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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

I always found it interesting that YC will fund competitors of existing portfolio companies, but I guess it might make sense from various angles as they increase the chance that one of their funded companies will make it big, and it will probably stimulate innovation.

I wonder though how they handle the potential conflict of interest as I imagine they get updates from both companies and might be asked for advice by both as well.

Regarding the product I think it’s interesting but if retroactive event streaming is the only USP I think that should be easy to reproduce for Segment. Also, I really like that Segment started taking privacy a bit more serious by introducing their privacy hub. Freshpaint is probably not compliant with GDPR as of now, I guess as they’re focused on the US market that might not matter much though.

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We didn't apply to YC with the idea of Freshpaint. We were initially a Postgres performance optimization tool.

> but if retroactive event streaming is the only USP I think that should be easy to reproduce for Segment

Retroactivity has been the main differentiator between Heap and it's competitors for seven years now. None of them have been able to successfully copy it yet. Mixpanel launched an autotrack feature, but later shut it down.

> Freshpaint is probably not compliant with GDPR as of now

We are GDPR compliant. In fact, Fitz helped form an industry working group on GDPR with the IAB while working at Quantcast a year ahead of GDPR coming into effect.

Can you speak to the architecture at all? e.g. an event hits Freshpaint, and 3 months later is is qualified as a defined "event" to be forwarded to 3 destinations - how does it happen?

I ask because I saw your previous comments and saw that 1) you're an expert at optimizing PostgreSQL, and 2) you said that Heap was harder to build because of the queries that users can define in the frontend.

So basically, are you able to leverage PostgreSQL to build something like Freshpaint? I would imagine it is prohibitively expensive to store your event data in PostgreSQL if it's sole purposed is to be categorized and forwarded to other destinations, vs. being queried like it was in Heap.

Amazing work and best of luck!

They probably store the XPath of each click, and when an event with the same XPath is created they browse through all the past click with this specific XPath

Of course. But my question pertains _how_ the event data is stored. Heap stored the event data in Citus, and OP worked to optimize their PostgreSQL for queries across the data. Freshpaint doesn't query the data (in the aggregate form that Heap does), it simply needs to find events that qualify as defined events and forward them to their destinations.

I'm just asking if PostgreSQL is still the right tool for that.

> None of them have been able to successfully copy it yet.

Not true, Contentsquare has been doing it before Heap and still doing it at least as well as Heap, actually they even offer retroactivity of website background

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