Causal Blog
causal.app · Company blog · on HN since 2019
Causal's company blog covers financial planning for startups, SaaS metrics, forecasting and engineering work on their spreadsheet-like modeling tool.
What HN saysHN links it for Show HN launches and finance guides; commenters praise the app as a promising tool for financial modeling and dashboards.
26HN people shared it
18linked it in comments
67stories submitted
2.0Kstory points
2 years agolast shared
2019people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups14 people · 289 points · first shared 2019 · 71 comments on HN
- 2Financial Statements: A Beginner's Guide3 people · 259 points · first shared 2020 · 67 comments on HN
- 3Improving React Interaction Times by 4x3 people · 5 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 4Show HN: Should you buy a house and rent it out?2 people · 353 points · first shared 2019 · 243 comments on HN
- 5Show HN: Excel Sensitivity Analysis Tool2 people · 163 points · first shared 2019 · 30 comments on HN
- 6Forecasting with uncertainty2 people · 128 points · first shared 2020 · 20 comments on HN
- 7Understanding SaaS Metrics2 people · 123 points · first shared 2021 · 14 comments on HN
- 8Minimum Viable Finance: The Guide for Seed/Series A Startups2 people · 40 points · first shared 2023 · 4 comments on HN
- 9Show HN: Should you buy or rent? – a Probabilistic Model2 people · 25 points · first shared 2019 · 4 comments on HN
- 10CAC is not S&M2 people · 18 points · first shared 2020 · 8 comments on HN
- 11Customisable Financial Models for Startups2 people · 11 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 12Down Round 1012 people · 9 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 13Show HN: How does currency hedging work? An Interactive Simulation2 people · 6 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 14Show HN: Causal Scenarios for Google Sheets2 people · 5 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 15The Minimum Viable Data Room2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
arunaugustine · 2025-02-05
This is exactly what I loved about the Causal app (no affiliation). They started as a general purpose spreadsheet with 'Amb' cells built-in, though later on they seem to have converged on the financial modeling space.
[0]: https://causal.app/
Lukas1994 · 2023-06-21
We're using Hypertune at https://causal.app for a few months now and it's been great! We have a few feature flags in there but also some more complex typed data for our onboarding modals.
refrigerator · 2023-02-01
Causal | Engineering | REMOTE (US, UK, Canada) | Full-time | https://causal.app
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-c06de71b7099)
- Full-stack Engineer — Product (https://jobs.lever.co/causal-app/4acaafbe-ef3d-45a6-bbe6-687c022d727c)
If this sounds interesting, then we'd love to hear from you: lukas [at] causal [dot] app. Thanks!
benjaminjosephw · 2020-12-30
Really looking forward to seeing the progress of causal[0]. Looks to me like they have a shot to become the best in class for interactive "dashboarding" in 2021. Imagine being able to do some on the fly scenario planning working from live data. Could be a game changer.
[0] - https://www.causal.app/
atanasb · 2022-04-07
I've had this conversation with a number of financial-savvy friends. It seems that we all have different methods depending on what you're after.
For myself - I hate spreadsheets and updating and categorising data.
I have also tried a number of tools that will "attempt" to automagically present useful reports. But I've found that in 90% of cases - I'm well aware of what I spend on and how much I spend.
The data that really interests me personally is - savings, pensions, asset wroth tracking and scenario simulation.
I find that looking at growth over the past 3,6,12 months motivates me to do even better or look for more efficient ways of organising my finances.
At the moment here's what I do:
- Following a guide like (UK Personal Investing Flowchart)[https://ukpersonal.finance/flowchart/] to judge where I am at and what my short/long term goals are.
- I have automated transfers at salary date (T+3 days to account for variations) to investments and savings.
- I do a monthly scan through of current and credit accounts to make sure nothing unusual occurs as well as monthly credit-rating check.
- For crypto investments I use (Delta)[https://delta.app/en]
- For Stocks and Shares I track current positions via Yahoo Finance.
- Lastly - every now and then I check-in to see how my Pension accounts are doing. So far I've gone through 4 different pension providers and tools - but none of them see to have good forecasting, scenario tools.
As a side topic recently got shown…
mnembrini · 2022-08-21
This seems exactly what you are looking for
https://www.causal.app/
HarveyKandola · 2022-07-21
Looks neat.
Causal [1] seems to be another option (they also raised funding recently).
[1] https://www.causal.app
davidbarker · 2022-03-31
I scanned the comments to see if anyone had mentioned Causal[1] yet. I’d describe it as a spreadsheet specifically for modelling.
I used it to build a cost model for the startup I work at, consisting of around 100 different inputs, and it was rather enjoyable.
I was able to (reasonably easily) insert the different AWS costs for (for example) SD vs. HD video transcoding and see how that affected the costs of encoding and storing video 12 months from now.
[1] https://www.causal.app/
inthewoods · 2021-07-11
Some compelling reasons - I think most of them can be addressed in Excel, but the reality is most people don't know how Excel really works or how to do anything complex in it. Having said that, as your need to batch process numbers goes up, R and other solutions have more value in my opinion.
I'm particularly interested in "half-way" solutions - something between R and Excel. I've been looking at https://www.causal.app/ - no affiliation but I find their approach similar to a Mac app I like called Numi.
westurner · 2020-10-22
https://www.causal.app/ has free business model templates: SaaS (Foresight), eCommerce (https://foresight.is/), Startup Runway, Buy/Rent, Ads Calculator
lharries · 2020-09-26
Would also highly recommend https://www.causal.app/startup-suite for this - allows you to model uncertainty too
alistairjallan · 2020-07-26
I have worked in non finance areas of large corporations and can highly recommend this https://www.causal.app/blog/whats-a-financial-statement
netvarun · 2019-04-17
vistimo.com => more in the context of software time estimate management
They had a post on it yesterday https://blog.vistimo.com/post/169546687605/estimation-math
https://causal.app => might be interesting too
jonpdw · 2025-02-06
was it https://www.causal.app/
melony · 2022-09-21
I think it's more like https://causal.app
franky47 · 2021-04-26
What are the differences between service costs and operating costs? [1]
I'm surprised not to see taxes and other external costs being taken into account in the Retention Margin. Are they pre-subtracted from gross sales as the input of RM ?
[1] edit: found the answer in the Learn More section: https://www.causal.app/saas-metrics/retention-margin
emarsden · 2019-11-25
Nice demo! It's perhaps a little confusing if you're using uniform probability distributions for the sensitivity analysis inputs, but normal distributions for the uncertainty analysis (shown at https://causal.app/buy-to-rent).
A previous comment mentions you are using SALib in Python, which can (even if it's not documented) use normal probability distributions for the inputs: here's a notebook with an example: https://risk-engineering.org/notebook/sensitivity-analysis.html
iamakulov · 2022-11-18
(Co)author here - happy to answer any questions :)
- This was a v fun (and challenging, due to Causal's scale!) project to do
- Most optimizations we’ve implemented were (very effective) one-off fixes. But we were also glad to find some rules of thumb that help to keep the app faster by default [1]
- My most interesting discovery was how ineffective Web Workers are. Causal, sometimes, has to do some expensive client-side data parsing. We tried to move data parsing to a web worker (= a separate thread) – but ended up reverting the optimization because it made the app slower. In JS, you can’t just pass a pointer to a data structure between threads; the browser has to clone the data structure [2] (with limited exceptions [3]). In our case, cloning the data between threads ended up being several times slower than parsing it in the main thread.
[1] https://www.causal.app/blog/react-perf#span-class=inline-codeuseselect…
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers_API/Struc…
[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Transferable_objects…