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?
Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
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Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#12Looks 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?
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 :)
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#13Hi 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 'multid…
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?
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#14Couple 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?
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#15Hi 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 'multid…
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…
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.youtube.com/watch?v=WELP2A5IzF4&ab_channel=Causa...
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#16Couple 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?
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!
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#17Congrats, 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.
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#18Couple 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?
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/…
Interesting, thanks. I’m pretty familiar with causal inference, so I’m curious — what direction did you think the product would head in?
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#19Congrats, 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.
Ah nice, definitely sounds like something Causal can handle for you :)
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#20One 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?