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Show HN: Effortless revenue forecasting for SaaS businesses

17 points by Doches 5y ago

PostHeat 5y ago
Are these the mean forecast based on some ARMA model? Why not include some type of confidence interval also? This something I would want to know as a user.
- Doches 5y ago
  Not an ARMA model, but exposing more information about the output of the model (and giving you more knobs to twist to explore hypotheticals) is definitely coming soon.
mpolichette 5y ago
It's wild that their demo is a real customer >This is a read-only view of real growth data from a Saascast customer — don't worry; they don't mind sharing it with you! I wonder if it'd be easy to tell based on the payment amounts and whatnot who the customer is!
danenania 5y ago
This looks really cool! I think for me to want to use this instead of a spreadsheet, I'd want a clear view of all the assumptions and constants that are going into the model and to be able to modify and experiment with those. Imho forecasts are only really useful when presented alongside the assumptions they're based on. Otherwise they tend to come across as astrology.
- Doches 5y ago
  Yep, making the forecasts more interactive -- giving you more control over the weights and priors that go into them -- is very definitely on my near-term backlog. They are a bit astrology now, which is...quite a damning description, and one I definitely don't want to keep true!
GordonS 5y ago
The demo says it's using data from one of their customers - on the trials page, I can see 4 email addresses that presumably belong to their prospective customers. They look like real email addresses, so if so, you probably want to not show those.
- Doches 5y ago
  Ah, well, that's awkward. They're OK with it, but you're absolutely right -- and we've pushed a quick fix to hide those. Thanks for the heads-up!
ecesena 5y ago
Very nice, I +1 the desire to see more details on the calculations. What's the long term plan for this? A saas / an api / open source? It'd be nice to have integrations with other tools (e.g., I'm thinking to our saasform).

17 points by Doches 5y ago

Are these the mean forecast based on some ARMA model? Why not include some type of confidence interval also? This something I would want to know as a user.

Doches 5y ago
Not an ARMA model, but exposing more information about the output of the model (and giving you more knobs to twist to explore hypotheticals) is definitely coming soon.

mpolichette 5y ago

It's wild that their demo is a real customer >This is a read-only view of real growth data from a Saascast customer — don't worry; they don't mind sharing it with you! I wonder if it'd be easy to tell based on the payment amounts and whatnot who the customer is!

danenania 5y ago

This looks really cool! I think for me to want to use this instead of a spreadsheet, I'd want a clear view of all the assumptions and constants that are going into the model and to be able to modify and experiment with those. Imho forecasts are only really useful when presented alongside the assumptions they're based on. Otherwise they tend to come across as astrology.

Doches 5y ago
Yep, making the forecasts more interactive -- giving you more control over the weights and priors that go into them -- is very definitely on my near-term backlog. They are a bit astrology now, which is...quite a damning description, and one I definitely don't want to keep true!

GordonS 5y ago

The demo says it's using data from one of their customers - on the trials page, I can see 4 email addresses that presumably belong to their prospective customers. They look like real email addresses, so if so, you probably want to not show those.

Doches 5y ago
Ah, well, that's awkward. They're OK with it, but you're absolutely right -- and we've pushed a quick fix to hide those. Thanks for the heads-up!

ecesena 5y ago

Very nice, I +1 the desire to see more details on the calculations. What's the long term plan for this? A saas / an api / open source? It'd be nice to have integrations with other tools (e.g., I'm thinking to our saasform).