The Growth Stacks of 2019 | Hacker News Reader

The Growth Stacks of 2019

segment.com

200 pointsrafaelc32 comments

This is a great example of a "launch" post:

1. Provide huge value based on data that only Segment has, which makes the post worth reading and - more importantly - shareable (though it would be nice to see the names for every company in each chart, not just one or two)

2. Segue nicely to calling out their new Developer Center[1], which streamlines the process of building on Segment.

Very nicely done.

FWIW I explored building on Segment in 2014, and just completed our integration on their new Dev Center. The latter experience was a lot more streamlined than the former appeared it would be. Also nicely done!

1- https://app.segment.com/developer/request-access

The color schemes used in these graphs are not usable for me as a colorblind person. The green-yellow and orange-yellow are indistinguishable to me. That seems like an odd choice when there are only 3 colors in the graph. My general rule is use primary colors and fall back to variations in brightness when you run out to maximize the distance between the points in the gamut.

Ah sorry about that, this is a great point.

I generated these via the seaborn palette in matplotlib[1], but agree that these could be way clearer. I'll see what I can do about changing the line type on them to make them a little bit more differentiated.

[1]: https://seaborn.pydata.org/

Seaborn has a colorblind-specific color palette: https://seaborn.pydata.org/tutorial/color_palettes.html#qual...

I feel like that's should be the default? People tend to forgot accessibility, so defaults matter.

I'm Calvin, one of the Segment co-founders.

We're excited to share some of our data around the evolution of the growth + saas ecosystems.

There are so many tools out there, that it's often incredibly hard to pick one.

We wanted to share the trends about what we're seeing to make it easier for companies to choose between the thousands of tools on the market. And we wanted to highlight a few of the new startups that we think are poised to grow significantly.

We welcome your feedback here! Deeper analysis to come.

Calvin - give your content marketing team a raise - or yourself since it's your byline :)

This is an outstanding breakdown and I loved the "highlight" strategy.

Composition feels a lot more like high quality / expensive financial services report aka Greenstreet Advisors but targeted to growth ecosystem.

Couple of questions:

1) If you could pick 3 early stage companies in your analysis to be an investor in which 3 would you select?

2) Do you guys have a data business around anonymous usage beyond this article or planning to get into the space?

Thanks, glad you liked it!

1) Honestly, there are a _lot_ more than just three startups here who seem to be growing actively. In general, I tend to bias towards great product quality and design, which puts Vitally, Split, ClearBrain, and Kustomer far up my list (and also a part of the reason we've highlighted them). That said, there are a ton of other companies in the space doing really interesting things.

2) No, at the heart of it, our revenue comes from our happy customers. We don't plan to sell or share our user’s data with other companies the way data brokers do. We just help our customers make better use of their own data for their own businesses. Occasionally, we’ll create trend reports like this that show aggregate trends to help our customers make better decisions.

Aw, blushing over here :) Thanks for the mention Calvin! We (Vitally) are thrilled to be one of the first custom-built Segment integrations and look forward to continuing to work with you all!

Hi Calvin!

This looks awesome and makes me want to use Segment all the more, but I can't because your pricing is insane if you want to track anonymous visitors to a site that gets even moderate traffic. 100k visitors per month (which is hardly crazy) costs me nothing on Google Analytics, nothing on Mixpanel, but ~$1,000 per month on Segment? I'd be happy to pay, but you guys are charging $10 CPM on anonymous visitors who are worth far less than that. Which means my options are either to only push customers to Segment (and thus lose the ability to tell where they came from, which is super valuable info), or just integrate directly with GA, Mixpanel, etc.

I'm hardly alone either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19221872

Is this just completely not the market you're going after? Is there some way to use Segment that I'm missing? Or is your target market just fine with paying $10 for every 1000 anonymous visitors they get per month?

Congrats to the Segment team. Here at Candu Labs, https://www.candu.ai, we've just finished integrating with them and it's been a really great experience. The docs are super clear, and the Segment's team really worked around the clock to help us get their integration done. I'd really recommend integrating with them.

@calvinfo: Under Raw Data, it appears a trend line is missing for Zapier.

"Some raw data tools on Segment’s platform, like Webhooks and Zapier, enable even more tools we don’t support today. Others provide a means for companies to run their own custom data pipelines, like Amazon S3 and Kinesis."

https://i.imgur.com/3uXq0T4.png

I think they bundled webhooks into zapier, not sure though.

What's the percentage of Segment customers who use Segment Warehouse? I believe that their Warehouse offering is a deal-breaker for data-driven startups which want to see the big picture.

We're working on building a product which provides Mixpanel-like UI for Segment Warehouse users so I would love hearing your experience.

I can't share the exact number, but it's high (above 33%) across all customers on our paid plans.

For companies on our business tier, it's even higher (above 66%). Most of these companies are doing more advanced data analysis, and it's hard to replace the utility of a warehouse for analysts at a certain point.

That's great for us, thanks for sharing! :)

Thanks a ton for putting this together, this seems great! Congrats to the Segment

Initially I balked at this - 5,000 different SaaS tools in the Marketing space. Even a Pointy Haired Boss's head would explode.

But the breakdown and explanations of each area actually made it possible to understand what each area "does" - enough to imagine one could write some code for ones own startup of one needed too - usually a good indicator I am starting to grok things

It's interesting to see the ways things like BigTable / Query are getting used for real world, and seeing some of the challenges (the forest / trees problem of individual users and accounts)

Thank you - worth bookmarking :-)

Wonderful to see this innovative platform grow, and even better to be a part of it!

Our process of building Personyze's integration with the Segment platform recently was easy and truly enjoyable, from start to finish. They have been pleasant to work with, and have guided us in a very clear and straightforward manner every step of the way.

I know I speak for the rest of our team when I say that we are proud to be integrated with Segment, and look forward to expanding the integration even further, in the future.

Amazing well done Calvin.

Have been a long time Segment user and a big fan of what you guys are doing.

When we recently started our own analytics company dreamdata.io, an multi-touch, account-based attribution tool we always saw Segment as the top 1 place to integrate and initially focused on only solving the problem for Segment customers.

Happy to share that we did the implementation in a very short time and the partnership team at Segment was really amazing. Implementation, testing, and documentation all in high quality and when in doubt the Segment team was ready to help.

Very excited to see Segment launch their Developer Center in conjunction with this Growth Stack overview. Our company (ClearBrain) was one of the early technology partners to build into their Development Center, and it's been a transformative impact on our business.

As an analytics company, one of the first hurdles to getting a customer successful is onboarding their data. Every customer has heteregenous schemas and then you need to wait weeks to collect enough data to find reasonable results. Segment made this dead simple by providing an API spec with a standardized schema that just took a couple days for us to integrate with. Once integrated, you gain access to 1000s of mutual companies using Segment, who can stream you their data in exactly the same format (a huge win for analytics efforts and data normalization).

Highly recommend other companies to consider integrating with Segment. The ease of integration and access to a platform serving thousands of customers is especially helpful for startups.

Amazing article. It’ll be interesting to see what this same data looked like 5 Years ago...

Congrats to Segment! We (ScopeAI) got a chance to work with Calvin and the team to build an integration. The processes couldn't have been clearer and the value add for our customer is huge!

FYI Calvin - The anchor to CRMs in the list of quick links is broken. The ID on the header is "#c-r-ms" and should be "#crms"

Thanks, fixed!

Very exciting to see Segment here. It was a breeze to integrate with and use their data from our clients. Congrats Calvin!

I can't access this link. Site seems down.

Seems all good to me!

Are you running pi-hole or something? I'm getting "uMatrix has prevented the following page from loading", segment seems to be some sort of spyware company.

I am, in fact, set it up this weekend.

It's probably because of your ad blocker. Whitelist the domain (if only temporarily) to read the post.

Outline: https://outline.com/Jgg2a2

StartPage Proxy: https://bit.ly/2Tw02n1

Reply on news.ycombinator.com