A New Day in Analytics for Seed Stage Startups

We hope that this unprecedented access to enterprise grade product analytics turbo charges all the bootstrapped teams out there.

Inside Amplitude
March 1, 2018
Image of Spenser Skates
Spenser Skates
CEO and Co-founder
A New Day in Analytics for Seed Stage Startups

Startup founders and product leaders are building the future. Here’s how we want to help them.

Building startups is hard and getting harder. We estimate that there are over 5M web and mobile applications out there.

However, customer expectations on the value and level of service a software product should offer them are very high today. As a result, analysts estimate that only 0.01% of these 5M applications are going to be commercially successful. That’s millions of teams struggling to understand their users and solve problems they are passionate about.

Finding Product Market Fit

The most important goal at the seed stage of a company is to find product market fit. As a first time founder and CEO, I couldn’t have done that at Amplitude without the ecosystem of advisors, professionals and software vendors that we had access to. As Brian Halligan, the CEO of one of Amplitude’s long term customers, HubSpot, puts it, “You can’t outspend the giants, but you can out-think, out-teach and out-help them.”

The one thing we found missing was a powerful product platform to truly understand what users wanted and the impact our development efforts were having on their user experience. That’s why we built Amplitude. That’s why we gave away 10M user actions per month on our free starter plan so that no one would have to struggle for insight the way we did.

We are so glad today to hear our customers say that we are the most powerful analytics platform for anyone interested in understanding how customers use their products. It’s important to us that the full power of our behavioral analytics solution is accessible to seed stage startups and builders of software products everywhere so that they can get to product market fit faster.

90% Scholarship

Today, we are excited to launch a 90% scholarship for seed stage startups to our complete behavioral analytics platform for millions more events per month. That’s both increased volume and 100x the power! Even small teams can now get easy visibility into exactly what makes users come back, which features to double down on and make more prominent or even learn how to optimize their product for better engagement, conversion and retention. These are the critical foundations of accelerating growth that we want to empower every team with.

Over the last few years we are pleased to have started serving enterprise customers like Microsoft, Under Armour, Intuit and Paypal. These are companies that continue to innovate and build new products that have become a part of our daily lives.

There’s a special place in our hearts for small teams like Calm, a free app with subscription options that uses mindfulness training and meditation to lower stress and anxiety. Calm has taken advantage of Amplitude’s retention-focused analytics solution to grow 10x, close $22M in annual revenue and win Apple’s App of The Year award in 2017. Their mission and success is a testament to the power of great products.

We hope that this unprecedented access to enterprise grade product analytics turbo charges all the bootstrapped teams out there. We hope that this helps developers and seed stage startups build better products in 2018.

If this has piqued your interest, apply for the scholarship here!

Go Product!
– Spenser Skates

About the Author
Spenser is the CEO and Co-founder of Amplitude. He experienced the need for a better product analytics solution firsthand while developing Sonalight, a text-to-voice app. Out of that need, Spenser created Amplitude so that everyone can learn from user behavior to build better products.