99% of startup founders are afraid of the terms Pro-forma Financials, Balance Sheet, Types of Cash Flow, WACC, IRR, and especially, Valuation.

99.9% of startup founders don’t understand how to logically estimate demand for their pre-revenue ventures.

If you’re reading this, it’s because you’re raising money or researching the best ways to raise money for your seed or Series A round. It’s a daunting challenge, even for the best finance professionals, and downright scary for startup founders with no finance experience.

Take our Investor Readiness Quiz to assess how ready you are for fundraising!

Calm your fears - You’ve come to the right place!

The Startup Station has helped hundreds of founders just like you to effectively articulate your business case to investors and ensure that your venture is financially feasible. We work with you to create a detailed strategic roadmap, a robust financial plan and a resulting valuation that outline business logic, drivers, financial goals, and key metrics for your company. The resulting strategic and financial plans give you the necessary timely insight on whether your strategy is working and how to adjust it based on market feedback.

We have experts with both Computer Science and MBA degrees. Therefore, we speak both the technical and business languages to help you bridge the gap.

Check out our recent E-Cornell webinars on optimizing your financial dashboard and searching for money.

HOW DO WE HELP?

We offer finance courses, services, and free resources to early-stage startups!

Knowledge of finance is integral for any founder looking to build a successful business but it is especially helpful for those searching for outside financing.

According to Fundable and Entrepreneur, 565,000 startups are launched every year and just under 3% receive angel and VC investments. Entrepreneur identifies three main reasons startup founders fail to secure funding:

• Misunderstanding your financial situation,
• Underutilizing your management team, and
• Lacking a clear go-to-market strategy.

By working with us, you can avoid making those mistakes and get funded faster.

The Startup Station helps you master easy-to-follow frameworks for modeling and valuing your startup. Specifically, we provide the tools to:

• Evaluate the financial feasibility of your business,
• Understand the drivers of your business model and logically determine their values, overcoming the main challenge of properly modeling early-stage ventures;
• Build your first financial model and credibly value your company;
• Learn startup-related finance and accounting; AND
• Create a necessary management tool to measure and monitor the effectiveness of your strategy.

There are three ways of working with us:

Do it yourself: Our finance curriculum is based on real case studies and specifically targets early stage, pre-revenue startups with little to no finance experience. The curriculum includes courses on financial accounting and analysis, financial modeling, valuation, and financing vehicles. After completing our program, you will have the tools to build your own financial model, value your company, and negotiate term sheets with investors!

Custom advice: For those who wish to get individualized support, we are happy to help you on a one-on-one basis. We are leading experts in creating credible financials and fair valuations for any product or tech startup. We can audit and improve existing models or create a new model from scratch. We also provide feedback for your pitch decks to make them investor-ready, logical, and thorough.

For beginners: We offer free resources on social media where we post new content related to strategic or financial aspects of running a startup.

Check out the About Page and meet our Team!

Our educational program

Our content is based on actual case studies and specifically targets early stage, pre-revenue startups with no or little financial history.

Benefits

Our curriculum covers the subjects of financial accounting and analysis, financial modeling, valuation and startup financing for early-stage software, service, and product startups.

Our courses are rigorous, thorough, practical, and appropriate for anyone regardless of their knowledge of finance. Even people with NO finance knowledge can learn how to model and value their company by following our curriculum. We have taught hundreds of founders of different ages and backgrounds. Thus, we know how to explain complex concepts in simple terms so anyone can understand.

If finance makes you anxious, scared, or confused, you've come to the right place. After taking our courses, you will:

• Feel confident that you have a robust financially feasible business,
• Firmly stand your ground with investors, and
• After a successful round of financing, sleep well at night because you have the money to continue building your company into a multi-billion-dollar venture.

How is our curriculum different?

Most financial modeling classes only focus on how to create an Income Statement for a limited number of simplified business models. The financial models they provide are incomplete and lack flexibility to be useful for an individual company's needs. Our financial model template is adjustable, comprehensive, and can be easily tailored for your business.

Additionally, our courses cover:

• Startup-related accounting, financial analysis, and valuation concepts, or the language of investors;
• Assumptions that must be formulated for sixteen business models and how to determine their values, i.e. the fundamentals on which startup financial models are built;
• A framework for modeling common business scenarios reflecting your strategy, or the process which you can use to create your own financial model from a template;
• How to create a financial summary of your results and which key performance indicators (KPIs) must be included for each business model, which is important when you present your model to investors;
• How to determine funding needs and your company’s valuation; both key concepts in fundraising.
• Types of financial vehicles, how they differ, and how to choose the best vehicle for you, which is important when you negotiate your financing deal.

Flagship 7-Course Series

Completing our Flagship 7-Course Series, "How to build pro-forma financial statements, model, value, and finance early-stage startups," enables you to:

• Formulate credible assumptions for your business model,
• Build pro-forma financial projections for your business,
• Value your startup,
• Select your financing vehicle and negotiate your term sheet, and
• Understand the basics of financial accounting and analysis.

This series consists of seven courses:

• Course 1: Accounting and Financial Analysis;
• Course 2A: Financial Modeling for Software and Service Startups: 8 Business Models;
• Course 2B: Financial Modeling for Product Startups: 8 Distribution Channels;
• Course 3: Valuation Concepts and Valuation Models;
• Course 4A: A Case Study: Modeling and Valuing an Early-Stage Software Startup;
• Course 4B: A Case Study: Modeling and Valuing an Early-Stage Product Startup; and
• Course 5: Fundraising Strategy and Financing Vehicles.

This series offers:

• LIFETIME ACCESS to 14+ hours of easy-to-understand MBA-level finance lectures;
• LIFETIME ACCESS to 850+ practice questions;
• AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD IMMEDIATELY: All PowerPoint and Excel materials;
• AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD IMMEDIATELY: Two comprehensive, complete, and functional financial model templates for a fictional early-stage software startup with subscription and advertising revenue streams and a fictional early-stage product startup with four distribution channels.

Support:

• LIFETIME ACCESS to a private Facebook group where you can interact with Victoria Yampolsky and other students.
• You can also always send your questions by email and we will respond within 24 hours.

Other series are available and all courses can also be taken stand-alone.