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Guesstimate – A Spreadsheet for things that aren't certain

getguesstimate.com

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Re: Guesstimate – A Spreadsheet for things that aren't certain

#11

Post by struct »

samstave wrote: post #6
struct wrote: post #4

Great tool! (I’m a regular user :D)

Can you give some examples on what you have built with it?

Sure! Here's a particularly big one I built when deciding whether to invest in Walmart: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/10935

Here's another one I did to ballpark a pension plan: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/11133

Another thing I like is that you can do simple statistical reckoning for it. For my job, I often have to benchmark something several hundred times with or without a patch applied. It can be bit difficult to put "on average x% faster" in context when the benchmark is noisy, but Guesstimate allows you to answer questions like "assuming somebody ran one run of this benchmark with the patch, and one run without it, what's the expected range of performance improvement that they'd see?" with the actual numbers that you get out of the benchmark: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/11850

Re: Guesstimate – A Spreadsheet for things that aren't certain

#13

Post by EGreg »

iamwil wrote: post #5

I saw this a couple of years ago, when it was just a project. Now that there's a price, how did you guys decide on a price? How did you find your first customers? For a broadly applicable tool, how did you know where to start looking?

Wouldn’t it be cool if they got it from their own spreadsheet?

Re: Guesstimate – A Spreadsheet for things that aren't certain

#14

Post by ozgooen »

Cofounder Here: Happy to see this on hnews again.

Update: Matthew (the other cofounder) and I got Guesstimate to a stage we were happy with. After a good amount of work it seemed like several customers were pretty happy with it, but there weren't many obvious ways of making a ton more money on it, and we ran out of many of the most requested/obvious improvements. We're keeping it running, but it's not getting much more active development at this time.

Note that it's all open source, so if you want to host it in-house you're encouraged to do so. I'm also happy to answer questions about it or help with specific modeling concerns.

Right now I'm working at the Future of Humanity Insitute on some other tools I think will compliment Guesstimate well. There was a certain point where it seemed like many of the next main features would make more sense in separate apps. Hopefully, I'll be able to announce one of these soon.

Re: Guesstimate – A Spreadsheet for things that aren't certain

#15

Post by ozgooen »

iamwil wrote: post #5

I saw this a couple of years ago, when it was just a project. Now that there's a price, how did you guys decide on a price? How did you find your first customers? For a broadly applicable tool, how did you know where to start looking?

We initially had a lot of uncertainty on how to price it but wanted to experiment with more users rather than fewer, with the premise that if it were very successful we could scale up.

I think if I were to start again or spend much time restructuring it, I'd probably focus a lot more on enterprise customers. That would be quite a bit of work though, so I don't have intentions of doing that soon.

Re: Guesstimate – A Spreadsheet for things that aren't certain

#16

Post by ozgooen »

carlob wrote: post #8

Maybe it's just the short video and the FAQ, but I found it particularly difficult to find information about the distributions involved and how to choose that. I imagine there a bunch of cases where the defaults would not work like you're trying to do error propagation (all normal distributions) or you're trying to compute interval arithmetic. Is it the case that if you input a range which span multiple orders of mag…

Thanks for the feedback.

We have some documentation [here](https://docs.getguesstimate.com/), and some in the sidebar entree.

Generally, we recommend lognormal distributions for estimated parameters that can't be negative. This works when you span multiple orders of magnitude, though it's possible you may want an even more skewed distribution (which is unsupported).

I may be able to make a much longer video introduction some-time soon.

Re: Guesstimate – A Spreadsheet for things that aren't certain

#18

Post by reitzensteinm »

ozgooen wrote: post #15
iamwil wrote: post #5

I saw this a couple of years ago, when it was just a project. Now that there's a price, how did you guys decide on a price? How did you find your first customers? For a broadly applicable tool, how did you know where to start looking?

We initially had a lot of uncertainty on how to price it but wanted to experiment with more users rather than fewer, with the premise that if it were very successful we could scale up. I think if I were to start again or spend much time restructuring it, I'd probably focus a lot more on enterprise customers. That would be quite a bit of work though, so I don't have intentions of doing that soon.

I feel like this was a big missed opportunity to link to your exploratory pricing guesstimate.
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