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?
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
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
This reminds me a lot of calculators I use for FIRE, ie the ones shown here [0]. Perhaps I should try Causal for personal use as well as for business use. I've also seen Maybe [1] for personal finances, which looks good too.
[0] https://engaging-data.com/early-retirement-calculators-and-t...
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
They're gonna make causal diagrams à la Judea Pearl, haha.
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
please do! spin up an engineering blog on hashnode. https://danluu.com/corp-eng-blogs/
We have released a few bits actually! https://causal.app/blog/scaling is one of my favourites (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000400 )
More of this please.
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#55There 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!
We’ve done some marketing partnerships with Ramp before, would be great to eventually get that data live in Causal!
Or plug in a feed from SimpleFin?
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#56We'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 chal…
>redesigning the formula editor to make human friendly yet expressive enough for the most hardcore user (fun UX challenge) I work in this space. I don't envy this. Been through it more than once. Did you also have challenges with circular references?
We've had "fun" solving this for Phosphor which has similar parts to Causal, but is focused more on real assets and emphasizes connection with computable contracts.
For circularity, we found that we could keep the UX dynamic by making a deep copy of the circular part of the DAG behind the scenes, asking the user to determine which variable in that path should be "resolved", hard coding that variable in the copy, then solving that variable to zero through a newton optimization. Once optimized (in parallel to main graph), it feeds back into the main DAG just like any other dependency.
Would be a silly approach in Excel, but not so much here.
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#57Understand 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
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
please do! spin up an engineering blog on hashnode. https://danluu.com/corp-eng-blogs/
We have released a few bits actually! https://causal.app/blog/scaling is one of my favourites (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000400 )
Machines like arrays, sequential access, avoiding conditions, and not touching memory unless you need to (compression == performance).
Looks like you've traveled the enlightenment path to array languages! The first time I read Whitney's K language description was a singular mind-expanding moment.
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#59WOW! 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.
Curious to hear what issues you faced (please!). I use FF (on Linux) as my main daily driver and I haven't had any issues with Causal (disclaimer, I work for Causal).
(granted, the experience is optimised for Chromium based browsers, but FF is not forgotten).
Re: Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups
#60Congrats 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?
Thanks! We are still very much a general purpose tool, but until we're a household name like Notion or Airtable, we kind of concluded that we'll need to be much more specific about our messaging/targeting until we reach that critical mass!