In 2014, I was working at Homejoy (RIP), and started hanging out w/ this guy I sorta knew from college. We were reintroduced at Mission Cliffs, started climbing together ~5-6x a week, and talked a lot about startups since I was a newcomer who was just learning about the space. Oliver co-founded an analytics company (Sensor Tower) and eventually invited me over to visit their office which they were sharing w/ another analytics company started by two guys from college that I also kinda knew: Spenser and Curtis.
They were sharing an office in the same building as Dropbox (ooo fancy) and each had one, mayyybe two employees. At the time, they were both still figuring out how to increase their self-serve revenue in hopes of eventually selling to businesses. (Hilariously, I remember thinking how boring B2B SaaS businesses were compared to... on-demand home cleaning startups??!? Oh how young and naive I was back then, haha)
Anyway, fast forward seven years… Oliver and I got married, had a baby, and now Spenser and Curtis' “baby,” Amplitude, is all grown up! [insert crying emoji]
I cannot overstate how proud I am of them and happy for the success of Amplitude. Spenser is one of the hardest working and most down-to-earth CEOs I know, too, so this monumental milestone is beyond deserved. What’s more, Amplitude is one of my customers on Key Values, and I am also a very satisfied Amplitude user myself. I mean, these are the SV stories we all dream of (using each other’s products, being each other’s customers, and building a company that goes public!) and they're coming true, y'all!
The biggest congrats to Spenser, Curtis, and the rest of the Amplitude team! YOU DID IT!
This is a great story! I love hearing about startups when they were tiny and growing (YC does a great job with this; Segment comes to mind).
My story about meeting someone "famous" when they were tiny is: I met @muneeb (a well known guy in the bitcoin-universe) in a 2 person office in a wework in NYC back in '14/'15. They were doing an identity/crypto sort of thing that I didn't understand.
The analytics space did not work out the way I expected. I remember the dark ages of google analytics where you couldn't granularly segment your data.
Then came Mixpanel with a product that worked well but had a critical flaw around tying back user profile data into event segmentation. That spawned off a number of competitors: amplitude, heap, etc.
Also the rollup product, Segment which basically put the fear of god in these companies' sales teams because switching costs were essentially negligible.
where Mixpanel began as the clear market leader, amplitude caught up. So began a race to the bottom for lowering the cost per event tracked as well as an arms race of features. Oddly enough, all of these companies are YC backed, and yet in competition with one another.
This space in general has changed the way we build products to be more rigorous and analytical about the features we create and meticulous in our execution with respect to our users. Congrats to the Amplitude team on their work up to this point and their execution that has lead to this IPO.
I think it’s KissMetrics that began as clear market leader, before losing to Mixpanel.
KissMetrics had great content marketing, its blog was educating a generation of startup founders on how to use analytics.
There is a post-mortem from the founder somewhere explaining how they lost that initial advantage. IIRC, basically worse vision/execution than Mixpanel (as they were basically the same product).
> Oddly enough, all of these companies are YC backed, and yet in competition with one another.
Doesn't seem that strange to me. If you're spending 1x on backing each startup, you're expecting most of them will fail and one of them will return 50x. It's mostly just a numbers game.
It is unfair from a startup perspective because you are also backing the competitor. Question becomes whom do you prioritize? How do you prioritize help?
At one point our mixpanel bill was more than our AWS one. No one said enlightenment would be cheap. Amplitude went after Mixpanel on pricing first. They basically offered 10M events free for startups.
Amplitude is NOT a great product when you actually try to implement it. I have seen at least 3 companies pay for them based on how good it looks and all the promises but only to realize that the integration is actually very hard, and the data in Amplitude is often wrong! Also they dont do a good job in sending data back to things like SFDC and what not.
I used to help answer customer support questions with Amplitude. Sometimes what looks like incorrect data is just that the query is different from what you’d expect. Something like “has a user been retained?” is a complicated question and has a very specific definition that may not be surfaced in the UI entirely, yet varies from analytics product to product.
The result is sometimes the data seems to be wrong (inconsistent with other products) when really the problem is a lack of industry standardization on the different definitions of terms.
> In October 2019, we entered into a 36-month contract with AWS for hosting-related services. Pursuant to the terms of the contract, we are required to spend a minimum of $15 million within each contract year for three years. As of December 31, 2020, we had $17 million remaining on the commitment.
Seems like there are managing their opex fairly well. But, I wonder for every customer dollar spent on Amplitude, how many cents directly goes to Amazon?
> "Seems like there are managing their opex fairly well."
Are they?
They signed a $45M TCV (which equates to $1.25M per month). In a span of 14 months (Oct'19 - Dec'20) they spent $28M ($45M - $17M remaining), which equates to $2M/month in AWS spend.
It’s so crazy to see this. I still remember meeting Spenser and Curtis for the first time when they were just like half a dozen people. Even then it was clear this solved a huge pain. Surreal to see. Congratulations Spenser, Curtis, and Jeff!
Happy Amplitude customer here. Congrats to Spenser and the team!
We got on for the generous free plan, stayed for the simple UX. Amplitude has been the only analytics product that we've gotten the whole team using (operators, engineers, designers, product).
Readit News
In 2014, I was working at Homejoy (RIP), and started hanging out w/ this guy I sorta knew from college. We were reintroduced at Mission Cliffs, started climbing together ~5-6x a week, and talked a lot about startups since I was a newcomer who was just learning about the space. Oliver co-founded an analytics company (Sensor Tower) and eventually invited me over to visit their office which they were sharing w/ another analytics company started by two guys from college that I also kinda knew: Spenser and Curtis.
They were sharing an office in the same building as Dropbox (ooo fancy) and each had one, mayyybe two employees. At the time, they were both still figuring out how to increase their self-serve revenue in hopes of eventually selling to businesses. (Hilariously, I remember thinking how boring B2B SaaS businesses were compared to... on-demand home cleaning startups??!? Oh how young and naive I was back then, haha)
Anyway, fast forward seven years… Oliver and I got married, had a baby, and now Spenser and Curtis' “baby,” Amplitude, is all grown up! [insert crying emoji]
I cannot overstate how proud I am of them and happy for the success of Amplitude. Spenser is one of the hardest working and most down-to-earth CEOs I know, too, so this monumental milestone is beyond deserved. What’s more, Amplitude is one of my customers on Key Values, and I am also a very satisfied Amplitude user myself. I mean, these are the SV stories we all dream of (using each other’s products, being each other’s customers, and building a company that goes public!) and they're coming true, y'all!
The biggest congrats to Spenser, Curtis, and the rest of the Amplitude team! YOU DID IT!
My story about meeting someone "famous" when they were tiny is: I met @muneeb (a well known guy in the bitcoin-universe) in a 2 person office in a wework in NYC back in '14/'15. They were doing an identity/crypto sort of thing that I didn't understand.
Then came Mixpanel with a product that worked well but had a critical flaw around tying back user profile data into event segmentation. That spawned off a number of competitors: amplitude, heap, etc.
Also the rollup product, Segment which basically put the fear of god in these companies' sales teams because switching costs were essentially negligible.
where Mixpanel began as the clear market leader, amplitude caught up. So began a race to the bottom for lowering the cost per event tracked as well as an arms race of features. Oddly enough, all of these companies are YC backed, and yet in competition with one another.
This space in general has changed the way we build products to be more rigorous and analytical about the features we create and meticulous in our execution with respect to our users. Congrats to the Amplitude team on their work up to this point and their execution that has lead to this IPO.
KissMetrics had great content marketing, its blog was educating a generation of startup founders on how to use analytics.
There is a post-mortem from the founder somewhere explaining how they lost that initial advantage. IIRC, basically worse vision/execution than Mixpanel (as they were basically the same product).
Doesn't seem that strange to me. If you're spending 1x on backing each startup, you're expecting most of them will fail and one of them will return 50x. It's mostly just a numbers game.
Telling it from real experience.
The result is sometimes the data seems to be wrong (inconsistent with other products) when really the problem is a lack of industry standardization on the different definitions of terms.
* 2019 Revenue: $68M with a net loss of $33M
* 2020 Revenue: $102M (50% YoY growth) with a net loss of $24M
* 2021 (Jan-Jun) Revenue: $72M (up 56% vs $46M same period 2020)
Seems like there are managing their opex fairly well. But, I wonder for every customer dollar spent on Amplitude, how many cents directly goes to Amazon?
Are they?
They signed a $45M TCV (which equates to $1.25M per month). In a span of 14 months (Oct'19 - Dec'20) they spent $28M ($45M - $17M remaining), which equates to $2M/month in AWS spend.
What would this tell you?
We got on for the generous free plan, stayed for the simple UX. Amplitude has been the only analytics product that we've gotten the whole team using (operators, engineers, designers, product).