How to Calculate Growth Rate in Amplitude Analytics

In his famous essay on growth, Paul Graham said:

If there’s one number every founder should always know, it’s the company’s growth rate. That’s the measure of a startup. If you don’t know that number, you don’t even know if you’re doing well or badly.

But it turns out, that calculating growth rate in Amplitude isn’t very easy. So I’ll save you some time and show you exactly how in 2 small steps:

Step 1/2

Open an event segmentation chart, and make sure you have selected the event, user segment, and time period that you are interested in. In my case, I want to look at the weekly growth rate of all active users in the last 8 weeks.

Step 2/2

Switch to the formula tab, paste in the below formula.

ROLLWIN(UNIQUES, A, 1)/(2*ROLLAVG(UNIQUES, A, 2)-ROLLWIN(UNIQUES, A, 1))

The tricky thing here, is Amplitude formula doesn’t have a function to look only at the previous day. So this formula is taking advantage of the math of rolling averages and rolling windows, to first calculate the metric offset by a day, and then look at the % growth of the current day. If you want to be really precise, you should also subtract 1 at the end.

Done! And you get a growth rate chart like this. Here we see a rate oscillating above and below 1, i.e. not growing.

Bonus

Try this formula out, and you’ll get a trendline for your growth rate too!

ROLLWIN(UNIQUES, A, 1)/(2*ROLLAVG(UNIQUES, A, 2)-ROLLWIN(UNIQUES, A, 1));TRENDLINE(ROLLWIN(UNIQUES, A, 1)/(2*ROLLAVG(UNIQUES, A, 2)-ROLLWIN(UNIQUES, A, 1)))

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