Author: Zach Winn | MIT News Office<\/p>\n
Creating a good customer experience increasingly means creating a good digital experience. But metrics like pageviews and clicks offer limited insight into how much customers actually like a digital product.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the problem the digital optimization company Amplitude is solving. Amplitude gives companies a clearer picture into how users interact with their digital products to help them understand exactly which features to promote or improve.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s all about using product data to drive your business,\u201d says Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates \u201910, who co-founded the company with Curtis Liu \u201910 and Stanford University graduate Jeffrey Wang. \u201cMobile apps and websites are really complex. The average app or website will have thousands of things you can do with it. The question is how you know which of those things are driving a great user experience and which parts are really frustrating for users.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amplitude\u2019s database can gather millions of details about how users behave inside an app or website and allow customers to explore that information without needing data science degrees.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt provides an interface for very easy, accessible ways of looking at your data, understanding your data, and asking questions of that data,\u201d Skates says.<\/p>\n
Amplitude, which recently announced it will be going public, is already helping 23 of the 100 largest companies in the U.S. Customers include media companies like NBC, tech companies like Twitter, and retail companies like Walmart.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur platform helps businesses understand how people are using their apps and websites so they can create better versions of their products,\u201d Skates says. \u201cIt\u2019s all about creating a really compelling product.\u201d<\/p>\n
Learning entrepreneurship<\/strong><\/p>\n The founders say their years at MIT were among the best of their lives. Skates and Liu were undergraduates from 2006 to 2010. Skates majored in biological engineering while Liu majored in mathematics and electrical engineering and computer science. The two first met as opponents in MIT\u2019s Battlecode competition, in which students use artificial intelligence algorithms to control teams of robots that compete in a strategy game against other teams. The following year they teamed up.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are a lot of parallels between what you\u2019re trying to do in Battlecode and what you end up having to do in the early stages of a startup,\u201d Liu says. \u201cYou have limited resources, limited time, and you\u2019re trying to accomplish a goal. What we found is trying a lot of different things, putting our ideas out there and testing them with real data, really helped us focus on the things that actually mattered. That method of iteration and continual improvement set the foundation for how we approach building products and startups.\u201d<\/p>\n Liu and Skates next participated in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition with an idea for a cloud-based music streaming service. After graduation, Skates began working in finance and Liu got a job at Google, but they continued pursuing startup ideas on the side, including a website that let alumni see where their classmates ended up and a marketplace for finding photographers.<\/p>\n A year after graduation, the founders decided to quit their jobs and work on a startup full time. Skates moved into Liu\u2019s apartment in San Francisco, setting up a mattress on the floor, and they began working on a project that became Sonalight, a voice recognition app. As part of the project, the founders built an internal system to understand where users got stuck in the app and what features were used the most.<\/p>\n Despite getting over 100,000 downloads, the founders decided Sonalight was a little too early for its time and started thinking their analytics feature could be useful to other companies. They spoke with about 30 different product teams to learn more about what companies wanted from their digital analytics. Amplitude was officially founded in 2012.<\/p>\n Amplitude gathers fine details about digital product usage, parsing out individual features and actions to give customers a better view of how their products are being used. Using the data in Amplitude\u2019s intuitive, no-code interface, customers can make strategic decisions like whether to launch a feature or change a distribution channel.<\/p>\n The platform is designed to ease the bottlenecks that arise when executives, product teams, salespeople, and marketers want to answer questions about customer experience or behavior but need the data science team to crunch the numbers for them.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very collaborative interface to encourage customers to work together to understand how users are engaging with their apps,\u201d Skates says.<\/p>\n Amplitude\u2019s database also uses machine learning to segment users, predict user outcomes, and uncover novel correlations. Earlier this year, the company unveiled a service called Recommend that helps companies create personalized user experiences across their entire platform in minutes. The service goes beyond demographics to personalize customer experiences based on what users have done or seen before within the product.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re very conscious on the privacy front,\u201d Skates says. \u201cA lot of analytics companies will resell your data to third parties or use it for advertising purposes. We don\u2019t do any of that. We\u2019re only here to provide product insights to our customers. We\u2019re not using data to track you across the web. Everyone expects Netflix to use the data on what you\u2019ve watched before to recommend what to watch next. That\u2019s effectively what we\u2019re helping other companies do.\u201d<\/p>\n Optimizing digital experiences<\/strong><\/p>\n The meditation app Calm is on a mission to help users build habits that improve their mental wellness. Using Amplitude, the company learned that users most often use the app to get better sleep and reduce stress. The insights helped Calm\u2019s team double down on content geared toward those goals, launching \u201csleep stories\u201d to help users unwind at the end of each day and adding content around anxiety relief and relaxation. Sleep stories are now Calm\u2019s most popular type of content, and Calm has grown rapidly to millions of people around the world.<\/p>\n Calm\u2019s story shows the power of letting user behavior drive product decisions. Amplitude has also helped the online fundraising site GoFundMe increase donations by showing users more compelling campaigns and the exercise bike company Peloton realize the importance of social features like leaderboards.<\/p>\n Moving forward, the founders believe Amplitude\u2019s platform will continue helping companies adapt to an increasingly digital world in which users expect more compelling, personalized experiences.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you think about the online experience for companies today compared to 10 years ago, now [digital] is the main point of contact, whether you\u2019re a media company streaming content, a retail company, or a finance company,\u201d Skates says. \u201cThat\u2019s only going to continue. That\u2019s where we\u2019re trying to help.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Go to Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"