Amplitude (YC W12), Mobile Analytics Startup, Raises $2M Seed Round | Hacker News Reader

Amplitude (YC W12), Mobile Analytics Startup, Raises $2M Seed Round

techcrunch.com

42 pointssskates16 comments

One of the things I really like about Heap Analytics is the "no instrumentation" approach. You just drop in some JS and you're good to go.

Do you have a similar feature?

This is quite useful in the early stages, when you don't have much data but also don't have much time.

Also, we're using HTML5 + Trigger.io (a YC-backed PhoneGap-like tool). Do you support that toolchain?

[edit: Added another question]

We don't- you need to explicitly instrument.

I think auto-instrumentation is great for web because you already have a clear DOM structure. Mobile is more difficult as it's native code and 1 to 1 mapping to UI elements is not as cut and dry and things can become brittle. It's also more difficult to scale because when you're tracking everything data volumes get pretty crazy. There is the big upside not having to instrument though! We haven't seen any requests from anyone who has experience analytics for it. I'm curious to see how this shakes out for developers.

We do have a javascript SDK although we really recommend using the native mobile one. Send me an email at spenser@amplitude.com and we can go over what you need.

From the article: "The funding comes after a period of growth among Amplitude’s enterprise customer base, which is up by 400 percent since the service’s launch."

Is it just me, or does this not really make any sense? Assuming they have 0 customers at launch, how would they have 400% growth?

We actually had a good number of customers in private beta from before our launch but it's grown by a factor of 5 since then. It's true though that the lower the denominator the higher the growth percentage that you can quote.

Spenser from Amplitude here, happy to answer any questions you guys have about what we're up to.

If you were to describe how Amp is differentiated with say Localytics, what would you say? We use localytics and while it's ok, I'm interested in learning about other tools out there. I think one pain point for us is understanding cohorts across apps, since we have a large portfolio.

Direct access to querying on your data via a data warehouse (Amazon Redshift). Localytics' sales team will say they have that but if you actually try it you basically have to build an entire ETL pipeline yourself (I'd encourage you to ask!) With Amplitude you login with the psql command from any CLI and you're done. It's particularly good if you have complex requirements like how particular metrics compare across apps.

Shoot me an email at dchurchill at localytics dot com and we'll set something up to walk through our Query Builder tool. It enables you to query all apps while in the dashboard.

(I’m a Sales Engineer @ Localytics)

Awesome. Mixpanel's pricing is outrageous, especially their People analytics.

We tried a few, and honestly for us nothing came close to Mixpanel. It's not perfect though, and as you said really expensive...

we're killing mixpanel as it's just too expensive

Spenser and Curtis are a study in how persistence pays off. Congratulations guys!

The instant demo is a huge plus. Thanks for having that available.

Congratulations to Spenser and Curtis!

Congrats guys!

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