Amplitude (YC W12) IPO S1
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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.
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.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-02-24/money-...
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).
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?
What would this tell you?
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.
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).