
Amplitude (YC W12), Mobile Analytics Startup, Raises $2M Seed Round - sskates
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/11/amplitude-the-analytics-startup-undercutting-mixpanel-raises-2-million-seed-round/
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bravura
One of the things I really like about Heap Analytics is the "no
instrumentation" approach. You just drop in some JS and you're good to go.

Do you have a similar feature?

This is quite useful in the early stages, when you don't have much data but
also don't have much time.

Also, we're using HTML5 + Trigger.io (a YC-backed PhoneGap-like tool). Do you
support that toolchain?

[edit: Added another question]

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sskates
We don't- you need to explicitly instrument.

I think auto-instrumentation is great for web because you already have a clear
DOM structure. Mobile is more difficult as it's native code and 1 to 1 mapping
to UI elements is not as cut and dry and things can become brittle. It's also
more difficult to scale because when you're tracking everything data volumes
get pretty crazy. There is the big upside not having to instrument though! We
haven't seen any requests from anyone who has experience analytics for it. I'm
curious to see how this shakes out for developers.

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econnors
From the article: "The funding comes after a period of growth among
Amplitude’s enterprise customer base, which is up by 400 percent since the
service’s launch."

Is it just me, or does this not really make any sense? Assuming they have 0
customers at launch, how would they have 400% growth?

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sskates
We actually had a good number of customers in private beta from before our
launch but it's grown by a factor of 5 since then. It's true though that the
lower the denominator the higher the growth percentage that you can quote.

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sskates
Spenser from Amplitude here, happy to answer any questions you guys have about
what we're up to.

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gdilla
If you were to describe how Amp is differentiated with say Localytics, what
would you say? We use localytics and while it's ok, I'm interested in learning
about other tools out there. I think one pain point for us is understanding
cohorts across apps, since we have a large portfolio.

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sskates
Direct access to querying on your data via a data warehouse (Amazon Redshift).
Localytics' sales team will say they have that but if you actually try it you
basically have to build an entire ETL pipeline yourself (I'd encourage you to
ask!) With Amplitude you login with the psql command from any CLI and you're
done. It's particularly good if you have complex requirements like how
particular metrics compare across apps.

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orasis
Awesome. Mixpanel's pricing is outrageous, especially their People analytics.

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Toine
We tried a few, and honestly for us nothing came close to Mixpanel. It's not
perfect though, and as you said really expensive...

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ajju
Spenser and Curtis are a study in how persistence pays off. Congratulations
guys!

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clubhi
The instant demo is a huge plus. Thanks for having that available.

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brandonb
Congratulations to Spenser and Curtis!

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nmb
Congrats guys!

