From Show HN to Series D
segment.com
segment.com
- after thousands of lines of code, we realized our Edtech startup did not have product market fit,
so we pivoted to building a Mixpanel competitor focused on segmentation*
- 6 product iterations later, nothing was working. We were trying to decide between a group trip
planner and what eventually became Segment. It was a dark time.*
I'd say more generally that finding product-market-fit felt much more like a 'pull' than a 'push' motion. We had been trying for 8 months to convince even a single user to rely on the product we were building earlier, and it just wasn't sticking.
When we launched today's product, we started seeing a lot more pull from customers. We solved one problem that other products did not, which prompted a bunch more requests from customers.
Read transcript at 4:48
Then I applied to become an engineer there and had one of the worst experiences of my life with a project. The project involved building a clone of their realtime event debugger with React. I really felt as though I had knocked it out of the park... I even used their Evergreen UI framework. All I got was a very brief thanks but no thanks kind of reply that left a very bitter taste in my mouth.
That way we wouldn't be wasting our time applying to do free work at a startup just to get a rejection at the end of it. 2c
Real-world problems have often been touted as a solution to useless whiteboard tests but then I've seen a lot of resentment when someone doesn't get a job with it. A month is too much time to spend on an interview project though.
I don’t mind a take home assignment that has a reasonable due date, but they should only be given deep enough into the recruiting process IMO.
Big fan of Segment, been wanting to transition some of our stuff over and tap into the kinesis pipeline connectors
Obviously, the Show HN on December 12, 2012 turned that around. But it still took us several months to realize we had a tiger by its tail and begin to recover psychologically.
So... for those of you searching for product market fit and not finding it yet, hang in there.
If they are raising $175M, their dilution is probably in the ~15% range, putting their valuation a bit north of $1B.
So, each founder probably is worth, on paper, around $50M right now. Again, this assumes equal splits. It's possible that the CEO has more shares by virtue of assuming greater responsibilities.
I often wonder about the viability of starting a tech company elsewhere. Does being a VC company impact this?
We made the move back to SF to be closer to our customers (since we had shifted to building an analytics product by then). It was much easier to walk them through the product in-person.
I wouldn't say this is strictly necessary today, but SF does have a nice density of startups if you are building a developer tool.
Makes sense though that you wanted to be near your customer base.
But why would you call raising soooo much money a success? It's an achievement for sure, congrats on that, but certainly not success.
It is also a huge market, with lots of interesting adjacencies that are equally whitespace. https://segment.com/protocols is starting to push into some of those areas.