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19 hours ago
1
A few months ago, I was given a rare opportunity to build a startup in an internal incubator at Amplitude (product analytics, like Google Analytics), here's how it went.
The CEO said I could build anything I wanted related to AI, and I would be given funding and a team. Since I've done a ton of SEO, I considered building something for SEO, but I kept hearing: SEO is dying, people are using ChatGPT. Around the same time, I noticed that the latest YC batch had 2 companies that collected data from ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity and helped brands show up more often and more favorably. This type of tool is known as "AI visibility" or "GEO". In addition, Profound, one of earlier AI visibility tools, had just raised $20M.
I tried out a bunch of these tools and realized they were unhelpful or overly expensive. I figured I could build something better and cheaper, and combine it with Amplitude's existing data. For example, Amplitude already has data on traffic from ChatGPT to our customers' websites and people can run A/B tests using Amplitude to optimize their content.
I built the initial version in a week with a small team during an internal hackathon, which we won. Then, the CEO wanted me to demo it to our existing customers, 5 customers call per week. Since we have great relationships with many customers, I easily found customers willing to see the product and give me feedback. Eventually, I was able to preload each customer's data before the calls, so they could use the product as it was being built. Most customers loved it, one calling it "the highlight of my week". Over the source of a few months, I've talked with 100+ customers, ranging from software engineers to marketing directors to CEOs. I've improved the product after each call (sometimes during the calls with Cursor). We've also hired a small engineering team to build the product, and now we're ready to show it off.
Here's some information I've gathered on the top companies in the space:
- Profound: the current market leader with $60 million in funding. They have a lot of bells and whistles, such as running prompts from different regions or analytics specifically for e-commerce. However, I found the UI and data unintuitive, as if they tried to cram in as much data as possible instead of asking people what they need in their workflows. The pricing is $400/month for the basic plan - Ahrefs Brand Radar: popular with existing users of Ahrefs. Several Amplitude customers have tried it, but most of them have said that the prompts they provide aren't relevant to the company, making the analysis useless - Peec/Athena/Anvil/Hall AI/etc: I tried a bunch of them, they mostly felt like Profound with fewer features, though slightly cheaper Since there's not a big differentiation between these products, it comes down to price and UX. I've spent months improving Amplitude AI Visibility's UX based on customer feedback. In addition, Amplitude's CEO wanted to make it available for free without signing up so as many people as possible can try it out.
Here's a demo with Hacker News' data: https://app.amplitude.com/analytics/share/ai-visibility/Hacker%20News
And you can generate your company's data: https://amplitude.com/try-ai-visibility
I'll answer any questions and debug any issues you come across.
