The Start:

Spenser Skates, before founding Amplitude, was deeply involved in the world of software engineering and data analysis. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Spenser's academic background was rooted in computer science and engineering.

His professional journey began at consultancy firm D.E. Shaw, where he gained significant experience in data analytics and financial software development.

The Problem:

Amplitude was built as a scratch-your-own-itch kind of product. The founder, Spenser Skates was working on a product called Sonalight which got him into YCombinator in 2012. But Sonalight had poor user retention.

Spenser had built an internal tool to look at the mobile user analytics (which would later become Amplitude).

Getting their first 100 customers:

The founders decided to speak to 30 prospective customers before building. And they consciously chose to spend 50% of their time talking to customers and 50% of their time building.

Their early motion was super simple. Talk to customers, give it away for free, get feedback, build requested features, talk to customers, and rinse and repeat.

They began reaching out to folks who have product analytics as a problem and just sent them an email saying — “hey are you having any of these issues wrt product analytics, if so we'd love to talk more”. On these sales calls, Spencer was often asked how Amplitude works and customers would often say that “Hey we are gonna buy this if it has XYZ features”.

And so Amplitude went and built that. Their mantra was to out-build the competition which at the time was Mixpanel.

And by doing this they built a much more robust solution that catered to their customer. On sales calls, Spenser would just keep doubling the amount he would ask for in every subsequent sales conversation and people kept saying yes.

Amplitude took a completely sales-led approach to growth and reached $1 million ARR in the next 9 months.

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