Kraftful co-founder Yana Welinder was a recovering lawyer and head of product at IFTTT when she decided to apply to Y Combinator in 2019. It seemed like a great time to build a product to help companies in the burgeoning IoT sphere. A year later, with hardware supply chains collapsing and IoT startups folding, the company she built needed to pivot.
And pivot it did. Yana, who had taught about AI and law nearly a decade earlier, now tapped large language models for the path forward, and Kraftful took off by helping product teams sort through and analyze the reams of feedback they received. Earlier this month, the startup was acquired by publicly traded data analytics platform Amplitude.
Product Hunt sat down with Yana to talk about pivoting during a pandemic, moving on from sales-led growth, and saying goodbye to the brand she built.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How did Kraftful start? What were the early days like?
So we got our start essentially applying to YC, and getting in almost on a whim—
You mean by accident?
It was the last day of being able to submit an application. I got it in super last minute, hit submit right before the deadline. In fact, I still had a job. I was head of product at IFTTT at the time and rushed home to record the video. I just submitted the first video where my 2-year-old wasn’t screaming in the background. To my great surprise, my co-founder and I got in and had to quit our jobs. YC was actually where I first met [Product Hunt CEO] Rajiv. We were in the same batch.
When you went into that YC batch, what was your idea for the product?
The vision was always to help product teams build better products. But it started in a very different place. The first version for Kraftful was essentially Webflow for IoT, and we later pivoted to Amplitude for IoT, which is kind of funny now that we've been acquired by Amplitude.
We eventually dropped IoT entirely and started focusing on product teams more broadly—and leveraging large language models to serve product teams, which is essentially when Kraftful really started taking off and getting broader adoption. That’s when we hit product-market fit.
Tell me a little bit about what made you pivot. When did you say, ‘Okay, it's time to drop Internet of Things?’
There were a few different things that were happening in parallel. I was probably one of the very first folks to build with LLMs. I built the first prototype of what Kraftful is today in early 2020. Then we launched an LLM-powered feature as part of our bigger solution in 2021. One piece of the ultimate pivot was that we saw there was a lot of pull towards one feature that was one part of our bigger solution.
The other part was that the connected hardware industry was getting hit multiple times. The very first hit that happened was around COVID—hardware generally is hard to build remotely. Then, there was a subsequent problem with supply chain for hardware, and chip shortages really impacted a lot of our customers.
The final punch was the market crash. In combination with the chipset shortages, hardware companies were really struggling to get investment. Hardware startups couldn't prove that their products worked because they couldn't get all the pieces in place. And investors got much more conservative around that time. A lot of our customers went out of business, laid off a bunch of folks, or stopped their integrations.
Meanwhile, we had this one piece of our product that everyone was interested in outside of the IoT space and made us realize, ‘Okay, we got it. We gotta do this. Now.’
Where were you when that aha moment hit?
I think it probably was a combination of lots of different moments, a lot of different customer conversations, conversations with friends who are also product builders, and me thinking back to my product-management days and realizing that this is the product I could have leveraged at any software company that I worked at prior to Kraftful. My background is as a product manager, ultimately leading product teams. Just realizing, ‘Hey, this is something that would be really powerful for me.’
And then I had this one moment where I was like, ‘Okay, I have a sense that this is gonna work, but I probably need something to bring to the team as a proof point.’ I went to the inaugural Masters of Scale Summit [based on the podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman and Jeff Berman]. It was an invite-only conference. They've now done a few of these, but that was the very first one, and I was one of a handful of the early-stage [founders] there. Most attendees were founders and product leaders of unicorns or what they called “soonnicorns.” I essentially presented as if the pivot had already happened and observed the reaction. And it was very clear that there was a really big pain point; these folks immediately wanted to buy the product, essentially a product we didn't yet have. So I think that was a big-time moment when it was clear that I could present this to the team.
How big was the team at that point?
I’m not certain. We expanded the team pretty significantly. Something like 15 people with contractors.
How did your team change because of the pivot?
We went from being sales-led to just being PLG [product-led growth. We serve over 60,000 product builders, and all of them have come inbound, organically, primarily from social media, Product Hunt, and a few other places.
And so we weren't really needing sales the same way we did for our prior product. We also needed quite a lot of engineers in the very first big push rebuilding our product, but then we didn't need as many. We had quite a few contractors that we didn't need on our team eventually.
In your acquisition announcement, you note that Kraftful was feeding data into Amplitude at the beginning. Was there a time when they were a competitor or your Venn diagrams overlapped?
Amplitude’s never been a competitor. It's always been an incredibly complementary solution. They provide quant data—an ability to see ‘What are users doing in your product?’ And we provide the qualitative analysis: ‘What are those users saying about your product?’ Both our customers have been asking for a joint solution—to be able to see both what users are doing and what they are saying.
What will be your and your team’s role at Amplitude?
Our product is being integrated right now to become a core part of the Amplitude platform. Our entire team has joined, and we're now in the process of integrating the product. We started the integration from Day One, and I should say, maybe even from Day Zero. Even as we were negotiating the deal, we also had a standing team meeting planning out integration.
How do you feel about the Kraftful brand going away and becoming part of something larger?
I have to admit that I will miss the Kraftful brand. It's a brand that a lot of folks recognize. As I mentioned, we had over 60,000 users, and they all found Kraftful via word of mouth. As I talk to people, lots of people know what Kraftful is and have followed the Kraftful journey. There's some sadness there. The brand is my baby. But there are so many exciting pieces to this acquisition. The Kraftful product is getting integrated into a public company's platform in a really core way. We get to scale it up to many, many more customers. That's incredible. It’s unfortunate that our brand cannot live on, but if it did, we wouldn’t be able to have the impact we’ll get to have.