Financial Modeling. Urdu medium.

A friend asked if I could try teaching in Urdu.

The challenge? Teach a 20 minute session on building financial modeling in Urdu without switching to English in between. Watch me fail miserably as I try to do so four times and ultimately always revert back to English somewhere in the lecture.

But the end product is still quite interesting. Even though in most Engineering schools the medium of instruction is English, some how teaching Financial modeling in Urdu was just so much more fun. There is so much more you can say in the language you have grown up with as a child. Even though, its only Urdu two third of the time, but it is still more accessible for many of my students.

As I do more of these, I will keep on adding them to this collection.

Four lectures. Spaced, 10 months apart. Just under one hundred minutes.

Four financial modeling lectures in Urdu.

Part I. Building models.

How to build a simple financial model in 19 minutes.

Mostly Urdu. 85%. Some English. 15%. Excel model walk through. Some Excel required.

Part II. Linking profiles and models

How do you link customer stories to financial models? How do you pitch a business model centered around the life arc of a single customer?

Mostly Urdu. 70%. Some English. 30%. Excel model walkthrough included. Some Excel required.

Here is a walk through of a real business that sells exam prep and continued medical education solutions to doctors and physicians in the making. We start with the customer life arc, map that to LTV and link that to our financial model. How? Start with your customer’s journey, link to LTV, model churn and retention, link that to scale multiples, link that to financial model and build your pitch around that story.

Part III. Investor Mindset.

Mostly Urdu. Some English. 30%. No Excel.

What questions should your model answer when you build it for tackling investor filters. Investors have multiple filters that they use to screen ideas, teams and founders.

a) Credibility. Do you know what you are doing, who you are doing it for and have you done it before.

b) Is it worthy of being done? Will it be big enough?

c) What is the timeline and what do we need? In terms of capital and resources?

d) What are the key assumptions that need to be validated

e) Is this a good match for our investment thesis, personal fit and interest.

Part IV. Modeling revenues, reach and growth.

Mostly Urdu. Some English. 35%. No Excel.

In any profession upgrading our skill level to the next stage requires context. It is important to understand intent and purpose. Why do we do what we do (build models), how will they be used (applications), what questions (discovery) should we ask ourselves, who will use them (investors or founders?).

51 minutes on modeling revenues, reach and growth using the sales funnel. And thinking and discovering business models.

Here a list of questions and challenges we try to answer in an hour.

1. Investor models in venture capital and what they imply for model builders. What do investors solve for? How is that different from what founders solve for?
2. Credibility and fit for venture portfolios. How do we address the credibility question?
3. Lazy thinking. Don’t steal that deck yet. What is the right profile for customers and markets. Do large markets necessarily mean large audiences? Do we know what we are doing?
4. Modeling revenues. Using sales funnels to create structure and revenue drivers. Extending sales funnels from digital to physical worlds.
5. Addressing reach and unit economics. The social campaign case study. How customer retention supercharges growth and profitability.
6. Validating assumptions. Social sales campaign that aren’t good deals. What do you need to run a manned mission to Mars? What will get you killed on the way back?
7. Linking profiles with products and funnels. Pick one of the two. 2 million targeted segment with a well specified need or 100 million unbanked customers? The wrong choice loses you half a billion dollars in three years. Why?
8. Modeling growth. Can’t model growth by talking about drivers outside your model. Fix growth or fix your model. If you can’t model it, you can’t grow it.
9. Aligning models and investors.