A visual cash flow tool for Small Business Owners or Professors? | Hacker News Reader

A visual cash flow tool for Small Business Owners or Professors?

7 pointsZoe0110 comments

Hello everyone! I have a visual cash flow app, and I have been marketing it to small business owners. I have had a very hard time managing my business finances in spreadsheets. I have never been a numbers person so formulas in spreadsheets made my work 10x harder and time-consuming. I was looking for simplicity and an app that would help me understand my financial data with just a look.

I couldn’t find any, so out of bare necessity, I built one with the help of my team. It shows my cash flow projections and budgets in a simple chart and graph.

After launching a lifetime deal on Product Hunt we gained traction and few users purchased the deal and loved it.

But, Hacker News was the real game-changer. We discovered a niche we hadn’t thought of before. Professors who manage research labs in universities have limited resources to manage their grant funding and disburse scholarships to students. This segment has good scope and is really struggling with expense optimization and budgeting.

As per the advice of our current user who’s an associate professor at UWaterloo, we changed the terminologies in our app to suit the needs of the niche. We did our research and contacted Associate professors and Principal investigators on LI but we don’t have any response.

Now, I can’t help but wonder should we continue our efforts to market towards university professors or go back to small business owners? What do you think? Should we change the current marketing plan and stick to the original? I really appreciate any feedback.

Thank you for taking the time out to read this.

Why not do both? It sounds like you have already created both marketing plans. How many professors and or SMB owners have you reached out to? If it's not a number in the thousands, you're going to have trouble validating whether or not it is viable. Keep pushing. Maybe spend some cash on lead gen if necessary.

If you're getting excessively low response, try splitting further into 4 different sets of copy, positioning, etc., and spread those among your targets. See what is sticking.

We have been split testing copy but the number is below 1000 so far. We have been running Facebook ads and using LI sales navigator.

> We did our research and contacted Associate professors and Principal investigators on LI

Academics typically don't use LinkedIn much (I assume this is what you mean by LI); if you want to reach them through social media then Twitter is probably a better bet.

However, rather than contacting individual researchers, you might find it more effective to try contacting people in Research Services/Research Support teams, whose role includes helping academics with things like costing grant proposals.

Twitter is a great. Thanks!! We have thinking of being more active there and strategically sharing content to build more authority. Research support teams is another great idea. We have been only focused on PI's and associate professors so far. Thank you for your advice.

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Any link to the app(mobile/web?)?

Hi, thanks for your interest. This is our website: https://monetohq.com/ And here is the registration link: https://app.monetohq.com/register Would love to hear your thoughts on it.

How is this different from other accounting tools? Is there a roundtrip from spreadsheet to monethq and back to spreadsheet?

link please...

Hi, thanks for your interest. This is our website: https://monetohq.com/ And here is the registration link: https://app.monetohq.com/register Would love to know your feedback.

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