Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees(techcrunch.com) |
Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees(techcrunch.com) |
I am happy to answer any questions that I can.
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.
It's too early to say what we'd do in an outcome like that. I certainly wouldn't want to see everything we've built go to waste.
presentation (2014): http://www.slideshare.net/metrics1/mixpanel-our-pitch-deck-t...
original source of the news: http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/08/mixpanel-starts-2016-with-...
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
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.
> 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?
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.
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 already see other's comments in this thread of this very scenario. We dodged that bullet.
And so it begins ... ?
I can't remember my conversation with them, but it was clear they were a bunch of a-holes I didn't want to do business with.
I tell everybody I can to avoid them.
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).
They want bigger customers than me, which is fine, but that also means that if and when I turn into a bigger customer, I might already be locked into a different solution.
When I looked at MixPanel we were already at more than 8 million page views per month and wanting to track more events than that.
But as we wanted to try MixPanel, the best way was to start by sampling a small number of users and activities.
As our trial of the software progressed we found we got way more value out of sampling a smaller set that we could make sense of rather than measuring everything.
For us, MixPanel became one more tool in a wider toolset. We didn't see the value in jumping up to the paid level as we didn't feel it would replace all of the other tools.
News organisations pay a lot of money for polls of only 1000-2000 people. 25k data points is quite sufficient in most cases.
And to be fair to sama, I haven't seen any comments from YC alumni about how he compares himself to a gangster rapper. However, the trend of VCs pontificating on Twitter about topics that they don't have a good grasp on is somewhat irritating. The only person who has truly demonstrated the ability to "go deep" on (multiple) extremely complicated subjects, and successfully put his time/money where his mouth is, is Elon Musk. And even he showed a typical lack of self-awareness in his younger days[0].
or you don't have many users of your own.
They might be looking to cut back on sales and try a more automated approach to convert people to smaller plans.
About half of the numbers are redacted, but you can see if it's a single digit or a double digit number. And you can read in the 2015/2016 plan on page 10:
* 3x sales headcount and rapidly race towards distribution
* Reduce sales ramp time by 30-50% via sales enablement
* Double headcount every 6-9 months
From the original article