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 first quarter and full year 2022, the expected performance of our products, expected quarterly and long-term growth, accelerated 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 on 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.
Thanks, Jason, and good afternoon to everyone joining us for our Q4 and fiscal year 2021 earnings call. 2021 was a breakthrough year for Amplitude in our Digital Optimization strategy. We closed out the year with 64% year-over-year growth for the fourth quarter and 63% for the full year. We also added over 500 customers and now have nearly 1,600 paying customers, including 26 of the Fortune 100. Existing customer demand for Amplitude was strong, with expanding customer usage and great traction with our recently introduced products, Recommend and Experiment. This was further demonstrated by a dollar-based net retention rate of 123%, which increased 400 basis points year-over-year. Beyond these great operating results, we also completed our direct listing in September and accomplished our objective of being a publicly traded company.
We further expanded our team and ended the year with 612 employees. To the Amplitude team, incredible work in 2021. I appreciate all of your efforts and dedication. Our 2021 results reflect the increasing demand for Digital Optimization and the need for companies to use product data to drive growth, revenue, and competitive advantage. Companies of every size and digital maturity are relying on Amplitude to help drive their product strategy and answer the strategic question, how do our products drive our business? Amplitude's vision is to help every company create better products through data. We are pioneering a new category of software called Digital Optimization, which connects product data directly to the business. Today, digital products don't just support the business, they are the business. Companies have spent the last decade undergoing digital transformation.
Now, they have to optimize the massive investments they've made, which is where Digital Optimization comes in. Digital Optimization accelerates innovation and growth through digital products. It transforms product strategy from an intuition-based process to a data-driven one by using event data to understand every behavior and action taken in the product and discover which behaviors drive better business outcomes. As digital products have become a core business driver, the revenue center within companies is shifting from the sales and marketing functions to the product organization. This sea change is resulting in the growing trend of product organizations and the rise of the chief product officer within the C-suite. Organizations are realizing that to connect with their customers, operationalize around product event data, and make better strategic decisions, they need a Digital Optimization system like Amplitude.
Similar to how Salesforce became the system of record for sales organizations and Adobe became the system of record for marketing, we believe that Amplitude can become the system of record for the product organization, representing a $37 billion market opportunity. There is growing evidence that the Digital Optimization market is gaining traction, and we believe Amplitude is the clear leader. Fresh off the press last week, G2's 2022 Best Software Awards ranked Amplitude as the number three best software product overall and the number five best enterprise product across all software products and markets that they review. The G2 Winter 2022 report also ranked Amplitude as the number one product analytics solution for the sixth quarter in a row and number one in mobile analytics. Amplitude was also recently included in three Forrester Now Tech reports focused on data analytics, customer journey management, and real-time interaction management.
Together, these three product segments make up the foundation for Digital Optimization. As companies transition beyond digital transformation, they're realizing it is essential to have actionable data and insight into how their customers are using their products. Whether that's understanding user journeys, managing interactions, or analyzing behaviors and outcomes, Amplitude's Digital Optimization system is critical to accelerating digital business growth. We're pleased to see this early third-party credibility with Forrester as Digital Optimization becomes an imperative for the enterprise. A key differentiator for Amplitude and our product suite is the open approach we take to help customers move data to our Digital Optimization system.
Today, we announced new and enhanced integrations across the technology stack to help customers better unify, analyze, and act on customer data. The new set of integrations allows customers to seamlessly ingest data into Amplitude to reduce time to implement and create more customized marketing campaigns. Amplitude now has new integrations with Adobe Launch, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Google Tag Manager, and more than 60 other technologies in order to unlock actionable customer insights that fuel faster product innovation. With new integrations into Adobe and Google Tag Manager, businesses can now easily move away from traditional web and marketing analytics solutions and adopt Amplitude, drastically reducing time to implement from weeks to minutes. The easier we make it for customers to unify and act on their data, the more powerful Amplitude becomes for our customers. Amplitude's leadership is further demonstrated by our customer momentum.
Our paying customer base has expanded 54%, driven by strong demand for our products from organizations across a variety of sizes, verticals, and digital maturity. Several notable new wins in the quarter included Toyota U.S., Taco Bell, Twilio, Wealthfront, UBS, Chatbooks, and HackerOne. We also had several customer expansions with A&E Networks, HBO, Notion, Canva, Ally Financial , and ClearScore in the quarter, and we continue to make encouraging progress with the adoption of our new products, Experiment and Recommend. I'll expand upon a few customer stories from the fourth quarter to provide additional context of what drove some of these wins and our increasing value to customers. One of our exciting wins in Q4 is Toyota, the world's largest automotive manufacturer and number one on the 2021 Fortune Global 500.
Toyota purchased Amplitude Analytics in Q4 to increase speed to insight, drive product strategy, and understand how users engage with their Toyota and Lexus apps. The Toyota and Lexus apps were developed to provide a convenient way to stay connected and informed about your vehicle, such as easy access to your owner's manual and warranty guides, locating a dealer, scheduling service, getting roadside assistance, and other connected services. The Toyota team wants their app and their decisions about new features to be data-driven. Now, with Amplitude, they can move quickly and use data to support strategic product decisions. Their goal is to drive growth by increasing service purchases and in-app subscriptions and better tie the in-app experience together with their vehicles. As consumers demand more digital connectivity from their vehicles, Toyota will use the Amplitude Digital Optimization system to manage their latest, their largest digital bets.
The chief product owner at Toyota and Lexus mobile app said it best, "It is critical that we take a data-driven approach to develop new features instead of guessing what our customer may want. I want to have analytics at my fingertips so that I can focus on problem-solving rather than waiting days or weeks to get someone to generate reports." Another big Q4 win was Wealthfront, a leading automated wealth management provider that recently agreed to be acquired by UBS. With over $27 billion in assets under management and more than 475,000 clients in the U.S., Wealthfront's award-winning platform helps clients easily manage their wealth. With aggressive growth goals for 2022, they knew they needed to scale their analytics efforts. In Q4, Wealthfront chose Amplitude as a strategic partner to drive velocity, visibility, and growth.
Another great Q4 expansion is A&E Networks, a global media company comprised of some of the most popular and culturally relevant brands, including A&E, the History Channel, Lifetime, LMN, FYI, Viceland, and Biography. Its premium content spans linear and digital platforms and is in seven out of ten American homes, cumulatively reaching 335 million people worldwide with 500+ million digital users. A&E Networks partnered with Amplitude for two of their main categories of products, TV Everywhere, TVE, ad-supported streaming, and subscription video on demand or streaming. A key objective was to increase their customer base across TVE and subscription video on demand with retention a significant focus as well. Beginning in 2017, Amplitude has helped A&E enhance their visibility into insights across their organization, and we've continued to bolster their customer engagement efforts.
They saw the Amplitude Digital Optimization system as a powerful way to create self-sufficiency across their marketing, strategy, digital video analytics, and product teams. This quarter, A&E expanded their adoption of Amplitude's newest product, Experiment, to bet big on the customer experience, to optimize how customers interact with digital experiences, and to be able to test current and future features. Now looking ahead to 2022. Making our customers successful is deeply embedded in our culture, and you'll continue to see us continue to prioritize ease of adoption and world-class customer success capabilities in support of winning the enterprise. We have been making significant investments in our product development and engineering teams over the past year, which resulted in the introduction of our Recommend and Experiment products. In 2022, we will be accelerating these investments to help customers bring on the full suite of our capabilities.
We'll also expand the Amplitude Digital Optimization system to address more use cases, building out the most comprehensive product suite available on the market. The Digital Optimization category is still early and relatively unknown, and we will continue to evangelize the success and transformative business impact our customers are seeing, which is key to our mission of helping companies build better product. Finally, supporting all these initiatives, I'm really excited to announce that we're holding Amplify, the number one product and growth conference from May 24th to May 26th as a hybrid in-person online event.
We'll be welcoming customers and users in person in Las Vegas as well as streaming the event live so that everyone can benefit from the experiences of global product leaders and learn about our exciting upcoming product announcements. In closing, we're pleased with our results in full year 2021, and I'm proud of our team's continued execution. We believe that we're at the beginning of a significant market opportunity, and we're investing aggressively in our pursuit of capturing that. Thank you for your interest in Amplitude, and now I'd like to turn it over to Hoang Vuong to walk through the financial results.
Thanks, Spenser, and thanks again to everyone joining us today. We had a solid fourth quarter with strong revenue growth, customer count, and net retention rate. Q4 revenue came in at $49.4 million, representing 64% annual growth. For the year, revenue was $167.3 million, an increase of 63% compared to full year 2020. We ended the quarter with 1,597 paying customers, an increase of 54% year- over- year. Because it's also the end of our fiscal year, we will provide a more detailed breakdown. We ended up with 385 customers with ARR commitments of over $100,000, which was up 47% year- over- year, represented approximately 73% of total ARR at the end of 2021.
Of these customers, 29 were above the $1 million mark, an annual increase of 93%. We are excited to see more customers embrace our Digital Optimization system and expand their usage of Amplitude and are excited to announce that we now have over 100 customers using our product, Experiment and Recommend. This expanding usage of our platform is also reflected in our improving dollar-based net retention rate, NRR, which increased 400 basis points year- over- year to 123%. As a reminder, this metric is calculated on a trailing 12-month basis. We are excited to see our land and expand strategy working. From a geographic standpoint, Q4 revenue in the U.S. increased 66% year- over- year to $31.3 million and international revenue increased 62% to $18.1 million.
The U.S. was 63% and international was 37% of reported revenue, consistent with the prior year. Turning to remaining performance obligations or RPO. In Q4, full RPO increased to $170.1 million, up 78% year-over-year. Current RPO increased to $137.3 million, up 60% year-over-year and represents about 81% of total RPO. Before turning to gross margins, expenses, and profitability, please note that I will be discussing non-GAAP results going forward. As a reminder, our GAAP financial results, along with reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP results, can be found on our earnings press release and supplemental financials on our IR website. Gross margins improved to 72% compared to 71% in Q4 2020 as we continue to scale the business. Moving to operating expenses.
For Q4, sales and marketing expenses was $21.9 million compared to $12.6 million last year. This is up 73% year-over-year and represented 44% of revenue compared to 42% of revenue in Q4 2020. We expect this line to increase as a percentage of revenue in fiscal year 2022 as we build out sales capacity and drive awareness, including our in-person Amplify event in Q2. R&D expense in Q4 was $9.8 million compared to $5.3 million last year. This represented approximately 20% of revenue compared to 18% of revenue in Q4 2020. We continue to increase our investments in product development as we focus on extending our leadership in product analytics and building additional solutions to service the chief product officer role.
G&A expense was $8.9 million for the fourth quarter compared to $3.6 million in the fourth quarter of last year. G&A was 18% of revenue versus 12% of revenue last year due to the incremental cost of operating as a public company, but we expect this to improve as a percent of revenue as we continue to scale. As a result, loss from operations in the fourth quarter was $5 million, compared to a loss of $0.2 million last year. Operating margins of -10% compared to -1% in the same period as we accelerated growth and investment for growth. Net loss was $5.4 million compared to $0.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Net loss per share was $0.05 based on 107.9 million shares compared to $0.02 in the fourth quarter of 2020 based on 26 million shares. Turning to free cash flow. Free cash flow was -$12.2 million or -25% of revenue compared to -$3.8 million or -13% of revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020. For the full year 2021, free cash flow was -$34.9 million or -21% of revenue. Note that Q4 and full year 2021 free cash flow includes approximately $6.5 million and $18.2 million in direct listing expenses, respectively. Adjusting for this, our free cash flow margin would have been -12% in Q4 and -10% for the year.
Turning to our balance sheet, our cash equivalents were $307.4 million at year-end, down from $317.8 million in the prior quarter. With 2021 complete, let's now shift our attention and discussion to our outlook for the first quarter and full year 2022. As detailed in today's press release, our initial revenue guidance for 2022 is $226 million-$234 million, which represents a growth rate of 37% at the midpoint and approximately 40% at the high end. Before going further into guidance, we'd like to provide you with some additional insights into our thinking on this range.
We believe we're still in the early days of Digital Optimization, and as we've seen with customers like Atlassian, Instacart, NBC, and Under Armour, it can take a few years for new customers to completely embrace the full capabilities of our Digital Optimization system, which can drive larger expansions. As we share, these can be quite meaningful to our results as we saw in Q2 2021. The precise timing of these can fluctuate, and that timing uncertainty is reflected in our 2022 guidance. We believe our new customer growth, new product adoption, rising net retention rates are great signals and that we're well-positioned to drive strong, sustained top-line growth. With that said, let me review the rest of our 2022 guidance. We expect our non-GAAP operating margins to be -22% to -20%, given our planned investment to build awareness and extend our product leadership.
We expect non-GAAP net loss per share to be between $0.44 and $0.42, assuming shares outstanding of approximately 111.9 million. For the first quarter of 2022, we expect revenue to be between $50 million-$51 million, representing an annual growth rate of 53% at the midpoint. Note that like most other cloud software companies, we recognize our revenue ratably on a daily basis. As there are two less days in the first quarter than in the fourth, this represents a headwind of approximately 2 percentage points of growth sequentially. We expect non-GAAP operating margins to represent approximately -22% to -20%, and we expect non-GAAP net loss per share to be between $0.10 and $0.09 assuming shares outstanding of approximately 109.5 million.
In summary, we believe we're well-positioned to drive attractive revenue growth as we help companies build better products with our Digital Optimization system. We're looking forward to continue our discussions with investors and analysts. We're excited about Amplitude market opportunity. With that said, I'll turn it back over to Jason to moderate the Q&A session.
Thanks, Hoang. We will now begin the Q&A portion of our webcast with sell-side analysts. Our first question will come from Michael Turits from KeyBanc. Our follow-up will be from Rob Oliver at R.W. Baird. Might take a second here.
Hey, guys. Finally unmuted there. Thank you. Hoang and Spenser, last quarter, you spoke about not seeing the expansion that you had seen earlier in the year in 2 Qs you just referred to now. What did you expect to turn around that that didn't obviously, you know, how do you rectify that? And at the same time, how does that square with what looks like a, Hoang Vuong, with a what looks like a pretty good expansion in your DBNRR, and you know, pretty decent CRPO growth on a sequential basis?
Yeah, Michael, thanks for the question. You know, first of all, obviously, you know, whenever we give guidance, we're obviously looking forward, and we're trying to make sure that whatever guidance we provide, we feel comfortable in delivering. The guidance is more about like, I would say, the future expansions. I think, you know, we kind of ended Q4 and executed in Q4 exactly kind of what we wanted to do. When we look at the opportunities for expansions throughout, there was just more, you know, kind of like fluctuation that we see in terms of, you know, there were obviously expansions that happened in 2021 because of customers that had accelerated growth in their business due to COVID.
We obviously expected that growth rate to kind of, you know, slow down or decline. They're still growing, but let's say slower. What's not clear is like, you know, those companies that are not impacted by COVID or that actually would benefit from, let's say, when we return back to normal, you know, first you kind of have Delta, and then you have Omicron, and so what's the exact timing of that? We also are, like I said, we're excited at the fact that we have so many new customers, and we're also excited that our new product, Recommend Experiment, are seeing traction with, you know, over 100 customers that are on it now. It's just not clear for us right now in terms of the exact timing of these expansions.
We're very confident that in the long term, you know, companies will adopt and expand in their usage of Amplitude, just like we've seen in the past with other customers. But that's just the best visibility we have at the moment.
I guess whether it's, I guess maybe Spenser can take the question maybe. I guess a go-to-market, is it a go-to-market issue or a product approach that you take to try to rectify this? I mean, to be as specific as you can, it's like, where is it that people were really not expanding where you expected? Do you feel like you've got to rectify that from a product perspective, or as I said, in terms of a different go-to-market motion of some sort?
I think, you know, to be clear, I mean, 2021, phenomenal year, real breakout year for us. You know, 63% revenue growth, 54% customer growth. I think what's key to understand is, to Hoang's point, the precise timing. This is an evangelical sale, and so the precise timing of these expansions can fluctuate. Great example of that is called Venmo and PayPal. Venmo has been a customer with us for a really long time, and then when they got acquired by PayPal, it took a few years for PayPal to adopt the religion of Digital Optimization, of data-driven product, of hey, we're gonna track metrics in our product and understand and use those metrics in order to figure out how to drive revenue throughout our products.
You know, it's not a rip and replace where it's like, okay, here's a clear thing and, you know, you swap it out. It's more an adoption of a new type of religion. To that point, I think you know, I have a lot of confidence that that's the right way to run your product business, and there's no question that that religion is happening. You know, we're seeing, you know, I mean, if you had asked me a few years ago, "Hey, would Toyota be a customer?" I'd be like, "They'll probably take a while." But we're seeing that happen in both tech and non-tech companies. The question I think is just what's the precise timing of that adoption of this new way of building product? Michael, you're on mute.
Just saying thanks very much, Jason and Hoang Vuong.
Yep. Thanks, Michael. Our next question will come from Rob Oliver, and the follow-up question will come from Elizabeth Elliott from Morgan Stanley.
Great. Thanks, Jason. Thanks, everybody. Hi, Spenser. Hi, Hoang. I think I'm gonna follow up on Michael's question, and maybe ask just a little different way. It seemed like you guys had a certain cadence of a deal evolution with, say, the Atlassian and Instacart. Was there an expectation around with that cadence relative to Recommend and Experiment that's maybe taking a little bit longer? Clearly, you guys are getting some nice early traction there, but I'd be curious to hear, you know, say, for example, like at the Fortune 100 where you guys have a really nice presence, but it's not a multi-product presence yet, what are you seeing there, and has there been a lengthening of some of those sales cycles? Then I had a quick follow-up.
So-
Yeah. Yep. No, go ahead. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. I think this is something we've seen since the start of Amplitude, where exactly how fast and how quick someone adopts Digital Optimization can vary. You know, obviously we saw, you know, last year, really great breakout year for us. Amazing. I think if you look at, you know, the examples you just talked about, Instacart, Atlassian, you know, Intuit was the same way, where it really can take. You know, it's not just a one quarter or one year thing. It can take many years even in these companies that are very tech forward, because they're adopting a new way of building their product. As we put out guidance for this coming year, we wanna make sure to be clear on what it is that we feel absolutely great about hitting. That's what you saw.
You know, that's what we went through with Hoang's remarks. In terms of the new products, I think I wanna separate that out. New products are still a very small percentage of the revenue base. Now we're really proud. Like, to get to, in the space of six months, 100 companies on new products, like, that's a real proof point to me as a CEO saying, "Hey, what we're doing here is working. Let's invest behind this." Now, you know, relative to our overall customer base of 1,600 customers, still relatively small. But, you know, that's given me a lot of confidence in order to say, "Hey, let's continue to invest behind these products.
Let's launch more products this year." You know, we expect to continue to want to launch one or two products a year from, you know, 2022 in years forward. I think, you know, we're excited about that as potential future upside. We also wanna be clear about, you know, what we think, where we think 2022 is gonna land.
Yeah. The only thing I would add to that, Rob, too, is that, you know, the comments that you mentioned, if you look at, you know, Atlassian and stuff like that, their timeline to expansion for us, you know, we're not seeing that timeline necessarily get longer or anything like that. If anything, what our hope was that actually the timeline may get a little bit shorter, but it's actually kind of staying relatively the same. It takes some time for those to happen.
I think the other, you know, piece is that, you know, when you have the folks that we would thought like, "Hey, they may actually grow and benefit from things going back to normal," that's the other portion of those cohorts, because, again, we actually have a pretty diversified customer base, and those customers, maybe the snapback or coming back from those isn't as fast as we initially was kind of looking and thinking they would be. Both those factors are things that we're trying to make sure that when we look out further, we're making sure that we're doing the right prudent things in providing the guidance.
Great. That's helpful. I just had a quick follow-up, if I may, Jason, just on sort of the two recent kind of developments around the Adobe extension and then the Snowflake integration.
Yeah.
Very nice customer additions this quarter, so I'd love to hear if the Adobe extension had, you know, played any role there. Then, you know, at the level of the IT department, I know it's still very early, and Spenser, you know, we talked about it last call, but just would love to hear if that Snowflake integration is, you know, sort of easing that barrier to adoption at all. Thank you, guys.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question, Rob. I love that. I love that you asked that. I think. You know, there's 60 different integrations we have in total in terms of different ways to bring in data into Amplitude. What makes the Adobe and Google integrations particularly exciting is those are massive companies. You know? It's like even, you know, totally different level than Snowflake. That opens up a whole new set of customers that, you know, previously it would take quite a lot of engineering resources to transition and get on and get set up with Amplitude. But now it's like you do a few clicks in an interface, and you're up and running. Those are really huge proof points.
Now, to be clear, you know, we just launched them, so it's not like we have tons of customers on them. You know, we've obviously beta'd with a bunch of customers, and we're just really excited to get it out there because now it's like, you know, I think going forward, the market on that, on those has really opened up for us. I think the other part of it is that, you know, I think with what you see, there's an expectation in the current generation of SaaS tooling that things are just very open and you're gonna be able to move data in and out from wherever you want. You know, that's the number one blocker to customers getting set up on Amplitude today. The more we can reduce that, the better.
You talk about, you know, Adobe and Google in particular, you know, again, massive, huge opportunities for us. Now, you know, it's early. We just launched those. We've, you know, obviously done a few customers in the beta side on them, but and we'll continue to do more. You know, there's a whole ecosystem of these things where customers may have their data.
Awesome.
Thanks, Rob.
Thanks again, guys.
You bet. Our next question will come from Elizabeth Elliott, and, after that it'll be Tyler Radke with Citi.
Hi. Thank you so much for the question. I wanted to ask about calculated billings. It looks like it was down quarter-over-quarter. I just wanted to get a sense of what's driving that. Was there any sort of pull forward that you had in Q3 that might be, you know, you're working through this quarter? What was the rationale for down quarter-over-quarter on billings?
Yeah. Thanks for the question, Elizabeth. You know, calculated billing obviously. It's a reflection of kind of the amount we're invoicing and then you also saw that decline in deferred revenue quarter-over-quarter. This is pretty much typical of our renewal base and the timing of the invoicing. It, you know, your Q4 invoicing that we do is typically we like kind of call it the end of September renewal base. Whereas the deals that are coming in December and new move base that are in December are usually billed in Q1. If you look at past trends, you'll see that we typically have one of our stronger billing period in Q1, and we're gonna see that.
You'll kind of see a flip-flop there in terms of, you know, billing for revenue down in Q4, 'cause that's kind of pulling out of the Q3 renewal base. The Q4 renewal base will actually get invoiced into January. That's just a little bit of a timing delta between Q4 and Q1.
Gotcha. Yeah, that'll be helpful as we start building out the historical database on that.
Yeah.
Um-
Yeah. There was also, obviously, the other point to make sure, you know, in Q3 was also particularly a little bit stronger because Q2 expansion was so strong. When you get billed out in Q3, you obviously have the Q3 number being also a little bit higher.
Okay, that's helpful. On NRR, you know, how much is it expanding with kind of really the analytics product and are some of the new products starting to drive that number higher? I know it's a trailing 12-month figure, so,
Yeah
Anything to call out in terms of low quarters rolling off and any sort of color that you can give on the in-quarter NRR improvement?
Yeah, sure. On a net retention rate, obviously it is a trailing 12 quarters, so you're starting to obviously you know drop off some of the quarters that will kind of get into the COVID years. As they kind of go through, you know that kind of will fall off, and you'll have the impact obviously of the momentum that we had in Q2. I think the other thing that's really positive and great is that when you look at it, the gross retention along those things have also improved over time as we've gotten better both from our product and our activation and how we engage with customers.
It's mainly a combination of us, you know, doing a better job on gross retention and us kind of really expanding on, you know, product analytics. The new products are still new. I mean, they just came into really, you know, launching Q2. They're starting to have some, you know, impact in Q3 and Q4, but it's still pretty small in the big scheme of things.
Got it. Thank you.
Thanks, Elizabeth. Okay, we'll head over to Tyler next. Following Tyler will be Bhavan Suri with William Blair.
Hey, thanks for taking my question, and good afternoon, everybody. I wanted to drill in a little bit more on your comments around some of the weaker expansions that you've seen thus far in Q1. You know, as I think about your expansions, I think of it as, you know, multiple dimensions to it. You have kind of the product usage and increased app usage, and then you also have kind of your upsell motion with newer use cases. I guess, did I hear you right in that it was just kind of that first example, kind of the weaker app usage that kind of drove this weaker expansion? I'm just curious if you're making any changes internally, whether it's, you know, customer success or, you know, deploying more resources to kind of help improve that metric.
Yeah. Yeah, Tyler, I just wanna make sure we're clear. We're not really saying that we've actually seen the kind of slower expansion. I think it's more of like looking out forward and looking at like what the pipeline is and making sure that, you know, we're doing the right level of guidance given where you are and stuff like that. Two parts of your question you asked. One is, there a difference in the type of expansion? I would say that, you know, we're not really seeing a difference in type of, one, is kind of more usage of product or changes in different product or volume.
They're both kind of come into play, because, you know, as a company, usually you kind of add additional product or move on to other product, like, once you've actually really kind of adopted, you know, Digital Optimization or product analytics as a way of doing it. That timeline, you know, is it feels like it's not, like, getting shorter. We probably do need to do, you know, continue to help raise awareness, do more education, and as that becomes more standardized and standard in the market, I do think that that timeline will get smaller, but it, we haven't seen that.
As far as volume increases are concerned, you know, that typically is more indicative of where the company may have already adopted, and it's really a reflection of, like, you know, how well are they doing growth. Again, obviously, you guys, you have the companies that have done really well last year. We, like I said before, we're not expecting those companies to have the same kind of growth rate. They're still growing. I think the unknown for us is, like, the companies that you would expect to, let's say, do better as we come back, whether it be travel or, you know, entertainment or, you know, hospitality and stuff like that. Like, you know, when does that actually come back? I think we're just trying to, again, make sure that we're doing a more prudent decision on that. We don't really know.
All the metrics we look at in terms of the product usage and what we call Weekly Learning Users, as we mentioned before, in terms of how many people are using a product, asking questions, those are looking really good. That's why we have a lot of confidence in the fact that we believe that, you know, the expansions will happen. The question is when. And because the timing of those expansions can impact the revenue, you know, pretty, you know, quite significantly like we've seen before, we just wanna make sure we're doing the right thing from a guidance standpoint.
Yeah. The only comment I'd add is just on the new products, again, those are super early. In terms of, you know, they're not making up a large portion of any of the numbers we're talking about or sharing. Now, we're seeing some really exciting things there, and it's really hard for SaaS companies to go from one product to multi-product. As a CEO, that gives me a lot of confidence that, you know, that'll continue. We'll continue to find success there. We want to invest behind those. We wanna, you know, launch new products and going forward. They don't make up a, you know, even if their growth rate numbers are off the charts, as a percentage relative to the rest of the business is still quite small.
Okay. Maybe just a follow-up. You know, you talked about some pretty impressive wins this quarter, like Toyota, you know, not necessarily known traditionally as a tech company. I'm curious just kind of how you see the pipeline evolving for maybe the more traditional industries, financial services, you know, automotive, just kind of your, y our non-traditional tech companies that are hoping to evolve to be a tech company.
Yeah, I think we've really seen a market change from a few years ago. I think, you know, if you were to go back to 2019 or even early 2020, most of the large expansions were from these tech companies, you know, the Intuit and the Atlassian and the PayPal and so on. What we're seeing now is that non-tech is adopting, you know, particularly in the last year in a really big way. Automotive is one. You know, Toyota was Q4, but we've also, you know, had done a lot of business with Ford this year, which has been really cool to see. On the media side, A&E Networks, HBO, NBC, you know, all really big customers on Amplitude.
I think you're seeing this transformation happening across a lot of non-tech industries. You know, as I think about how we manage the business, it's like, okay, let's make sure to make, you know, investments in going after those guys in a big way as well.
Great. Thanks, Tyler. Okay, we'll go to Bhavan next, and he'll be followed by Koji Ikeda with Bank of America.
Great. Thanks. Can you guys hear me okay? Great. So let me just follow up that set of questions a little bit more here. There's a sort of concept, like if I look at Atlassian, they're so invested in what you guys do that if they launch a new product, it feels like you guys are embedded in there, no question. Or it will be. That flywheel for some of the tech guys, as you said, was leading edge. You're starting to see it with some of these other guys. I guess my first question is, how do you go to market differently there? The tech guys obviously get it, but is it a vertical? Have you verticalized the sales force? Is there some approach to say, "Hey, here's how we think about it"?
B, I'd love to talk to you a little bit about how you're offsetting that with conservatism, because you're saying, "We don't know when the expansion is gonna happen," but you've seen the flywheel kick in at tech and you seem to be seeing that flywheel kick in. Help me balance those two things as well as sort of the go-to-market.
Yeah. First, you know, it's early, so it's not like we've decided to verticalize or, you know, that's still a many-year thing away. I think with those sort of customers, that's when you do need more robust support. You know, they're more like, "Hey, teach me about this religion," versus, you know, being embracers themselves. Now, the crazy thing from my standpoint as CEO is that there are actually some very sophisticated digital people in this company, you know. In conversations with Ford, I mean, they get it. Like, they get this religion. They understand it. It's just a question of how do they actually do the change management to adopt it. You know, same with NBC. You know, they're kind of all in on understanding their digital platform.
Like, you know, they've been all in for a number of years on understanding their digital platform, and now we're seeing that across more and more and more companies now. I think part of it for us is, like, you know, how do we continue to increase our sophistication and ability to serve them, whether that's with more customized and, you know, substantial services? We've already done a lot on the implementation end to help them, both on the product side that I talked earlier, those integrations, as well as, you know, we actually do charge regularly for implementation services now, and that wasn't a thing in the past. We wanna continue maturing and building a more robust muscle there, so that we're really well positioned to go after the opportunity.
As to the timing comment, I think this is something frankly I've seen as CEO, you know, since the very beginning of Amplitude. Like, you come in, you'll land with a team, and they'll start to get some wins, and then that religion will grow and get adopted by the rest of the company. But that process, you know, it can take a few years. You know, it's not just like a one-quarter thing where it's like, all right, let's roll this whole thing out, from day one. We're not seeing any inconsistency in that. That's actually the same thing happening at Ford and NBC, that we see happening at the Atlassian and the Intuit, you know, and the tech guys.
We wanna make sure that the numbers that we're putting out for this year reflect that in the right way.
Helpful. Yeah. Sorry to beat that to death. I just wanna make clear about that. But then my second question is just on the competitive environment. Any change in landscape, and are you still sort of battling in some of the newer wins, this idea that I can just take product data and maybe take Urchin from Google or whatever it's called now and put it into data warehouse? How is that? Is that coming up more or less? How do we think about that, and sort of broader sort of, productized competitors? How are you seeing that environment play out?
Yeah. It's still very greenfield, and that's why we're talking so much about the adoption of the religion versus the, "Hey, you know, how are we competing against someone?" Now I think what normally will happen is as someone starts to adopt this religion, they'll start to kinda duct tape a few different things together. Maybe they have a data warehouse. Maybe they have a BI tool on top. You know, maybe they have a bunch of data engineers building out a pipeline.
What we can, w hat is really exciting for me is we can come to them and say, "Hey, look, all of this stuff, all these customized engineering resources, you know, all this really custom stack, we can do it for you." What's really interesting to see is that, you know, so non-tech companies, they get that, they love it. Even within tech, like, you know, a lot of tech folks, you might think, oh, build in-house. You know, if I'm Twitter, I might wanna build in-house or Intuit. They've actually, you know, come around to it in the same way.
From a competitive standpoint, it's more about getting people to adopt the religion and embrace Amplitude as part of that than it is, you know, and not use a bunch of duct tape things than it is about any one, you know, any other player in the market.
Gotcha. Thank you. Thanks for taking my questions. I appreciate it.
Bhavan. Okay, we'll go. Next question will come from Koji, and then we'll finish up with Taylor McGinnis at UBS.
Yeah. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Had a question on sales productivity. You know, just quick back of the envelope math here from the 2022 revenue guide. It looks about the net add for 2022 is about the same as 2021. You know, you guys have been clearly investing heavily in sales capacity, branding, and all that sorts of stuff. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how sales capacity has been ramping. Is it going to plan? You know, and how do we triangulate all the investments that you've done with the revenue guide?
Yeah, for sure, Koji. I think that's a great question. I think there's two really important parts to that. First is if you look at either 2020 or 2021, we were very conservative in how we invested in the business, you know, whether from a sales or go-to-market or what have you perspective, because out of abundance of caution with the uncertainty in the environment with coronavirus and everything else that was impacted by the pandemic. A lot of what we're doing now is kinda just catching up to the place that we should have been, you know, a year or two ago, in terms of making the investments commensurate with the growth numbers that we're seeing. That's kind of first and foremost.
The second part of that is that 2020 investment is not just about, you know, this exact year and what we're looking at. It's about the, you know, the long term and the years ahead. We wanna make sure to set ourselves up for 2023 and 2024 and so on. We closely track all the numbers that you're talking about, sales capacity, sales ramp, you know, the whole thing. We feel great about where those are at with the team. We wanna make sure to make the investments that will set us up to own the massive market in the long term versus, you know, doing anything else.
Got it. Thanks, Spenser. Just one follow-up for Hoang. I wanted to go back to a previous question on the billing seasonality. Just wanted to make sure I understood that correctly. Could you dig in just a little bit, you know, why would Q1 be the strong seasonal renewal quarter, if I heard that correctly? You know, what is it different about the customer uses that shifts it over to Q1 versus, you know, what we're more used to of a traditional Q4 strength? As the business scales, do you foresee an eventual shift to a more Q4-weighted billing seasonality?
Yeah. I actually think we're very similar to most of those companies in that Q4, you know, in prior years has always historically been our stronger quarter. It's just that the invoicing for those December renewals ends up they don't actually happen till January, right? It just happens to be that when you look at it from an invoicing and then when it hits you for revenue, it'll actually show up under Q1. It's similar. It's just that we don't bill it out in the exact same month that renewal will actually happen. It tends to bill out the following month with every follow.
Okay, just one quick follow-up, you know, thinking about the invoicing timing. Is it like a renewal then a 30-day delay, or, you know, how do we think about that and how can we incorporate that into our models?
Oh, yeah. I guess the best way to think in the past is we, you know, if a salesperson signs a deal, that deal would typically start the day of the following month. When the day of the following month starts, you'll kind of have a lot of January first start date, right? With that January first start date, that would be the date that it's actually billed.
Got it. Thanks, guys. Thanks for taking my questions.
Thanks, Koji. Okay, and our final question comes from Taylor.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe going off of the last question that was just asked, when you think about the billings and invoicing being stronger in 1Q versus 4Q, can you maybe talk about that in the context, I guess, of what we saw this past year? You know, if I look at 2021, it seems that 1Q and 3Q were similar in size of in terms of sequential growth, and it was really 2Q that I think you saw the strength in the quarter. I guess how might this coming year be similar or not to, like, what we saw this past year?
You know, anything that you could add just in terms of, like, DR being down sequentially this quarter, if there was anything anomalous in there too?
Sure, yeah. You know, Q2 was obviously a stronger quarter than normal just because we did have some early expansion where when they early expand in Q2, they obviously also kind of billed some in Q2, right? Because some folks you know still kind of had those expansion at the end of Q2, they may have flipped also into Q3 billing, right? Your Q2 and Q3 billings will have a mix of some of the expansion that happened actually in Q2. That's why you saw the CRPO, the increase in Q2, but the invoicing kind of sort of spread out between two quarters, right?
Typically in the past, if we didn't have that kind of a one time, your Q1 billing is typically your big quarter growth because your Q3 bookings tend to be the, we call it the smaller one or an end one, so therefore your Q4 billing is slightly lower 'cause of that one monthly lag.
Okay. Got it. Just my last one for me, you know, a lot of people have already commented that net customer adds are really strong in the quarter. I guess what we have less visibility to, in the context of what you guys are talking a lot about was just the in-quarter dollar-based net expansion rate. Can you maybe like talk about what that might have looked like this quarter, you know, relative to past quarters? Anything you can talk about just in terms of average land size and as we look ahead, I know in the past you've talked about, you know, continuing to see improvement on the 120%, you know, plus dollar-based net expansion rate.
In the context of today's calls, how do we think about that, as we look forward?
Yeah. First of all, we're still committed to maintaining our net retention rate over 120% in the long term because I think, you know, obviously as the base gets bigger, it does get more challenging. But we also believe we are adding so many new customers that they're still in the early days of their expansion and then obviously you also have the new products. I think that that's a really important factor for us. I think that, you know, when you think about, you know, our expansion, how we perform in Q4, to answer your question on that, we did really well. I think again, it's more about when we look at the guys looking at like multiple quarters and we're trying to give out guidance for a year.
We're trying to figure out what the expansions are out in the Q4. You know, our net dollar retention, you know, even as trailing 12 months and up, it's all really positive there, from a Q4 performance. It was more of just kinda looking at visibility like, "Hey, when will these new accounts expand?" But most of our new customer adds, both of them are still actually in our commercial SMB, right? They're still smaller accounts. We're actually super excited to have them, right? Because sometimes those small accounts, they'll become big and sometimes they'll also get acquired by some other larger company and those. That's how the larger company are learning about the innovative way to do the best practice of, you know, using data to build better products, right?
We will continue to go after that. As far as like ASP is concerned for that, we haven't seen any real material changes. I mean, there's like in some markets slightly up, some markets slightly down, but net it's been pretty consistent, because we haven't seen any change there.
Great. Thanks for taking the time.
Thank you, Taylor.
Thank you. With that, we'll conclude today's discussion. Thanks for your interest in Amplitude and joining today's webcast.
Thanks everyone. Appreciate it.