Segment (YC S11) Raises $15 Million Series A
segment.com
segment.com
1. That they will continue to raise prices like many other in the SaaS-space, without grandfathering excisting user/customers.
2. That they will keep limiting certain integrations to their premium plans. This prevents me from integrating with them for new "pet"-projects. I make a lot of MVP-type product for clients, that we test the demand for. For such products, I usually integrate with a lot of tools straight away (GA, Mixpanel, Facebook Ads, Adwords, Optimizely). Even though such MVP-project only will get a few hundre visitors, it still requires Segment.io's "Startup"-plan, which is 79usd/month. I think it makes a lot more sense to allow most integrations for the free plan, and rather segment your customer based on API calls. Many of the integrations that require the Startup-plans are really useful for MVP project (Facebook Ads, Adwords, Kissmetrics, Mailchimp etc.). So please segment your customers based on API-calls, not integrations (maybe except for super expensive enterprise software). I know I could just have one "Startup"-account, and add all the MVP projects to that account, but some of my clients want to have their own segment.io account.
1. Yep we've grandfathered all the old customers as we've updated pricing, they keep their old pricing.
2. We're thinking about ways to handle this, and may have some updates soon. There's actually a low API call threshold (5k api calls I believe) where we just won't bother you about payment no matter what integrations you're using.
2. Good. There are just so many useful tools for a MVP-projects in your Startup-plan (and some in the Project-plan). You should move most, if not all of them to the Developer-plan. I just think it makes really sense for you to go for the Mixpanel and Stripe-approach of getting as many web products tighly integrated with you at the earliest time possible (at the MVP-stage).
Maybe it makes sense to limit integration in the short term (forces some people to go premium), but I think it'll be better for you in the long term to lower the bar of integrating with you. My experience is that once integrated with you, there is no turning back:)
if you are incorporating their product into commercial projects of your own, how in the world do you come to the conclusion that it should be free?
to segment: raise your prices according to the utility your product provides. make money. this kind of product is changing the way enterprise software is built and sold and viewed at large. i will gladly pay good money to a dozen small saas startups rather than oracle or microsoft or whoever. i've worked for the giants and it's a complete shit show. i know where that money goes and it's not pretty.
i LIKE paying for saas because it feels like i am engaging in an actual business transaction. i trust 'free' (as in gratis) solutions as far as i can throw them.
also, companies that under-charge are toxic elements in the marketplace - they push out healthy firms because they can subsidize the cost of operations and marketing with an unlimited budget of funny money. and when that solution your business is relying on goes out of business because they never had the inclination to make any money, that sucks.
try going to the market and asking about their freemium chicken.
I do, however, whole hardheartedly agree with you sentiment about relying upon free services or saas.
We're using this code-level approach in basically every one of our Rails apps these days: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/segment-io-and-ruby
Most common integrations: Intercom, Mixpanel, HubSpot, AdWords, Twitter Ads, Google Analytics.
Good interview with Peter (Segment founder) from February this year: http://podcasts.thoughtbot.com/giantrobots/86
Does the tld really matter? My hunch is that .io is perceived as a toy product TLD and .com is where 'real' business is done?
This kind of sentiment sucks though because other startups probably see it as well and will needlessly shell out cash for a .com.
When I worked for clients they used to really push hard for a .com. They'd rather have a 25 character .com than use anything else. My guess is that they only trust .com.
.com is simple and guaranteed to work. By that I mean both with humans (who just assume '.com' is the thing that goes in the location bar) and with computers (Interac e-transfers, a way of moving money in Canada by sending to an email address, don't work with .photography domains).
its okay for conferences and dev related things, but I wouldn't start a business on it now.
its not a name you should give your company if you want to last say 10 or 50 years
in germany there are all these companies called 24 like http://www.immobilienscout24.de/ because back in the 90s this was the trendy german website thing. now it just sounds silly
we spent 10.5k :)
That being said, I've used them for a little over a year and a half now and am quite pleased. The "one stop shop" for integrating all the analytics and email stuff is great
For quite a while, a majority of our new inbounds mentioned that they first saw Amplitude through the list of tools at Segment. A lot of companies see Segment as a recommendation platform- so they’ll go to them to get a list of vendors. It's definitely huge for us that you guys are around.
The ecosystem of developer tools is expanding fast and guys like Segment (and us- mParticle) are helping lead the way for app developers to move faster and build better apps.
This is good for everyone!!!
I'm thrilled for your progress and excited for what your team does in the future!
Congrats to the team!