Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 85 posts

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#21

Post by throwaway2048 »

Impossible wrote: post #10
lubos wrote: post #2

MixPanel has very generous free plan and many free users. Sales people were hired to try to convert free users into paying customers. Plan failed, sales people shown the door. This is why companies need to think really hard about freemium model. In case of MixPanel, many of their free users keep adjusting so they send just enough data to stay under free plan. They are probably not going to be persuaded by sales peopl…

I had a really bad experience where a Mixpanel salesman aggressively cold emailed me on my personal email (I'm guessing he got it through Linkedin?) and continued to do so even though I told him not to contact me multiple times and that I had no ability to make or influence purchasing decisions for analytics software. I understand hustling, but at the time it came off as really desperate.

well it looks like his job was on the line

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#23

Post by alextgordon »

lyime wrote: post #5
lubos wrote: post #2

MixPanel has very generous free plan and many free users. Sales people were hired to try to convert free users into paying customers. Plan failed, sales people shown the door. This is why companies need to think really hard about freemium model. In case of MixPanel, many of their free users keep adjusting so they send just enough data to stay under free plan. They are probably not going to be persuaded by sales peopl…

If you are doing 25,000 of fewer events, you are probably not making much money.

It's not a population of 25k events, but a sample size of 25k.

News organisations pay a lot of money for polls of only 1000-2000 people. 25k data points is quite sufficient in most cases.

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#24

Post by boomzilla »

suhail wrote: post #19

Hey everyone, I am one of the founders at Mixpanel. Layoffs were tough on us, we did over hire a bit, and wanted to make the company more lean. We are deeply sorry for those that are no longer part of Mixpanel - they were our friends and co-workers that we continue to miss. I am happy to answer any questions that I can.

what package are you giving to the laid off?

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#25

Post by peterrushkin »

nailer wrote: post #12
[deleted] wrote: post #3

[deleted]

A search for 'Neil Patel' ended up on http://www.quicksprout.com/pro/ "Hey, I'm Neil Patel. I’m determined to make a business in successful. My only question is, will it be yours?" It then analyses your site, finds a whole bunch of 'errors', and won't tell you what they are until you tell them your marketing budget (which you should, because there's 'only 1 place left'). It might be a fantastic tool, but its marketin…

Hilarious, (Patel) Chromedome looks oblivious!

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#26

Post by apapli »

That's a worrying sign - sales are generally the last people to go - if you're under financial stress you generally need revenue and customers.

Unless they somehow believe they can pull off another Atlassian (who actually spend a ton of money on marketing, despite being seen as a "no salesperson" business) I'd say the $65m funding they received is going down the gurgler.

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#28

Post by jkkorn »

suhail wrote: post #19

Hey everyone, I am one of the founders at Mixpanel. Layoffs were tough on us, we did over hire a bit, and wanted to make the company more lean. We are deeply sorry for those that are no longer part of Mixpanel - they were our friends and co-workers that we continue to miss. I am happy to answer any questions that I can.

Hi Suhail! I love MixPanel and think you guys really know how to time your new features. I'd love it if MixPanel could offer prices adjusted to foreign currency (similar to Steam?) I live in Brazil and the recent devaluation of the BRL to the USD has made MixPanel prohibitively expensive.

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#29

Post by no1youknowz »

suhail wrote: post #19

Hey everyone, I am one of the founders at Mixpanel. Layoffs were tough on us, we did over hire a bit, and wanted to make the company more lean. We are deeply sorry for those that are no longer part of Mixpanel - they were our friends and co-workers that we continue to miss. I am happy to answer any questions that I can.

Should the preverbal hit the fan, would you open-source the code and have a paid support plan... should all else fails to monetize this?

Not sure why the down votes. I don't know the balance sheet of the company. Also lots of other companies like Aerospike open source their code and make money from support plans.

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#30

Post by jfoster »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #14
Swizec wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one of those free MixPanel users - their non-free plan is just too expensive. I eventually stopped using MixPanel altogether. In a choice between "only get a small subset of data" and "get all the data, but super super expensively", I decided I just don't care enough and opted for no data. Or rather, the combination of gAnalytics and a few others is Good Enough (tm).

I had the same experience, and I have to say that I'm torn in that I can see both sides. MixPanel doesn't want to screw around with $10 or $20/month plans, but I have no interest in paying $150/month. They want bigger customers than me, which is fine, but that also means that if and when I turn into a bigger customer, I might already be locked into a different solution.

For the reason you suggest (lock-in during growth), it seems to me that they are being foolish by not having a startup tier. Tens of thousands of $10/mo or $20/mo customers adds up to quite significant revenue.
Post reply on HN