Thursday 24 April 2014

Get (part of) your Industry Intelligence for Free. Google Sheets Magic for Entrepreneurs

Email personalised for your industry. Read below to receive the same monthly.

How often do you conduct industry intelligence for your startup? Odds are - most entrepreneurs need to do it a lot more than they currently do.

While an entrepreneur in an early stage startup should focus first on his own product and business, spending a few minutes a month on the industry you're operating in and watching the market performance has value (the ultimate valuation of a startup is linked to listed companies in some ways and listed companies are potential acquirers).

I like to regularly follow the news in the spaces I'm interested in, and monitor market trends for listed companies in these sectors. Google Finance and Bloomberg are great tools I love to use to track the market and trends. For most entrepreneurs though, they are scary tools reserved for Wall Street bankers and market finance-tie wearing people.

Could we make it easier? 
Could we get stock market monitoring through a tool that all of us know how to use? Industry intelligence as a "nothing-to-do" service.

When I work with entrepreneurs as a "CFO by the Day" to help them monitor their progress, I build with them easy to use dashboards for themselves, their teams and their investors. That sometimes involves doing spreadsheets. Not the boring Excel ones. The magic-powered Google Sheets.

Most entrepreneurs I work with with are not market finance experts and don’t do industry intelligence. But that’s not to say that they don't realize the importance of it. It’s just that for a zillion reasons, they don’t.

So, I got down to creating industry dashboards of listed companies. The setup is on Sheets. The data is loaded from Google Finance. Emails can be sent automatically. Best part - it’s all free. Entrepreneurs can get a regular update on listed companies in their industry right in their inbox.

Get Yours for Free once a month: Just email me at CFOasAservice@flowventures.sg with the industry you are interested in. That's it.

SaaS, Gaming, e-commerce and Travel are already available. I will add other industries on popular demand.

This is what you can expect:
- Highlight of the 3 biggest players in your industry (Did you know that in the travel space, Priceline is the biggest at $60bn, followed by TripAdvisor and Expedia at "only" $10bn?)
- Best stock price performance over 30 days
- Worst stock price performance over 30 days
- Listing of all the listed companies included in the monitoring





For those of you who love spreadsheets, this is how it looks behind the scenes. Yep, sparklines are available in Google Sheets to show trends. Isn't life beautiful?

Google Sheets receiving data from Google Finance. You don't even have to do it, just email me.