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Comment by _dark_matter_ | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a no-brainer. I wonder if they ever started to build these capabilities in house; I'm sure they already had so much of the tooling available.

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Yeah, I was always curious why Fivetran didn't build this themselves when reverse-ETL started to take off.

I built a company[0], SeekWell, in this space (launched before Census), but was mostly focused on Sheets and Slack as destinations. SeekWell was acquired a few years ago too.

0 - https://seekwell.io/

The challenge of syncing from stubborn SaaS tools to your data warehouse / database I suspect is different than syncing data from your data warehouse / database back to SaaS tools. Specifically, reverse ETL has to incorporate more context from the business I guess so the data that lands in the 3rd party tools is actually solid.

Once you have customers and a good network of integrations with a large number of tools, I suspect it's easier to just buy that company than build it all yourself?

This is exactly right. We even went so far as to build a proof of concept internally, and the technical challenges are just very different. The simplest way to explain it is that Fivetran connects a skinny pipe (APIs) to a fat pipe (databases) while Census connects a fat pipe to a skinny pipe.

The data is only as solid as you make it to be. Ultimately reverse ETL is just a technology (basically from SQL to APIs). The quality/correctness of data is someone else's headache. I've been there and done that, and reverse ETL is a feature-product with huge churn. See how Hightouch pivoted hard from that into CDP.

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