We're teaching you too: the Academy is live

Calculating a project's NPV is easy: the calculator does it in two seconds. Knowing what to say when someone asks you "so is it worth it?" is the hard part. That gap — between having the number and being able to defend it — is what the Academy we're launching today closes.

What changed in one line

Starting today, the product has an Academy with its first free track: Feasibility Fundamentals, eight short lessons that teach you to read and interpret NPV, IRR, Payback and Break-even, with exercises that run on the real calculator. When you finish, you can issue a public, verifiable certificate with your name.

To see it, open the Academy from the main menu. If you already have an account, you can start the first lesson in under a minute.

Before

Until this week, factibility.io gave you the tool but not the training. If you arrived without engineering economy knowledge, you had three options:

• Read the blog (long articles, useful, but passive: they explained theory without forcing you to apply it).
• Try the calculator cold and deduce each number's meaning from context.
• Look elsewhere — YouTube videos, university courses, old textbooks — and come back armed.

All three work, but none of them was inside the product. The consequence: every new user faced a learning curve that depended on their personal discipline, not on the product's design.

The cost of that gap

We saw two concrete effects in real usage:

• Users loading entire projects without understanding what the result told them. An NPV of $2.3M is positive, but if the hurdle rate was 12% and the IRR was 13%, the margin is razor-thin — and many kept moving forward believing they had a solid project.
• Analyses completed but never presented. The founder finished the calculation and found themselves without the language to defend the numbers in front of a partner, a bank or an investor. The file ended up shelved.

Why we decided to change it

The product's promise has always been to be the replacement for a financial consultant for founders who can't afford one. A consultant doesn't just hand you a spreadsheet: they explain what each figure says, what risks they detected, and how you should communicate it. That training layer lived outside the product, and that weakened the proposition.

The differential isn't just "you have pretty charts." It's "you walk away knowing how to defend what they show." Without that second part, the first one is a spreadsheet in disguise.

The second reason has to do with how people learn. The difference between reading about NPV and calculating it on your own project is enormous. The Academy was designed around that observation: every lesson ends with an exercise on the real calculator, not theoretical questions. When you finish, you didn't learn a concept: you learned how to use it.

Now

The Feasibility Fundamentals track has eight lessons, one for each decision a founder makes in an analysis:

1. What feasibility analysis is — the track map and the difference between an idea and a project.
2. Cash flow — the input every indicator depends on.
3. Net Present Value — the central indicator: does this project create or destroy value?
4. IRR vs NPV — the rate of return and when it contradicts NPV.
5. Hurdle rate and cost of capital — the minimum rate you require.
6. Payback — when you recover your investment.
7. Break-even — how much you need to sell to not lose money.
8. Deciding and presenting — how to combine the four indicators into a recommendation.

Each lesson takes five to seven minutes of reading, plus an exercise that takes one or two minutes. The idea is that in less than an hour you can have the whole track done.

Each lesson has three blocks

A lesson isn't only reading. It has three mandatory steps:

• Short read — the concept explained in founder language, with a numerical example.
• Exercise on the real calculator — a mini-form where you move inputs until you hit the correct range. The calculation engine is the same one the dashboard uses, not a simulation.
• Three-question quiz — comprehension check. You pass with two correct, and every wrong option has explanatory feedback about why it's wrong.

The certificate

Once you finish the eight lessons (read + exercise + quiz on each) and load a real analysis in your account, you can issue a verifiable certificate. It's public: anyone with the link can confirm the credential is authentic, see your name, the issue date and the reference analysis backing it.

Unlike other online certificates, ours isn't just "I completed a course." It references real work done with the tool. The person receiving it can open it and see the student's actual analysis.

Concrete example: the founder before and after

Imagine Florencia, a food-and-beverage founder who wants to open a café in Mendoza.

Before the Academy, her typical workflow was:

• She'd load into the dashboard: initial investment $18,000,000, year-1 volume of 22,000 cups, price $1,200, variable cost $480, fixed monthly cost $480,000, hurdle rate 18%, 5-year horizon.
• She'd receive: NPV +$3.1M, IRR 26%, Payback 3.2 years, Break-even 800 cups/month.
• Her reaction: "Positive NPV, looks like a yes. But what happens if instead of 22,000 cups I sell 18,000?" She'd lower the input, see NPV fall to $400,000, and get confused about whether that was "still good" or "too close to the edge."
• Result: analysis on standby. Decision postponed due to interpretive uncertainty.

After completing the Fundamentals track (1 hour invested):

• She loads the same analysis.
• In the Payback lesson exercise she learned that 3.2 years on a 5-year horizon is fast (under 65% of the horizon).
• In the Sensitivity lesson she learned that the relevant data isn't "what happens at −20% volume" but rather how far her projection sits from break-even — and she discovered she's selling 1,833 cups/month against a break-even of 800, a 56% margin of safety.
• In the IRR lesson she learned to compare against her hurdle rate: 26% vs 18% leaves an 8-point cushion, robust.
• In the final lesson she learned to present it in five blocks: summary, assumptions, sensitivity, cash flow, methodology annex.
• Result: analysis defended in front of a partner-investor in 20 minutes, without hesitation.

The project was the same. What changed is what she could do with it.

What's next

This first version covers the free Fundamentals track. Coming next:

First, two premium tracks: Advanced Analysis (multivariate sensitivity, scenarios, project comparison) and Pitching to Investors (how to defend the analysis to a committee, which questions to anticipate, how to build the narrative). They unlock with product credits, no new subscription.

Second, more unlockable achievements. Each key lesson enables extra capabilities in the dashboard — for example, completing the Sensitivity lesson unlocks the Tornado chart and the "Improvement Levers" panel for that user. This turns every lesson into a concrete piece of product onboarding, not just abstract training.

Third, content internationalization. Today the lessons are in Argentine Spanish. For the next tracks we'll have English and Portuguese versions, aligned with the locales the product already supports.

Is there an engineering economy topic you feel is missing or that you'd want to see explained differently? Write to psservices.client@gmail.com and we'll evaluate it for the next track. In the meantime, open the Academy → and start Fundamentals. It's free, takes less than an hour, and you walk away with your first defensible analysis.