We often see a startup emerging with a boom, a great idea, an exceptionally passionate team, receive a good amount of investments but within a few months or a year, it fades away. What is the common factor in all these startups that fail to sustain themselves?
Why startups fail?
When Meenah Tariq, a seasoned entrepreneur, co-founder, trainer and consultant for many startups, an accelerator at Invest2innovate and a Venture Capital Investor says why a startup fails, you listen carefully.
According to her these startups show promising prospects but can’t sustain themselves because they fail to handle the finances well. Small businesses often mix their personal and business finances causing uncertainty in the growth chart, vague profit determination and an ambiguous customer acquisition cost.
Handling finances isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Expecting a nascent business to hire an experienced accountant is unfair given their bounded resources. What is the solution then?
In this age of Artificial Intelligence, the solution has to be a digital app that handles all your money matters providing precise revenue, profits and costs and keeping a record of all your financial reports and documents.
What is Metric?
Metric is a team of veteran entrepreneurs, industry experts, and venture capital investors that have intensive experience with startups. The founders consulted many small businesses and startups regarding issues they face in financial management to come up with the model of metric.
“We believe it is impossible for a business to survive and grow without the right financial tracking and insights.”
~ Metric founding team
Metric offers financial assistance. It requires you to enter your inflows, outflows and number of orders per day. As a result of these inputs, the app provides you with financial documents and professional accounts required to strategize your business, apply for loans or for taxation purposes.
Good bookkeeping practices provide transparency of transactions which is a great way to minimize the smallest of corruptions. It also portrays a clear and sorted image of the company for venture capital firms and investors.
Is Metric just a digital ledger?
No, there’s definitely more. The prime feature of the app is that it recognizes and states all the critical metrics that your business needs to be tracking.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC measures how much an organization spends to acquire new customers. Metric app in accordance with your data suggests ways to optimize CAC.
Average Order Value (AOV)
It notifies you of your AOV which tracks the average amount spent each time a customer places an order on a website or mobile app. Based on the long-term value of individual customers, you can update your pricing strategy and marketing.
Lifetime value (LTV)
LTV is an estimate of the average revenue that a customer will generate throughout their lifespan as a customer. Knowing these statistics will help the founders formulate a plan that would sustain the company while attracting a new audience.
Seasonal Insights
One feature that amazes me is the insights it provides on Seasonality. What season witnessed better sales or more new customers, which happen to be the dry seasons, gives all the information. Using this data smartly would put the team on right track in what promotions should be offered in which season.
Performance of Similar Businesses
Now for the most interesting part, by an anonymized system, metric tells you about similar businesses and their performance relative to yours. This insight could make you do wonders if used proficiently.
Financial Plans of Metric
Metric is currently offering free and paid versions of the app. The free app provides records, insights and suggestions. But, the advanced version offers affiliated backend real accounting platforms. Here we list the financial plans the Metric app offers:
- MICRO | $0
- Real time financial dashboard
- Automatic metric tracking
- Custom profit-loss, revenue, and expense reports
- Cloud-based transaction record
- Business and competition insights
- STARTUP | $86/ month
- All of MICRO features
- Cloud-based bills/invoices uploads
- Personal accountant support
- Payables and Receivables functionality
- Monthly profit-loss, balance sheet and cash flow reporting
- GROWING | $175/ month
- All of STARTUP features
- Complete, cloud-based, audit-ready accounts maintenance
- Payroll processing
- Annual IFRS and IAS compliant financial statements
Access to the app was earlier given to some startups only for testing and feedback purposes. Now, however, the app is available for beta testing. The metric app is taking sign up requests from businesses ranging from a single person to up to a team of 40 persons. There are absolutely no specifications around which type of businesses can use it. As an incentive, it gives a bonus credit of $250 for trials of the advanced version of the metric app.
Fundraising by Metric
Pre-Seed fundraise of $900K led by i2i Ventures
On March 18th, 2022, Metric announced raising a total of $900K in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round led by i2i ventures. The round saw participation from many local and international Venture Capitalists including Ratio Ventures, Deosai Ventures, Kinnow Capital, Outliers Venture Capital and Augmentor Capital. Along with the VCs, angel investors such as Aspire and Lifepal’s founder Giacomo Ficari, Arif Habib Limited Chairperson Alam Zafar, deep tech VC Faridul Haque and founder of Eligible.ai Rameez Zafar also participated.
Considering the highly skilled team and their extensive experience with startups in Pakistan, Metric has a high chance of success. The oversubscribed funding round further validates the app’s demand and trust of investors in the product and the team. The new concept would enable businesses from all socioeconomic classes to keep their money managed and sorted and thus increase their prospects of success.
