4 ms·

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 a

by 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 Why hasn't Segment been replaced by an open-source project?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.)
      - irq11 9y ago
        Yes, I see this value. But again, that's something that could rather easily exist as an open-source, self-hosted tool, and I kind of wonder why the middleman hasn't been optimized away. We're in a world where people would rather self-host github to save a few bucks...this is an easier problem.
        pclark 9y ago
        open source is basically dead courtesy of SaaS. people would much rather pay a few bucks than self-host. hell, there are entire successful companies that 'just' host open source software and wrap it up in a SaaS experience.
- 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?

by pclark 9y ago

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.)
    - irq11 9y ago
      Yes, I see this value. But again, that's something that could rather easily exist as an open-source, self-hosted tool, and I kind of wonder why the middleman hasn't been optimized away. We're in a world where people would rather self-host github to save a few bucks...this is an easier problem.
      - pclark 9y ago
        open source is basically dead courtesy of SaaS. people would much rather pay a few bucks than self-host. hell, there are entire successful companies that 'just' host open source software and wrap it up in a SaaS experience.
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?