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Today’s Episode
This podcast is important for you for two reasons:
It shows how a failed startup can lead to a billion-dollar product, if you’re solving the right problem.
It gives a front-row seat to how top PMs and CEOs actually use data, AI, and experimentation to build winning products.
In this episode, Spenser (co-founder & CEO of Amplitude) shares how a failed AI voice assistant led to one of the most widely used product analytics platforms in the world.
Plus a full live demo of Amplitude’s latest AI, session replay, and experimentation features!
If you're serious about building data-informed products, this is the episode you don’t want to miss.
Some of My Favorite Takeaways
1. From MIT to Startup Grind
Spenser didn’t set out to build Amplitude.
He and Curtis were building a voice assistant startup (Sonolight - think Siri before Siri) that never took off.
But they had one internal tool that did work, it helped them understand why users weren’t sticking.
That tool became Amplitude we know today!
You don’t always pivot to a “better” idea.
Sometimes, you build the one thing that actually helped you, and it turns out others needed it too.
So, don’t chase startup ideas. Chase the problem that keeps bothering you.
2. Founding Amplitude: The Real Product-Market Fit Test? 10 Teams Saying the Same Painful Thing!
Before writing a single line of code for Amplitude, they interviewed 30 startups.
Ten of them repeated the same thing: “We have no idea why users churn.”
So they went all in.
Fast forward: Amplitude now powers 3,000+ companies, hundreds of thousands of users, and $300M+ in revenue.
Also: Spenser’s not a fan of measuring scale by headcount. That’s noise.
Focus on product reach and customer outcomes.
3. Scaling to $1.5B isn’t Technical, it’s Emotional
There’s a point in every founder’s journey where the skills that got you here… won’t get you further.
So, he had to step back.
Replace early team members.
Hire execs who knew more than him.
He called it an identity crisis and said it was the hardest part of scaling Amplitude.
But that shift is what made room for the company to actually grow.
And that’s not a failure though, that’s the process and part of the job.
4. Building Products at CEO Level: Review > Run
He’s not in the weeds shipping features. But he’s not hands-off either.
He does weekly 2-hour product reviews, inspects roadmap alignment, and pushes teams to answer:
Is this solving a real problem?
Can we prove it moves the needle?
Are we building with enough urgency?
He’s also obsessed with narrowing the feedback loop using Amplitude dashboards internally…
To audit adoption, conversions, and time-to-value.
Because “You can’t fake usage. You either built something useful, or you didn’t.”
5. Live Demo By The CEO On Using Amplitude Use Cases
In the episode, Spenser gives a full walkthrough of Amplitude’s power tools, built live:
→ Autocapture + manual event tracking
→ Funnel views + retention curves
→ Segmentation by country, device, language
→ Heatmaps + cohort builders
→ Session replays + AI-generated summaries
→ Ask Amplitude: a natural language analytics interface
→ Experiments: visual editor + real-time A/B testing
The next wave they’re working on is An AI agent that runs diagnostics, suggests experiments, and accelerates iteration cycles…
Without needing a data analyst or PM to manually dig.
The future is bright!
Where to Find Spenser
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Up Next
I hope you enjoyed the last episode with Dr. Bart (where we dove into his story of going from laid off to 125k followers). Up next, we have episodes with:
Pawel Huryn - The Top 6 AI PM Skills
Brad Schaefer - How to Become a VP of Product
Matt Le May - How to be Impact-First
Finally, check out my latest deep dive if you haven’t yet: How to Ace the Presentation Round of PM Interviews (with examples).
Cheers,
Aakash
