Founded On Purpose · Renew Venture Capital

Building What Users Say & Do: How Yana Welinder Built a Product Teams Loved — And Sold It to Amplitude

·41 min·2 clips

"Companies are bought, not sold"—but Yana says inbound interest still changes the outcome.

1. Founded On Purpose follows Yana Welinder and Craftful after Amplitude acquired the company, with Katie McBratney framing the conversation around what happens "after the exit." 2. Katie McBratney hosts, and Yana Welinder appears as founder and CEO of Craftful, a company she says was acquired by Amplitude. 3. The episode asks how Yana built a product teams loved, found product-market fit, and chose an acquisition path that protected her team and customers. 4. Yana says she started in law, moved through academia, and realized she was trying to build legal frameworks rather than just apply them. 5. She says she later became a product manager, eventually working as "PM number two" at a fast-growing unicorn and then leading products with millions of users. 6. Before Craftful, she describes spending Friday nights reading App Store reviews with a glass of wine to hear what users were saying. 7. Craftful began with the goal of gathering user feedback from many sources and learning from it quickly and effectively. 8. Yana says the first YC idea was "Webflow for IoT," and the company later became "Amplitude for IoT" before dropping IoT entirely. 9. She says she used GPT-3 to build an early prototype and launched a broader analytics feature in 2021. 10. She says the strongest pull came from analyzing app reviews, which showed demand outside the IoT market. 11. Yana says the pandemic slowed IoT, which made the pivot feel more obvious in hindsight. 12. She says Product Hunt became one of Craftful's most critical go-to-market channels and helped drive organic growth to more than 60,000 users. 13. She says she emailed the entire user and customer base around Product Hunt launches to generate upvotes and support. 14. Yana says she raised three rounds in 2019, 2020, 2021, and again in 2023, and optimized for speed because she was a solo founder. 15. She says the 2023 raise came right after a pivoted LLM-powered launch, and she wrapped that fundraise in a few weeks to get back to building. 16. She says acquisition interest came from several companies, but one strategically aligned company led her to contact about 25 companies and run a process with more than 10. 17. Yana says she chose Amplitude because its product tells you what users are doing while Craftful tells you what users are saying. 18. She also says a public-company buyer mattered because it helped ensure the product could be integrated and continue living on. 19. The conversation is an interview with a practical, founder-to-founder tone, and it spends a lot of time on fundraising, diligence, and product strategy. 20. People focused on product-led growth, acquisition prep, or founder decision-making would likely enjoy it, while listeners wanting a story without process detail may skip it.

As heard by us

A grounded exit conversation about fit, customer voice, and what survives a sale.

Founded on Purpose focuses on the quieter side of an acquisition, where fit matters as much as price. Yana Wellender comes across clearly on the move from law and academia into product, and the strongest stretch is the link between Craftful's core idea and the way customer voice…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You're weighing an exit and want the people side, not just the price.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Founded On Purpose