What Amplitude’s choice to direct list says about its products, growth and value – TechCrunch

What does Amplitudes decision to list direct tell us about its products, growth, and value?
Amplitude will go public via a direct listing. Its shares will trade on Nasdaq under ticker symbol AMPL and the company filed its S-1 document.

In its S-1 filing, the startup, which is based in San Francisco, lists Battery, Benchmark and IVP as major shareholders. Each investor owns at most 5% of the company.

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After our digging through the most recent IPO filings of Toast and Freshworks, we took a spade to the Amplitudes document.

We are curious as to why Amplitude is launching a direct listing rather than raising capital at its debut. We are also curious about the company's future vision, as its product thesis is essentially a road map to its long-term success. Investors will be able to value the company based on Wall Street's perception of Amplitude's technology direction.

We'll continue our work to understand the company's revenue mix, quality, and wrap it up with some noodling about what it might be worth. Does that sound like fun? That sounds fun? Let's get to it.

The core product thesis of Amplitudes

Many S-1 filings contain corporate gibberish that I won't bore you with. We don't really need to talk about why a specific vertical SaaS company believes its niche is a great one. You know the thoughts of the debuting company. Amplitude is a little more.

Amplitude sells digital optimization software. Its software is used to help other companies create better software.

According to the company, digital product building has changed. It believes that digital design decisions can no longer be made based on intuition. Amplitude predicts that digital products companies will instead rely on data-driven decision making. As it stated in its filing, digital product development is moving on from the Mad Men phase to a more Moneyball era.

Amplitude believes data is the key to how companies design future products. According to Amplitude, companies rely on many different software tools to gather data about their digital footprint. Amplitude believes it has a better way to collect digital user data and learn from it.