I'm Yana, former CEO & Founder of Kraftful, now Head of AI at Amplitude. AMA!
by•
Hey Product Hunt!
I’m Yana Welinder, you might remember me from Kraftful.
Today, we’re launching as part of Amplitude with Amplitude AI Feedback.
I’ll be here all day answering questions about my founder journey, our acquisition, and more. Ask me anything!
https://youtu.be/6VgjRlDu-vI
144 views
Replies
Context Sync - Universal AI Memory
Nice work Yana! I'm curious - when you were running Kraftful, what's one operational thing Amplitude does that made you think 'damn, I wish we'd done it this way'?
Kraftful
@intina Amplitude definitely has a better enterprise muscle. At Kraftful we grew to 50,000+ users with organic word of mouth and our revenue came from self-serve upgrades in the product. We missed so many enterprise sales opportunities because our tiny team was busy building the product.
Context Sync - Universal AI Memory
@yanaw That's real - you can't clone yourself. speaking of building fast though, @Kraftful weekly releases were legendary. What's the biggest adjustment in terms of shipping speed now that you're at Amplitude? Do you miss the 'just ship it' days or is the structure actually freeing in some ways?
Kraftful
@intina That's great to hear!! My goal is to make AI product dev at Amplitude work much more like a startup, so that we can move fast given how this space is moving. Will report back! :)
How has joining Amplitude affected the roadmap for AI Feedback vs. Kraftful? Like, are there features that you were able to build in AI Feedback that wouldn't have worked or weren't in Kraftful, or other changes that combining with Amplitude helped make?
Kraftful
@paul_morrill Amplitude definitely unlocked our ability to paint a broader picture by connecting qual insights to analytics. But there was also quite a bit of complexity around what part of Kraftful to integrate so that it becomes a really native part of the Amplitude platform. We had plans to expand parts of the product that we decided not to integrate because it would duplicative with Amplitude platform. For example, we had a Kraftful Survey product, that included AI generated surveys and user interviews. We may integrate those AI products into Amplitude Surveys down the road depending on demand from customers.
Raycast
Head of AI at Amplitude is an awesome role! What do your duties and responsibilities include?
And how do you intend to stay competitive and on top of everything that's happening now that you're inside a bigger company?
Kraftful
@chrismessina Thanks, Chris! I’ve been focusing on what it really means for us to become an AI-native analytics platform and the obvious place to build in a world where most products will be AI products. Along with that, I’m pushing to expand our reach with AI-native startups. We have some super exciting AI products in the pipeline that we’ll be rolling out over the next few months.
The only way to stay on top of what’s happening in AI is to actually build with the latest models. I’ve always done that personally, well beyond what we were shipping at Kraftful, including experimenting with image and video gen models.
We’re also trying to shape AI development at Amplitude so it works a lot more like a startup than a big company, which helps us move fast and learn quickly.
Triforce Todos
Best of Luck, Yana :)
Kraftful
@abod_rehman thanks!
Wow, Yana! Excited to see you here. As someone interested in product management and AI, I’d love to hear: what was the biggest challenge transitioning from founder of Kraftful to leading AI at Amplitude, and what advice would you give for founders navigating acquisitions?