[HN Gopher] Show HN: Causal 2.0 - Modern Financial Planning for ...
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Show HN: Causal 2.0 - Modern Financial Planning for Startups
Author : refrigerator
Score : 187 points
Date : 2024-03-19 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (causal.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (causal.app)
| skadamat wrote:
| I've been following Taimur's work for many years and it's neat to
| see Causal evolve their messaging.
|
| Overall, it's cool to see lots of startups creating the next
| generation of spreadsheets:
|
| - Causal.app
|
| - Rows.com
|
| - Equals.com
|
| - Rowzero.io
|
| - and at least 50 others I've found
| refrigerator wrote:
| Thanks man! Messaging has been a long journey and I still think
| we're very far from cracking it haha
| dark_ph0enix wrote:
| We've had a number of very interesting technical challenges along
| the way to this 2.0 release:
|
| - traffic tiering and balancing based on request's perceived
| amount of work
|
| - low latency data loading during our calc loop
|
| - implementing a selector framework to unify all the stores used
| by the application
|
| - redesigning the formula editor to make human friendly yet
| expressive enough for the most hardcore user (fun UX challenge)
|
| We really ought to start blogging more about these things :D.
| swyx wrote:
| please do! spin up an engineering blog on hashnode.
| https://danluu.com/corp-eng-blogs/
| refrigerator wrote:
| Hi everyone, I'm one of the Causal founders -- we actually
| launched a super barebones MVP here on HN in 2019[1], back when
| we were still tinkering around on nights and weekends, and the
| reception + signups from that gave us the confidence to quit our
| jobs and go full-time on this, so thanks for the early support!
|
| The product has come a long way since that first HN launch. The
| best way to think about it is as a 'multidimensional spreadsheet'
| -- instead of writing formulas that operate on single cells,
| Causal formulas operate on "variables" that span lots of cells
| (e.g. multiple 'months', or multiple 'products', or multiple
| 'countries'), so you can express any kind of model with 100-1000x
| fewer formulas. Lot of other important functionality like live
| data integrations, dashboards, etc. but the multi-dimensional
| modelling system is really the secret sauce :)
|
| Sounds super abstract, but the main use-case today is financial
| planning/reporting for early-stage companies, although some of
| our users have actually replaced their BI tools with Causal as
| well.
|
| Anyway, thanks for the support and keen to hear feedback :)
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19704418
| sksk wrote:
| I am curious about your comment on 100-1000x fewer formulas. Is
| there a simpler example you can show how your product will do
| it relative to Excel? When I read your comment, I was thinking,
| SUM in Excel operates over many cells. You can have Arrays,
| etc. in Excel. So I am not sure how formulas work in your
| product that is fundamentally different. Is this like a
| function that I can define and call that function so it is
| easier?
| Lukas1994 wrote:
| Great question! Quite often in financial models, you're
| dealing with "dimensions" (e.g. your revenue is broken down
| by product, geography, and time). To model this in Excel you
| have to write complex SUMIF/INDEX/MATCH formulas. Then you
| have to drag these formulas over 1000s of cells (if you make
| a mistake you're screwed, see https://eusprig.org/research-
| info/horror-stories/).
|
| Causal's building blocks are "variables" and "dimensions"
| which makes it much more powerful to work with dimensional
| data.
|
| This video explains this in a more visual way: https://www.yo
| utube.com/watch?v=WELP2A5IzF4&ab_channel=Causa...
| sksk wrote:
| Thank you. That makes sense. I totally agree, Excel is a
| nightmare to debug.
| localhost wrote:
| For your use case, what if you could use Python in Excel with
| pandas, numpy and the Anaconda ecosystem readily available? How
| would that change things?
|
| Disclosure: I was a founding member of the Python in Excel team
| and am looking for new problems that Python in Excel could
| solve.
| varadhjain wrote:
| excited by this launch
| parkaboy wrote:
| Very excited by this and congratulations. I've been an avid
| causal user on the free plan at the early-stage startup I work
| for, and used it at my startup before that. It's been so great to
| see how the product has evolved. I can't overstate what a
| pleasure it has been to work with even when it was in its
| earliest stages.
|
| I would absolutely convert to paying if the jump to the next tier
| weren't so expensive ($250/mo), which has been really tough to
| digest right now.
| refrigerator wrote:
| Totally get it -- we know the $250 is too big a jump and we're
| currently trying to figure out the mechanics of a starter plan
| at $99/mo.
|
| In the meantime, we're pretty chill about offering $99 plans to
| early stage companies if you're under 10 people, or have raised
| under $500k.
|
| You can find the form for that on our pricing page under
| "Startup programme": https://causal.app/pricing
|
| Hope that helps, and thanks for the kind words and loyal
| support!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Same pricing for a non profit by chance?
| martykausas wrote:
| this is pretty great
| loremchecksum wrote:
| Looks great!
|
| I work in enterprise planning and wonder what is keeping you from
| targeting larger firms. Is the startup-target temporary or do you
| expect to let your clients "scale out" of the product?
| refrigerator wrote:
| We do actually have a bunch of bigger companies using Causal
| (incl. public companies) so it definitely works for bigger
| companies depending on exactly what they need. If they're
| looking for a great modelling tool with nice dashboards then I
| think we're perfect, if they're looking for something with more
| "workflows" type of stuff with lots of stakeholders who need to
| contribute to things, then we're less good.
|
| Because of this, we're focusing on smaller companies as a self-
| serve product for a while, and then gradually plan to build out
| that kind of enterprise stuff for bigger companies.
|
| There's also a lot more competition in the mid-
| market/enterprise in this space, and 0 competition for
| SMBs/self-serve, so we thought it would be good to lean in
| there :)
| ig1 wrote:
| If you're looking for something more enterprise focused then
| https://www.pigment.com/ might be a good fit
| slinkypinky wrote:
| Couple questions:
|
| 1. Where does the name come from?
|
| 2. I've seen a lot of startups with the business model of serving
| other startups. These remind me a lot of derivatives in the stock
| market in terms of the "risk" of their business model, and there
| have been instances of companies having to pivot when the economy
| goes down (i.e. Brex)... Do you have a contingency plan for this?
| refrigerator wrote:
| 1. It comes from the concept of 'causal inference' in
| statistics[1] -- when we started out, we though the product
| would go in a much technical/statistical direction, but we were
| very wrong about that But 'causal' as a word is still relevant
| to modelling, etc.
|
| 2. Fair question haha. While a majority of our customers are
| startups/tech cos, a bunch of our customers are also non-tech
| small businesses (e.g. small agencies/consulting firms in
| various niches). Interestingly, we found that after the economy
| went down 18 months ago there seemed to be more demand for
| Causal from smaller companies (startups + regular SMBs) -- our
| guess is that staying on top of finances is important when
| things are tough, and less important when there's tonnes of
| cash flying around!
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_inference
| slinkypinky wrote:
| Interesting, thanks. I'm pretty familiar with causal
| inference, so I'm curious -- what direction did you think the
| product would head in?
| seels wrote:
| Congrats, Causal! I'm a fan and excited to see the 2.0 launch. A
| big part of our financial planning comes from manual syncing data
| from the tools we use for billing, expenses, and so on into our
| excel model -- definitely going to try this out.
| refrigerator wrote:
| Ah nice, definitely sounds like something Causal can handle for
| you :)
| bryanmgreen wrote:
| One thing I have to really congratulate you on is your product
| video.
|
| I honestly think it's one of the best I've seen for any software.
| It showcases the functionality, displays the actual UI, doesn't
| rely on narration, is visually interesting, and succinct.
|
| Was it made internally or with an agency?
| refrigerator wrote:
| Ahh thanks, glad you liked it! We made it internally with the
| help of a video editor.
| killion wrote:
| This does look really good. Do you mind if I ask which one
| you used? Thanks!
| refrigerator wrote:
| Feel free to drop me an email (taimur [at] causal [dot]
| app) and I'd be happy to introduce you to him :)
| zuhayeer wrote:
| The soundtrack actually goes so hard. Love it.
| pedalpete wrote:
| Along with an excellent use of music and pacing. Though it
| doesn't answer the "is this product for me" question, it does
| build excitement to make me want to learn more.
| habitue wrote:
| Do you offer monte carlo simulations for forecasting?
| refrigerator wrote:
| Yes! Causal natively supports Monte Carlo simulation. E.g.
| instead of writing "7.5%" in a cell, you can write "5% to 10%"
| and it will turn that into a distribution, and automatically
| run a few thousand samples with different values every time it
| re-calculates.
|
| Docs: https://docs.causal.app/formulas/values-with-uncertainty
| habitue wrote:
| That's amazing
| ttul wrote:
| This alone makes me want to try Causal. I run my business
| with a gargantuan Google Sheet. It works - we nail our
| numbers. But scenario testing is very hard.
| refrigerator wrote:
| Nice -- definitely try Causal out! We have a 'scenarios'
| feature that lets you easily spin up "discrete" scenarios,
| and then you can use the Monte Carlo stuff to see
| continuous ranges of outcomes.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| First thing I noticed is that the UI looks exactly like Linear.
| Have seen more companies copy the same UI but not sure if it was
| actually Linear that started it.
| refrigerator wrote:
| Haha, I think the evolution was something like this:
|
| 1. Slack introduces "sidebar" concept
|
| 2. Notion takes it a step further
|
| 3. Everyone starts doing sidebars, including Linear
|
| We took inspiration from Linear's 'search button in sidebar'
| and 'profile pic in sidebar', which I think were maybe their
| unique contributions to the tradition :)
| deathanatos wrote:
| Really, it's just a tab strip, no? (But with fixed
| heterogeneous tabs, as opposed to a set of homogeneous ones
| the user adds/removes from as they open/close docs.)
|
| Reminds me of the vertical tab strips in FF w/ TreeStyleTabs.
|
| Which reminds me of OS/2, where tab strips were on the side,
| with some nice skeuomorphism: https://www.landley.net/history
| /mirror/os2/history/os221/vxr...
| monkeydust wrote:
| Looks interesting, any similarities to CausalLens product?
| refrigerator wrote:
| No similarities at all, just the name
| thecharleskerr wrote:
| This is pretty epic, have been testing it for a few weeks - top
| work!
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| WOW! congrats! it's been ages I didn't see anyone actually manage
| to make a website that doesn't work with the non-dominant
| browser!
|
| I cannot even login using firefox.
| durmanhoth wrote:
| There seem to be some synergies that you can leverage with spend
| management and expense management platforms (such as Brex, Ramp,
| etc.). Is this a fair assumption, and if so, have you considered
| exploring any opportunities in this area?
|
| Interesting stuff!
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