Readit NewsI have some experience with accounting software and its use in various types of business (not just startups).
Xero (rather than Quickbooks) is dominant in the UK and it has a lot of problems. However, I think you are addressing a fundamentally different market. Quickbooks and Xero are both targeted at the long-tail of small businesses - think tradesmen, cafes, hairdressers, etc. The main thing they accomplish for those customers is basic book keeping and business functions (like invoicing, payroll, etc)
Your software seems much more aimed at small companies which want sophisticated tools to generate financial insight. This is not a criticism, just a comment that this is a different and potentially smaller market.
However, one way you could capture the "long tail" of small businesses is by winning over the high-street accountant. If you could let them prepare annual accounts with 10x less work - even if the customer book keeping is a mess - then every accountant will recommend your software to their clients.
Anyway - great to see something new in this space. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss further.
This is clearly not an attempt to replace Excel, it's an attempt to accomplish a set of use cases in a better way than clunky export-import flows.
The in-app sheets look great, keep going!
> This is clearly not an attempt to replace Excel, it's an attempt to accomplish a set of use cases in a better way than clunky export-import flows
This is exactly how we think about this too.
If you give the user time to get through all of the integrations/setup steps, you should be even more confident in your ability to convert them as they're invested at that point.
If you're worried about the 'load' of a user on your SaaS, then you have bigger issues to solve because the unit economics of having a low usage/free tier user should be essentially free. If a user does require a lot of human touch/support during their trial, then I feel like you handle that manually on a case by case basis. It's likely going to be rare and you can decide how to handle (eg. talk to them about paying for support / moving to a paid plan / etc). I tend to believe you're missing out on the learning and feedback loop from these types of users even if you perceive them as unprofitable or what have you.
The original intent behind 14 days was to force a deadline onto user to get set-up properly and realize value of the product. (Seeing their financials in real-time)
Though the comment above justifiably mentioned that some folks might want an entire accounting period to run books in parallel while evaluating. We'll keep looking into this.