Product Talk Inside An AI Acquisition: How Yana Welinder Built & Sold Kraftful To Amplitude
Jan 26, 2026
Yana Welinder, founder of Kraftful and now Head of AI at Amplitude, built AI-native product experiences and led a startup-to-acquisition journey. She discusses early GPT prototyping, finding a real use case in product feedback analysis, staying focused to avoid AI hype, founder-led growth via social media, and scaling AI inside a larger company while preserving startup culture.
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Early Access Sparked The Idea
- Yana Welinder got early GPT access because her then-husband led product and engineering at OpenAI and asked her to test their work.
- That early playtesting inspired Craftful's first LLM experiments in 2020 and kept her close to the tech as it evolved.
Validate With A One-Liner And A Landing Page
- Validate demand publicly by pitching a concise one-liner and observing real reactions from peers.
- Capture inbound interest with a simple website and iterate quickly once signups arrive.
Make AI Invisible; Surface Outcomes
- Focus on the user problem and hide AI complexity behind simple UX and outcomes.
- Users want clear insights, not the model's internal reasoning or flashy AI explanations.