Don’t Let AI Slop Sink Your Valuation

AI patronizes you. Cayenne prepares you for your toughest critic.

When raising equity capital, the perceived valuation of your company will affect your dilution. As shown in this study, polished materials increase the funding obtained.

AI patronizes you. Cayenne prepares you for your toughest critic.

Whether you’re seeking startup funding, applying for a loan, or preparing to scale, professionally written pitch materials and a solid financial model can make all the difference. AI can give you a head start, but it can also sabotage your progress, especially when turning your numbers over to an AI business plan generator. The lesson will be painful and potentially catastrophic.

At Cayenne Consulting, our corporate finance experts and strategists help entrepreneurs articulate their vision, analyze their market, and communicate their value proposition clearly and persuasively. The potential returns of investors are estimated in a custom spreadsheet.

Excel has over 40 years of development to model any type of business. Many financial models of AI business plan generators don’t actually use AI. Usually, you will be asked to enter pricing, COGS, annual growth, operating expenses, growth rates, etc. If it does use AI, the numbers they generate are often off by a factor of 3x. If you enter all the forecasts into their platforms, you will be futilely typing numbers into little boxes, just to realize it is in a rigid, proprietary system, and you’ll eventually have to start from scratch if you’re raising more than $100k.

We deliberately fed these AI business plan generators a faulty model, and none of them picked it up. ChatGPT, which is not an AI business plan platform per se, was the only one that pointed out the model was fundamentally flawed.

And if this wasn’t bad enough – several of these new AI business plan generators on the market boast having tens of thousands clients, but had scarcely 250 followers on their social media profiles. If you look at a real company like Carta that has served 50,000 customers, you’ll see they have about 350k followers on their primary social media page. That is a one to seven ratio!

One that didn’t appear to lie about its customer base was still misleading about accessing forecasts offline. It said you can download your numbers in Excel with their premium plan, but the truth is you only get a CSV file without formulas. It is a repeating problem where we have to start their model over from scratch because a CSV without formulas is useless beyond inputs. Just because you can open a CSV file in Excel doesn’t make it a workable model.

With decades of combined entrepreneurial experience and deep industry expertise, our business plan writers create investor-ready documents that support real-world results.

Most of our consultants have hands-on experience starting and growing their own businesses.

Let us help you. Contact us today!

Typical engagements exceed $5,000. See our Resources page if this exceeds your budget.