How Statsig Grows: The Story, Growth Motion, Product, and Market
Statsig has shaken up the experimentation and feature flag markets. So I talked to 5 of its leaders and 3 of its customers. I learned its story only has just begun. Here's all the details
You know those famous posters around the Facebook offices?
The one that says ‘Be scrappy’ is attributed to Vijaye Raji, the founder and CEO of Statsig.
As they say: behind every phenomenal startup lies a phenomenal founder.
In talking to a former colleague of Vijaye’s at Meta, this is what I heard about him:
He was one of the culture carriers at a young Facebook. Since he arrived in 2011, he always stood out as someone who embodied Facebook’s values. The entire exec team loved him since he became VP in 2017.
Today, we’re going to crack open Vijaye’s new company’s growth and strategy to see what they’re doing.
It’s a story of bringing the best Facebook had to offer to data-driven product development, but then evolving as they learned what customers wanted.
Today’s Post
Words : 4,738 | Est. Reading Time: 21 mins
After talking to 5 Statsig folks, 3 customers and 2 customers of competitors, I’m excited to present the web’s deepest dive yet into the company:
The Story of Statsig
How Statsig Builds Product
The 7 Layers of Statsig’s Growth Motion
Statsig’s Market Position and Future Growth
The Post in a Picture
1. The Story of Statsig
Chapter 1 - Facebook
The Founding Insight
In the 2010s at Facebook, Vijaye built several billion-dollar businesses - Mobile App Ads, Audience Network, Marketplace, Gaming, and Entertainment.
Each of these efforts relied heavily on Facebook’s culture of experimentation - and infrastructure to support that.
Want to test a new feature?
Launch an experiment?
Analyze the results?
As Pierre Estephan, a former Staff SWE at Meta, and now Engineering Manager at Statsig, recalled:
These tools just worked.
And, in that tooling, Vijaye saw something bigger.
His teams moved fast, making thousands of small improvements with tools that made experimentation seamless.
Deltoid, Unidash, and Scuba (the names of these tools) weren’t just analytics platforms—they were the engines behind Facebook’s rapid product development.
This was the insight behind founding Statsig.
Assembling a Team
During his work-from-home days in 2020, between back-to-back Zoom meetings, Vijaye started imagining how to bring these capabilities to the wider world.
Not just the tools themselves, but the entire infrastructure that made Facebook's experimentation culture possible.
The first call went to Marcos, his engineering lead over late night games of DOTA2. Marcos agreed with the opportunity.
Together, they began quietly connecting with the most talented engineers they knew. Not through formal recruitment channels, but through direct conversations about building something new.
The criteria were specific: they needed people who understood both high-performance systems and the statistical rigor required for experimentation tools.
Most importantly? They needed builders who could move fast.
Committing to In-Person
By the time they were done, they had assembled an elite squad: six engineers who were well versed in building for scale, and one data scientist who understood the math behind it all.
They all got together to work in-person in Seattle:
They weren't just leaving Facebook - they were taking its best practices and preparing to rebuild them from the ground up.
Chapter 2 - 8 Months to a Customer
Early Struggles
They put together a strong MVP in short order, and beta launched in May 2021.
Then... silence.
The team had built something they thought was incredible. The kind of experimentation platform that Facebook engineers took for granted. The sort of tooling that could help any company move faster, build better, test smarter.
But they couldn't give it away. Vijaye would later recall, in thinking back to those eight months:
It was one of my lowest points.
The product was free, yet still no one was biting.
They had the engineering talent. They had the infrastructure. They had built exactly what they set out to build.
What they didn't have was a single paying customer.
Every startup faces its dark night of the soul. For Statsig, it was watching month after month go by, wondering if they had built something nobody wanted.
The Ex-Facebook Connection
Had they been too deep in the Facebook bubble? Had they overestimated the market's need for sophisticated experimentation tools?
It seemed that way until Jeff, an ex-Facebook PM now at Headspace, reached out.
Finally — someone who understood exactly what they had built. Someone who recognized the power of Facebook-grade experimentation tools.
Someone willing to sign a contract.
That first deal changed everything. Within about a year, they'd hit $1M in ARR.
But more importantly, they'd learned something crucial: maybe the path to success wasn't just about replicating Facebook's tools.
Maybe it was about evolving them into something new entirely.
Chapter 3 - Experimentation
A Strong Entrypoint
The experimentation product became their trojan horse.
As Margaret-Ann, their Head of Product, puts it:
Experimentation is our most mature product - it’s best in class. It has opened up the most conversations.
One by one, major tech companies started taking notice. Notion. Brex. Affirm. Each one that signed on made the next conversation easier.
The pitch was compelling: Facebook-grade experimentation tools, but accessible to any company. Want to test new features with the same rigor as tech giants? Now you could.
Their reputation began to grow. Former employees of big tech companies, now at smaller firms, became their biggest champions. They knew what good looked like - they'd used similar tools at places like Airbnb and Uber.
Figma. Electronic Arts. OpenAI. The logos kept getting bigger.
Direct Access
It wasn't just about having the tools anymore. Statsig's team had become known for building alongside customers and forming deep partnerships with them.
When a major customer wanted to implement the platform, Statsig would often send engineers on-site to help them succeed:
No ticketing system
No layers of support to wade through
Direct access to the people building the product
The experimentation platform had evolved beyond what even they had imagined at Facebook. It wasn't just a copy of internal tools anymore - it was something better.
Something that could work for everyone from startups to enterprises.
But as they'd soon learn, this was just the beginning of what their customers wanted.
Chapter 4 - Warehouse-Native
Initial Resistance
June 2023 marked a turning point.
Companies were tired of sending their data everywhere. They had invested heavily in Snowflake and BigQuery warehouses. Why couldn't tools just meet them where their data lived?
The market had shifted, but most players hadn't noticed. Optimizely was still cloud-first. The only real competition in warehouse-native was Eppo, a specialized player.
Initially, Statsig resisted. As Jiakan Wang, Head of Enterprise Engineering, recalls:
When we first heard about it, we didn't have that perspective. We were building what Facebook had. We didn't think what they had was that good.
One Customer Changing the Trajectory
Then, HelloFresh changed everything.
It was their first major warehouse-native contract. The product wasn't ready - but instead of saying no, Jiakan took a team of three engineers and embedded with HelloFresh.
We scrambled, built a lot of features. We showed we were really willing to work with them even though the warehouse native had less features.
The gamble paid off. After a few months of intense iteration, they had built something better than any warehouse-native offering on the market.
While Amplitude was still "teasing" warehouse-native features and had a limited beta on select warehouses, Statsig was winning deal after deal.
Mixpanel didn't have it at all. LaunchDarkly and Optimizely didn’t have it either.
A New Growth Vector
They had found their next growth vector - meeting enterprise customers where their data lived. As Pierre notes:
If you already have mature pipelines or precomputed metrics, you want to go warehouse native.
It became a good chunk of their new bookings.
But more importantly, they had learned something crucial: sometimes the best opportunities aren't in copying what worked at Facebook.
They're in building what customers actually need today.
Chapter 5 - Product Expansion
Product Analytics and Session Replay
By September 2023, Statsig had two successful product lines - Feature Flagging & Experimentation.
They sailed past $10M ARR in 2.5 years - a huge feat for anyone.
But they weren’t done. They launched Product Analytics, directly challenging Amplitude and Mixpanel.
Session replays followed in August 2024.
Scalability
But the real test came from Figma.
The design software giant had extreme requirements for reliability and stability - so extreme they initially decided to stay in-house. But Statsig made promises, rebuilt their infrastructure, and won them back months later.
Then came OpenAI.
As their AI models exploded in popularity, OpenAI needed a platform that could scale with them. They didn't just become Statsig's biggest customer - they completely blew past their initial contract volume.
The platform didn't blink.
Statsig enables us to grow, scale and learn efficiently.
—Dave Cummings, Engineering Manager at OpenAI
OpenAI expanded their usage to feature flagging and product analytics as well - a major victory in different products category altogether.
Today’s Success
The numbers tell the story:
>$25M ARR
1000s of self-serve customers
Hundreds of major enterprises
Processing >1 trillion events daily
Handling 11.5M events per second
Maintaining four nines of availability
The Vision
The vision has evolved: become the one-stop data platform for any product builder. Not just experimentation. Not just feature flags. Not just analytics.
Everything.
Here’s from Vijaye himself on the vision:
"Product building is our primary moat," he explains. "The only way to mitigate risk is to keep building."
From Facebook replica to warehouse pioneer to full-suite platform.
And they're just getting started. So how do they build product and grow?
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