[HN Gopher] Minimum Viable Finance: The Guide for Seed/Series A ...
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Minimum Viable Finance: The Guide for Seed/Series A Startups
Author : refrigerator
Score : 52 points
Date : 2023-03-17 21:38 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.causal.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.causal.app)
| refrigerator wrote:
| Hi HN, I'm the founder of https://causal.app and the author of
| this post --
|
| Most of the finance content online is very textbook-y and
| overkill for early stage cos, so wanted this to be a 'no-
| nonsense' guide for founders/ops people that have to juggle a bit
| of finance stuff alongside everything else.
|
| We've helped lots of startups across different stages with
| finance stuff over the last few years through Causal, so I'm
| happy to try and answer any questions :)
|
| Thanks for reading!
| nawgz wrote:
| I'm always curious what makes you credentialed for this type of
| business / corporate knowledge.
|
| It's not to denigrate this person or their current company, but
| Causal itself seems to only be at the Series A point in funding,
| maybe they're working on their Series B. The author himself seems
| to have no other experience in startups, just some past
| professional experience. On the flip side, it is true his company
| seems to have 7 or 8 digits of funding and has a few employees
| after existing for 4 years, which is probably a pretty strong
| outcome in startup world.
|
| I perceive this to be the value of YC itself for instance -
| institutional knowledge of a hard-to-get type.
| refrigerator wrote:
| Appreciate the thought-leadership skepticism :)
|
| Causal is a financial modelling tool so while we're only Series
| A, we've spent the last 4 years working with finance teams
| across all stages (our customers), as well as the wider startup
| finance ecosystem of accountants, CFOs, VCs.
|
| The post is mostly based on that accumulated experience, but of
| course coloured by our own experience operating at the
| Seed/Series A stage as well.
| nawgz wrote:
| I like that, multiplicative value because you can self-apply
| the lessons you applied to your product. Thanks for sharing
| the knowledge then.
| molsongolden wrote:
| Skimmed the post and there aren't really any "trust me, I'm
| experienced" items in there. The opinionated bits have detailed
| reasoning. I have relevant experience pre-seed through C with a
| bunch of companies, the only thing that stuck out is that the
| bookkeeping pricing listed is on the low end.
|
| Maybe take the service provider recommendations with a grain of
| salt but everything else reads like a nice summary.
| sbussard wrote:
| Why buy bookkeeping services, couldn't you automatically
| categorize expenses?
| refrigerator wrote:
| Lots of tools integrate with Quickbooks and Xero now so you're
| right that a big chunk of bookkeeping work is pretty automated,
| but there will always be a bunch of transactions that don't
| live inside a nice system that will need manual categorisation,
| e.g. random invoices from vendors that need to be manually paid
| and categorised.
|
| Outside of categorisation, there's some more technical
| accounting stuff that also needs to be done, e.g. accounting
| for revenue properly on the Balance Sheet.
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