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Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups

by refrigerator on 3/19/24, 2:06 PM with 71 comments

• by refrigerator on 3/19/24, 4:00 PM

  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

• by dark_ph0enix on 3/19/24, 3:53 PM

  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.

• by bryanmgreen on 3/19/24, 6:06 PM

  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?

• by parkaboy on 3/19/24, 4:23 PM

  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.

• by gillesjacobs on 3/20/24, 1:08 PM

  Looks great, but I have my reservations about confidentiality of the data.

  The financial model, expenses, hiring/ salary plan and basically all thin ledger financials of most SMBs/startups are highly sensitive.

  If leaked or sold to third parties, it gives competitors (or maybe your own investors) insights in the technology, development expenses, and direction of the company.

  How do you handle data confidentiality? How is the data security?

• by slinkypinky on 3/19/24, 5:01 PM

  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?

• by loremchecksum on 3/19/24, 4:52 PM

  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?

• by lharries on 3/19/24, 11:38 PM

  Congrats on the 2.0! If I remember right you started as a more general purpose excel competitor, how did you think about doubling down on the financial planning use case?

• by seels on 3/19/24, 5:20 PM

  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.

• by durmanhoth on 3/19/24, 10:00 PM

  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!

• by jgorn on 3/20/24, 3:49 AM

  Understand this is targetted at financial planning for startups/SMBs, but I'm curious as to if it could be adapted to work for personal financial planning (retirement wealth projections, modelling market downturns)? Curious if that's a use case you considered or a path the product may go down in the future

• by thecharleskerr on 3/19/24, 8:38 PM

  This is pretty epic, have been testing it for a few weeks - top work!

• by jtwaleson on 3/19/24, 7:48 PM

  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.

• by habitue on 3/19/24, 7:44 PM

  Do you offer monte carlo simulations for forecasting?

• by mahsima on 3/23/24, 10:22 AM

  Great one. submit it to productivity.directory

• by monkeydust on 3/19/24, 7:58 PM

  Looks interesting, any similarities to CausalLens product?

• by varadhjain on 3/19/24, 4:01 PM

  excited by this launch

• by martykausas on 3/19/24, 4:45 PM

  this is pretty great

• by skadamat on 3/19/24, 3:36 PM

  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

• by 1oooqooq on 3/19/24, 8:39 PM

  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.