Building the Most Loved Analytics Tool ($1.05B, $100M ARR, 60+ NPS) | Mixpanel, Amir Movafaghi

00:00at one point mixpanel we were turning almost  half of our customers every year and it was this place where as a company that's growing fast  you know in some ways that can that metric can be overlooked but in many ways it was a time where  we really came together and said look turning half the customers is a major major problem in  that we are clearly not driving and delivering the value as a company that we need to and even  though you know we we're still growing we have to go back and address churn but the reality was much  more complicated and nuanced it so happened that

00:36there wasn't one answer you it wasn't one thing  it was a set of a bunch of different things that we needed to do and so that's where our journey  began and we literally made a you know a series of categories of different priorities we had  a series of things that we were going to go out and and Tackle uh and everyone the company  from go to market to epd sort of had this core mission to go out and get this done and the  result was really incredible and by the time we did our series C we were at 50 and this past  spring we almost touched 60 which is really like

01:10now kind of consumer grade category and then  retention went from you know 50 to close to 90% hello my name is uh Amir moaf fagi I'm the CEO  here at mixpanel we are an event-based analytics company currently have 9,000 customers globally  distributed company crossed the 100 million in Revenue a little less than a couple of years  ago we're super proud to have our uh one other metric that we disclos in our customer MPS  being almost a consumer grade approaching [Music] 60 I was born in uh in tan in Iran I spent 7even  years in Istanbul Turkey so I spent a good number

01:54of years there we moved there when I was about  eight and then I came to United States when I was 15 when I was uh going through graduate school  it was a time when financial crisis had hit in New York it was right at the the beginning of where  social platforms were coming online and Uprising uh in Iran I couldn't get a hold of my parents  because all the phone lines were were shut down and you know email was not working and at the  time Twitter was the only uh uh platform that was uh really reporting what was happening on  the ground in ton and it was this sort of like

02:30incredible moment of realizing just how powerful  the social platforms were becoming at that point it was such a personal attachment to the product  that was my lead in to Tech so I joined Twitter in 2010 when I joined a company we were about  a little over 100 employees we were pre-ad Revenue it was a extraordinarily exciting time  even Twitter at its height of success every 6 months was like a completely different company  you had this company that you would wake up you all of a sudden had an ad product that failed  you kind of had a moment of having to really

03:03kind of have these moments of existential crisis  right hey are we going to have you are we going to have a company you know in 6 months is there  going to be are we going to be able to make it to the other side in a lot of ways the way that  we go through and fix things together as a team is this ability to really come together on a core  problem and we understand why we are focusing on what we're focusing we have Clarity around what  objective and what outcome we're trying to get to and then we're flexible about the how right  and we're able to take feedback along the way

03:33from our customers from our peers from our board  you know from everybody investors like we are able to learn and understand and then iterate and then  hold ourselves accountable to these outcomes so I think fixing problems at its core comes down  to First really centering oursel on why this matters why it takes precedent priority over the  99 other problems you have and then rallying and inspiring people to really get in have Clarity on  how they can make an impact and difference on that Journey when I left Twitter we had grown from  nearly 100 employees to 4,500 employees it was

04:10from close to zero to you 2 billion in Revenue it  was um phenomenal incredible growth that happened during that time biggest lesson was the impact  that user experience had on the success of the company and this Obsession around delivering  a better product a better user experience and sort of like a in a way having that as a leading  path into better monetization and better growth companies in Enterprise software have invested  quite a bit on technology you know better utility building a better technology as like a first order  of business being part of Twitter it was getting a

04:52lot more closer to just how much the significance  of making sure that you're always thinking of the user the customer first before you go figure  out everything else because without the value without that Ultimate Experience that you're  delivering that's creating value everything else can feel much more femoral and much weaker  Foundation I think you know in many ways when you're part of a in in a great company that's  has a number of different opportunities to make an impact and connect and grow with in many ways  you want to make sure that your skill set is You

05:28Know Rich enough and mature enough to be able  to deliver a bunch of impact but hopefully if you're in the right position you're also gaining  a bunch of new knowledge and new tools I think in many ways the the growth comes from just  having that sheer intellectual curiosity and a desire to make sure that you're influencing  and impacting things that matter and so biggest one is this constant ability to ask am I doing  the thing that is the highest impact uh work that I could be doing am I focusing on things that  actually will drive and make a difference and then

05:59usually if you're in the right role and you  have the right foundational skill set then the rest of it will take care of itself you'll  figure out resources and who to tap into it's one of the best parts of being in Silicon Valley  is you pick up the phone and you can call so many people around us that have either experienced  that exact same situation that you're in one of the things that I always mention people talk  about like hey what's so special about Silicon Valley why you know would I move my company there  why would we you know start a company you know in

06:30Silicon Valley instead of somewhere else the and  the answer I give is when I started at Twitter we were going through a bunch of newish problems that  we were experiencing and at that time I remember just through networking finding out experts  that were you know at Facebook or at LinkedIn or at Google and you would reach out in every  single time almost 100% of the time there were willing to jump on a call and they were willing to  collaborate and they were willing to give advice and I think that was such a a phenomenal sort  of validation of just how important it is to be

07:04in an environment where people are experiencing  that same set of growth ambition and experiences that they can impart and and give to you as  you're solving your your problems in your company do you use Ken Lee to book calls Tod  do is to manage tasks trell to keep track of projects what if I told you that you could do all  these with one tool but then it also integrates with all of the tools that I just mentioned hi  everyone I'm Hannah from the EO team and I'm here to introduce the gamechanging productivity tool  akif flow it's basically a smart combination of

07:40all the essential productivity features I need  on the daily first is the beautiful marriage of task management and time blocking akif flow has  this interface where you can create a to-do list just as you would in any task management tools  but you can also drag these certain tasks right into your calendar to the exact time of day  I find this particular visualization of two dos and schedules side by side very helpful  in prioritizing my work carving out chunks of focus time needed for video editing  blocking time here syncs with all of my

08:13other connected apps such as slack Ken Le and  more secondly it's the magical command bar the go-to shortcut for all features within aif flow  instead of navigating the app manually I simply click on the command bar to command what I  wish to perform for example let's just say that we confirmed an interview filming and I  want to put that in my calendar I could just set that up manually on the Google Calendar  or I could simply go ahead and type akif flow founder interview filming on October 28th  from 12:00 p.m.

08:39to 3: p.m. and there's my schedule we've been using it to keep track of  our hectic filming and traveling schedules every day okay at one point mpanel we were turning  almost half of our customers every year and it was this place where as a company that's growing fast  you know in some ways that can that metric can be overlooked you're like Hey we're still we're still  growing things are still great and you know you would show up and and look at these numbers and  you wouldn't even blink you're like yeah we just

09:15had like half of our customers like walk out the  door but it's not a big deal cuz we're getting so much more and we're still growing but in many  ways it was a time where we really came together and said look turning half the customers is a  major your major problem in that we are clearly not driving and delivering the value as a company  that we need to and even though you know we we're still growing we have to go back and address churn  as a way of making sure we have sustainable growth over time and that product needs to kind of get  to this level of maturity over time and you know

09:47the problem is actually this one was quite  difficult cuz we were initially just trying to find like easy answers you know maybe this is  a segment problem like SMB has higher turn maybe we just need to go to Enterprise and that'll be  the fix all of our problems but the reality was much more complicated and nuanced and what it  required was a very very diligent way of again segmenting and understanding the behavior from a  different customers in different segments and then being able to really narrow in on the reasons it  it so happened that there wasn't one answer you

10:20know it wasn't one thing it was a set of a bunch  of different things that we needed to do and the list was quite overwhelming the way that we came  at it was instead of putting some crazy insane kind of goal for where we wanted to be in a in in  a year time we acknowledge that retention was a lagging indicator that it would take time for us  to really move it and so instead we said what is the single kind of proxy leading indicator we can  grab that would Inspire the team get them excited about making the right set of improvements um  in moving retention in the right direction and

10:53then we shifted our Focus to NPS user NPS we said  look if we are able to improve Pro user sentiment that's a much faster in product signal we're going  to get from our users that starts going up then we know we can kind of move the dial on on retention  over time and so that's where our journey began and we literally made a you know a series of  categories of different priorities we had a series of things that we were going to go out and  and Tackle uh and everyone the company from go to market to epd sort of had this core mission to go  out and get this done and the result was really

11:29incredible we were in single digits uh MPS  at the time and we were able to move that 10 points every single year and by the time we did  our series C we were at 50 and this past spring we almost touched 60 which is really like now kind  of consumer grade category and then retention went from you know 50 to close to 90% as a result  which I think again speaks to this ability to establish real feedback loops that allow you to  understand whether you're the things you're doing are moving the needle and then having this kind  of combination of leading lagging indicators so

12:07that you have things to inspire get inspired along  the way in your journey of execution rather than having to wait you know a year to find out if  something was working companies go through very very different stages and challenges as they're  going from no Revenue to the initial uh signals that there's demand and there's a need for their  product to get 10 million Milestone they get the 50 million Milestone and there's huge drop offs  from each of these stages learning an experience that at least we've taken here at mix spanel is  the ability to really have a very rich signal

12:47coming in from the pool of customers that you  don't have right because so much of your signal and constant uh feedback loop is around the core  Market that you're addressing and your core set of customers that are paying you today a lot of  your signals are coming from existing customers and so along the way as company's maturing you  want to make sure you always have in the initial phase you you you just you want to get as small  as possible solve the problem for the smallest audience that is uh able to get value and pay you  for for your product um but as you're scaling and

13:23getting to 50 100 million plus then you're really  trying to also make sure you have a lens toward the set of the part of the market that you don't  own that you don't have and make sure that you understand what opportunities you have to grow  and continue to expand your offering and and creating more value for a bigger part of the  market I think Beyond product and and signal from customers the other dimension that's  really critical as you're scaling is way that teams operate internally how and the the  way that your executive team and you as a CEO

13:56need to operate is going to change completely  right as a 10 person startup you're in a very different capacity everybody's everybody's doing  everything and then you're you're need to then go create leverage really create autonomy and  ownership modularity within the organization is going to be key uh in driving kind of  growth and success you need past a certain scale I think product L growth is is really  important and I think sometimes we oversimplify what it means even expel we've we've had quite  a bit of a journey in terms of understanding the

14:32nuances of you know what it entails what works  within product L growth and what you need to augment and layer on the the fact of the matter is  what's really awesome about product L growth and what's so good about so many of the startups and  different you know growth companies really leaning into to this at its heart the principle is we have  we need to have a really amazing product that's self- servable that can people can get value  out of right away that sort of speaks for itself uh you barely need to sell you know that's kind  of like the the the end all sort of uh goal of

15:06product lead and that's awesome but there is so  much more to being able to leveraging product L growth and actually creating sustainable  growth over time and a big part of that is this element of you know Market education  everyone is going to come in to your product with a very different set of maturity right  they may be at a different part of the company understanding of the problem that you're trying  to solve as a company being very intellectually honest about truly segmenting and understanding  where you have an opportunity to actually go

15:40drive product Le growth where you can deliver  a self- serve for the most part a self- serve experience that's really key acknowledging that  there's this space and there's absolutely an opportunity to be very sales l and a way that  you drive augmenting that product Le growth knowing that you can always rely and fall back  on the fact that you have an incredible product that once you get to a right level of Market  education when you get to the right level of getting a customer to the same spot then your  product will take care of the rest it's just

16:12this kind of core appreciation that initially  product L growth is really awesome because of its unit economics it's like the fastest the most  affordable the best way you can possibly grow but it's kind of core at its core uh it requires  a really deep segmentation Focus for it to to work first one is about being open and  being open to feedback you know we as people get attached emotionally to our  decisions about how to go from point A to point B and just knowing that uh having  qualitative quantitative feedback will let

16:46your course correct and make sure you get to  the destination on time um and then the second one is about being able to lead change and Lead  change has the element that Nick spanel every months is going to be a fundamentally different  company and we want not only individuals to you know be okay with change or support it but we  want them to lead it we want them to know that we're going to need to explore and find ways to go  out and create ways that we can create more value in the marketplace third is uh a customer focus  which at the end of the day we're only successful

17:19if our customers are getting value and so any  decision we make around what product we prioritize How We Do pricing and packaging right how we  evolve our support organization is around this kind of long-term value that we're creating for  our customers the fourth one is results oriented which acknowledges that you know the single  best way for us to keep ourselves accountable on whether we're moving toward fulfilling our mission  as a company to help the world learn from its data is uh people's willingness to pay us money to  to solve that problem and so Topline a growth

17:49are we uh driving that in a sustainable fashion  through the right margin profile and then finally is the one team which really emphasizes the import  importance of establishing meaningful connections among employees to move beyond the transactional  zoom interactions into a place where they know each other they can trust one another so when  they do get into a position of conflict there's a foundational trust and safety that allows them  to work through those things productively [Music]