I recently spent some time on YouNoodle to test their Startup Predictor. YouNoodle’s Startup Predictor estimates what your startup will be worth in 3 years – Bizak estimates (based on revenues) what your startup is worth right now. From the YouNoodle questions it appears that they calculate your startup’s valuation based on the probability of success and the previous success of similar startups and entrepreneurs. For example, I have 13 years of online experience so my guess would be that I have a higher valuation or probability of success than someone with only 1 year of experience?
My initial interest in YouNoodle was because my startup, Bizak, calculates valuation based on revenues and in essence could be seen as a competitor. However, this information could be very interesting and possible useful for Bizak – especially on the consulting side. In addition to the Bizak Benchmarks it could also be beneficial to offer startups this probability of success data. For example an entrepreneur looking to start a business network can use Bizak to determine the average valuation of startups in his industry is $100,000. They can then use YouNoodle’s probability of success data to determine that for entrepreneurs with over 5 years of experience the average valuation jumps to $500,000. That would be a very interesting combination of data! This combination would be very beneficial to investors in the form of direct data, research papers and consulting services. With this information we can decrease investors’ investment risk by providing them with both an estimate of future valuation and which type of entrepreneurs have a higher probability of success.
