Amplitude - Q3 2022

Transcript

Yaoxian Chew (VP of Investor Relations)

Hello everyone. Welcome to Amplitude's Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. I'm Yaoxian Chew, Vice President of Investor Relations. Joining me are Spenser Skates, CEO and co-founder of Amplitude, and Hoang Vuong, the company's Chief Financial Officer. During today's call, management will make forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our financial outlook for the fourth quarter and full year 2022, the expected performance of our products, our expected quarterly and long-term growth, investments and our overall future prospects. These forward-looking statements are based on current information, assumptions, and expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties, some of which are beyond our control, that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in these statements. Further information on the risks that could cause actual results to differ is included in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, and we assume no obligation to update these statements after today's call, except as required by law. Certain financial measures used in today's call are expressed on a non-GAAP basis. We use these non-GAAP financial measures internally to facilitate analysis of our financial and business trends and for internal planning and forecasting purposes. These non-GAAP financial measures have limitations and should not be used in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation between these GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is included in our earnings press release, which can be found on our investor relations website at investors.amplitude.com. With that, I'll hand the call over to Spenser.

Spenser Skates (CEO and Co-Founder)

Thank you, Yao. Good afternoon, everyone tuning in for our Q3 2022 earnings call. Amplitude delivered a strong third quarter. We closed with $61.6 million in revenue, up 35% year-over-year. This was above the high end of our guidance. We are also delivering strong operating leverage and raising our margin outlook for the year thanks to our disciplined investment approach. Our dollar-based net retention was 123%. We now have more than 1,900 customers. For those of you joining us for the first time, Amplitude helps companies build amazing products, drive growth, and win their categories. We are Digital Analytics platform that gives self-service visibility into the entire customer journey. With Amplitude, teams can understand what product features are working, where users are getting stuck, and what actions lead to the right outcomes.

Nothing is more critical to driving digital revenue growth. Our land performance in Q3 was exceptional. It was our best land bookings quarter in Amplitude's history. New Amplitude customers include Zillow, Fox Broadcasting, Volkswagen, Volaris, Shell, and Ably. We also had several large six-figure wins. Our customers tell us that Amplitude delivers better ROI than their existing solutions. We can provide insights that were not possible with other means, and our self-service approach is more scalable. However, the macroeconomic environment has clearly shifted. This quarter was more challenging with regards to expansion and churn, and we expect these dynamics to persist through 2023. As our customers try to navigate the sudden whiplash from the pandemic to 2021 highs to current macroeconomic weakness, we want to work with them to ensure their success.

Hoang will provide more details on how the environment will temper our growth expectations in the near term. Against this, I'm confident that the need for Digital Analytics will drive long-term durable growth for Amplitude's business. Our unique approach to analytics at the behavior level resonates deeply with our customers. We continue to gain share in our early growing market. When it comes to product data, companies are in the first inning. I speak with data leaders all the time, and I consistently hear from them that they're only 5% or 10% of the way towards completing their vision for leveraging customer data at their companies. That includes some of the most sophisticated technology companies who are on Amplitude. We are helping shape an early category of software. We're seeing some signs that we're even earlier in the category than we initially thought.

Many of our new customers are digital natives who are already familiar with product-led growth, yet they still need Amplitude to understand their customer journey and build better product experiences. Companies have spent a fortune for teams of data scientists and data engineers, stopgap in-house tools and frustrating legacy analytics solutions. The most common result is tedious data breadlines where the entire organization is blocked on access to data by a few analysts. This means teams do not have an understanding of their customers, lack appropriate context for decisions, and are unable to build winning products. Amplitude's technology and self-serve approach gives organizations data that's trustworthy and robust enough to run their business on and that everyone can use. This unique combination enables customers to run their business in a data-driven way at scale. Improving your data helps you build an amazing product, drive growth, and win your category.

BeReal, the social network app that went from 10,000 daily active users to tens of millions of daily active users in 18 months, expanded its work with Amplitude in Q3 in order to keep up with its rapid growth. Data is a central part of BeReal's culture. Almost all of its employees are in Amplitude daily. Alexis, their CEO, told me he spends several hours in Amplitude every day. For fundraising, he shows an Amplitude dashboard instead of a standard pitch deck because it shows how engaging his product is. BeReal's expanded use of Amplitude will help the team improve the product experience so more of their users create a daily habit. Companies don't just work with Amplitude because of where our product is today.

They work with us because of how quickly our product gets better. We outship and out innovate everyone in the space, and we are fanatical about being responsive to customer needs. We released more than 30 new features in Q3. They're all aimed at helping companies make more informed decisions faster. One of the features I'm most excited about is Cart Analytics. Typically, a user's product behavior and their purchase behavior are in different systems. Amplitude brings this together cohesively. This lets teams analyze performance down to the SKU level and discover opportunities for product combinations and cross-sells. We also launched Starter Templates to give users a better out-of-the-box dashboard experiences and new integrations with Slack and Miro to bring key metrics to the collaboration tools that our users live in every day. These updates are all about making it easy for anyone to benefit from Amplitude.

Data Tables, which we talked about last quarter, has already become one of the most top five used features in Amplitude. This is a great example of us leading with first-to-market innovation. We're the only Digital Analytics vendor with this type of multidimensional analysis. Finally, we're also doubling down on our core and product analytics. First, we're investing in design and user experience to extend Amplitude's Ease of Use and Accessibility. Our goal has always been to make Amplitude's number one ranked product analytics solution the essential platform for product, data, engineering, and growth leaders alike. These new investments will help every potential user, regardless of technical know-how. We want everyone to be able to crawl, walk, and then run with Digital Analytics platform. second, we're making significant engineering investments to help customers track data more cost effectively and extend our structural cost advantage over our peers.

We hear our customers' concerns in a cost-conscious economic environment and desire to track large volumes of data in a cost-effective manner. We are also investing in greater transparency to help our customers better track usage and drive confidence for scale. We believe this approach, combined with continued Product Innovation, will make Amplitude even more valuable. Amplitude CDP, which went GA at the end of August, has well exceeded internal expectations. It's still too early to give you more specifics, but this is an important part of our platform value proposition and approach to innovation. CDP will make it easier to get up and running with Amplitude and remove duplicative spend for our customers. Experiment now includes support for low latency use cases via local evaluation and real-time monitoring to improve test outcomes. Better performance for customers means more iterations, more tests, and better results.

We continue to see strong external validation for Amplitude's leading position in the market. We were mentioned in Gartner's Hype Cycle for Customer Experience Analytics report, and Amplitude ranked number one in nine categories in the G2 Fall 2022 report, including number one in product analytics for the 9th quarter in a row and number one in Mobile App Analytics for the 4th quarter in a row. We also ranked number three in Digital Analytics for the 7th quarter in a row. Amplitude was also recognized as an Insights and Analytics Category Leader in Snowflake's inaugural Modern Marketing Data Stack report. We have hundreds of joint customers driving significant value using our Snowflake integrations and will be continuing to focus on deepening this partnership. Our go-to-market evolution continues with new experience leadership.

As part of this evolution, I am thrilled to welcome Tifenn Dano Kwan as our new Chief Marketing Officer. Tifenn was previously CMO at Collibra and Dropbox, and she held numerous marketing leadership roles at SAP, including as CMO of SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass. We knew Tifenn was the right leader for Amplitude because she has an amazing track record for driving product-led growth, expanding pipeline, and building strong teams. I'm excited to have her on board. As we continue to add leadership, we're focused on improving our execution across go-to-market, including improved approaches to sales operating cadence, pipeline hygiene, accurate quarterly forecasting, better enablement, detailed inspections of top accounts with more engagement and accountability, and value-based selling. These are all muscles that we are building so that our go-to-market strategy and efforts can match our world-class product.

I'm pleased with the progress the team is making and the results they delivered this quarter. While we have many of the ingredients in place, our path to greatness here will not be done overnight. We'll continue to invest in and grow our organization to get us there. Numerous deals this quarter were catalyzed by changes in Google Analytics. I think it's important to clarify why Amplitude is superior as more companies move over. At its core, Amplitude's focus is always on product and growth workflows. We give the most critical insights into the entire customer journey. This is different from Google Analytics, which only focuses on marketing workflows. Technologically, we built a proprietary columnar database that allows us to perform complex distributed joins. This means we can deliver behavioral insights on what drives growth in ways that other systems can't.

Our customer data infrastructure layer also ensures data easily comes in, unifies, and stays high quality. Our customers can then take action on these insights, making better product decisions through data-driven experimentation and audience activation. Customers who have moved also tell us we have a significant edge in collaboration and usability. Amplitude works better for casual data users and expert analysts alike. New business trends remain encouraging. While there's greater scrutiny on buying decisions, product analytics continues to be seen as a must-have. Data and analytics continue to rank high on the spectrum of IT prioritization.

There's growing appreciation of Amplitude's unmatched ROI and a widening opportunity set for competitive replacements. In addition to some of the big wins I mentioned earlier, other Q3 lands include Teladoc Health, Holiday Inn Club Vacations, and H-E-B Grocery Company. We also had Notable Customer Expansions in Q3, including NerdWallet, BeReal, Miro, MaxRewards, and AllTrails.

I'm gonna share a few customer stories from the third quarter that show what drove some of these wins. One of the Q3 wins I'm most excited about is Zillow, the most visited real estate website in the United States. After using a page-based analytics solution for years, the Zillow team decided to work with Amplitude to better report and measure the full online and offline customer journey. This sets up Zillow to achieve two big goals. First, to expand the data-driven culture that it has been building for years. With Amplitude, over 200 product and marketing team members will be able to ask and answer critical questions without having to write SQL or without having to wait for a data scientist to get an answer for them. Second, Zillow wants to connect their app and website to buying a home.

They wanna know what features a customer used that drove them to make a transaction. Amplitude will help the Zillow team surface trends, connect specific features to those outcomes, and continue to innovate. A part of the Volkswagen Group, Elli, is creating a holistic energy and charging experience for electric car drivers and dealers. Until now, the team had little understanding of how customers were using its apps, what features were working, or where users were getting stuck. In Q3, Elli started working with Amplitude Analytics to establish a more data-driven product management strategy for its three white label apps. With Amplitude, the Elli team will be able to track user conversion rates, validate user journey hypotheses, and ultimately increase app subscription rates. Brainly, the most popular education app in the world with more than 300 million users, started working with Amplitude last year.

With a cross-platform view of its customer journey, Brainly discovered that people who use its Instant Answers feature at least five times are far more likely to buy a subscription. With this insight in mind, the Brainly team adjusted the product experience to make this feature more accessible, and as a result, increased free to paid conversions. Now Brainly is expanding its work with us to include Amplitude Experiment. This team has always had a culture of experimentation, but now its non-technical teams will be able to set up product tests and analyze outcomes at a much faster pace. While it will be challenging for the near term, I view this time as an incredible opportunity for Amplitude. Digital Analytics platform is getting better every day. We are even earlier than we thought in our markets.

Our customers love us and want to do more with us over the long term, and we have the flexibility to play offense to set us up for long-term success. We have done a lot in the one year since becoming public. We've won more than 500 new customers and announced our biggest set of product launches in company history. We are investing in our people, we are building a world-class team, and we are setting the foundation for sustainable, durable growth. You know, at a recent company all hands, I asked our team, "What is the most important determinant of long-term success?" What I told them is that persistence trumps everything else. How long you stick at something day after day, mont- after-month, year-after-year. While it has been an eventful year in the public lens, it's also been an eventful decade since our founding.

We've been hard at work here at Amplitude since we started this company 10 years ago, and I expect to be hard at work for decades to come. Thank you for your interest in Amplitude. I'd now like to turn it over to Hoang Vuong to walk through the financial results.

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

Thanks, Spenser. Thanks again to everyone for joining us today. Third quarter revenue was $61.6 million, up 35% year-over-year. Customer count was also up 35% year-over-year to 1,913. Dollar-based net retention was 123%. In the third quarter, we flexed our superior product position and strong execution to deliver our best land booking quarters ever. We signed numerous large deals thanks to our go-to-market and product teams. They did a tremendous job in highlighting competitive differentiation and showing how Amplitude helped our customer build amazing products, drive growth, and win their categories. It is also worth mentioning that more than a quarter of our lands in Q3 had Google Analytics as the incumbent solution. We started 2022 with a goal of driving longer term contracts and attaching new products.

We're excited to see more large customers signing multi-year deals. We also crossed a significant milestone of 10 million in ARR from both experiment and audience products in just one year. This is strong validation and execution of our strategy, especially in this macro environment. We mentioned the potential headwinds in the economy during our last earnings call, and we saw the following specific impact in Q3. Expansion bookings were lighter than expected as some of our customer business slowed and budget scrutiny remained elevated. We saw higher churn from small businesses who were unable to pay. Partial churn increased as customers right-sized due to budget or utilization. If we look past the near-term headwinds, our growth factors have not changed.

We will work to continue to acquire new customers around the world, expand across our existing customer base, and extend our product leadership in an early and under-penetrated market. We are confident that we can continue to navigate this environment and come out even stronger. We're seeing results from prior investments and managing the business for long-term sustainable growth. We're in a great position to stay aggressive and win the Digital Analytics category. Geographically, revenue from the U.S. increased 26% year-over-year to $37.4 million in Q3, or 61% of total revenue. International Revenue increased 52% to $24.2 million, or 39% of total revenue. As a reminder, we invoice primarily in U.S. dollar, so the strength of the dollar does not have an FX impact on revenue, but it does have a negative impact on new business.

Total RPO increased to $248.1 million, up 63% year-over-year. Current RPO also increased to $183.9 million, up 46% year-over-year, or approximately 74% of total RPO. Our strong growth in RPO benefited from a steady increase in multi-year deal. Next, I'll be discussing non-GAAP results for Q3 going forward. As a reminder, our GAAP financial results, along with a reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP results, can be found in our earnings press release and supplemental financials on our IR website. Gross margin was 74%, up more than 300 basis points year-over-year. We saw upside to gross margin this quarter, with us achieving another credit from our hosting provider. We expect to continue to operate in the range of 71%-74% in the near term.

Turning to operating expenses in the quarter, sales and marketing expense was 45% of revenue, compared to 43% of revenue in Q3 2021. R&D expense was 23% of revenue, compared to 19% of revenue in Q3 2021. As planned, we continue to hire across all functions at the more measured pace that we had planned for. Our strong discipline delivered an operating loss of $4.9 million or -8%, beating our guidance of -16% to -17%, and compared to a loss of $2.3 million or -5% in Q3 2021. Net loss per share was $0.03 based on 112 million shares, compared to a loss of $0.05 with 39.3 million shares a year ago.

Cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities were $306.6 million at the end of Q3. Note, this now includes $59.4 million in U.S. Treasury bonds classified as non-current. Free cash flow was negative $3.9 million or negative 6% of revenue, compared to negative $15.8 million or negative 35% of revenue in a year ago period. As a reminder, last year cash flow included $10.9 million in direct listing expenses paid in the quarter. Now on to our outlook. As always, our guidance reflects the most recent customer conversations, spend environment and event volume trends. Here's how we're thinking about some of the financial impact to the model. Heightened economic stress will cause more full and partial churn.

We expect the impact on customer accounts to be larger than the impact on revenue, as we see more churn with smaller customers. As a reminder, more than 70% of our revenue comes from companies spending more than $100,000 a year. We are expecting lower event volume-based expansion as customer growth slows. Our base case is that higher churn and lower event volume-based expansion will persist through the first half of 2023. If the environment continues to deteriorate, the shape of the curve could be longer. Given the net retention rate is a trailing 12-month number, we expect it to decline. For the fourth quarter, we are expecting revenue between $62.5 million and 64.5 million, representing an annual growth rate of 28% at the midpoint. Non-GAAP operating margins of -10% to -11%.

Non-GAAP net loss per share to be between $0.03 and $0.04, assuming shares outstanding of approximately 113.3 million. For the full year 2022, we are raising our revenue guidance to between $235 million and $237 million, with an annual growth rate of 40%-42%. This is higher than our prior guidance, a range of $232 milli to 236 million, due to our Q3 beat. We expect non-GAAP operating margins to be between -11% and -12%, a marked improvement versus our prior guidance of -15% to -16%. We expect non-GAAP net loss per share to be between $0.21 and $0.22, assuming shares outstanding of approximately 111.6 million. In summary, we delivered strong Q3 results amidst a challenging environment.

We remain incredibly well-positioned to win in Digital Analytics. We're in a position to invest as others are retreating. As always, we're focused on long-term sustainable growth. With that, we look forward to your questions. Over to you, Yao.

Yaoxian Chew (VP of Investor Relations)

As a reminder, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up in the interest of time. Unmute your mic and turn on the video when called upon. Our first question comes from Michael Turits of KeyBanc. Michael?

Michael Vidovic (Equity Research Analyst)

Hi, this is Michael Vidovic on for Michael Turits, but thanks for taking my question, and congrats on the quarter, guys.

Yaoxian Chew (VP of Investor Relations)

Thanks, Michael.

Michael Vidovic (Equity Research Analyst)

On the CDP side, you talked about exceeding expectations internally, and I know you're not giving specifics, but I'm curious if you could talk about, you know, what draws customers to your CDP versus the competitors, and then are those customers generally replacing an existing CDP provider, or they didn't have one to begin with usually?

Spenser Skates (CEO and Co-Founder)

It's both. I think first, in a macro environment like this, you're getting a bunch of spend consolidation, where you're trying to eliminate, you know, multiple vendor spend and come on to us, something like an Amplitude. Being able to have a CDP and Experiment offering as well as a whole bunch of other stuff on product and marketing analytics helps us drive that. I think with H-E-B Grocery was actually an example of they came on net new to Amplitude for the first time, and they decided to buy the full stack outright. They didn't really have anything in place already. They had a bunch of people who just joined the company that had been previous Amplitude users at another company, decided to go all in with us from the start.

We are seeing other places where we're already on the analytics and then they're adding in CDP, either because they don't have one or to replace an existing vendor, so that's definitely happening too. I think from my standpoint, definitely a lot of strong data points in terms of traction from that as well as Experiment.

Michael Vidovic (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you.

Yaoxian Chew (VP of Investor Relations)

Great. Next question comes from Clarke Jeffries at Piper, followed by Elizabeth Porter. Clark?

Clarke Jeffries (VP and Senior Research Analyst)

Yeah. Hello. Thank you for taking the question. You know, first I wanted to dig into the, you know, the highest quarter for new land bookings in the company's history. You know, could you dig into any industry or driver that really enabled that? This is the first quarter of sub 100 net add in 2020, so you were able to still net that strong quarter in new land even with the lower amount of customers, and so can you talk about how contract values were trending, any drivers of strength there?

Spenser Skates (CEO and Co-Founder)

Let me break that down for you. I think one of the big trends that we're seeing is that I think historically it was only very sophisticated, more bleeding edge technology companies that were big adopters of Amplitude. This would be, you know, the DoorDash or the Atlassian or the Intuit or the HubSpot of the world that had already embraced this way of building product and were kinda ready to go when they first met us. I think what we're seeing is more of the kinda average or majority technology company. You know, I called out Zillow, which was fantastic land in Q3. We had a record, another record deal that was actually an eight-figure deal over multiple years with a household tech company name.

That was exciting to see. I think you see this change from, you know, early adopter tech companies to, you know, more of the majority tech companies. That's something that's happening in a big way now. I think in terms of total number of customer ads, I think it's definitely a more challenging environment for some of the long tail and smaller and earlier stage startups where the funding is not like it was in 2021. Because of that, you know, a lot of them are cutting back on resources and spend decisions and, you know, things like that. That's how you know I net those two things out.

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

Hey, Clarke, I just wanna make a correction there. I think Spenser mentioned it was six-plus figure deal. It was not an eight-figure deal, so I don't want folks to kinda overreact to that. I do think the only thing I would add to that is by what we're seeing in terms of acquisition of new customer both last quarter and this quarter, is you're starting to see some companies you actually think of as being digitally native. So that's why we're saying we're so early in this market.

Finally, you know, a company that you would think they've already been doing product analytics and Digital Analytics for a long time, going, "Hey. Wow, maybe this isn't the best way," whether it's their in-house solution or they were using some existing marketing solution, going, "Hey, is there something better?" as they evaluate, and they discover Amplitude, and they're moving over to us. Obviously, those digital companies have a lot more event volume. They already have an existing digital business, and so that's helping our land value.

As you pointed out, you know, our new ad did decrease comp relative to the last prior quarters, but a big chunk of that also has to do with churn from smaller businesses that as I mentioned, they were unable to pay.

Clarke Jeffries (VP and Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Just one follow-up, Hoang Vuong. You know, another quarter of 48% CRPO growth. You know, could you walk us through the divergence between revenue growth and CRPO growth and, you know, ultimately, would you expect them to converge over the near term?

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

Yeah. I would ask you to focus on the revenue growth. I mean, obviously, as I mentioned on the CRPO, it's benefiting from the multi-year. As you kind of reach some kind of plateau in the multi-year, you may actually see a flip of between revenue and CRPO. I would focus on the revenue growth.

Clarke Jeffries (VP and Senior Research Analyst)

All right. Perfect. Thanks very much.

Yaoxian Chew (VP of Investor Relations)

Great. Next question from Elizabeth Porter, followed by, Arjun Bhatia. Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Porter (Executive Director in Equity Research)

Great. Thank you so much. I wanted to ask on the NRR. We did see that bigger decline and just because it is a 12-month rolling number, we don't usually see that much kinda quarter-to-quarter change. I was hoping to provide, you know, you called out a couple headwinds, but just a little bit more color on where you're seeing kinda more of that pressure, the churn versus the upsell, and any sort of qualifiers on what we should think about for the floor. You know, is there a risk that that number goes kind of below what we saw in the first half of 2021? Thanks.

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

Thanks. That's a great question. I think that Spenser mentioned this in his prepared comment in terms of the whiplash. I think what you're seeing is in 2021, we had some customer who really drove a massive expansion as their business grew and kinda came back from, you know, the COVID and the post-COVID. I think what we're seeing actually in 2022 is actually a combination of the two things. One is expansion kinda being a lot less from those existing customer base, and at the same time, you're also seeing churn.

We obviously mentioned in Q1 we had some high churn both with Twitter and also us deciding not to do business with Russia and Ukraine. I think what you're just gonna start seeing is you got really high expansion that drove a lot of growth in 2021, and then you got lower expansion combined with higher churn that's caused by the current macroeconomic and some of the things that happened in Q1, that's gonna play into that net retention rate.

Spenser Skates (CEO and Co-Founder)

The only thing I'd wanna add to that is I think from my standpoint, we wanna do the right long-term thing for all our customers. I think some of them may have been overambitious, you know, projected out 2021 growth rates for the very long term. A lot of them are asking us to right-size spend. I don't think we're getting a lot of churns in that segment. What we wanna do, all of them have confidence that they're gonna increase their spend with Amplitude long term, and we're deploying different levers to help them out.

Whether from helping them track the ROI of that spend better by seeing what data is being used, who's using it, to selling, you know, getting them additional products if they're not getting all the usage that they want out of core analytics, or in some cases, decreasing the volume, you know, that they're doing with Amplitude.

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

I think Spenser makes a good point there. You know, we did the same thing in early 2020 when COVID first hit us. As you guys probably saw when we obviously went public, we published out a net retention rate of, like, 116, I believe at that time. I think the right thing is to always do the right thing for the customer because ultimately, they're gonna expand into other business unit, other product lines. They're gonna go and buy Experiment, Audience, and CDP. We you know love the future of where it is, and we're gonna do the right thing for the customer in today's environment.

Elizabeth Porter (Executive Director in Equity Research)

Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. For my second question, I just wanted to ask on the operating margins, really nice expansion that you got in the quarter. You know, is the pulling back on any of those expenses, is that more of a reaction to the macro or something more structurally and permanent? Also just a little bit more color on what were some of the biggest areas of improvement that drove that leverage.

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

Yeah, I'll kind of talk to a few things actually, 'cause at the end of the day for us, we've always operated very efficiently. I mean, if you look at our operating margin from last year and we're actually spending more. We're actually increasing our investment in product development. We were at 19%. We're now at 23%. We're actually investing. The increase in expenditures actually for this particular year centers around investment in product development. Some stuff kind of, obviously call it post-COVID and return to office, and also doing event like Amplify.

We're actually investing and spending, and some of the cutback that you're seeing is actually as a result of us kind of bringing in new leadership and them saying, "Hey, let's take a pause on things we know are not working so that I can actually redeploy and use them on new bets and new things that I think will work even better." We never want to just spend to spend. That just seems silly. I think our ability to turn that operating margins. Obviously, our gross margin is at a very solid number of 74%, compared to where we were before, 71. So that's gaining us three points. And then us also being much more prudent around our investment spend and making sure that we, you know, put more into the things that are working and then taking off of things that are not.

Elizabeth Porter (Executive Director in Equity Research)

Great. Thank you.

Yaoxian Chew (VP of Investor Relations)

Great. Arjun from Blair, you're up, followed by Koji Ikeda from Bank of America. Arjun, please.

Arjun Bhatia (Partner)

Awesome. Thank you. Spenser, and maybe this one's for Hoang actually. Just want to clarify one thing on churn. Are you seeing churn in larger customers outside of Twitter, and is it true churn or is it downsell? Just last one on this topic. As customers do churn, whether it's SMB or enterprise, what are they going to? Are they just saying, "We don't need anything"? Are they going back to their in-house system, going to GA? What's the replacement for Amplitude if they do decide to shut it down?

Spenser Skates (CEO and Co-Founder)

Yeah. Well, let me take this one high level, and then I can let Hoang fill in on some of the details. The biggest reasons are either companies or business units getting shut down or going out of business, or a lack of ability to secure implementation resources. We almost never see someone kinda go backwards in their maturity journey. It's not like folks are going to Google Analytics or to saying, "Hey, I'm gonna go try to build this in-house after, you know, having not been successful with Amplitude."

That never happens. I think for us, it's about making sure, you know, customers get implemented, customers get set up. That's a huge focus of Thomas and Karl Heimer and team, in terms of what we wanna try to drive in this environment. The other thing is from our customers, I think there is an expectation even for the ones right-sizing that they will continue to grow with us long term.

I just talked to, you know, a current six, seven-figure customer a few weeks ago that was like, "Hey, you know, I wanna be conscious about how we're spending over the next year," because they're going through spending reevaluation internally in their company. Their expectation is that, you know, in out years, in 2024 and beyond, that they'll continue to grow with us, as they have since they've started with us five years ago. From the customer side, you know, it's not. Yeah, from a competitive standpoint, we feel really well set up. We're always kinda the product that's the most innovative, bleeding edge in terms of what we're able to do.

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

Yeah. I mean, the only thing I can add for you there, obviously, like you said, you do see churn coming from small businesses that are unable to pay. I think the large enterprise customer, the only time they really do churn is if they really have not kind of adopted into our solution. 'Cause if you're leaving, you know, to answer your question, I mean, there's nowhere, they're not gonna go back to something else. It's really either they're going out of business, or they're just not gonna get those questions answered. I do think that for the good customers, what we're seeing, because of the macro environment is they have a much tighter budget. They may actually be looking at the data that they're sending in and trying to figure out ways to optimize that.

Now, we're actually taking the, you know, a very different stance on it, which is we're saying, "Hey, great. Let's help you." I think, you know, Spenser mentioned this in the prepared remark. We're trying to work around giving more visibility to the data owner to understand how they're using the data, what data's has high value. Because again, we help them, we believe we'll be better off in the long run.

You know, if it means that in the near term they like, "Hey, I got budget constraints. I gotta figure out how to save a, you know, a dollar here or a dollar there," we're actually trying to help them identify which events may not be used and how you can actually do it smarter. That's gonna cause some near-term issues, but in the long term, I think the health of the relationship is gonna be really strong.

Arjun Bhatia (Partner)

Yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. Just when you think about the coming quarters and even, you know, going into next year, the Google Analytics opportunity, are you expecting that to ramp up? Or is what you're seeing now in terms of the impact on new customers and the migrations that are taking place, is that kind of a steady state that you expect to contribute over the next few quarters?

Spenser Skates (CEO and Co-Founder)

You know, I'd say I don't know. I mean, you know, a third of our new customers coming from Google Analytics is already pretty significant. I think we'll expect to continue to see that over the next few quarters. I mean, Google just announced that they're extending the sunsetting date for Universal Analytics because, you know, a lot of their customers are unhappy. I think that will continue our focus there in terms of being the bridge from previous-generation tool to an Amplitude will continue to bear fruit and be successful. That's a huge part of why, you know, we built out a whole bunch of marketing analytics that we talked about on last quarter's earnings call. I expect to see more lands now. You know, will it grow even more? I certainly hope so. We're investing in that way, in the business in that way?

Arjun Bhatia (Partner)

Awesome. Thank you very much.

Spenser Skates (CEO and Co-Founder)

Thanks, Arjun.

Yaoxian Chew (VP of Investor Relations)

Great. Next question from Koji Ikeda, followed by Nick Altmann from Scotiabank. Koji, please.

Koji Ikeda (Director in Equity Research)

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Great to see you, Spenser and Hoang.

Yaoxian Chew (VP of Investor Relations)

Yes, Koji

Koji Ikeda (Director in Equity Research)

I wanted to ask you a question on billings. Hey, guys. Wanted to ask you a question on billings. You know, I recall back in the second quarter, there was kind of a $10 million pull forward, and that would help that quarter but affect this third quarter. I guess even after adding back that $10 million, you know, the third quarter billings would still be, I mean, we calculated roughly 23%, so a pretty big delta from what we've seen in the past.

Then when you look at that compared to the billings growth of 60%. Hoang, I do realize that you just said focus on revenue, but billings has been really topical out there. With this big of a delta, I just wanna make sure we're understanding, you know, any sort of volatility or what could be causing that volatility in the billings, and how it could potentially affect the forward growth trajectory.

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

You get that. Thanks. First of all, you know, as we said last time, our billings in Q2 actually grew 57% quarter-over-quarter. Actually that was a very strong billing quarter. A big piece of that was obviously, as you mentioned, the $10 million that we obviously moved through renewal base because we actually had really large expansion happen in the month of April in Q2. Some of those customers were actually supposed to renew in Q3. You know, yes, you know, from a billing standpoint, we grew 4% year-over-year for Q3. Considering the fact that the, you know, big portion of that renewal base moved over to Q2, that billing was actually a little bit higher than we were expecting.

Koji Ikeda (Director in Equity Research)

Okay.

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

The last thing I would

Koji Ikeda (Director in Equity Research)

Quick.

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

One last piece, just remember on our billing, we tend to, just as a reminder, we bill the following month, right? We don't bill on the same month. If we actually obviously have bookings that actually happen in the month of, let's say, September, they're gonna get billed in October. Or if your contracts, you know, get started in October, you're not getting billed until October. That's another factor into where the billing's gonna come in. Our billing will be pretty lumpy when you look at quarter-over-quarter and stuff like that.

Koji Ikeda (Director in Equity Research)

Got it. Okay. No, understood. And then I wanted to ask you a question on international. Just, you know, really thinking about 40% of revenue for you guys is coming international. And Hoang, you mentioned you priced in USD, so, you know, presumably it's a lot, it's getting harder for international customers to buy the product. So, you know, just thinking forward, if FX persists at these kind of levels, how are you thinking about packaging pricing internationally to help alleviate any sort of FX headwinds to international sales cycles?

Spenser Skates (CEO and Co-Founder)

This is actually so it's not just international that we're looking at this. It's for the entire customer base. One of the big opportunities in 2023 for us is we're gonna be focusing more on a product-led growth motion, which includes self-service and a whole bunch of other things to allow customers to get started at lower price points or more easily with Amplitude as we get into next year. That's gonna be allowing someone to, you know, "Hey, let's start small, prove out some ROI, and then grow with us over time," is gonna be one of the big levers as we look to next year.

Koji Ikeda (Director in Equity Research)

Got it. Thanks, guys. Thanks for taking the questions.

Spenser Skates (CEO and Co-Founder)

For sure.

Yaoxian Chew (VP of Investor Relations)

Nick Altmann from Scotiabank, followed by Claire Gerdes from UBS.

Nick Altmann (VP and Equity Research Analyst)

Yeah. Great. Thanks, guys. I'm curious if you've seen sort of any change from customers, either on the net new side of the equation or at renewal, just in terms of their event volume commitments, right? Like, just given, you know, the macro environment, I'm curious just from a customer perspective, are they taking a little bit more of a conservative approach to their event volume commitments and so perhaps maybe there's gonna be more overages in the future? Or have you guys not really seen more, sort of scrutiny on, you know, upfront commitments at renewal or even on the net new side?

Spenser Skates (CEO and Co-Founder)

Yeah. Tends not to happen as much on the net new side. It really is on the renewal side that there are some customers that are putting a bunch of pressure on how much, you know, what event volume they're doing. That's why I'd mentioned that we're gonna be doing a whole bunch more on the tooling side to give better transparency into the value, as well as helping them, you know, find other places that we can help drive that value.

I think for event volume, you know, one of the other big things is customers wanna know that as they continue to scale with us, we'll scale with them. That's another big area of investment for 2023, is we're gonna be doing a whole bunch there for so very, very large volume customers that we're able to track more of the data, because the more data we can track, the more value that we're able to provide.

Nick Altmann (VP and Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Then can you just talk about how overages have trended as of late and whether those have been sort of impacted given the macro? As a follow-up, I guess as it sort of pertains to your guidance philosophy, do you typically embed a certain level of overages into your guidance? Or is that, you know, typically the driver of upside?

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

Yeah, Nick, I'll take that one. You know, overages for us is a relatively very small percentage of our revenue to, you know, call it, you know, it's under 2% or so. Because obviously what typically happens is if customers are going over, they'll actually end up renewing and expanding their contract. That's why we saw, for instance, in Q2, such a large expansion happen early in that quarter, in the month of April, which is 'cause those customer were already overaged. You know, again, our number one priority is partnering with the customer, and so we're not trying to get them from overages. We obviously. It helps us to have the right contract so that, you know, we can do a better job of planning and executing on that side.

We haven't seen kind of a, you know, call it, again, it's such a small percentage, we haven't seen a big increase or decrease per se on the overages. It's been fairly consistent. If anything, it may have gone down slightly just 'cause some of those large customer already expanded, like I said, in April, and so then after those expansion, overages tend to go down slightly and then they begin to build up again. It's such a small percentage of everything.

Nick Altmann (VP and Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Yeah. Thank you.

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

Great.

Yaoxian Chew (VP of Investor Relations)

Next question from Claire Gerdes from UBS, followed by Tyler Radke from Citi. Claire, please.

Claire Gerdes (Director and Relationship Manager)

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Sorry to go back and harp on billings a little bit, but is the softness in the quarter more a reflection of invoice timing, or is it all related to the more flexible payment terms maybe, or changes in duration given the macro? As a second part as well, if billings on an adjusted basis for the pull forward is kind of in the low twenties, should we think of that as a leading indicator going forward to potential revenue growth next year, or maybe not?

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

Yeah. A couple things on billing. Again, the timing of the billing in terms of for us does matter, therefore the timing of the bookings also matter. In Q2, our linearity of that booking happened to be more front-end loaded in the quarter. In our Q3, more of our bookings were more back-end loaded. Now being back-end loaded is actually more normal and typical for us. That's why we were. You know, even though we don't guide on billing, we were, as I mentioned earlier, I think our billing actually kind of was a little bit higher than we thought. That also has a lot to do with our linearity of where they ha, and so happen as they happen in the end of the quarter, they'll get billed in the following quarter.

Claire Gerdes (Director and Relationship Manager)

Okay, great. Thank you. Maybe you don't wanna touch on the low twenties comment, but could that be used as kind of a leading indicator for rev growth or just since it's gonna be so variable quarter to quarter, not something to focus on too much?

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

Yeah, I mean, I would point you to what we guided for Q4 in terms of our you know our guidance for that quarter. I think we're guiding to the midpoint of like 28%. As far as the fiscal year 2023, obviously we'll wait until the early part of next year to provide guidance on that, as we kind of continue to monitor the environment.

Claire Gerdes (Director and Relationship Manager)

Great. Thank you.

Yaoxian Chew (VP of Investor Relations)

Great. Next question from Tyler Radke. Tyler?

Tyler Radke (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Yeah, hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to touch just on the go-to-market side. You know, obviously there's been some new changes to sales leadership. Just curious if how you're thinking about maybe some of the changes for next year, as you're going through the planning cycle, you know, whether it's from a overall messaging or just how you're thinking about organizing or compensating the sales force. Secondly, if you could just comment on your overall visibility into next year. I know RPO's been outgrowing current RPO, so you are seeing multi-year contracts, but just give us a sense on how your visibility is improved and how we should think about next year. Thank you.

Spenser Skates (CEO and Co-Founder)

First, I'm really excited that Thomas is here. I mean, he's already driven a lot of changes within the organization, up-leveled leadership that we have across the board. Tifenn, our new CMO, who I mentioned, very excited that he brought her in. Multiple hires across ops, sales ops leadership, sales leadership, enablement, a few other areas, and, you know, we'll continue to evolve the team. I think the way I think about setting it up is we're building out the leadership to take us from here to a billion in revenue, and that's a new kind of stage for us as a company.

You know, obviously we've done a great job in kind of getting us here, but now it's about how do we build the machine that executes for the, you know, for the next few years. In terms of the different areas, I mean, from sales comp, we always love compensating great salespeople well, and so if you wanna make a lot of money, come join us here at Amplitude. You know, that's an area that we're always evaluating how to reward great sellers and great sales performance, and we wanna make sure to set people up well there.

I think there's a lot, just generally on the execution that we're focused on improving, so I mentioned, you know, a whole bunch of areas during the prepared remarks, forecasting, pipeline growth, enablement, inspection, on top accounts and things like that. I think I'm seeing a lot of great improvement there, you know, Thomas has only been here for a few months, and so there's still quite a ways for that to play out, as we go forward over the next few quarters.

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

Tyler, to address your question on visibility, I think it's a little bit of a mixed bag. I think obviously we're really excited by the fact that we actually have more multi-year, and you can see that in our RPO, and that we're also starting to see some really great traction on the land side. But I think also the macroeconomic kind of pressure on both kind of partial turn and full turn on those customer base is kind of, let's just say, giving it some of those clouds too. At the moment, it seems like we're always chasing one thing, and then something else has changed. You know, I think, like, if you were to ask me early in the quarter, we felt.

I'm sorry, early in the year, we felt really good about a lot of things, and then the question around land was actually gonna be more of like, "Hey, how is that gonna come out? How is that gonna play out?" As we kind of put a lot of energy and execution on that, you're starting to see the benefit from that. Now, obviously the macro is causing some of those things that we weren't really expecting. But we're gonna work and manage through those two.

Tyler Radke (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great. If I could just ask a follow-up on competition. Obviously you touched on Google Analytics earlier, but just as we think about the you know reduced VC funding environment and you know obviously less capital formation, how are you seeing that change the competitive position with some of the privates out there, if there's anything to call out? Thank you.

Spenser Skates (CEO and Co-Founder)

Yeah. I mean, we're still in a great competitive position. I think, you know, we continue to win a lot of the top growing companies, and BeReal's a phenomenal example of that on the consumer side, where they've really taken off in a big way and they're big Amplitude customers. Our focus is continuing on trying to win that. I think one of the big things, as I talked about, is, like, pricing and packaging to make sure that we have more options and opportunities for those people to come onto Amplitude. I think the value in them is not just in the revenue, but that a lot of those companies are the most bleeding edge when it comes to how they think about what data they're looking at and how they're using that to drive product.

We wanna make sure to be successful with them, which is why we're doing a bunch on the pricing and packaging front, as well into making sure to be very specific about targeting, you know, the top growing companies. A lot of them. A lot of the larger, you know, companies, both in tech and non-tech, actually look to those startups when they say, "How should I build out a data-driven, product first culture?" It's super important for us to win. We're continuing to do that, and you know, that's always a top priority on our end.

Tyler Radke (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you.

Yaoxian Chew (VP of Investor Relations)

Great. With that, I'm seeing no further questions in queue. We will be at the UBS Global TMT Conference in December. Details will be posted to the Investor Relations page of Amplitude's website at investors.amplitude.com. Thank you very much for attending our Q3 earnings conference call. You may now disconnect.

Spenser Skates (CEO and Co-Founder)

Thank you, everyone.

Hoang Vuong (CFO)

Thanks, guys.