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suhailon The pitch deck that helped us get an $865M valuation

pmarca: if you're reading this, feel free to chime in ;)

suhailon The pitch deck that helped us get an $865M valuation

Many reasons but the one the our customers value the most: retroactive funnels instead of forward looking funnels which drive people crazy in GA.

suhailon The pitch deck that helped us get an $865M valuation

I changed it on the blog too! :)

suhailon The pitch deck that helped us get an $865M valuation

That slide looked very similar 2, 3, and 4 years ago. It was not enough, many people still passed on us. Raising any amount of capital (in part due to the risk at each stage) is more complex than showing a single graph.

suhailon The pitch deck that helped us get an $865M valuation

Not a whole lot. In 2012, the most important thing I realized while making a deck was to state your problem, solution, and vision at the beginning.

Your deck shouldn't tell the whole story. YOU should be telling the story. And your slides should function as bullet points to tell that story.

In 2012, the only addition to our deck was a clearer sense of how we'd use the money with a use of proceeds section. I think that's unnecessary though. I think a "what we plan to do in the next 12-18 months" is more specific.

suhailon The pitch deck that helped us get an $865M valuation

Happy to answer questions if other founders have any on the topic of fundraising, pitch decks, etc.

suhailon Weebly (YC W07) Debuts an iPad App for Building and Managing Websites

That's probably not exactly the right perspective. It's about empowering people who do not have the same skills. I don't think Weebly is aiming to replace the web developer: highly skilled people will always be in demand because they're inventing new things and pushing the boundaries on cutting-edge tech.

Weebly seems to be aimed at mainstream people who think "Boy, I should have website for my wedding/club/team/group/gaming clan." Of course, their goal is make that more and more empowering over time though. If you think about it, what you can do with Weebly was potentially difficult for the average web developer 10-15 years ago -- I'd say that's a leap! Before I started programming, I used front-page and dreamweaver to get started. Eventually, I got more sophisticated as I got more interested in building things but it was empowering to create a website without knowing HTML or CSS.

suhailon Amazon Mobile Analytics

You're right, the primary cost for us (and like most B2B companies) are the employees that serve our customers. That's about 25% for our business. However, the % of cost substantially increases to become infra for the highest volume customers.

So, in a way, you make an interesting point: it's quite difficult to reduce costs for your smallest customers since the cost of supporting them isn't generally infra related (unless you're a consumer startup?).

There are number of advantages to have lots of smaller customers, no matter how seemingly "unprofitable" on paper they are: marketing, product feedback, etc. Your mileage may vary though for each business and its timing in the market.

suhailon Amazon Mobile Analytics

While your opinion is a fair and valid one, you're extremely mean person on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nbevans

suhailon Amazon Mobile Analytics

I understand you may be frustrated but would you mind emailing me at suhail@mixpanel.com? I'd like to look into why we missed picking up your email so we can fix a bigger issue we might have. We are really serious about our customer support so this really surprises me and likely surprises my support team.

I am really sorry that we messed up here.

suhailon Amazon Mobile Analytics

What pricing structure do you want for your startup?

suhailon Amazon Mobile Analytics

Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Mixpanel

This is far more of a competitor to Google Analytics instead of us. Google Analytics gives away their product for free - by that measure this is expensive!

Though biased, I wanted to point out a few things since this isn't as amazing as one might think -- it comes with several gotchas (and please correct me if I am wrong):

- Systems events will take up a LARGE portion of this free tier and the paid tiers. Start and End events are going to put reasonably sized apps into the billions.

- If you manage to get rid of said system events, big parts of the dashboard are likely to be rendered useless like DAU, MAU, retention, etc.

- You cannot deeply segment any of this information so you will have a lot of questions remaining even just the next day

- It will be difficult to offer funnel analysis (which doesn't exist) that is retroactive at that scale. That means you will get the same kind of funnel that people hate with Google Analytics' goals.

- Generally speaking: complexity of analysis will mean higher prices

While Mixpanel pricing may seem expensive by comparison, the products are not comparable. You get what you pay for in the level of sophisticated analysis.

Given that, over time it is our plan to lower prices relative to the rate that hardware and infrastructure becomes less expensive. We think that's fair. And if we can improve our technology to become more efficient we most certainly want to make our software and products more accessible.

We are very open to your thoughts so please be harsh and candid (as I know HN can be). We deeply care about our startup customers who made and pushed us into who we are today.

suhailon iOS8 Adoption, hour by hour

fixing :) - thx for the feedback

suhailon iOS8 Adoption, hour by hour

fixing -- it was a timezone offset issue

suhailon iOS8 Adoption, hour by hour

can you take a screenshot to show us what you're talking about?

suhailon iOS8 Adoption, hour by hour

I just tried it in Firefox and it works fine for me -- what version of FF? I am on 32.0.1

suhailon Introducing mobile A/B testing

What's the issue we have with our API? Email me: suhail@mixpanel.com - we'll try to fix it

suhailon Introducing mobile A/B testing

Julien & Mason but it's a big team effort in the end.

suhailon Introducing mobile A/B testing

Yes - we're working on making it more friendly right now but we wanted to release something rather than delay getting it into customer's hands.

suhailon Introducing mobile A/B testing

Hey there, we actually did that first before mobile ab testing: https://mixpanel.com/blog/2014/04/10/introducing-a-b-testing - it works for email, push, in-app, SMS, etc.

We just didn't make a big stink about it.

suhailon Introducing mobile A/B testing

It's native only but we are thinking about making a wrapper to make it interoperable between iOS and Unity. You should be able to drop it in despite unity but it may require some small extra work. We can help if you email support@mixpanel.com

suhailon Product Hunt Is in Current Y Combinator Batch

Companies evolve with time. Not every business has to look like a traditional revenue-generating machine out the gate. Great products and ideas can take time to be big.

suhailon Valuations

I'd say it's more like 20x revenue actually (assuming the stage is series A/B)

suhailon How VC’s Get to “Yes”

Building a large sales team to go to market is initially expensive or your burn rate relative to the capital in the bank is growing despite your profitability (you may not want to risk your limited run way if the economy goes bad).

suhailon Mixpanel Lets Devs Deliver Targeted Messages Through New In-App Notifications

Intercom let's you have a one to one conversation with a specific user. We send a notification that doesn't elicit a one to one conversation - it's purely informational. I use the word broadcast because it generally implies a lack of two-way communication.

suhailon Mixpanel Lets Devs Deliver Targeted Messages Through New In-App Notifications

These aren't ads. They're app specific notifications.

suhailon Mixpanel Lets Devs Deliver Targeted Messages Through New In-App Notifications

Intercom offers a way to directly communicate with your customers and have a conversation with them but this does not. In-app notifications are a one-way message to broadcast information in a beautiful way.

suhailon Ask HN: How do you manage your sales leads?

I think to answer that question, you'd have to pick a very specific part of Salesforce. There are also many different kinds of people who use Salesforce: A sales rep (tracking leads), a sales leader (reporting, forecasts), a sales operations person (reporting/lead management), etc. They all have different problems they want to solve.

suhailon Ask HN: How do you manage your sales leads?

We use Salesforce (combined with ecquire.com) at Mixpanel - it's not a very friendly UI but it has every feature you'll need in the future. You learn to love it. Plus, every sales person you may hire in the future will already know how to use it (or should). Salesforce, like most CRM tools, has a way to bcc your emails to keep track of the conversations you're having.

You need to start hiring another sales rep too if you're handling 100s of leads by yourself.

You should begin building a qualification framework to understand which leads are valuable and worth your time: Do they have budget? Who has the authority to get this deal done? Do they have a serious need? When will they buy if everything about your product was perfect? And any other unique factors related to your business. Then, get this information into Salesforce!

It's probably time to start using marketing automation/drip campaigns to keep your leads warm too.

Depending on how long your phone calls/meetings run - you'll usually only be able to handle 5-6/day assuming you're doing this full-time so you should consider calculating how many things you can juggle at once.

Use CRM to build a forecast so you can measure your effectiveness. A forecast is as simple as taking the amount of money you might make from each customer that month and multiplying it by the probability you'll close that customer. That'll force you to prioritize.

suhailon Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes

It's different: it's a recommendation of our product and it drives real clicks back to Mixpanel (excluding google). Powered by badges are extremely common and are more akin to an ad. The main difference is that Rapgenius' sole goal is to game Google, ours is not.