Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups

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

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

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.

this is pretty great