Taimur Abdaal

Causal — Business planning for modern teams

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Causal lets you build financial models effortlessly, connect them directly to your data, and share them with interactive dashboards and beautiful visuals. Run scenarios, compare versions, manage cash and burn, and prepare for fundraising.

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Taimur Abdaal
Hi everyone! I’m Taimur, co-founder and CEO of Causal, a new tool for working with numbers. Spreadsheets can be used for pretty much anything — Airtable, Notion, Asana, etc. are doing a great job of tackling the “general productivity” use-cases: making lists of things, tracking projects, managing processes, and so on. We’ve built Causal to tackle the other half of spreadsheets: number-crunching — doing calculations, visualising data, and communicating with numbers. And everyone needs to do this: 1. 💻 CEOs at Seed/Series A startups: cash runway forecasting, hiring planning, fundraising 2. 🏦 Finance teams at Series B+ companies: annual budgeting, tracking budgets vs actuals, investor reporting, multi-currency consolidation 3. 📞 Sales teams: quota capacity planning, pipeline forecasting, interactive ROI calculators 4. 📈 Marketing teams: performance marketing forecasting, ad spend planning Compared to Excel/Sheets, Causal gives you: 1. 🔤 Plain english formulas: write formulas you can actually read, with 100x fewer formulas needed to build the same model as Excel 2. 🔌 Live data integrations: pull data from your accounting system/ERP, CRM, HRIS, and data warehouse automatically 3. 🎆 Interactive dashboard reports: share live dashboards where your team can play with the numbers without breaking anything I’d love to hear what you think — sign up for a free account at https://causal.app and try it out! If you need our advanced features (data integrations, version comparison), we’re offering our Startup plan for $99/month (usually $250/month) with the code PRODUCTHUNT. Enjoy!
Al Khan
@taimurabdaal This is incredible! Thoroughly impressed with all the features available. Casual is by far one of the best “spreadsheet alternatives” I’ve come across. Congrats on the launch!
Taimur Abdaal
@adamwesol Thanks for all your support Adam, especially back in the early days!
Jeffrey Johnson
@taimurabdaal - Our org signed up for causal earlier this year. We love using the tool to build complex models and supporting visuals. The team there was extremely helpful with onboarding and and answering questions we along the away. Great job guys!!
Jonah Cait
@taimurabdaal congrats! Wondering if it's possible to confirm the cost to add BigQuery as part of the Startup plan. Causal looks awesome. Wishing you and your team all the best!
Michael Taylor
Been using Causal for a while - for me the major thing is the ability to bake in uncertainty to your models. Instead of saying our cost of showing 1,000 ads (CPM) is $10, we can say it's $8 to $10 and then everything downstream that references that will show a range too. Now you know the probability of hitting your target, missing it, or exceeding it. I've found that to be hugely helpful in setting realistic goals and expectations with leadership and finance. I'm sure it can do a lot more than this, but just wanted to highlight that one feature because it's subtle but really useful.
Taimur Abdaal
@2michaeltaylor Thanks Mike — glad the uncertainty feature comes in handy for you! Appreciate your support in the early days 2 years ago! 🙏
Michael Taylor
@taimurabdaal I was just excited that someone other than me was geeking out over Monte Carlo simulations :-)
Mack Grenfell
Huge fan of Causal. Way easier & simpler to use than Excel, for pretty much any model. Always fun to send a client a model in Causal and let them play with the assumptions, rather than have to go back and forth making tweaks of my own.
Farokh Shahabi
Very nice UI, congrats! Can it integrate with custom live databases like Formaloo or airtable too?
Anna Filou
@farokh_shahabi they can pull data from Google Sheets so you could have Google Sheets pull data from e.g. Airtable. See their integrations page.
Farokh Shahabi
@anna_0x That’s not ideal, do you have plan to add more data sources like Formaloo and airtable and even custom data source integration in future?
Anna Filou
@farokh_shahabi I’m not one of the ?makers (otherwise I wouldn’t have used “they” to refer to them). Just pointed out something I saw on their website.
lukas
Hey Product Hunt, The Causal team is thrilled to share our platform with you today. For 50 years, Excel has been the only tool that truly allows people and businesses alike to model with numbers, albeit not very efficiently. Not anymore. Causal is revolutionizing the way people are working with numbers with direct integrations, fast modelling, strong collaboration and beautiful visualizations. So give it a try and let the team know what you think!
Daniel Hegarty
(Disclosure - I'm a minuscule investor, but my enthusiasm for Causal is not limited to financial rewards!). It is such an impressive tool on so many fronts. Displacing Excel/Sheets feels like an impossible task - but I have been absolutely delighted as a user of the product. It's such an elegant re-thinking of many of the fundamental jobs of the spreadsheet. Would highly recommend to anyone who needs to think about the future through the lens of numbers.
Taimur Abdaal
@danielphegarty Thanks Dan!
Zouhair
I tried Causal to build a simple model for our SaaS business and I was impressed. You can easily connect your Xero account and use your synced data to make projections. Can't wait for the Stripe integration to be live
Grant Shaddick
Love Causal. Makes my team think I'm smart. Amazing job @taimurabdaal
Frank Silva
Love the product, been a big fan as soon as I discovered them. So excited to keep tabs with their progress! Give them a try!
Will Sheldon
I’ve found Causal to be a great way to improve the sync at board level about the business metrics that really matter. Favourite features for me so far include the uncertainty intervals, “common sense” formula structure, data integrations, budget tracking, and intuitive cohorts and charting 🎯
Taimur Abdaal
@wjshel Thanks Will!
Jamie Cox
We use causal religiously now to model out revenue and burn predictions. Life saving product.
Eithiriel DeMerè
Love the templates so far!
Ryan Hoover
Awesome to see Causal's evolution since we first met 2-3 years ago, @taimurabdaal. What's been the biggest learning or surprise so far?
Israt Jahan
Looks so promising. Best of luck.
Kameron Tanseli
Congrats on your launch 🙌 Been a fan of causal ever since we used it for our growth models at tray.io.
Enzo Avigo (📊 june.so)
Great team. Great Product. Period. 🔥
Greg Janota
Congrats! Good luck!
Andrey Vinitsky
🤩🔥 congrats on launching!
Anton Butusov
Looks great! Will definitely try it
Qudsia Ali
Congratulations on your launch.