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.
2,407 karma · joined December 28, 2011
1. Slack introduces "sidebar" concept
2. Notion takes it a step further
3. Everyone starts doing sidebars, including Linear
We took inspiration from Linear's 'search button in sidebar' and 'profile pic in sidebar', which I think were maybe their unique contributions to the tradition :)
Docs: https://docs.causal.app/formulas/values-with-uncertainty
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!
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 :)
In the meantime, we're pretty chill about offering $99 plans to early stage companies if you're under 10 people, or have raised under $500k.
You can find the form for that on our pricing page under "Startup programme": https://causal.app/pricing
Hope that helps, and thanks for the kind words and loyal 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 :)
We've been using Hypertune at Causal (https://causal.app) for the last few months and it's saved tonnes of engineering cycles letting me and our PM iterate directly on custom onboarding copy for different Causal templates, alongside more typical feature flag use-cases :)
$30m–60m+ Series A rounds are extreme outliers, especially in 2023, and the $1m MRR number you quoted in another comment is 5x higher than where most Series A companies are at.
Would genuinely appreciate feedback on anything specific in the post that you disagree with, with that target audience in mind :)
Outside of categorisation, there's some more technical accounting stuff that also needs to be done, e.g. accounting for revenue properly on the Balance Sheet.
Causal is a financial modelling tool so while we're only Series A, we've spent the last 4 years working with finance teams across all stages (our customers), as well as the wider startup finance ecosystem of accountants, CFOs, VCs.
The post is mostly based on that accumulated experience, but of course coloured by our own experience operating at the Seed/Series A stage as well.
Most of the finance content online is very textbook-y and overkill for early stage cos, so wanted this to be a 'no-nonsense' guide for founders/ops people that have to juggle a bit of finance stuff alongside everything else.
We've helped lots of startups across different stages with finance stuff over the last few years through Causal, so I'm happy to try and answer any questions :)
Thanks for reading!
Causal is a tool for performing calculations, visualising data, and communicating with numbers. We take the good parts of spreadsheets and combine them with the good parts of programming, to make number-crunching fast, collaborative, and accessible to everyone.
We're a team of 25, raised $25m from top VCs (Coatue, Accel) and angels (Naval, Scott Belsky, and more), and are hiring for a bunch of engineering roles:
- Backend Engineer — Data (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/e696335f-c4d8-49ec-b264-c06...)
- Full-stack Engineer — Product (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/4acaafbe-ef3d-45a6-bbe6-687...)
If this sounds interesting, then we'd love to hear from you: lukas [at] causal [dot] app. Thanks!
Causal is a tool for performing calculations, visualising data, and communicating with numbers. We take the good parts of spreadsheets and combine them with the good parts of programming, to make number-crunching fast, collaborative, and accessible to everyone.
We're a team of 25, raised $25m from top VCs (Coatue, Accel) and angels (Naval, Scott Belsky, and more), and are hiring for a bunch of engineering roles:
- Backend Engineer — Data (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/e696335f-c4d8-49ec-b264-c06...)
- Backend Engineer — Performance (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/6059574a-06f5-4635-99f6-536...)
- Full-stack Engineer — Product (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/4acaafbe-ef3d-45a6-bbe6-687...)
If this sounds interesting, then we'd love to hear from you: lukas [at] causal [dot] app. Thanks!
Causal is a tool for performing calculations, visualising data, and communicating with numbers. We take the good parts of spreadsheets and combine them with the good parts of programming, to make number-crunching fast, collaborative, and accessible to everyone.
We're a team of 25, raised $25m from top VCs (Coatue, Accel) and angels (Naval, Scott Belsky, and more), and are hiring for a bunch of engineering roles:
- Backend Engineer — Data (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/e696335f-c4d8-49ec-b264-c06...)
- Backend Engineer — Performance (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/6059574a-06f5-4635-99f6-536...)
- Full-stack Engineer — Product (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/4acaafbe-ef3d-45a6-bbe6-687...)
If this sounds interesting, then we'd love to hear from you: lukas [at] causal [dot] app. Thanks!
Causal is a tool for performing calculations, visualising data, and communicating with numbers. We take the good parts of spreadsheets and combine them with the good parts of programming, to make number-crunching fast, collaborative, and accessible to everyone.
We're a team of 20, raised $25m from top VCs (Coatue, Accel) and angels (Naval, Scott Belsky, and more), and are hiring for a bunch of engineering roles:
- Backend Engineer — Data (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/e696335f-c4d8-49ec-b264-c06...)
- Backend Engineer — Performance (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/6059574a-06f5-4635-99f6-536...)
- Frontend Engineer — Growth (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/b3a654f5-933d-4be9-aca9-803...)
- Frontend Engineer — Product (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/4acaafbe-ef3d-45a6-bbe6-687...)
If this sounds interesting, then we'd love to hear from you: lukas [at] causal [dot] app. Thanks!
Causal is a tool for performing calculations, visualising data, and communicating with numbers. We take the good parts of spreadsheets and combine them with the good parts of programming, to make number-crunching fast, collaborative, and accessible to everyone.
We're a team of 20, raised $25m from top VCs (Coatue, Accel) and angels (Naval, Scott Belsky, and more), and are hiring for a bunch of product roles:
- First product designer (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/512ec4d8-ef6b-44ee-8175-f5e...)
- Software engineers (various: https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app)
If this sounds interesting, then I'd love to hear from you: taimur [at] causal [dot] app. Thanks!
Causal is a tool for performing calculations, visualising data, and communicating with numbers. We take the good parts of spreadsheets and combine them with the good parts of programming, to make number-crunching fast, collaborative, and accessible to everyone.
We're a team of 20, raised $25m from top VCs (Coatue, Accel) and angels (Naval, Scott Belsky, and more), and are hiring for a bunch of roles:
- First product designer (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/512ec4d8-ef6b-44ee-8175-f5e...)
- First demand gen hire (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/d1b99b23-42c1-4c64-87e4-0c7...)
- Software engineers (various: https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app)
- Account executives (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/979aacbe-2ee1-4d57-8dc3-45c...)
If this sounds interesting, then I'd love to hear from you: taimur [at] causal [dot] app. Thanks!
Causal is a tool for performing calculations, visualising data, and communicating with numbers. We take the good parts of spreadsheets and combine them with the good parts of programming, to make number-crunching fast, collaborative, and accessible to everyone.
We're a team of 12, well-funded by top VCs (Coatue, Accel) and angels (Naval, Scott Belsky, and more), and are hiring for a bunch of roles:
- First product designer (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/512ec4d8-ef6b-44ee-8175-f5e...)
- First product marketer (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/3a90b381-4962-4e89-afd3-b6c...)
- Software engineers (various: https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app)
- Account executives (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/2a8587b4-0912-495d-8040-cf1...)
If this sounds interesting, then I'd love to hear from you: taimur [at] causal [dot] app. Thanks!
They’re currently working in Malawi, Pakistan, Liberia + I think a couple of other countries, and expanding this year.
If they're successful then their work will be more impactful (per dollar spent) than even the top GiveWell recommended charities.