The Start:

Suhail Doshi, an MIT dropout, co-founded Mixpanel with his friend Tim Trefren. Suhail left MIT to pursue his passion for entrepreneurship and data analytics.

Before starting Mixpanel, he worked on several side projects that deepened his understanding of data-driven decision-making.

With a keen interest in making complex data accessible and useful, Suhail and Tim set out to create a tool that would transform how companies understood user behavior.

The Problem:

Suhail and Tim realized that many companies relied on superficial metrics and struggled to gain meaningful insights into user behavior on their digital products.

Traditional analytics tools were often limited, offering only basic data visualization without actionable insights.

With Mixpanel, they aimed to solve this problem by providing a powerful, user-friendly product analytics platform that enabled companies to track detailed user interactions in real-time.

This would allow businesses to make data-driven decisions, optimize their products, and ultimately improve user experiences.

Getting their first customers:

Founder Suhail shared his journey and lessons on acquiring the first 100 users: Talk to users. Suhail found creative ways to locate groups of like-minded individuals.

Early on, he wrote a Twitter script to follow a person’s followers, especially those who blogged about the problem they were solving. This approach helped them find hundreds of customers willing to try their product.

He emphasized putting as much energy into the first three steps of your product, including the landing page, as you do into the rest of the product. If users don't get past step three, the rest of the product doesn't matter.

They gave the product to all the Y Combinator companies for feedback and connected with many Facebook app developers, asking them to try it.

Digging this? Get more actionable strategies like these straight in your inbox for free