Creating a Seamless Self-Serve Experience with Amplitude Made Easy

When we set out to launch Amplitude’s new self-serve experience, we faced a big challenge. For over a decade, our team of skilled Ampliteers has worked with customers to craft tailored solutions for digital analytics. Our user base was diverse: Some came to us with prior experience and were ready for a more robust platform. Others had outgrown their internal systems and needed a tool to grow with them. And then some were brand new to digital analytics, needing guidance on what to track, how to track it, and why it mattered.

Our goal with self-serve was more than just a smooth sign-up or a compelling pricing page. We needed the product itself to speak for us—to convey the expertise that our customer success managers (CSMs) deliver every day. From the first login, we wanted users to see Amplitude’s value without needing a deep technical background.

Early on though, this wasn’t the case. Our onboarding process demanded effort and a strong belief in the value of digital analytics. Asking an engineer to dedicate time to instrumenting events before seeing results was a big ask.

So, how did we transform this into a seamless, self-serve experience that delivers value in the very first session—whether for a complete beginner or a seasoned pro?

Effortless sign-up

We trimmed down our sign-up flow from six steps to just one screen. Prospects simply want to explore your product, so why make it difficult? This change sparked many conversations with our marketing ops team about the trade-offs involved, as reducing friction meant being selective about what data we absolutely needed to capture. Our goal? A sub-five-second sign-up experience focusing on a personalized user journey without unnecessary friction.

Instant data integration with one line of code

Setting up a taxonomy used to be a pain point for many customers—where do you even start? To address this, we re-engineered our SDK, allowing customers to see live, real-time insights with just one line of code. Now, users can get value from their data from the outset without spending days or weeks setting it up.

Out-of-the-box analytics

One of our goals was for users to immediately understand the value of Amplitude when they first log in. Previously, onboarding required instruction. Now, users are greeted with visualized data stories—sessions, tagged events, click event screenshots, and interactive maps of user journeys—bridging the gap between raw event data and actionable insights.

Where Amplitude shines

While making it easy to get started with real-time analytics is crucial, we also needed users to explore our powerful cohort analysis, feature flagging, and ability to handle complex event structures. We revamped the product navigation to surface these differentiators clearly, enabling users to discover key features on their own. Seamless movement through charts, events, and user profiles should reveal correlations and insights without a CSM walking the user through them. Every interaction in Amplitude should yield valuable insights—no dead clicks, no dead ends.

Unlock new insights

Our team has worked tirelessly to create this experience, and we hope it helps you unlock deeper insights into your product and users.