Break Into the Venture Capital World with Enloop

Running a business takes money. In most cases, you need quite a lot of it, and at times the revenues won’t be enough to keep the business afloat. Sure, you can dip into your savings or get a loan, but the ideal solution would be to bring in investors to spread the risk and unlock the value. Besides, investors can turn into mentors, offering valuable insights about running your business.

A rough sketch on a paper napkin is fine when you are trying to raise money from friends and family. To pitch to a professional investor, you will need a comprehensive business plan that doesn’t leave any detail out about the business. Enloop auto writes business plans for you. It might be a sign of the times that there’s an app fully dedicated to helping you raise funding for a startup, but if you find yourself wanting to get your great idea funded, it might be the very tool you need. Let’s put their claim to the test, and see if it’s the app that can help your startup break into the venture capital world.

Overview

When writing a business plan, Enloop’s patented, innovative system does the heavy lifting for you, all the while educating you on the finer points of accounting and planning so you can really understand your financial forecasts. Based on your inputs, Enloop automatically creates customized financial forecasts for your business too.

Sales, Profit & Loss, Cash Flow and Balance Sheet forecasts are all generated on-the-fly and can be easily updated at any time. The business plan can either be downloaded as a PDF file or shared instantly with others.

Pricing

Enloop’s subscription plans are very sensible. Instead of charging an arm and leg, plans start at $9.95 a month. This plan comes with all the standard bearings, but if you feel you need more deeper financial forecasts be done, opt for the $39.95 plan. There is always the dependable, always free plan that lets you create one business plan without having to pay a penny. And, hopefully you’ll actually get investment, so you can quit worrying about pitching and get back to building your business!

Getting Started

Without wasting time, you can get started by clicking on Add a Company. However, if you are totally clueless hit the What do you need button to see a checklist of must have items for your business plan. You don’t need everything in the list to create a business plan, but with them all, the plan would be more complete. It’s a great place to start by thinking through all the things potential investors will want to know.

Creating a Business Plan

Creating a business plan is a four step process and of those four, only the first two are data intensive. In the first step, all you need to provide are basic information like the company name, address etc. The second step is all about your financial information and how long ahead you plan to forecast your revenues. Unless the investors demand, go with the 3 year annual forecast suggested by the app.

Then, use the form to invite people whom you want to view and edit your business plan. You can always come back and do this later if you need, though. As the final step, you can upload a company logo. If you don’t have one, you could use the LogoMaker that Enloop recommends, or just create a simple image with your company’s name set in a nice font, and sweat these smaller details later.

Fleshing Out the Details

So far, we have successfully created a skeleton business plan. Now, it’s time to fill it up to the brim with all the information about your company and its details. Not one aspect of business detail is left out and the app covers everything from basic business information to marketing and financial plans as well.

Enloop isn’t an app with pages after pages of dumb forms to fill. Business codes can be really confusing and the app has a great tool that systematically helps you find the right business and the appropriate code. And in cases where you don’t have the required (or not required) Government registration, a helpful link to create one is rightly available.

Change your inputs, play with different financial scenarios, and Enloop automatically updates the financial information in the text. This eliminates a tedious task allowng you to focus on refining your plan rather than editing your text every time you make a change to your forecasts. You can always add additional text as you like.

You might want the help of your accountant when filling out the financial and accounting information section to avoid silly mistakes; even as simple as Enloop makes it, there’s always things you could mess up with finances that could hurt you later. Then, from the Reports section you can check the facts in a jiffy whenever you make a change in the original data. The final PDF document downloaded was very professional and looked more like the one created by an accounting department of a large corporation, complete with an index and all!

Final Thoughts

The goal behind Enloop is simple. The web app is designed to let entrepreneurs focus on their business by automating how business plans are written, transcending traditional business planning software and the difficult, boring process of writing a business plan.

Not only does the app takes the pain out of writing a business plan, but also succeeds to a great extent by not giving away the fact that it wasn’t handcrafted entirely by you. I loved using Enloop and when there is a need for me to create a real business plan, I would use this app in a heartbeat! Now to getting that next billion dollar idea to pitch investors on…

So we’re curious: have you ever written a business proposal in the past, and would you be interested in using an app like this instead of writing your proposal in a word processor?