I wanted to build a tool for people trying to break into FP&A. A month later I think I might give up on the idea.
Context: I left my finance job in January. Three and a half years - Big Four, then FP&A for a big retail group. MSc in Finance. And in interviews I still froze on "tell me about a forecast you built," because everything I'd done belonged to my employer and none of it was mine to show.
So I built what I wished existed. A realistic month-end close - messy variances, a stakeholder inbox where one person is "confidently wrong", numbers that actually reconcile to the cent. You do the analysis, write the commentary you'd send a CFO, and get it scored honestly against a published rubric.
It took a month. I don't have a job, so it cost me the only thing I've got, which is time.
Then: 275 visitors. Zero submissions. Zero emails. Zero feedback of any kind. Not even someone telling me it was bad. On a free case 😆
I've spent weeks trying to work out which of these it is:
* nobody can find it - a distribution problem, fixable;
* people won't spend 90 minutes on unpaid practice - a motivation problem and I probably can't fix that;
* or it isn't a real problem at all in the market and I invented it out of my own bad interviews.
So I'd rather ask than keep guessing.
**When you were trying to get into FP&A or a first analyst seat - did you ever practise on anything real?** Not courses or Excel tutorials, but something where you had to reach a conclusion and someone told you it was wrong, and why.
Honest answers welcome, including "this isn't a problem, you built something nobody needs." 😆