When I launched Quantus on Hacker News, I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect. Most products on Show HN are built by and for software engineers. Quantus, on the other hand, is a learning platform for financial modeling. Would the Hacker News audience care?
To bridge the gap, I titled my post: “Quantus – LeetCode for Financial Modeling.” That framing ended up resonating far more than I imagined—Quantus stayed on the front page for 24 hours, bringing a wave of new users and valuable feedback.
A few years earlier, I was preparing for software engineering internship interviews. Like many others, I had to grind on LeetCode. It was a brutal process—some of the problems felt harder than the computer science courses I took at RPI.
But after solving 100+ problems, something clicked. My brain started recognizing patterns. Even when I faced new problems I hadn’t seen before, I could quickly find a direction to solve them. The real-time feedback on LeetCode helped me iterate fast and know when I was on the right track.
Later, as I dove deeper into finance, I realized financial modeling is very similar. It’s the “tech” of the finance world.
Learning financial modeling means:
And just like with LeetCode, the more problems I solved, the more patterns I recognized. That made me more flexible in making assumptions and understanding why certain approaches worked.
That’s why I named Quantus “LeetCode for Financial Modeling.” The analogy wasn’t just marketing—it reflected my own learning journey.
Fun fact 😄: many of the early users who found Quantus through that Hacker News post told me the analogy clicked with them too. They started “grinding” financial modeling problems in Quantus the same way I once grinded coding problems on LeetCode.
Launching on Hacker News was both nerve-wracking and rewarding. The title matters—a lot. How you frame the problem you’re solving, and explain why existing solutions fall short, is just as important as the product itself.
For me, it showed that financial modeling can be learned the same way engineers learn coding—through practice, pattern recognition, and feedback. And that’s the spirit behind Quantus.