Amplitude Seed Stage

This is the Amplitude pitch deck to raise a $2m seed round in 2014.

About

Amplitude is the product intelligence platform that helps companies use their customer data to build great product experiences for systematic business growth. Headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Singapore, Amplitude is the cross-platform intelligence solution of choice for modern product and growth teams. Amplitude serves over 30,000 teams at companies like Microsoft, Twitter, Adidas, CapitalOne, NBC, Hubspot, and Procter & Gamble.

Analytics startup Amplitude announced in July that it has confidentially filed to go public in a direct listing, just one month after it had raised a $150 million Series F at a $4 billion valuation led by Sequoia Capital.

This week, Amplitude publicly released its S-1 paperwork ahead of that listing, showing growing revenues: It posted over $72 million in revenue for the first six months of 2021, up 57% from the same period of 2020. It also shows that while the company isn’t profitable, its losses are narrowing, posting a loss of $0.57 per share over that same period, down from $0.68 in the same period of 2020.

The filing also shows that venture capital firm Benchmark Capital owns 15% of the company, making it the single largest outside investor, followed by Battery Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital.

The direct listing means that Skates will be the youngest CEO to take a software company public since Box’s Aaron Levie in 2015 — with the document also showing that the 33-year old CEO has a compensation package of over $6 million.

The startup has experienced tremendous growth in the past year as companies increasingly want to use data to better engage their customers online. But the firm’s journey hasn’t always been smooth.

Earlier this year, Amplitude CEO and cofounder Spenser Skates told Insider that he initially struggled to get venture capitalists to understand what his startup was trying to do. While he believed the aim of his company was clear — to help businesses understand how customers are using their products — the VCs just couldn’t seem to get it.

He pitched over 70 firms for his seed round back in 2012 and was met with a lot of scepticism. He felt incredibly frustrated and remembers blowing off steam to a friend by saying he “hates” the investors. It took two years before Amplitude was able to raise a $2 million seed round from SV Angel, Quest Venture Partners, and Data Collective.

Skates eventually realized that his pitch was the problem: He was spending too much time trying to explain the company itself, and not enough time showing how the product would be good for users.

“I realized when I look back in the seed decks and in terms of pitching, I didn’t do a good job talking about customers and the pain they had,” Skates said. He revamped his deck, and managed to raise a $9 million Series A round led by Benchmark Capital in 2015, followed by a $15.9 million Series B led by Battery Ventures in 2017.

You can read Amplitude’s seed deck, as well as the Series A pitch deck that actually got VCs to open their wallets, below, to see how the company’s messaging to investors changed over time.

But Skates really had a pitching epiphany when he met with Sequoia Capital’s Pat Grady, who, after the presentation, pitched the company back to Skates even better than he could explain it himself.

Grady honed in on how Amplitude’s tool helps companies understand their digital products — not just with how mobile apps are being used, but how digital services like apps or websites serve as a “distribution channel” that can drive attention to specific goods, and services, or deals.

For example, one of Amplitude’s clients is Burger King and it helps the fast food chain measure what features on its app users use the most: which promotions are most attractive to customers, for example, or which menu items they linger over.

“When Grady made this big point about the product being its own distribution channel, I thought ‘whoa, this guy finally gets it,’ he is able to see the company’s potential,” Skates said.

Funding Rounds

Announced Date	Transaction Name	Number of Investors	Money Raised	Lead Investors
June 9, 2021	Series F – Amplitude	4	$150M	Sequoia Capital
May 21, 2020	Series E – Amplitude	7	$50M	GIC
Dec 5, 2018	Series D – Amplitude	6	$80M	Sequoia Capital
Aug 10, 2017	Series C – Amplitude	6	$30M	IVP (Institutional Venture Partners)
Jun 8, 2016	Series B – Amplitude	6	$15.9M	Battery Ventures
August 5, 2015	Series A – Amplitude	6	$9M	Benchmark
Jan 16, 2015	Series A – Amplitude	2	—	—
Jul 11, 2014	Seed Round – Amplitude	8	$2M	—
Sep 10, 2013	Seed Round – Amplitude	2	—	Quest Venture Partners
Jan 1, 2013	Seed Round – Amplitude	1	—	—

Pitch Deck Review Summary

 

Structured Summary Review

Words

On most of the slides, they are Chatty Kathys writing walls of text. It’s a lot of effort to get through the deck.

Slide length

At 12 slides the deck is on the short end.

Headers

The headers of the slides are not well written. You need to actually explain the point.

Appearance

Don’t use slide backgrounds. There is pretty much no design in the deck. It’s just a list of bullet points and they stick in some screenshots.

Narrative

There is no narrative in the deck.

Structure

At least they know how to use bullet points.

Slides

They don’t cover a lot of the slides that an investor would be interested in. I have no idea about who the competition is, how large the market is, how they make money etc.

Slide by Slide Review

The cover is fine.

Don’t use template background design slides like this. They just aren’t needed.

Starting with the problem is rarely a good idea, ease investors into it first.

This is about the worst way you can explain the problem. It’s like they can’t be bothered to make a slide so they said screw it let’s just put in a customer quote.

So what’s the actual problem then? Something about analytics? It is your job to tell me.

“Two core beliefs” is a weird slide header. What they believe has zero context. I mean, ads are not the way to acquire and retain me, that’s for sure.

More lazy headers. Tell investors what the point is.

If you are going to explain the product, then point to what the product does with a bullet, or explain the process.

Don’t write repetitive bullets with “we allow you to”.

We are on slide 4 now and I have zero clue what it is that they do and for whom.

Are they on a sales pitch educating potential clients on use cases? Investors want to know why your product is better and different from everything else. Why is it that your product is so killer?

Don’t write a wall of text on a slide. They’re writing like a stream of consciousness. Why are they writing that they are not distracted by another business? Stay on point and message.

Make your slides legible. The font on the chart is minuscule.

What’s the point of this slide? If you put a chart on a slide then explain it. Ok, well they have slid in the MoM growth rate at the bottom. It would be more evident at the top.

What do apps tracked mean? The number of users they have?

How are these competitive advantages? What does scale up and down mean? These are features.

Ok, well they are explaining each of the points now. I don’t know why they needed the prior slide.

What does the nearest competitor do? Do they really take 24 hours? It’s only a competitive advantage if we have something to compare it to.

Again, no walls of text and writing as you think. If you sent me this deck I just wouldn’t read it.

What is idempotent? Don’t use two-dollar words.

They haven’t explained once how these are actually competitive advantages. How are they better than anything else?

Do not write two words as a header. Write the point.

The headers above the charts are decently done, but it’s obvious they didn’t write them. It looks like these are likely slides from Mary Meeker’s Internet Report.

They are using bizarrely sized font at the bottom of the slide.

Deck Collection

See the rest of the collection here:

BACK TO THE DECK COLLECTION