[HN Gopher] Amplitude (YC W12) IPO S1
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Amplitude (YC W12) IPO S1
Author : alonmower
Score : 85 points
Date : 2021-08-31 16:32 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sec.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sec.gov)
| tin7in wrote:
| Amplitude has 1280 paying customers (22 with >1m ARR, 311 with
| >100k ARR). I would have thought they have much more than this.
| joegahona wrote:
| I would have too, but as a customer who (happily) gives them
| $100K/year, that adds up...
| Giorgi wrote:
| I visited their website, could not understand what it does or
| solves, left. Looks like bloated soft.
| blader wrote:
| It's so crazy to see this. I still remember meeting Spenser and
| Curtis for the first time when they were just like half a dozen
| people. Even then it was clear this solved a huge pain. Surreal
| to see. Congratulations Spenser, Curtis, and Jeff!
| rgbrgb wrote:
| Happy Amplitude customer here. Congrats to Spenser and the team!
|
| We got on for the generous free plan, stayed for the simple UX.
| Amplitude has been the only analytics product that we've gotten
| the whole team using (operators, engineers, designers, product).
| node-bayarea wrote:
| Amplitude is NOT a great product when you actually try to
| implement it. I have seen at least 3 companies pay for them based
| on how good it looks and all the promises but only to realize
| that the integration is actually very hard, and the data in
| Amplitude is often wrong! Also they dont do a good job in sending
| data back to things like SFDC and what not.
|
| Telling it from real experience.
| dzonga wrote:
| these guys, look like they've a great product. but damn, why are
| they cash flow negative. if financing dries up, the business goes
| kaboom. I feel like at the revenue they had maybe they shouldn't
| have taken vc money. $50m revenue, with a lean team team turn
| profit. now things can look up, if they get acquired by a PE firm
| that trims the fat.
| alberth wrote:
| Summary:
|
| * 2019 Revenue: $68M with a net loss of $33M
|
| * 2020 Revenue: $102M (50% YoY growth) with a net loss of $24M
|
| * 2021 (Jan-Jun) Revenue: $72M (up 56% vs $46M same period 2020)
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Market price for a pre-profit software co is primarily hinging
| on revenue and growth, so I'm expecting about a ~5b valuation.
| lynnetye wrote:
| This is a very un-HN-like comment, but...
|
| In 2014, I was working at Homejoy (RIP), and started hanging out
| w/ this guy I sorta knew from college. We were reintroduced at
| Mission Cliffs, started climbing together ~5-6x a week, and
| talked a lot about startups since I was a newcomer who was just
| learning about the space. Oliver co-founded an analytics company
| (Sensor Tower) and eventually invited me over to visit their
| office which they were sharing w/ another analytics company
| started by two guys from college that I also kinda knew: Spenser
| and Curtis.
|
| They were sharing an office in the same building as Dropbox (ooo
| fancy) and each had one, mayyybe two employees. At the time, they
| were both still figuring out how to increase their self-serve
| revenue in hopes of eventually selling to businesses.
| (Hilariously, I remember thinking how boring B2B SaaS businesses
| were compared to... on-demand home cleaning startups??!? Oh how
| young and naive I was back then, haha)
|
| Anyway, fast forward seven years... Oliver and I got married, had
| a baby, and now Spenser and Curtis' "baby," Amplitude, is _all
| grown up_! [insert crying emoji]
|
| I cannot overstate how proud I am of them and happy for the
| success of Amplitude. Spenser is one of the hardest working and
| most down-to-earth CEOs I know, too, so this monumental milestone
| is beyond deserved. What's more, Amplitude is one of my customers
| on Key Values, and I am also a very satisfied Amplitude user
| myself. I mean, these are the SV stories we all dream of (using
| each other's products, being each other's customers, and building
| a company that goes public!) and they're coming true, y'all!
|
| The biggest congrats to Spenser, Curtis, and the rest of the
| Amplitude team! YOU DID IT!
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| This is a great story! I love hearing about startups when they
| were tiny and growing (YC does a great job with this; Segment
| comes to mind).
|
| My story about meeting someone "famous" when they were tiny is:
| I met @muneeb (a well known guy in the bitcoin-universe) in a 2
| person office in a wework in NYC back in '14/'15. They were
| doing an identity/crypto sort of thing that I didn't
| understand.
| irtefa wrote:
| this is beautiful
| ajaymehta wrote:
| Congrats to Spenser, Curtis, and the whole team. From a YC pivot
| to a Nasdaq-listed company, bravo! Couldn't have happened to a
| more genuinely awesome group.
| random123450987 wrote:
| What was the original startup project ?
| martythemaniak wrote:
| https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/20/real-time-mobile-
| analytics...
| ram_rar wrote:
| > In October 2019, we entered into a 36-month contract with AWS
| for hosting-related services. Pursuant to the terms of the
| contract, we are required to spend a minimum of $15 million
| within each contract year for three years. As of December 31,
| 2020, we had $17 million remaining on the commitment.
|
| Seems like there are managing their opex fairly well. But, I
| wonder for every customer dollar spent on Amplitude, how many
| cents directly goes to Amazon?
| ctvo wrote:
| > But, I wonder for every customer dollar spent on Amplitude,
| how many cents directly goes to Amazon?
|
| What would this tell you?
| alberth wrote:
| > "Seems like there are managing their opex fairly well."
|
| Are they?
|
| They signed a $45M TCV (which equates to $1.25M per month). In
| a span of 14 months (Oct'19 - Dec'20) they spent $28M ($45M -
| $17M remaining), which equates to $2M/month in AWS spend.
| carlineng wrote:
| Gross Margin for Calendar Year 2020 was around 71%, so no more
| than 29c.
| enahs-sf wrote:
| The analytics space did not work out the way I expected. I
| remember the dark ages of google analytics where you couldn't
| granularly segment your data.
|
| Then came Mixpanel with a product that worked well but had a
| critical flaw around tying back user profile data into event
| segmentation. That spawned off a number of competitors:
| amplitude, heap, etc.
|
| Also the rollup product, Segment which basically put the fear of
| god in these companies' sales teams because switching costs were
| essentially negligible.
|
| where Mixpanel began as the clear market leader, amplitude caught
| up. So began a race to the bottom for lowering the cost per event
| tracked as well as an arms race of features. Oddly enough, all of
| these companies are YC backed, and yet in competition with one
| another.
|
| This space in general has changed the way we build products to be
| more rigorous and analytical about the features we create and
| meticulous in our execution with respect to our users. Congrats
| to the Amplitude team on their work up to this point and their
| execution that has lead to this IPO.
| indigochill wrote:
| > Oddly enough, all of these companies are YC backed, and yet
| in competition with one another.
|
| Doesn't seem that strange to me. If you're spending 1x on
| backing each startup, you're expecting most of them will fail
| and one of them will return 50x. It's mostly just a numbers
| game.
| debarshri wrote:
| It is unfair from a startup perspective because you are also
| backing the competitor. Question becomes whom do you
| prioritize? How do you prioritize help?
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| Feels like a micro version of Matt Levine's Stock Market
| Inc model of competitors who share the same owners and thus
| occasionally are directed to work towards a common good.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-02-24/money
| -...
| ngokevin wrote:
| There's no prioritization for help. It's not like YC is
| running the businesses or anything is zero-sum because they
| both have the same and equal resources and access for
| guidance.
| soneca wrote:
| I think it's KissMetrics that began as clear market leader,
| before losing to Mixpanel.
|
| KissMetrics had great content marketing, its blog was educating
| a generation of startup founders on how to use analytics.
|
| There is a post-mortem from the founder somewhere explaining
| how they lost that initial advantage. IIRC, basically worse
| vision/execution than Mixpanel (as they were basically the same
| product).
| sh_001_z wrote:
| Race to the bottom? Amplitude charges 30k per year...
| enahs-sf wrote:
| At one point our mixpanel bill was more than our AWS one. No
| one said enlightenment would be cheap. Amplitude went after
| Mixpanel on pricing first. They basically offered 10M events
| free for startups.
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