Being a Founder is hard…you have to wear a TON of hats… and one of the most important but also one of the ugliest hats in a Founder’s closet is Finance. If Finance were a hat it’d probably look like your grandpa’s fedora…dusty, smelly, and out of style. Yet Finance is the literal LIFE BLOOD of any business. Without cash coming in, without positive economics, businesses fail, that’s the hard truth.
Our mission at Sturppy is to help build a future where Founders have access to financial tools and educational resources to build economically stable and scalable companies… You could say we’re essentially on a mission to bring fedora’s back into style and make finance sexy again for Founders. 😉
In late 2021 we released our flagship product, Sturppy Planning. Sturppy Planning is a financial planning and forecasting tool for early stage startups and small businesses. We looked at the market and asked ourselves, “Why isn’t there an easy way to build a financial model for a startup or small business?”. Sure there’s Excel but in order to build a financial model with Excel you need domain knowledge, not only for Excel but also in financial modeling and finance. We created Sturppy Planning as a solution to those exact problems; it’s easy to use, powerful, and has been used by over 4,000 founders from 98 countries to build investor-ready financial models.
Sturppy Planning is one of a kind and is a fantastic resource and tool for early stage founders that have aspirations of raising outside funding or for founders just looking for an easier way to understand if their assumptions about their business economically make sense. Even if you have zero knowledge of finance or financial modeling, you can use Sturppy Planning to build a beautiful, shareable, investor-ready financial model in a fraction of the time it’d take with an Excel template.
Most Sturppy Planning users are pre-revenue or early revenue, and haven’t raised significant funding beyond friends and family rounds. If you’re at this stage today, Sturppy Planning is a game changer… It’s been used by Founders to secure pre-seed, seed, and even series A rounds. But there’s a point in a startup's maturity, typically when $10K/mo in revenue has been crossed, where the financial planning priorities evolve. When a startup reaches that inflection point ($10K/mo or raising $250K in funding) they suddenly have a whole new set of challenges to tackle beyond what Sturppy Planning is capable of. Things like tracking actual cash burn, runway, budget vs. actuals, board reporting, revenue forecasting, and more… That's where Sturppy Plus comes in 👇
CFOs are expensive…like $424,464 average annual-salary-expensive (source). So when’s the right time to hire a CFO? According to sources like TechCrunch, most startups don’t need a full time CFO until they’ve crossed $100M in annual revenue. Some rules of thumb say you don’t need to hire a CFO until you’re 12 to 18 months out from a planned IPO…
OK well, so…what’s the main role of a CFO in a startup anyways? CFOs are primarily responsible for helping the CEO and/or founding team plan for the future. CFOs tackle tasks like: managing the financial reporting, creating forecasts and models, establishing budgets, reporting on budget vs. actuals, assisting with board reporting, and handling new capital raises. You can’t rely on the bookkeeper or even a controller to tackle these taks… Without a CFO, all of these responsibilities fall on the shoulders of the Founder.
Our team looked at this set of problems and said, “OK, CFOs are clearly too expensive for even growing startups, but that set of tasks is also a HUGE burden for founders to take on themselves…can we create a new tool and set of features to help tackle this?”...queue Sturppy Plus!
Sturppy Plus is a CFO co-pilot for data-driven Founders. We built Sturppy Plus to be a helpful hand to Founders planning for the future. It tackles ALL of the tasks expected of a CFO; live financial reporting and tracking, forecasting/modeling, budget vs actual reporting, and even builds graphics that can be used for board reports and future fundraising rounds.
STEP 1: Connect your live data sources to Sturppy Plus
Accounting software: (i.e. QuickBooks, Xero, etc.)
Acquisition data: (i.e. HubSpot, Shopify, Google Analytics, etc.)
STEP 2: Transform and structure your data
STEP 3: Visualize your data in the form of live dashboards and automated reports
*We provide complimentary white glove onboarding for all of our Sturppy Plus clients to ensure all of your data, KPIs, dashboards, and reports meet your needs.
Having a platform like Sturppy Plus allows Founders to focus on growing the business without having to spend thousands and hundreds of hours per year with consultants or fractional CFOs.
If you think your business could benefit from Sturppy Plus, schedule a free 20 min demo call with myself.
For us, the job is never 100% finished when it comes to software…there can and will always be improvements we’re focused on making. With Sturppy Planning, we’re excited to have recently released templates - a whole new way to speed up the model building process. With Sturppy Plus, we’re working on building new integrations and are even thinking about ways we might be able to introduce natural language and AI into the product 🤫👀
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