Picking up where she left off, Victoria talks about how times like these can be either a bane or an unexpected boon for fledgling startups, and how to tell where you fit on that spectrum.

Listen to Part 1 here.

Julie: Hello, everyone, welcome back to the XR for Learning podcast. My name is Julie Smithson, I am your host, and today we have Part 2 with Victoria Yampolsky. We're talking about forecasting for innovation with the execution roadmap. Victoria is the founder and president of The Startup Station, an education and consulting company committed to helping founders be successful and get funded faster. She focuses on creating credible financials and valuations for early stage ventures. Welcome, Victoria.

Victoria: Thank you so much,Julie. It's a pleasure for me to be back.

Julie: Yes. Thank you. And let'scontinue our conversation. The first episode, we talked aboutforecasting for innovation with the opportunity, and assessing whatopportunities are out there. We're right now in the first couple ofweeks of having this pandemic with the coronavirus. So some of ourconversations are obviously highlighted with the sensitivity of somecompanies and businesses and startups which are affected in apositive way, and in a negative way. And of course, assessing theopportunities right now for each startup will be different. But we'regoing to continue on with an execution roadmap. If your business isone of the fortunate ones that is doing well during these times, whatkind of roadmap and execution path will you take? And maybe you cancontinue the conversation from here on innovation, and how-to, andthe impact on revenues, costs, supply chain, and capital expendituresand being able to budget for the unfortunate.

Victoria: For a startup, creating a financial model needs to be a lot more granular than for a more established entity, because you need to really model your activities to be able to evaluate which activities are working, and which activities are not. And here I'm specifically referring to go-to-market strategy. It's not enough when you're thinking about your revenues to just project the top line and say "I think I'm going to get the 10 percent user growth, or 10 percent client growth, etc." because it's not clear where that growth comes from. And when you begin modeling your go-to-market strategy, you are then going to be forced to determine the drivers that make that strategy happen. And then those drivers are the ones that you can change to test the sensitivity of your business model and sensitivity to your business to various scenarios, such as the coronavirus. So when it comes to AR/VR, there are only two types of customers to which you can sell. You can sell directly to the consumer, in which case you employ a variety of marketing strategies: digital marketing, social media marketing. You may go and make podcasts such as this one, you may employ influencers, radio advertising, etc. Or you may sell to enterprises and that usually employs a sales force. Each of those strategies have assumptions associated with them. One of them is a budget. Budget is a discretionary assumption that every company can decide on. And in these times, that is a decision that your company should make, whether you want to increase or decrease your marketing budgets, depending on how aggressive you want to be or more cautious you want to be, in conjunction with your company's strategy and also how you're going to allocate that budget across the marketing strategies. Now, how do you decide whether your budget should be increased or decreased? I think you need to think about who your customers are, and whether they are affected by th