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Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

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Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#31

Post by lubos »

sreeramvenkat wrote: post #17
nailer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I got 11 'errors' when I tried to analyze www.quicksprout.com

Because it's just Javascript generating random numbers. It's not analyzing anything at all.

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#33

Post by web007 »

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.

Are you the person to contact if we have potential job leads for anyone that was let go?

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#35

Post by robryan »

jfoster wrote: post #30
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe this is where they are heading? The heavy sales team route requires larger customers for it to be worth their time converting them to paid users.

They might be looking to cut back on sales and try a more automated approach to convert people to smaller plans.

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#36

Post by suhail »

no1youknowz wrote: post #29
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.

We aren't having trouble monetizing the business. Our revenue projections remain the same even though we let some staff go and we are doing fine on that end. Mixpanel isn't going anywhere if that's your concern. If anything, we are investing a lot more in engineering, product, and design to make our products a lot better for all you.

It's too early to say what we'd do in an outcome like that. I certainly wouldn't want to see everything we've built go to waste.

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#37

Post by suhail »

web007 wrote: post #33
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.

Are you the person to contact if we have potential job leads for anyone that was let go?

Yes - email in my profile.

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#38

Post by calbear81 »

apapli wrote: post #26

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.

That's not necessarily true, you could have also overhired on sales or realized that you need to increase sales quotas to hit your profitability targets which would result in letting go of underperforming folks.

Re: Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

#40

Post by azinman2 »

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.

Either you really aren't getting value, or you don't have many users of your own. $150/mo is much cheaper than building and maintaining something equivalent. $150/mo is nothing compared to even payroll taxes, let alone payroll itself.
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