Amplitude

Amplitude is a digital analytics platform that specializes in product analytics, helping teams understand user behavior, measure feature adoption, and optimize product experiences. While it competes with Mixpanel and Google Analytics, Amplitude has differentiated itself through its behavioral cohorting engine and its ability to connect user actions to business outcomes like revenue and retention. For custom web application development, Amplitude's SDK and HTTP API make it straightforward to instrument custom events, track user journeys across sessions, and build real-time dashboards that show how people actually use the product. It is especially popular with product-led growth companies that need to make data-driven decisions about which features to build next.

Amplitude was founded in 2012 by Spenser Skates and Curtis Liu, who had previously built a voice recognition startup called Sonalight together. Sonalight was a voice-to-text app for Android, and while the app itself did not take off, the founders became obsessed with understanding why users were dropping off. They realized the existing analytics tools were inadequate for answering the behavioral questions they had about their product. That frustration led them to pivot entirely and build the analytics platform they wished they had. They went through Y Combinator with Amplitude and raised their Series A from Benchmark in 2014. The company went public via direct listing on Nasdaq in September 2021.

Before Amplitude was Amplitude, the product analytics platform was actually a complete pivot from a text-to-speech Android app. Spenser Skates and Curtis Liu spent months building analytics tooling internally at Sonalight just to understand their own product. When they showed this internal tool to other startup founders, the response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic, with multiple people asking if they could use it too. Skates has said that the most important lesson from the Sonalight experience was that sometimes the tool you build to solve your own problem is more valuable than the original product you were building.