Mixpanel, the analytics startup backed by Sequoia Capital, hasn’t yet succeeded in its goal of unseating established analytics services like Omniture — but momentum is building.
Let’s start with the biggest number that co-founder Suhail Doshi shared with me this week. He says the company is now tracking 4 billion actions every month. Back in July 2010, that number was “only” 1 billion. He also says there are more than 2,500 organizations who are sending Mixpanel data every month (I guess that’s the Mixpanel equivalent of an “active user”). And that customer base was built through word-of-mouth because, Doshi says, “We basically do almost no marketing.” The startup’s total monthly marketing spend is between $3,000 and $5,000.
Mixpanel charges customers based on the number of actions it’s tracking, so with billions of actions tracked, it’s not too surprising that the business model seems to be working as well. Doshi says revenue has quadrupled since nine months ago, that Mixpanel now on a run rate for several million dollars of revenue a year, and that the company is cash-flow positive.
Even though Mixpanel launched in 2009, Doshi attributes much of the recent success to the launch of a new data store last summer. As a result, he says Mixpanel is now able to examine data at a much more specific and customizable level, on multi-dimensions rather than just one. For example, rather than just telling a customer how many visitors came to their site from Twitter, Mixpanel can show how many visitors came in from Twitter, broken down by country, and limited to those were between the ages of 10 and 13. Doshi also says that mobile analytics have been a big draw — of the startup’s top five customers, he estimates that three or four are mobile-only.
“Our next goals involve figuring out how to really grow the company and continue to offer more tools and services around our vision,” Doshi says. “How can we help the world learn about our data? How can we make organizations really data-driven?”
In addition to Sequoia, Mixpanel’s backers include incubator Y Combinator, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Square COO Keith Rabois, and Bebo co-founder Michael Birch.