Almost all of SV passed on Amplitude at one point or another. I remember one of them made a comment like "analytics companies pop up like mushrooms after a rainstorm".
Raising our seed round was brutal. It took 6 months end to end and was one of the lowest points for me personally. I was trying to scrape together $1M in $50k chunks from any angel who would give us money. We ended up having to lean on our background as founders (MIT engineers, winners of the Battlecode programming competition) to convince the first set of VCs to come in.
Once we started showing traction (0-$1M in ARR in 9 months) we went like hotcakes in our Series A and beyond.
The real test is do customers buy. If you can show that everything will follow. VCs are weak predictors of market success. There's some signal, but they get it wrong almost as often as they get it right. If you close 3-4 paying customers I guarantee you they will change their tune. The incumbency argument is pretty weak IMO, particularly in B2B. Markets are so massive these days it's easy to carve out a large niche. For example, Freshworks went public last week even though Salesforce "dominates" cloud CRM.
Deals ranged between $12-120k/year. We were very much the "deer" range vs rabbits or elephant hunting. The customers ranged from small to mid sized companies, we only had 2-3 true enterprises at the time.
Getting first 1-10 paying clients is really tough. And with the $12k-$120k/year range, it might have been really tough. Would you be able to share how did you get those first few paid clients? Thanks.
Our first one was intro from a prospective investor. Second sent me an email after we launched on TechCrunch. The third one sent us the following email:
"Hello — we are a Mixpanel customer and evaluating alternatives right now and came across the TC article. We also use RJ metrics, so what you guys are offering is really compelling.
I do have a question about what "custom integration" means on the feature breakdown by tier. Let me know if there is some more information about what that includes that I could review."
After that I can't remember. Ex-Zynga product people were an early sweet spot for us and we're lucky we got on a few of their radars. It was then about finding our way into more similar situations.
That's hilarious -- I worked on Zynga's analytics system in the early days, and we made it (hopefully) very easy to instrument code and get up and running. We created patient zero I guess.
Raising our seed round was brutal. It took 6 months end to end and was one of the lowest points for me personally. I was trying to scrape together $1M in $50k chunks from any angel who would give us money. We ended up having to lean on our background as founders (MIT engineers, winners of the Battlecode programming competition) to convince the first set of VCs to come in.
Once we started showing traction (0-$1M in ARR in 9 months) we went like hotcakes in our Series A and beyond.
The real test is do customers buy. If you can show that everything will follow. VCs are weak predictors of market success. There's some signal, but they get it wrong almost as often as they get it right. If you close 3-4 paying customers I guarantee you they will change their tune. The incumbency argument is pretty weak IMO, particularly in B2B. Markets are so massive these days it's easy to carve out a large niche. For example, Freshworks went public last week even though Salesforce "dominates" cloud CRM.