Featured Startup Pitch: Enloop—Bringing sanity to the small business planning process

Company: Enloop
Website: www.enloop.com
Founder: Cynthia McCahon
Headquarters: San Francisco
Year Founded: 2010
Employees: 6
Investors:  Family and friends

Company Description (in 140 characters or less): "Enloop helps entrepreneurs and small business owners auto-write business plans, test their idea and forecast their success."

By Cynthia McCahon, Founder and CEO

Product Overview

Enloop is a free software-as-a-service tool that helps everyone from the seasoned business owner to students dreaming up businesses in their dorm-rooms to quickly build bank-ready business plans and quantify the probability of success for their business idea. Users complete a simple step-by-step online form and Enloop automatically generates a customized business plan and performance score for the user, complete with text, financial forecasts and ratio analysis prepared on-the-fly, ready to present to financial institutions.

Founders’ Story

Enloop was created out of frustration. I had been helping small businesses with their financials for over 15 years and watched a lot of people break into their savings and 401ks only to end up empty-handed because they didn’t understand their risk. The simple truth was that there was no system that could help people answer the essential question of ‘How do you know if a business idea is a good idea’? Why? Because a good business plan helps you communicate business ideas, financials and the risk associated to partners and lenders. And a great business plan helps you communicate with yourself about whether the business is worth pursuing.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

We have been very lucky in this regard as we have a $0 customer acquisition cost since our launch in early May, mostly due to word-of-mouth and viral groundswell. We have a PR/social media team that handles press and community outreach to small business forums and entrepreneurs that has done a fantastic job and we have several social media campaigns that we’re in the midst of developing as well. We have also been featured in Forbes, Inc., CNNMoney and most recently in ReadWriteWeb which has helped us grow our user base significantly.

How the Company Differentiates Itself from the Competition

Enloop is unlike any other business planning and forecasting service. It’s a cloud-based living document that allows anyone to evaluate the potential for success of a business idea, or improve existing businesses by using a predictive scoring algorithm (Enloop Performance Score). The system provides potential business owners with a real-time score based on industry-specific data (on a scale of 1-1,000) that updates as the user interacts with the system. This allows the user to immediately know whether or not their business idea will be successful.

Business Model

Enloop’s basic features will always be free and will be providing premium plans in the coming months, including financial forecasts, financial ratios and the ability to print out your own unbranded PDF business plans.

Current Needs

We are looking for a seed round of about $1-2 million right now.

Enloop – www.enloop.com