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Hmm - I re-upped* this post after seeing it, but I wonder if Spenser is now busy with other things, since more than "a couple hours" have passed. In the meantime, Geoff's article from yesterday is here: https://blog.ycombinator.com/amplitude-w12-is-going-public/ * a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
Thanks Daniel! Sorry, I'm on it right now!
Congratulations, I'm a user and big fan of your product! Three questions: 1) What was the hardest part of your journey to IPO? 2) If you could give just one piece of advice to early-stage founders, what would it be? 3) Of all the common startup mantras you hear repeated, what one would you would advise people to ignore?
1) It's not talked about much but this is an AMA so let's do it. Having to change our management team as we scaled. You have so much loyalty to people who made you successful it is brutal to have to hire a different set of people as you change as a company. This is true for almost every founder CEO scaling a fast growing business. Here's Larry Ellison talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzZOfoHzju4
2) Set your life up so that you can stick with building a startup for a very long period of time. If you're not ready to make that level of life commitment then I recommend you don't do a startup! One of the things I found when I was researching what it took to be successful was almost every great startup would go through a period in the first few years where rationally they should give up (eg Airbnb founders selling cereal). For whatever reason they didn't and went on to find massive success as through sheer persistence. We spent a year on voice recognition app Sonalight and it didn't work out. There was no question though that we would keep going with Amplitude. It doesn't matter where you start out as a founder, by sticking around enough you end up learning so much and getting more formidable over time. Eventually you outlast most other founders who quit and go on to find success.
3) I need to think more about this one. Most of the stuff I agree with, the challenge comes in understanding what it means in practice. What mantras are you curious about?
If I had a product page featuring either a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses, which would get the most clicks?
I'm 60/40 on the duck, it's less confusing and more clear click target.
Tell us about your first enterprise sale. How far along were you? How did you find the customer? How long was the process? Also, congrats!
Hey Spencer, congrats on going public! I’ve been a happy Amplitude customer at several companies now. If you were starting a company today, what would you do differently from how you approached starting Amplitude?
Ask for money for your product, even if it's incomplete. We didn't start asking for money until a year in because our egos felt we needed to have a fully functional product before charging customers. You'll get a lot of no's initially which is great because it allows you to focus on the very few yes'. If you're an engineer, make sure you're spending 50% of your time talking to customers because you'll always lean towards building product.
Congratulations Spencer! Had a question about the early days. How did you keep everyone motivated during the early days of heads down building before you had real customers? Did you talk to customers during that time, and what best practices can you share? How did you communicate your vision to your team / investors?
Even before you have any customers or a product, my #1 recommendation is to get engineers regularly talking to people who could be your customers. They will get so motivated to build something that will solve their problems (at least if you have the right engineers). Potential customers love talking to engineers as well as they're the ones who can actually solve their problem. Once you get a win with an engineer solving a potential customer problem, that starts a virtuous cycle where the team wants to get even more wins. I always tell people our best salesperson at Amplitude is actually our best engineer- my cofounder Jeffrey.
Congrats! It was a fun many years competing & excited to see the space validated in the public markets.
Congratulations! So happy for you. I'm sure others in this community are too. Some Qs: In as competitive a space that Amplitude operates in, what were some decisions the company took during tough periods or in anticipation of dooms-day scenarios that you think proved invaluable? Consequently, what moments do you think would have killed Amplitude if not for luck or execution or vision or hardwork? What is that unique…
Probably our worst failure was our 2016 outage where we were down for an entire week. I remember thinking we would lose a big portion of our customer base. What we did really well was our outage response and customer communication. We proactively reached out to customers, fully owned the mistake, and were very transparent about what was going on. As a result we didn't churn a single customer! I later heard that some investors passed on our Series B as a result of our outage. Which is so funny to hear that now because it's such a stupid criteria to evaluate a company. It just goes to show how much sheep mentality there is in the investing world. Here's the retro: https://amplitude.com/blog/amplitude-post-mortem
Product/product management is a new buying center in the enterprise. There will be a giant company built around selling to that function.