Hey everyone, I am one of the founders at Mixpanel. Layoffs were tough on us, we did over hire a bit, and wanted to make the company more lean. We are deeply sorry for those that are no longer part of Mixpanel - they were our friends and co-workers that we continue to miss.
Should the preverbal hit the fan, would you open-source the code and have a paid support plan... should all else fails to monetize this?
Not sure why the down votes. I don't know the balance sheet of the company. Also lots of other companies like Aerospike open source their code and make money from support plans.
Did you fire after they finished development or during? At what point did you realize that you did not have enough income to support that many? How much were you expecting to make by this time?
You seem freindly but these questions are often left unanswered. Im usually led to believe companies are looking for contract workers but hire sallery because what is available isnt what they were looking for. Nothing personel, just a pattern
Hi Suhail! I love MixPanel and think you guys really know how to time your new features.
I'd love it if MixPanel could offer prices adjusted to foreign currency (similar to Steam?)
I live in Brazil and the recent devaluation of the BRL to the USD has made MixPanel prohibitively expensive.
MixPanel has very generous free plan and many free users. Sales people were hired to try to convert free users into paying customers. Plan failed, sales people shown the door.
This is why companies need to think really hard about freemium model. In case of MixPanel, many of their free users keep adjusting so they send just enough data to stay under free plan. They are probably not going to be persuaded by sales people to pay.
One of the things lots of people (including founders) don't understand is that when they're converting from early stage VC subsidized business models to "we need to actually be a real business and make money", maintaining freemium means that the subsidies move from the VCs to paid customers, and paying customers hate to cover freeloaders.
This. We use Mixpanel's free plan and were recently hit up by their sales team. It's unfortunate because Mixpanel is an amazing product that we would be happy to pay for, but it's just too expensive relative to the value we get out of it.
As one of those free MixPanel users - their non-free plan is just too expensive.
I eventually stopped using MixPanel altogether. In a choice between "only get a small subset of data" and "get all the data, but super super expensively", I decided I just don't care enough and opted for no data. Or rather, the combination of gAnalytics and a few others is Good Enough (tm).
I had a really bad experience where a Mixpanel salesman aggressively cold emailed me on my personal email (I'm guessing he got it through Linkedin?) and continued to do so even though I told him not to contact me multiple times and that I had no ability to make or influence purchasing decisions for analytics software. I understand hustling, but at the time it came off as really desperate.
> the CEO's three favorite things are talking about how much he likes to drink, comparing himself to a gangster rapper, and a juvenile lack of self-awareness
Based on his LinkedIn profile, he can't be older than 30 and has never held a real job. Why exactly is someone like this running a company that has raised $77M instead of working as a junior engineer?
That's a worrying sign - sales are generally the last people to go - if you're under financial stress you generally need revenue and customers.
Unless they somehow believe they can pull off another Atlassian (who actually spend a ton of money on marketing, despite being seen as a "no salesperson" business) I'd say the $65m funding they received is going down the gurgler.
'sales are generally the last people to go' - generally where? In startups , especially engineering driven ones, shredding parts of sales team first is not un-heard of.
Also, according to the CEO, they over-hired. Looks like they tried to expand more than they could handle.
Doesn't seem like a worrying sign to me.
Generally if it's an engineering focused set of founders they're most likely to get sales wrong. And sales driven leadership tends to get engineering hiring wrong. To way over simplify, both sides think "Well if we 2x headcount we'll 2x revenue/new features" They don't make that mistake on the discipline they came up with.
That's not necessarily true, you could have also overhired on sales or realized that you need to increase sales quotas to hit your profitability targets which would result in letting go of underperforming folks.
I ran a free service for a long while... they should just dump the free service or at least not accept any more free customers. They will save a lot of money and since the customers don't transition up anyway it won't really affect their business. A business isn't a charity. I learned that the hard way!
If it's mostly sales people, it is perfectly reasonable to think they are reassessing their outbound marketing efforts. For example, perhaps their sales channel produced poorer quality leads compared to organic or the type of product they were selling was low enough margin that the sales commission removed any profit they were getting.
Mixpanel has a great product but suffers quite a bit from the curse of having a product everyone loves but nobody wants to pay for.
The layoffs are a likely a further materialization of their struggles to get people to pay for the product at the rate they were hoping.
There's a lot of competition in this space out there now. Mixpanel isn't as unique as it once was. There's also the elephant in the room of questioning how much of the revenue in this sector comes from other companies surviving only on VC cash (i.e. cat video site analyzing page traffic that shows ads for a toothpaste delivery iPhone app that analyzes its social media interactions with users that turn out to just be bots in some Russian guy's basement). Point being the rapid downturn in VC funding recently isn't exactly helping Mixpanel's revenue either.
I checked out mixpanel couple years ago and I couldn't get tied down to a service which didn't have a cheaper than a $150 plan. What if I find it very useful and then ran out of the free tier quota. That scenario was unacceptable and thus, we are not a client.
I already see other's comments in this thread of this very scenario. We dodged that bullet.
"Hey, I'm Neil Patel. I’m determined to make a business in <GEOIP> successful. My only question is, will it be yours?"
It then analyses your site, finds a whole bunch of 'errors', and won't tell you what they are until you tell them your marketing budget (which you should, because there's 'only 1 place left'). It might be a fantastic tool, but its marketing is a real turnoff.
[+] [-] suhail|10 years ago|reply
I am happy to answer any questions that I can.
[+] [-] no1youknowz|10 years ago|reply
Not sure why the down votes. I don't know the balance sheet of the company. Also lots of other companies like Aerospike open source their code and make money from support plans.
[+] [-] frozenport|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] web007|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramoq|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s986s|10 years ago|reply
You seem freindly but these questions are often left unanswered. Im usually led to believe companies are looking for contract workers but hire sallery because what is available isnt what they were looking for. Nothing personel, just a pattern
[+] [-] jkkorn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boomzilla|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lubos|10 years ago|reply
This is why companies need to think really hard about freemium model. In case of MixPanel, many of their free users keep adjusting so they send just enough data to stay under free plan. They are probably not going to be persuaded by sales people to pay.
[+] [-] bane|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredtking|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swizec|10 years ago|reply
I eventually stopped using MixPanel altogether. In a choice between "only get a small subset of data" and "get all the data, but super super expensively", I decided I just don't care enough and opted for no data. Or rather, the combination of gAnalytics and a few others is Good Enough (tm).
[+] [-] Impossible|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lyime|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staunch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benchmark6|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w1ntermute|10 years ago|reply
> the CEO's three favorite things are talking about how much he likes to drink, comparing himself to a gangster rapper, and a juvenile lack of self-awareness
Based on his LinkedIn profile, he can't be older than 30 and has never held a real job. Why exactly is someone like this running a company that has raised $77M instead of working as a junior engineer?
[+] [-] apapli|10 years ago|reply
Unless they somehow believe they can pull off another Atlassian (who actually spend a ton of money on marketing, despite being seen as a "no salesperson" business) I'd say the $65m funding they received is going down the gurgler.
[+] [-] openforce|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jusben1369|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calbear81|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1as|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gscott|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielrhodes|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swingbridge|10 years ago|reply
The layoffs are a likely a further materialization of their struggles to get people to pay for the product at the rate they were hoping.
There's a lot of competition in this space out there now. Mixpanel isn't as unique as it once was. There's also the elephant in the room of questioning how much of the revenue in this sector comes from other companies surviving only on VC cash (i.e. cat video site analyzing page traffic that shows ads for a toothpaste delivery iPhone app that analyzes its social media interactions with users that turn out to just be bots in some Russian guy's basement). Point being the rapid downturn in VC funding recently isn't exactly helping Mixpanel's revenue either.
[+] [-] bankim|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wildmXranat|10 years ago|reply
I already see other's comments in this thread of this very scenario. We dodged that bullet.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thewarrior|10 years ago|reply
And so it begins ... ?
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/08/burn-slower-or-vaporize/
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ksec|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greensamuelm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] nailer|10 years ago|reply
"Hey, I'm Neil Patel. I’m determined to make a business in <GEOIP> successful. My only question is, will it be yours?"
It then analyses your site, finds a whole bunch of 'errors', and won't tell you what they are until you tell them your marketing budget (which you should, because there's 'only 1 place left'). It might be a fantastic tool, but its marketing is a real turnoff.
[+] [-] AznHisoka|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrits|10 years ago|reply