How Teal Uses Amplitude Analytics to Boost Conversions and Empower Job Seekers
Business moves fast, and there are so many career opportunities on the market that choosing the right option is no longer a human-solvable problem. To match the pace of workforce innovation, Teal has engineered a unique platform meant to act as a co-pilot during the most difficult stages of a job search. The platform provides users with the tools, skills, and recommendations they need to accelerate their careers. Over 100,000 users have joined since its launch in 2019, and they use Teal to access search tools for career opportunities, personalized resume recommendations and adjustments, and work style evaluations that better direct their career paths.
Teal began using Amplitude to gather more data to test, track, and learn about their feature usage. It’s now become a source of truth for the team, who has built tracking and measuring into their development process.
A lack of tooling slowed product development
Teal spent about a year building the software that encompasses their career development platform. Once the initial design was complete, however, they recognized a need to analyze the impact of their features with more robust tools—namely a product analytics platform that could help uncover relevant insights. "We just have to put software out there and see what people gravitate towards," said David Fano, the CEO and Founder of Teal. "We really needed to do this in a deeply analytical way, and we needed high instrumentation to see what worked and resonated with people."
At the time, Teal was forced to roll out product features without the ability to measure, track, or monitor their usage over time. If something wasn’t working, they had no way to determine if that was because users couldn’t see a new feature, were confused about how to use it, or just didn't like it altogether.
The team at Teal examined a few different product analytics platforms at the beginning of their search, and quickly discovered that Amplitude was the gold standard for many of their industry peers. The platform offered everything they were looking for: a low barrier to entry, a high ceiling for growth, and plenty of opportunities for self-service data. David and his team decided to invest in the Amplitude Free plan to familiarize themselves with the platform and what it would mean for their product.
Spanning the gap between small scale and enterprise
As Teal iterated its way into maturity and found more questions that needed answering, they needed to offer their users more robust features. To unlock the platform’s greatest potential, Teal would need more enterprise features from Amplitude, especially cohorting. The company joined a scholarship program that provided a free year of Amplitude's enterprise plan, which allowed them to get more comfortable with the expanded capabilities of the platform.
“There was actually a lot more there that we hadn't taken advantage of at the time,” said Lara Perlstein, Vice President of Operations at Teal. “Even today, Amplitude seems to constantly be adding new functionalities that have been really helpful for us.”
As they transitioned out of the scholarship program and became a paying customer, they worked alongside the Amplitude Professional Services Team to audit their existing setup and discuss improvements and best practices going forward.
Amplitude helped us become more deliberate about our data usage, and became even more of a source of truth for learning things as we launched new products.
Harnessing data to drive conversions
Now that Teal is fully trained on Amplitude's enterprise plan, all members of the team are able to surface insights at scale. The company understands how to better visualize their data with more complex charts and graphs, which offer unique insights about their users' preferences for features and how they could be improved over time. Teal is also able to set and define its own metrics for growth, including user activation, and continuously measure them over time. “Before we really invested our time and energy in Amplitude, we were rolling out products without the ability to measure it necessarily, which wasn't great,” Lara said. “We kind of shifted our mentality, that in order to push out new product or new features, we need to be able to measure it.”
Amplitude's enterprise plan has also helped Teal drive higher conversion rates. The company is currently refactoring their job tracker tool, one of their most-used features. Leveraging Amplitude to monitor the launch of their premium program, Teal Plus, they discovered a bug in the way their premium features were gated. The development team dug into the data and realized that Teal Plus required some additional tweaking, and decided to refactor their product to resonate better with users. With the redesign now complete, the company now enjoys a much higher conversion rate and offers a better experience to premium users.
When we actually dove into the data, we were able to be much more critical and deliberate about our channels thanks to the downstream things Amplitude enabled us to know.
Lessons learned
Success is not found by focusing on features alone, but by starting with the information your company needs to know. Teal has gradually learned how to ask the right questions about the right features, and the Amplitude enterprise plan has answered all these questions and more. "Just iterate your way into capturing more and more and more," David advises. "Don't think you need to have it all solved from day one."
Teal is looking to leverage Amplitude for conversion rate optimization (CRO) and move away from Google Analytics. They’ve instrumented their entire website with Amplitude to track metrics on a per-page basis, and uses a lot of conversion funnels to see which pages are converting better than others. By doing so, Teal enjoys a full lifecycle of marketing and product analytics. "Now we look at a lot of our website data, not just our product data, through Amplitude," David says.
As Teal continues to grow and expand, David doesn’t want to use his gut to make decisions. “We've only got so many at-bats as a venture backed startup,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that the decisions we were making were informed and had at least a higher chance of success with some initial insights versus just random guesses.” With Amplitude, they have a higher chance of hitting a home run.
