validate assumptions. Offtoa helps by interviewing entrepreneurs about their business ideas and recording all the critical assumptions in one place.
3. Sustainable engines of growth are not afterthoughts; they should be planned in upfront. Offtoa allows you to define your entire revenue model using sticky, viral and paid engines of growth.
4. Innovation accounting is terrific but is even more powerful when used in conjunction with traditional accounting. Offtoa lets you pivot with confidence. Every time you determine that a fundamental assumption is not true, you need to pivot. That pivoting requires you to (a) change that fundamental assumption in your list of assumptions, and (b) change other assumptions until you once again return to a state that can result in solid financial outcomes. Offtoa gives you the ability to change those assumptions and instantly see the ramifications.

Just how does a lean startup use Offtoa?

A startup company's revenue growth occurs as the result of only three activities: paid growth, viral growth, and stickiness. Offtoa provides the lean entrepreneur with the ability to define (during the planning stage) values for the assumptions underlying these three engines of growth. Then, as the company launches, as experiments are conducted, and as actual values for these assumptions are determined, Offtoa allows the entrepreneur to replace the values with more accurate values, slowly iterating toward more and more accurate predictions of revenue. As a result, entrepreneurs can be assured at all times that they are on a path that could result in a positive financial outcome.

The parameterized assumptions that drive revenue are unique to Offtoa and are “complete” in that they completely define all aspects of paid, viral, and sticky growth. The assumptions are:

• Assumptions for Paid Growth
  1. Marketing and Sales Activity. Of the many marketing and sales activities that your company may have, which one is going to drive revenue growth?
  2. Customer acquisition cost (CAC). If spending $10,000 on the specific activity creates, say, 200 leads, and you expect to convert 20% of them into prospects, and 50% of those into paying customers, then CAC should be recorded as $500, i.e.,
     
     $10,000 / (200 x 20% x 50%).
  3. Sales cycle. On average, how months elapse between the marketing and sales activity and the resultant customers are acquired?
• Assumptions for Viral Growth
  1. Viral coefficient. How many new customers will each existing customer attract?
  2. Viral cycle. How many days elapse between each new generation of customer referrals, i.e., how long does it take (on average) for customers to “spread the word” and get their friends to become customers?
• Assumptions for Sticky Growth
  1. Average order size. What is the average recurring revenue attributed to each customer? This will be an array of average order sizes, one for each year.
  2. Periodicity. How often will each customer place an order? Daily? Monthly? Quarterly? Annually? Once per lifetime?
  3. Annual retention rate. What percent of existing customers remain customers after 12 months?

Once you start planning your company, choose “Use Marketing and Sales to Drive New Customer Acquisition” as your sales model, and you will see the above assumptions. Enjoy!