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Comment by calvinfo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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