Productivity - Setup Guide

How to set up Amplitude

Otto's honest, no-fluff walkthrough. Every step here is what we'd actually do if we were sitting at your keyboard. Real gotchas first, real steps second, and a link to the personalized version at the bottom.

Read these before you start

• Amplitude's free tier includes 50K MTUs but caps saved dashboards, cohorts, and lookback windows. Once you hit those caps, upgrade is the only option [source: amplitude.com/pricing].
• Session Replay is an add-on line item on Plus, priced separately per session. Adding replay to a large user base gets expensive fast.
• The MTU model means a bot storm or an accidental identify() call on every anonymous visitor spikes your bill. Filter at the SDK.
• Amplitude Analytics and Amplitude Experiment are separate products under the same umbrella. Buying one does not include the other.
• Historical data cannot be reprocessed if event schema changes. Rename an event, break the historical funnel.

The 7-step setup

1. 1

   Create your Amplitude account

   Sign up at the link below. Free tier available - no card required. Use your business email so you can invite teammates later.

   Open Amplitude signup
2. 2

   Complete the initial onboarding

   Skip the marketing questionnaires when you can. Fill only the fields that actually configure the product - name, timezone, your first workspace or project. If Amplitude pushes you into a setup wizard, take it - it usually accelerates the first productive session.

3. 3

   Connect your existing tools

   Wire Amplitude into the rest of your stack. The integrations that most people set up first: Segment (industry standard), Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks, Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Braze, Iterable, Customer.io, mParticle, Rudderstack, Zapier, LaunchDarkly, Optimizely.. Do these before importing data - clean integration first, data second.

4. 4

   Import your existing data (only what you'll actually use)

   Do NOT bulk-import everything. Import the last 30 days of the ONE workflow you're moving over first. Prove it works. Then import more. Big-bang migrations are how Amplitude deployments die in month 3.

5. 5

   Set up your first real workflow

   Pick the single most-frequent task you'll do in Amplitude - the daily-driver workflow. Configure it end-to-end. Use it live for a week. Do not touch any other feature yet. Adoption failure comes from teams trying to use everything on day one instead of the one thing that actually pays.

6. 6

   Add your team (if applicable) and set access

   Once your solo workflow works, invite one teammate at a time. Watch them use it. The friction points you missed are the ones they hit. Fix those before scaling to more users. Never invite 20 people at once - you'll get 20 confused people and 0 useful feedback.

7. 7

   Compound with the right pairings

   Recommend Amplitude for growing product teams (10+ people, real product analytics discipline, likely to hit enterprise tier eventually). Recommend Mixpanel for smaller product teams or teams that prioritize UI simplicity. Recommend Heap for teams that want autocapture and do not want to instrument events manually. Do NOT recommend for websites, local businesses, agencies, or trades; those are wrong-shape use cases.