Amplitude is the first pure-play analytics SaaS company to IPO in quite a while
It's growing a stunning 57% at $150m+ ARR ... and that's up from 50% just a year ago
It's a $7B leader so many of us rely on in our products
5 Interesting Learnings: 🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽
#1. 1,200 total paying customers, with 300 of them at $100k ARR and 22 at $1m+ ARR
Amplitude has consistently gone upmarket, but not radically. This is the sort of organic upmarket path a lot of us see, growing more enterprise each year:
#2. Customer count growing as fast as revenue — rare, & a great sign for future
New customers grew from +41% in 2020 to +51% in 2021! Most leaders at scale with high NRR get more & more revenue from existing base. Having that high a ratio is a strong sign of future growth.
#3. Use overages to renegotiate contracts -- but not so much to charge per event
While Amplitude charges per volume, in part, it doesn’t make a material amount from overages. Rather, it uses overage events to trigger a call from sales to buy more.
#4. 119% NRR. Strong, but not at crazy levels of some developer apps.
119% is strong NRR, but on its own, not the crazy high we’ve seen with some adjacent Cloud players. But plenty strong to fuel growth for a decade. A good comp if you are like Amplitude.
#5. Amplitude is accelerating — from 50% growth to 57% at $150m ARR.
This is super impressive and what we’re seeing from so many Cloud leaders. The best of the best are not just maintaining growth rates we haven’t seen before -- they’re growing even faster at scale. Amazing
And a few bonus notes:
#6. 245 employees in Sales & Marketing — vs. 101 in Engineering / R&D. It does take an army to support an analytics platform, even with a free edition.
#7. Founders own about 16% together at IPO. CEO Spencer Skates owns 8.5%, CTO Curtis Liu 8.0%
Expensify was founded way back in 2008, in the dawn of mobile, and took 13 years to file to IPO
When Covid hit, the business was hit hard as travel stopped
But then ... it's roared back to 60% growth (!) at $140m ARR. And on to IPO shortly!
5 Interesting Learnings: 🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽
#1. Only 140 employees (!).
$1M in ARR per employee could be a new efficiency record at IPO for SaaS. Expensify kept it lean, maybe almost too lean. They raised little VC capital and became cash-flow positive.
As part of that, they learned to outsource anything they could (vs hiring internally), and maximized the PLG playbook … leading to a stunning $1m in ARR per employee. We can’t all do this. But it shows it can be done.
It's one that just ... always was growing at epic rates, from YC Demo Day to IPO
It's growing a stunning 69% a year at $250,000,000+ in ARR
5 Interesting Learnings: 🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽
#1. 152% NRR from $100k+ customers.
We’re getting used to seeing these super-high NRR numbers from the top developer-focused leaders, in many cases because utility pricing often encourages it (see also Datadog, Twilio, etc). Still, these are truly top-tier numbers:
#2. 97% GRR (Gross Retention Rate)
It’s great and helpful to see this broken out as well to compare yourself to. GitLab’s customers … stay. Almost all of them.
97% GRR is world-class. Service Now has 99% -- but their customers sign 3 year contracts!!
$1M in ARR per employee could be a new efficiency record at IPO for SaaS:
An incredible 60% of their revenue comes from employees using the free version on their own, for their own expenses, and then socializing it to their "boss".
And it's growing a stunning 118% at a $3B run rate
But the overall margins are low (21%), they lose money on services and hardware, and barely make money on payments
Is it SaaS?
5 Interesting Learnings: 🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽
#1. With gross margins of only 21%, is Toast really a software company? Not yet. Not today.
While its software has decent margins of 66%, software is only 10% of Toast’s total GAAP revenue.
It loses money on the hardware (gross margin negative) and payments have barely a 20%+ margin and constitute the vast majority of revenue today. It would take a lot of work for Toast to hit the 60% gross margin standard to be a true software company