refrigerator

Very fun and impressive to do this without LLMs!

My score:

191 animals listed 𓆈𓇼 ⬛鯉𓃱唐𓆉𓃸𓆣𓆉

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Great concept — definitely needed and will hopefully push the labs to improve design abilities of models!

Amazing, congrats man!!

Would love to chat to it — please publish online!

This is spot on. All the smart and ambitious people I know who studied (non-software) Engineering at university in the UK have ended up going into software engineering via self-teaching or finance/consulting because the only hardware engineering career paths seem to be working for Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere with terrible pay, or alternatively working at Jaguar Land Rover in the middle of nowhere with terrible pay

Thanks! Definitely keen to start something again eventually, but in no rush right now :)

Thanks man!

We started as a US company in 2019 to make fundraising easier, and I think this did have a material impact. It's operationally quite annoying, but chances are that we would have had to do it eventually, to efficiently employ US people without paying Deel extortionate fees

Lucanet approached us a few months ago, we were open to taking a couple of meetings to learn more, and they sold us on the acquisition pretty well

We will likely stay focused on financial planning rather than go broad on all the rest of the spreadsheet use cases

That’s awesome! Thanks for using Causal and really glad you like it.

Nothing will change for existing users so you can keep using it for sure :)

Yup we’re sticking around and leading the Causal business unit within Lucanet

Thanks!

Thank you!

Thanks!

Thanks! We hope to get back on the pod :)

I think the spreadsheet space is honestly super challenging. There’s lots of possible use-cases for these tools, but also, Excel/Sheets are great products that everyone already knows how to use.

I think if these products nail some core use-case(s) that are valuable enough to build the core business around, then this can probably get you to “escape velocity” and you can start to become a truly horizontal tool as traction and awareness compound. (This is the path we were going for)

Lots of spreadsheet type products have tried to stay very horizontal from the beginning and end up trying to boil the ocean, or ended up focusing on a dead-end use-case that isn’t valuable enough to reach that escape velocity.

Thank you!

Without getting into numbers, it’s more than we would have been able to make at, say, a big tech job over the same time period (5 years)

Thanks!

We didn’t have an end goal in mind from the beginning — we had the idea for the product and wanted to see if it had legs as a business, and then grow it and see where we could take it.

From what I recall, I don’t think this kind of acquisition was on our radar in the early days — we expected the startup game to be much more binary (massive outcome or bust), and this was the standard narrative at the time.

We’re fortunate to have landed in a middle ground that more founders should be aware of earlier on (and I think awareness is increasing).

Not a massive outcome by VC standards, but still a win for us, our team, our customers, our product, and our early investors, and not the end of the journey yet!

Ah awesome, thanks!!

Product acquisition, we’ll be continuing to grow Causal at Lucanet, lots of potential to cross-sell into their existing customer base :)

Thank you!

Thanks man!

Hi, CEO of Causal here — Lucanet has been around for ~25 years and their product is very mature, but it's also very good software. Super high NPS and metrics, really quick time-to-value, extremely happy and sticky customers, etc. The UI might not follow the latest startup trends, but don't be fooled by that :)

The UI is definitely similar and no doubt that we're competitors, but under the hood I think we've taken somewhat different approaches to how the product works :)

Definitely — we have a bunch of users doing that kind of stuff in Causal as well. The product is completely general-purpose (a bit like a spreadsheet), but for business reasons, we're trying to keep our messaging and targeting much more specific to the startups/SMB 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!

We’ve done some marketing partnerships with Ramp before, would be great to eventually get that data live in Causal!

Yup we’ve done that a bunch - please fill in the form and we’d love to consider :)

Feel free to drop me an email (taimur [at] causal [dot] app) and I'd be happy to introduce you to him :)