Analytics platform
Noticed pull for internal tool: A internal analytics tool they built for themselves was getting a lot of interest from other founders.
A hands-free texting app called Sonalight
Low retention
https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/08/sonalight-lets-android-users-text-while-driving-without-touching-a-phone/
“We started with a different company before Amplitude, called Sonalight, which was a voice recognition application that allowed you to send and receive text messages by talking to your phone. Sonalight did decently well, reaching hundreds of thousands of downloads and some number of paying customers, but it never really became a mainstream success. One of the things that was really clear to us at the time was that you should look at what people are doing in your product in order to figure out how to make it better. Figure out where people are getting stuck, what keeps them coming back, what they like to use, and what they don’t like to use. We tried out tons of products on the market. I remember Flurry, Google Analytics, Adobe, Kissmetrics, and others. And none of them were able to answer the questions I just posed. And so we said, ‘All right, well, we’ve got to build it ourselves.’ A bunch of engineers with a lot of hubris, ha ha. So we ended up doing that. And as we shared those insights with other companies that we knew (we were at Y Combinator at the time), they were like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing. I really need to understand that about my business.’ So we pivoted from Sonalight and built what’s now called Amplitude.” —Spenser Skates, co-founder and CEO
1 year
Their internal analyics tech