9 ms·

Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator

208 points by gwintrob 9y ago

pclark 9y ago
I'm a massive fan (and user!) of Segment. I think it could be revolutionary. I do worry a lot about how they tell the world about what they _are_ though, it's an inherently complex and technical product - and often the buyers of this software may not be technical enough to appreciate the sophistication of this product. In my experience Segment is confusing to explain until you actually use it, then you love it.
- irq11 9y ago
  I keep going back and forth between understanding the value of this product (dashboard for marketing to add integrations w/o dev time; better integration of analytics), to wondering why technical people pay for this. It doesn't seem cheap, and you're throwing a lot of control over latency-sensitive data to a black box. The founder straight-up admits in this article that the problems they're solving are largely simple. To my mind, there's no need for a hosted service. Why hasn't Segment been replaced by an open-source project? I'm not trolling here...I really don't understand the full value.
  - bendavis381 9y ago
    Snowplow is open-source, although certainly not trivial to set up. https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow
    - jackgolding 9y ago
      yup snowplow's devops requirements and lack of evangelism are hurting them IMO but these are probably the challenges every open source product has.
  - pkrein 9y ago
    Any individual connection is simple. Website to Mixpanel? Easy. Mobile app to Facebook App Events? Also simple. Both website and mobile app to warehouse? Bigger investment but still doable. Data out of Stripe and Zendesk into the warehouse? Also reasonable straight forward to build, more annoying to maintain, very annoying to scale. The issue is that companies need all of this together. And they need it now. Many enterprises have 100+ business units each using 50+ tools and all of that needs to be connected together. So the issue isn't that building a single connection is hard. It's that managing N interconnected things is N^2 hard, and N^2 gets big very very fast. Wrangling that mess is just way too complicated for an open source project... even though analytics.js is open source, the vast, vast majority of a.js users only use it through Segment.
    - irq11 9y ago
      I've personally built all of the things you're talking about, on real products, with lots of traffic, and it just isn't that hard. Annoying, yes, but arguably a core competency of any data team, and something you want to think very carefully about outsourcing. Also, most teams won't have to "scale" many of the things you're talking about...that's a problem that you only have to solve when you're the central point of failure for lots of companies. As for the n^2 problem, yes, I can see that argument, but in my experience, n is always a small number (i.e. 2-10), and they rarely need to cross-communicate in a fully connected graph. In short, piping everything through an expensive, centralized point-of-failure run by strangers seems like such a risky proposition that I can't imagine many companies would have the integration complexity to justify the risks. But again, people seem to be finding value in it, so maybe I'm missing something. I was honestly expecting you to tell me something about advanced data warehousing or integrated analytics tools or something like that. If you tell me that integrating with segment automatically starts correlating session data across providers, well...that starts to be compelling.
      - pclark 9y ago
        Go tell a marketer that if they use Segment they can onboard new marketing tools and it'll 'just work' without any engineering time, and they'll shit a brick. (the data warehouse part is imho folly.)
  - gamache 9y ago
    I use Segment, I love Segment, and I love the fact that the problem they're solving is forehead-slappingly simple: data fanout and delivery is a pain in the ass, fix it. It's one of those "but I could have done that!" businesses that just comes down to foresight, acumen, and most importantly, execution. Analytics.js could be replaced by a self-hosted/bundled solution in theory, but Segment's server-side integrations are an extremely valuable piece of network plumbing. It's awfully nice that I was able to set up a few endpoints on our API (quick) and went through the approval process (sorry, not quick) and now my customers have a super-easy option if they want to point their data hose at us.
  - thinkMOAR 9y ago
    My brain often cracks on startups like these and particularly listed users/client companies. And it kind of worries me that those companies can't do their own analytics and outsource it to segment or alike. All they need to do is install some dashboard, data processing tools and think of what data they want to correlate with other data and if that correlation has any interesting meaning. But of course having your company listed at a hot startup site is simply exposure or marketing too. Maybe those companies don't even use it, they just want their logo to be shown every where on the 'hot' parts of the web. And having listed on your site that 15.000+ companies trust you? Why do you still need to raise money then? Start charging people if your product has value. Also as a private citizen can i request at Segment if you are storing, processing or handling my private data (provided by parties i did business with) in anyway?
jph 9y ago
Congratulations! I'm totally impressed by the excellent company the Segment team is creating-- both the product and the support are first rate. And special kudos to Peter, who provided direct hands on tech help for one of my clients during our crunch time.
- pkrein 9y ago
  thanks for being a customer :)
philip1209 9y ago
I was implementing Segment this week, and I was excited to see that they do far more than customer analytics now. With a single installation of analytics.js, you can turn on tools like Sentry.io error tracking, HelloBar announcements, or secure user accounts with Castle.io. With a single integration, Segment is becoming an app store for websites.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  As we learned in another post, having the name analytics.js can get you blocked by Ad block extensions. Expect analytics.js to not run in your apps.
  - murtali 9y ago
    To me this is the primary challenge of outsourcing your client side tracking -- you risk a wholesale block of your analytics if the Segment file gets blacklisted.
  - jaequery 9y ago
    this is definitely a deal breaker. other than server-side, are there any other work arounds? like roll your own domain proxy or something?
    - michaelbuckbee 9y ago
      I've looked deeply into this and it works to a point, but you still end up in situations where vital things get blocked.
    - bendavis381 9y ago
      Just bundle it in with the rest of JS payload with something like webpack. Individual calls to certain domains (GA, Heap, etc) might still get blocked, but the payload itself will be fine.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
dzink 9y ago
Strong work! CloudFlare may be on their tail with Apps. https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/ https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/
dirkdk 9y ago
congrats! Awesome company
mijustin 9y ago
I've been a Segment user, and advocate, from the beginning. It was highly recommended in the book Marketing for Developers. One thing I'd like to see is a better free tier for developers starting new projects. Currently, you're limited to 1000 visitors per month. Even indie projects can quickly run up monthly costs of $100+. As a comparison, Mixpanel's free tier gives devs 20 million data points per month.
- pkrein 9y ago
  thanks justin! would you be open to putting a badge on your site (similar to mixpanel's)? we also have an incubator/accelerator discount for pre-series a, just email friends@segment.com and we can get you set up.
  - sorich87 9y ago
    I'm not the GP but we would totally be open to putting a badge! We got 3 months free from Founderskit (via Startup School). Is there a better discount than that? If yes, that would be helpful!
  - doublerebel 9y ago
    Thank you! Late comment but I'm starting a new business and was missing the old cheaper/startup plans. I would be fine with badging the site Mixpanel-style. Congrats on the success, your tools have saved me many many man-hours in past businesses.
- cyberferret 9y ago
  This was my take when we investigated integrating Segment into our SaaS app too. We are purely boot strapped, and at the level where our monthly site visitor are building up at a great clip, and we would be occasionally pushing the free limits of Segment into real dollar that would eat up a chunk of our slowly growing revenue.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
We use Segment and it's incredibly useful to be able to turn on and off services, especially for reporting tools like mixpanel.
pcl 9y ago
Interesting... this is the first time I've heard of YC leading a Series C. Is there a new later-stage fund? Or is this just a case-by-case thing?
- aetherson 9y ago
  New later-stage fund: YC Continuity.
- beambot 9y ago
  https://www.ycombinator.com/continuity/ https://www.ycombinator.com/continuity/
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tonydiv 9y ago
Had nothing but problems with their product over the years. In 2012, they had a bug in their analytics.js which resulted in me losing about 10k new users. Last year, I was experiencing multi-day delays between an event and it appearing in Mixpanel, Intercom, etc. Prior this year, I was using Branch and then realized how many sacrifices you make when you use Segment – they will never be up to date with all the most recent SDKs/APIs, so you will always be pulling your hair out. We ended up using Segment + 4 other services, it would have been better to not use Segment at all. I hope they sort these problems out, and build a better developer product. Right now, they're focused on the enterprise, and I'm amazed their product is sufficient. I'm writing this because their team is amazing and kind, but I hope they improve their product.
- pkrein 9y ago
  Shoot. I'm sorry this happened. I'd love to chat more about your experience with Branch SDK/APIs recently. I found your email in another HN comment and will reach out shortly. On the other two issues... Analytics.js launched on HN in December 2012. It had some bugs in its early form, but it has certainly become a lot more stable in the five years since then. Today it runs without issue on 500m+ browsers and hundreds of thousands of websites each day. For event delivery, you can see real-time event deliverability and latency stats on our public status page: https://status.segment.com https://status.segment.com For most services we deliver data in a few hundred milliseconds, but some services consistently drop data. We retry that data over the next 12 hours, and this actually increases the deliverability to our partner endpoints. (For example, we're improving deliverability to Iron.io from 95.4% to 98.4% right now.)
  - Hydraulix989 9y ago
    Latency can be more or less questionable depending on when the stopwatch button is pressed. For example, in VR, the gold standard is "motion to photon" -- anything else is just not representative of what actual latency means for actual users (i.e. getting motion sick). There are many definitions of latency, so it's important to choose the right one (the one that matters for your users). For us, latency means the time between when the _event_ actually occurs in real life (user clicks on a button) and when it showed up in all of our analytics integrations (Mixpanel, Intercom, etc.). As developers, this is the definition of "latency" that really matters for us because it represents the minimum time before we can take action on our users' behaviors. The reason I'm very skeptical is because what we were actually seeing was orders-of-magnitude differences from the 44 ms "latency" claimed on your status graph and what we were measuring ourselves (~1-10 hours for us) -- not just 10% differences which would have been more than acceptable for our use case. For example, Intercom support were able to identify a four hour delay from when the /identify actually took place and when Segment sent the event to Intercom. Segment Support then mentioned a race condition with their Intercom integration that they had yet to solve (we ran into this ourselves -- we had to guarantee we called /identify BEFORE calling any /track calls). With Mixpanel, not only were we experiencing multi-hour delays, we also experienced many nonsensically mis-ordered events when using Segment (even with timestamping -- it turned out that Mixpanel still relied on events being ordered properly within a 2-minute window -- something we were only able to guarantee by directly sending events to Mixpanel ourselves). Segment's response: "Our infrastructure is built on top of a queue system that accommodates high scalability. The drawback to this is that sometimes events are received by our API in a mixed up order because we have multiple queues feeding events to multiple workers." These problems were all resolved immediately when we started issuing direct calls to our various analytics providers.
soared 9y ago
Odd to see hn cheering on segment, but hate on analytics solutions in almost every other thread. Is it okay because anything yc does is good, or is enabling analytics different than using analytics somehow?
- soared 9y ago
  It's not that surprising. Hn isn't a single being.. it's a bunch of individuals with differing opinions. Some are web devs who like usage analytics, some email from the command line because they're afraid of web browsers.
  - Hydraulix989 9y ago
    I'm very confused because you replied to your own comment as if you were a different person.
    - SonOfLilit 9y ago
      It's not surprising, soared isn't a single being... :-)
      - gricardo99 9y ago
        lol! You made my day with that one. Just the right amount of snark and wit.
    - ryanx435 9y ago
      forgot to switch to his sockpuppet account
    - cdelsolar 9y ago
      I think it was irony
naturalgradient 9y ago
Have not used the product but have highly enjoyed reading their tech blog, great stuff.
- fouadmatin 9y ago
  Thanks! Glad to hear it :) Keep your eyes peeled for some really exciting upcoming posts! (there's also a subscribe link at the bottom of posts)
gjmveloso 9y ago
Congrats! Great people, great product and great contributions to OSS. Well deserved and keep rocking!
jzebedee 9y ago
We used Segment for application analytics and exception reporting in an enterprise setting. Their .NET libraries were abysmal and had some show-stopper bugs that we wrestled with, particularly broken dependencies. I eventually had to fork the Analytics.NET repo and fix them myself. It was months before I heard any response to the issues or PRs, although they did eventually get merged in. It was just disappointing overall. I don't know why they'd release .NET tooling but have it be broken out-of-the-box, or maintain an open source project but not respond to any contributions.
- ivolo 9y ago
  Hey, this is Ilya - i'm one of the co-founders and original author of the .NET library - I'm really sorry that happened. In the early days, I was the author of 5 of our open source libraries and also a student of the .NET platform. Today we have a larger team working on our libraries - .NET in particular has 200+ customers (mostly on our business tier) and we're processing 21B+ API calls/mo originating from .NET. If you could send me an email at ilya@segment.com, I'd love to chat live and collect any other feedback you have from the experience. Thanks again for leaving the note.
- rjbwork 9y ago
  Usually these kind of startups that produce native libraries for use in other software produce poor .NET libraries. (see sendgrid) I wouldn't place the blame totally on them - you often have 1 person supporting multiple libraries in multiple languages, and .NET is not often used at these sorts of startups. On the other hand, a few thousand dollars for a consultant to get their situation in order would not be a bad investment to get them out of the situation, because a bad experience like this festers in the community for years.
jgalt212 9y ago
90% of this money is going straight to AWS.
- calvinfo 9y ago
  This comment might be in jest, but we've actually been working on a few different ways to help optimize [1] and manage our AWS spend [2]. That said, there are quite a few places left for us to optimize. We're hoping to share more of the techniques and architecture we've used to get better performance in upcoming blog posts. [1] https://segment.com/blog/the-million-dollar-eng-problem/ https://segment.com/blog/the-million-dollar-eng-problem/ [2] https://segment.com/blog/spotting-a-million-dollars-in-your-aws-account/ https://segment.com/blog/spotting-a-million-dollars-in-your-...
  - jgalt212 9y ago
    yes, sorry for the snark. It was more about, how does one go about spending $94MM in this day and age? And even after reading your well written post on AWS cost control, I still can't figure out how to spend that much money on a software biz other than given the lion's share to AWS. e.g. even if your engineers and salespeople cost (all in) $200K a year. $94MM = 470 person years of expensive staff.
    - pkrein 9y ago
      completely theoretically with nice round numbers, let's say a SaaS company has $50m in annual revenue, and they want to grow to $100m in annual revenue next year. lastly, let's assume time required to pay back the cost of customer acquisition (marketing, sales, setup support) is 24 months, and customers always pay annually up front. (24 months is kind of a long payback time, so this is a bit extreme.) doing the math... you have $50m in revenue so you can buy another $25m in recurring revenue with that. and then you need another $50m in capital from somewhere to add the other $25m in recurring revenue to get to $100m ARR total. it also follows from the math above that the faster you grow revenue, the more capital you need. :) saas math is a bit funky.
shubhamjain 9y ago
Segment is perfect example of a small solution that proved to be extremely useful for everyone. I imagine Segment can grow to an extent that it'll start affecting other products' customer base—or maybe it already has. Earlier if a company was using Mixpanel, moving away would have meant wasting hundreds of man-hours to switch to a newer solution, which could have deterred companies from having that discussion. With Segment, it'll only take a few clicks. We need more solutions similar to Segment which make we-are-too-much-invested-in-that reason less and less common.
maccaw 9y ago
I'm a massive fan of Segment - we use it everywhere at my company (Clearbit) and my only regret was not integrating it sooner. For example, some things we do: * Sync Salesforce to Redshift - then perform queries across it * Sync all incoming lead to Salesforce * Enrich incoming leads with person/company data * Fire webhooks to lambda processing incoming signup events, qualifying them, and then triggering subsequent events
slkdjf 9y ago
Not really a segment user anymore but I'm desperately lonely and want someone to reply to me. So i will say something negative about it, hopefully a segment employee will reply. I was a segment user for years and then analytics.js murdered my pet pig, then bragged about it on twitter. Users worried about the security breach in my young startup all vanished and I received a Series B funding of negative 7.5million, bankrupting my company. Thanks for nothing segment.
- harrisreynolds 9y ago
  Did you at least BBQ the pet pig?
cyberferret 9y ago
From the discussion here, it appears that a lot of 'picks and shovels' app tool providers seem to expect that their customer base will be well venture funded companies. Their pricing plans seems to reflect this by have a 'free' tier that supports nothing more than a quick test MVP, then a paid plan in a VERY high price range that would be considered negligible for someone who has just secured $100M in venture cap. Feel for we founders who want to stay bootstrapped, and who will be paying for tools out of nothing but slowly trickling in revenue from paying customers. For us, $250+ per month is a real cost, and not a flippant consideration in the early stages of our growth. I'd much prefer to see vendors have more gradually tiered pricing plans, or else peg the cost to a meaningful metric, such as 'per paying customer' rather than 'per anonymous site visitor' etc.
jdotjdot 9y ago
Segment is one of my favorite products, and I consider it a core part of our stack. It's enabled us to be leaps and bounds ahead of other companies our size as far as analytics tracking, distribution, analysis in our warehouse, and more. We use pretty much every piece of it--even the esoteric options like their embedded pixel API. It's such a core part of my day that I sometimes actually spend time daydreaming about new features I'd add to the product rather than actually doing my job :) All I need now is for them to add the ability to push my events in real time to my Kafka cluster. (Please add that!)
- pkrein 9y ago
  thanks jj! happy to get you into the kafka beta — shoot me an email peter at segment.
  - dookahku 9y ago
    So if I'm reading Segment's page correctly, Segment is a service that reads other API data and warehouses it into a single place to be read later? I feel like I'm missing a lot of the picture. :)
    - danenania 9y ago
      I'm not a Segment user, but my understanding is that it allows you to track events via a single API, and then push those events to lots of other services. So instead of needing to have js script tags/tracking codes/event calls for Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Optimizely, etc. etc., you just send your events to Segment, and Segment sends them on to wherever you want.
aloisbarreras 9y ago
I work at Astronomer, another company in the clickstream and data integration industry, so I am very familiar the problem they are trying to solve. From an engineering perspective I can attest that they are tackling some huge and very complex problems, especially with the massive volume of events they process. I have been very impressed with the content of their engineering blog lately, and am not surprised to hear they are doing well. They have an awesome team, and a lot of developers really respect them. Some other comments in here mentioned having a bad experience with their product, but I think that was back in 2012 when they were still a small start up. In my experience, their product is solid.
dhruvsodumb 9y ago
True story one of the cofounders of segment once saved me from drowning in the Charles river. Great company all around.

208 points by gwintrob 9y ago

I'm a massive fan (and user!) of Segment. I think it could be revolutionary. I do worry a lot about how they tell the world about what they _are_ though, it's an inherently complex and technical product - and often the buyers of this software may not be technical enough to appreciate the sophistication of this product. In my experience Segment is confusing to explain until you actually use it, then you love it.

irq11 9y ago
I keep going back and forth between understanding the value of this product (dashboard for marketing to add integrations w/o dev time; better integration of analytics), to wondering why technical people pay for this. It doesn't seem cheap, and you're throwing a lot of control over latency-sensitive data to a black box. The founder straight-up admits in this article that the problems they're solving are largely simple. To my mind, there's no need for a hosted service. Why hasn't Segment been replaced by an open-source project? I'm not trolling here...I really don't understand the full value.
- bendavis381 9y ago
  Snowplow is open-source, although certainly not trivial to set up. https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow
  - jackgolding 9y ago
    yup snowplow's devops requirements and lack of evangelism are hurting them IMO but these are probably the challenges every open source product has.
- pkrein 9y ago
  Any individual connection is simple. Website to Mixpanel? Easy. Mobile app to Facebook App Events? Also simple. Both website and mobile app to warehouse? Bigger investment but still doable. Data out of Stripe and Zendesk into the warehouse? Also reasonable straight forward to build, more annoying to maintain, very annoying to scale. The issue is that companies need all of this together. And they need it now. Many enterprises have 100+ business units each using 50+ tools and all of that needs to be connected together. So the issue isn't that building a single connection is hard. It's that managing N interconnected things is N^2 hard, and N^2 gets big very very fast. Wrangling that mess is just way too complicated for an open source project... even though analytics.js is open source, the vast, vast majority of a.js users only use it through Segment.
  - irq11 9y ago
    I've personally built all of the things you're talking about, on real products, with lots of traffic, and it just isn't that hard. Annoying, yes, but arguably a core competency of any data team, and something you want to think very carefully about outsourcing. Also, most teams won't have to "scale" many of the things you're talking about...that's a problem that you only have to solve when you're the central point of failure for lots of companies. As for the n^2 problem, yes, I can see that argument, but in my experience, n is always a small number (i.e. 2-10), and they rarely need to cross-communicate in a fully connected graph. In short, piping everything through an expensive, centralized point-of-failure run by strangers seems like such a risky proposition that I can't imagine many companies would have the integration complexity to justify the risks. But again, people seem to be finding value in it, so maybe I'm missing something. I was honestly expecting you to tell me something about advanced data warehousing or integrated analytics tools or something like that. If you tell me that integrating with segment automatically starts correlating session data across providers, well...that starts to be compelling.
    - pclark 9y ago
      Go tell a marketer that if they use Segment they can onboard new marketing tools and it'll 'just work' without any engineering time, and they'll shit a brick. (the data warehouse part is imho folly.)
- gamache 9y ago
  I use Segment, I love Segment, and I love the fact that the problem they're solving is forehead-slappingly simple: data fanout and delivery is a pain in the ass, fix it. It's one of those "but I could have done that!" businesses that just comes down to foresight, acumen, and most importantly, execution. Analytics.js could be replaced by a self-hosted/bundled solution in theory, but Segment's server-side integrations are an extremely valuable piece of network plumbing. It's awfully nice that I was able to set up a few endpoints on our API (quick) and went through the approval process (sorry, not quick) and now my customers have a super-easy option if they want to point their data hose at us.
- thinkMOAR 9y ago
  My brain often cracks on startups like these and particularly listed users/client companies. And it kind of worries me that those companies can't do their own analytics and outsource it to segment or alike. All they need to do is install some dashboard, data processing tools and think of what data they want to correlate with other data and if that correlation has any interesting meaning. But of course having your company listed at a hot startup site is simply exposure or marketing too. Maybe those companies don't even use it, they just want their logo to be shown every where on the 'hot' parts of the web. And having listed on your site that 15.000+ companies trust you? Why do you still need to raise money then? Start charging people if your product has value. Also as a private citizen can i request at Segment if you are storing, processing or handling my private data (provided by parties i did business with) in anyway?

jph 9y ago

Congratulations! I'm totally impressed by the excellent company the Segment team is creating-- both the product and the support are first rate. And special kudos to Peter, who provided direct hands on tech help for one of my clients during our crunch time.

pkrein 9y ago
thanks for being a customer :)

philip1209 9y ago

I was implementing Segment this week, and I was excited to see that they do far more than customer analytics now. With a single installation of analytics.js, you can turn on tools like Sentry.io error tracking, HelloBar announcements, or secure user accounts with Castle.io. With a single integration, Segment is becoming an app store for websites.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
As we learned in another post, having the name analytics.js can get you blocked by Ad block extensions. Expect analytics.js to not run in your apps.
- murtali 9y ago
  To me this is the primary challenge of outsourcing your client side tracking -- you risk a wholesale block of your analytics if the Segment file gets blacklisted.
- jaequery 9y ago
  this is definitely a deal breaker. other than server-side, are there any other work arounds? like roll your own domain proxy or something?
  - michaelbuckbee 9y ago
    I've looked deeply into this and it works to a point, but you still end up in situations where vital things get blocked.
  - bendavis381 9y ago
    Just bundle it in with the rest of JS payload with something like webpack. Individual calls to certain domains (GA, Heap, etc) might still get blocked, but the payload itself will be fine.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]

dzink 9y ago

Strong work! CloudFlare may be on their tail with Apps. https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/ https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/

dirkdk 9y ago

congrats! Awesome company

mijustin 9y ago

I've been a Segment user, and advocate, from the beginning. It was highly recommended in the book Marketing for Developers. One thing I'd like to see is a better free tier for developers starting new projects. Currently, you're limited to 1000 visitors per month. Even indie projects can quickly run up monthly costs of $100+. As a comparison, Mixpanel's free tier gives devs 20 million data points per month.

pkrein 9y ago
thanks justin! would you be open to putting a badge on your site (similar to mixpanel's)? we also have an incubator/accelerator discount for pre-series a, just email friends@segment.com and we can get you set up.
- sorich87 9y ago
  I'm not the GP but we would totally be open to putting a badge! We got 3 months free from Founderskit (via Startup School). Is there a better discount than that? If yes, that would be helpful!
- doublerebel 9y ago
  Thank you! Late comment but I'm starting a new business and was missing the old cheaper/startup plans. I would be fine with badging the site Mixpanel-style. Congrats on the success, your tools have saved me many many man-hours in past businesses.
cyberferret 9y ago
This was my take when we investigated integrating Segment into our SaaS app too. We are purely boot strapped, and at the level where our monthly site visitor are building up at a great clip, and we would be occasionally pushing the free limits of Segment into real dollar that would eat up a chunk of our slowly growing revenue.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

We use Segment and it's incredibly useful to be able to turn on and off services, especially for reporting tools like mixpanel.

pcl 9y ago

Interesting... this is the first time I've heard of YC leading a Series C. Is there a new later-stage fund? Or is this just a case-by-case thing?

aetherson 9y ago
New later-stage fund: YC Continuity.
beambot 9y ago
https://www.ycombinator.com/continuity/ https://www.ycombinator.com/continuity/

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tonydiv 9y ago

Had nothing but problems with their product over the years. In 2012, they had a bug in their analytics.js which resulted in me losing about 10k new users. Last year, I was experiencing multi-day delays between an event and it appearing in Mixpanel, Intercom, etc. Prior this year, I was using Branch and then realized how many sacrifices you make when you use Segment – they will never be up to date with all the most recent SDKs/APIs, so you will always be pulling your hair out. We ended up using Segment + 4 other services, it would have been better to not use Segment at all. I hope they sort these problems out, and build a better developer product. Right now, they're focused on the enterprise, and I'm amazed their product is sufficient. I'm writing this because their team is amazing and kind, but I hope they improve their product.

pkrein 9y ago
Shoot. I'm sorry this happened. I'd love to chat more about your experience with Branch SDK/APIs recently. I found your email in another HN comment and will reach out shortly. On the other two issues... Analytics.js launched on HN in December 2012. It had some bugs in its early form, but it has certainly become a lot more stable in the five years since then. Today it runs without issue on 500m+ browsers and hundreds of thousands of websites each day. For event delivery, you can see real-time event deliverability and latency stats on our public status page: https://status.segment.com https://status.segment.com For most services we deliver data in a few hundred milliseconds, but some services consistently drop data. We retry that data over the next 12 hours, and this actually increases the deliverability to our partner endpoints. (For example, we're improving deliverability to Iron.io from 95.4% to 98.4% right now.)
- Hydraulix989 9y ago
  Latency can be more or less questionable depending on when the stopwatch button is pressed. For example, in VR, the gold standard is "motion to photon" -- anything else is just not representative of what actual latency means for actual users (i.e. getting motion sick). There are many definitions of latency, so it's important to choose the right one (the one that matters for your users). For us, latency means the time between when the _event_ actually occurs in real life (user clicks on a button) and when it showed up in all of our analytics integrations (Mixpanel, Intercom, etc.). As developers, this is the definition of "latency" that really matters for us because it represents the minimum time before we can take action on our users' behaviors. The reason I'm very skeptical is because what we were actually seeing was orders-of-magnitude differences from the 44 ms "latency" claimed on your status graph and what we were measuring ourselves (~1-10 hours for us) -- not just 10% differences which would have been more than acceptable for our use case. For example, Intercom support were able to identify a four hour delay from when the /identify actually took place and when Segment sent the event to Intercom. Segment Support then mentioned a race condition with their Intercom integration that they had yet to solve (we ran into this ourselves -- we had to guarantee we called /identify BEFORE calling any /track calls). With Mixpanel, not only were we experiencing multi-hour delays, we also experienced many nonsensically mis-ordered events when using Segment (even with timestamping -- it turned out that Mixpanel still relied on events being ordered properly within a 2-minute window -- something we were only able to guarantee by directly sending events to Mixpanel ourselves). Segment's response: "Our infrastructure is built on top of a queue system that accommodates high scalability. The drawback to this is that sometimes events are received by our API in a mixed up order because we have multiple queues feeding events to multiple workers." These problems were all resolved immediately when we started issuing direct calls to our various analytics providers.

soared 9y ago

Odd to see hn cheering on segment, but hate on analytics solutions in almost every other thread. Is it okay because anything yc does is good, or is enabling analytics different than using analytics somehow?

soared 9y ago
It's not that surprising. Hn isn't a single being.. it's a bunch of individuals with differing opinions. Some are web devs who like usage analytics, some email from the command line because they're afraid of web browsers.
- Hydraulix989 9y ago
  I'm very confused because you replied to your own comment as if you were a different person.
  - SonOfLilit 9y ago
    It's not surprising, soared isn't a single being... :-)
    - gricardo99 9y ago
      lol! You made my day with that one. Just the right amount of snark and wit.
  - ryanx435 9y ago
    forgot to switch to his sockpuppet account
  - cdelsolar 9y ago
    I think it was irony

naturalgradient 9y ago

Have not used the product but have highly enjoyed reading their tech blog, great stuff.

fouadmatin 9y ago
Thanks! Glad to hear it :) Keep your eyes peeled for some really exciting upcoming posts! (there's also a subscribe link at the bottom of posts)

gjmveloso 9y ago

Congrats! Great people, great product and great contributions to OSS. Well deserved and keep rocking!

jzebedee 9y ago

We used Segment for application analytics and exception reporting in an enterprise setting. Their .NET libraries were abysmal and had some show-stopper bugs that we wrestled with, particularly broken dependencies. I eventually had to fork the Analytics.NET repo and fix them myself. It was months before I heard any response to the issues or PRs, although they did eventually get merged in. It was just disappointing overall. I don't know why they'd release .NET tooling but have it be broken out-of-the-box, or maintain an open source project but not respond to any contributions.

ivolo 9y ago
Hey, this is Ilya - i'm one of the co-founders and original author of the .NET library - I'm really sorry that happened. In the early days, I was the author of 5 of our open source libraries and also a student of the .NET platform. Today we have a larger team working on our libraries - .NET in particular has 200+ customers (mostly on our business tier) and we're processing 21B+ API calls/mo originating from .NET. If you could send me an email at ilya@segment.com, I'd love to chat live and collect any other feedback you have from the experience. Thanks again for leaving the note.
rjbwork 9y ago
Usually these kind of startups that produce native libraries for use in other software produce poor .NET libraries. (see sendgrid) I wouldn't place the blame totally on them - you often have 1 person supporting multiple libraries in multiple languages, and .NET is not often used at these sorts of startups. On the other hand, a few thousand dollars for a consultant to get their situation in order would not be a bad investment to get them out of the situation, because a bad experience like this festers in the community for years.

jgalt212 9y ago

90% of this money is going straight to AWS.

calvinfo 9y ago
This comment might be in jest, but we've actually been working on a few different ways to help optimize [1] and manage our AWS spend [2]. That said, there are quite a few places left for us to optimize. We're hoping to share more of the techniques and architecture we've used to get better performance in upcoming blog posts. [1] https://segment.com/blog/the-million-dollar-eng-problem/ https://segment.com/blog/the-million-dollar-eng-problem/ [2] https://segment.com/blog/spotting-a-million-dollars-in-your-aws-account/ https://segment.com/blog/spotting-a-million-dollars-in-your-...
- jgalt212 9y ago
  yes, sorry for the snark. It was more about, how does one go about spending $94MM in this day and age? And even after reading your well written post on AWS cost control, I still can't figure out how to spend that much money on a software biz other than given the lion's share to AWS. e.g. even if your engineers and salespeople cost (all in) $200K a year. $94MM = 470 person years of expensive staff.
  - pkrein 9y ago
    completely theoretically with nice round numbers, let's say a SaaS company has $50m in annual revenue, and they want to grow to $100m in annual revenue next year. lastly, let's assume time required to pay back the cost of customer acquisition (marketing, sales, setup support) is 24 months, and customers always pay annually up front. (24 months is kind of a long payback time, so this is a bit extreme.) doing the math... you have $50m in revenue so you can buy another $25m in recurring revenue with that. and then you need another $50m in capital from somewhere to add the other $25m in recurring revenue to get to $100m ARR total. it also follows from the math above that the faster you grow revenue, the more capital you need. :) saas math is a bit funky.

shubhamjain 9y ago

Segment is perfect example of a small solution that proved to be extremely useful for everyone. I imagine Segment can grow to an extent that it'll start affecting other products' customer base—or maybe it already has. Earlier if a company was using Mixpanel, moving away would have meant wasting hundreds of man-hours to switch to a newer solution, which could have deterred companies from having that discussion. With Segment, it'll only take a few clicks. We need more solutions similar to Segment which make we-are-too-much-invested-in-that reason less and less common.

maccaw 9y ago

I'm a massive fan of Segment - we use it everywhere at my company (Clearbit) and my only regret was not integrating it sooner. For example, some things we do: * Sync Salesforce to Redshift - then perform queries across it * Sync all incoming lead to Salesforce * Enrich incoming leads with person/company data * Fire webhooks to lambda processing incoming signup events, qualifying them, and then triggering subsequent events

slkdjf 9y ago

Not really a segment user anymore but I'm desperately lonely and want someone to reply to me. So i will say something negative about it, hopefully a segment employee will reply. I was a segment user for years and then analytics.js murdered my pet pig, then bragged about it on twitter. Users worried about the security breach in my young startup all vanished and I received a Series B funding of negative 7.5million, bankrupting my company. Thanks for nothing segment.

harrisreynolds 9y ago
Did you at least BBQ the pet pig?

cyberferret 9y ago

From the discussion here, it appears that a lot of 'picks and shovels' app tool providers seem to expect that their customer base will be well venture funded companies. Their pricing plans seems to reflect this by have a 'free' tier that supports nothing more than a quick test MVP, then a paid plan in a VERY high price range that would be considered negligible for someone who has just secured $100M in venture cap. Feel for we founders who want to stay bootstrapped, and who will be paying for tools out of nothing but slowly trickling in revenue from paying customers. For us, $250+ per month is a real cost, and not a flippant consideration in the early stages of our growth. I'd much prefer to see vendors have more gradually tiered pricing plans, or else peg the cost to a meaningful metric, such as 'per paying customer' rather than 'per anonymous site visitor' etc.

jdotjdot 9y ago

Segment is one of my favorite products, and I consider it a core part of our stack. It's enabled us to be leaps and bounds ahead of other companies our size as far as analytics tracking, distribution, analysis in our warehouse, and more. We use pretty much every piece of it--even the esoteric options like their embedded pixel API. It's such a core part of my day that I sometimes actually spend time daydreaming about new features I'd add to the product rather than actually doing my job :) All I need now is for them to add the ability to push my events in real time to my Kafka cluster. (Please add that!)

pkrein 9y ago
thanks jj! happy to get you into the kafka beta — shoot me an email peter at segment.
- dookahku 9y ago
  So if I'm reading Segment's page correctly, Segment is a service that reads other API data and warehouses it into a single place to be read later? I feel like I'm missing a lot of the picture. :)
  - danenania 9y ago
    I'm not a Segment user, but my understanding is that it allows you to track events via a single API, and then push those events to lots of other services. So instead of needing to have js script tags/tracking codes/event calls for Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Optimizely, etc. etc., you just send your events to Segment, and Segment sends them on to wherever you want.

aloisbarreras 9y ago

I work at Astronomer, another company in the clickstream and data integration industry, so I am very familiar the problem they are trying to solve. From an engineering perspective I can attest that they are tackling some huge and very complex problems, especially with the massive volume of events they process. I have been very impressed with the content of their engineering blog lately, and am not surprised to hear they are doing well. They have an awesome team, and a lot of developers really respect them. Some other comments in here mentioned having a bad experience with their product, but I think that was back in 2012 when they were still a small start up. In my experience, their product is solid.

dhruvsodumb 9y ago

True story one of the cofounders of segment once saved me from drowning in the Charles river. Great company all around.