Alright, we’re really excited to get these updates online…we’ve been hard at work for weeks and it’s time to share our work with all of you. Aside from several small fixes and enhancements, there are two new updates you’ve got to check out.
New Financial Model:
The old model was really more of a proof-of-concept, the new model is just awesome. First off, it covers all the bases - from manufacturing to financing the business, we’ve got a five step process that covers the inputs. Second, the inputs themselves are changing - instead of assuming each assumption stays the same for the full five years, we’ve got a simple new interface that allows you to plot changes in assumptions over time. Here are some screenshots:
You can form simple curves, fit curves to points you plot and customize it all. It’s slick.
But there’s more. Our financial engine - which churns out the calculations and pro-forma statements based on your inputs is more powerful than ever before. The engine takes over 1000 inputs (which sounds like a lot, but thanks to our new user interfaces you can enter 20 or 60 inputs in seconds!), processes north of 50,000 calculations, and generates a fully-functional Excel version of the model all in seconds. The Excel export is particularly exciting, as it allows you to take the entire model offline for customization and testing. We’ve got all our calculations built into this model for you too, which means you can make changes on the fly in this file and get the same quick and easy pro-forma statements in Excel.
Individual and Team Chat:
We love Gmail over here - we use it everyday to keep tabs on our email - but we also take advantage of the built in chat all the time. We thought it’d be great if you could do the same on our site. So we did, and we’re proud to share this with you. After building it we realized why every site out there doesn’t have real-time chat…it’s a technical challenge for sure.
Either way, what we’ve got is a new bar at the bottom of every page that will probably remind you of Facebook’s chat (thanks to the position and right aligned available connections list). As you sign in, you’ll be plugged into chat and be able to converse with anyone in your network who’s online.
But as cool as chat alone can be - we see real value in teams being able to talk smoothly online while working on the plan or financials. So, we did this too. If you click on Available Connections you’ll see both Individual Chat and Idea Team Chat. The latter allows an entire team to chat with each other all in real-time - whether it’s 3 or 13 of you working on the idea.
The system even senses dropped connections to the server and alerts you - it can even tell whether you’ve been disconnected from the Internet or if it’s an issues specific to TheIdeaStartup - which of course it never will be! 
Abobe Flash is required to participate in chat - though you’ll find there aren’t any flash interfaces - it’s all built right into the site.
Be sure to checkout these new additions and let us know what you think - we’d love to get your feedback. If you don’t already have an account, let us know and we’ll get you online as soon as we can. Per the norm, we hope the new features continue to run smoothly and provide little to no interruption for any users - but should you run into any issues, drop us a line via team [at] theideastartup dot com and we’ll help sort things out.
More good stuff to come.
- the Team
