Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees

Hey everyone, I am one of the founders at Mixpanel. Layoffs were tough on us, we did over hire a bit, and wanted to make the company more lean. We are deeply sorry for those that are no longer part of Mixpanel - they were our friends and co-workers that we continue to miss.<p>I am happy to answer any questions that I can.

MixPanel has very generous free plan and many free users. Sales people were hired to try to convert free users into paying customers. Plan failed, sales people shown the door.<p>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.

Mixpanel is a revolving door. It&#x27;s only called layoffs because Suhail decided to fire many at once this time <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;Mixpanel-Reviews-E406910.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;Mixpanel-Reviews-E406910.h...</a>

That&#x27;s a worrying sign - sales are generally the last people to go - if you&#x27;re under financial stress you generally need revenue and customers.<p>Unless they somehow believe they can pull off another Atlassian (who actually spend a ton of money on marketing, despite being seen as a &quot;no salesperson&quot; business) I&#x27;d say the $65m funding they received is going down the gurgler.

Source article: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;08&#x2F;mixpanel-starts-2016-with-layoffs-we-just-overhired&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;08&#x2F;mixpanel-starts-2016-with-...</a>

I ran a free service for a long while... they should just dump the free service or at least not accept any more free customers. They will save a lot of money and since the customers don&#x27;t transition up anyway it won&#x27;t really affect their business. A business isn&#x27;t a charity. I learned that the hard way!

If it&#x27;s mostly sales people, it is perfectly reasonable to think they are reassessing their outbound marketing efforts. For example, perhaps their sales channel produced poorer quality leads compared to organic or the type of product they were selling was low enough margin that the sales commission removed any profit they were getting.

Mixpanel has a great product but suffers quite a bit from the curse of having a product everyone loves but nobody wants to pay for.<p>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.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of competition in this space out there now. Mixpanel isn&#x27;t as unique as it once was. There&#x27;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&#x27;s basement). Point being the rapid downturn in VC funding recently isn&#x27;t exactly helping Mixpanel&#x27;s revenue either.

Wouldn&#x27;t this negatively impact hiring in other depts like engineering in near future?

I checked out mixpanel couple years ago and I couldn&#x27;t get tied down to a service which didn&#x27;t have a cheaper than a $150 plan. What if I find it very useful and then ran out of the free tier quota. That scenario was unacceptable and thus, we are not a client.<p>I already see other&#x27;s comments in this thread of this very scenario. We dodged that bullet.

Yahoo,Mixpanel,Instacart,Jawbone,Tango,Hotels tonight,Maker media ..<p>And so it begins ... ?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;08&#x2F;burn-slower-or-vaporize&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;08&#x2F;burn-slower-or-vaporize&#x2F;</a>

Has anyone try both Gosquared and Mixpanel? How do they compare?

The P isn&#x27;t capitalized. It&#x27;s Mixpanel.