
Segment (YC S11) Raises $27M for Its “One API to Rule Them All” - jimsojim
http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/09/segment-raises-27-million-for-its-one-api-to-rule-them-all/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook
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jph
Congratulations! The Segment tools are amazing, and the team is 100% dedicated
to success.

For example: I wrote a complex iOS app, and was having app store issues
related to metrics; the CEO of Segment came to my office to help, and we
looked at the app together, including source code and libraries, to diagnose
the issue. This kind of excellent help is why I recommend Segment to all my
clients.

~~~
supercoder
That sounds scalable

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ghufran_syed
[http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

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amluto
If I run a website and I actually want to send all my data and as much of my
users' data as I can possibly collect to, say, ten different vendors, then
Segment looks great.

On the other hand, that means that I'm giving ten different vendors the
ability to monetize all the data my site generates essentially for free. This
is great for them, kind of crappy for the users who get tracked and monetized,
and terrible for me, because I'm not realizing the value I generate.

I'm frankly rather surprised that Condé Nast doesn't try to _prevent_ third-
party tracking of its readers so that it can realize more of that value
itself. After all, why should an advertiser buy a high-value targeted add for
display on a Condé Nast property when it can buy the same ad _with the same
Condé Nast-dervied target_ for much less on a site full of cat pictures?

~~~
shostack
> _" On the other hand, that means that I'm giving ten different vendors the
> ability to monetize all the data my site generates essentially for free.
> This is great for them, kind of crappy for the users who get tracked and
> monetized, and terrible for me, because I'm not realizing the value I
> generate."_

Presumably you are not directly sending data to any vendors you are not
receiving value from. In the analytics world, it is kind of understood that if
you use Google Analytics, you should have an expectation that Google is using
that data however they see fit. Same holds true with other vendors unless they
explicitly say otherwise.

As such, the burden (rightfully) falls on the site owner to properly vet their
vendors to make sure they work with companies whose business practices align
with the site owner's data policies.

Nobody is forcing you to integrate with vendors who don't adhere to your
standards, but not everyone has the same standards.

So at the end of the day, I'm confused by your point about how this is
terrible for you since you're not realizing any value that you generate. You
are exchanging data, money, or both, in exchange for a service. It is up to
you to determine what that is worth to you and whether you are paying a fair
price, but it isn't Segment's fault if you decide to partner with companies
that give you a raw deal.

~~~
amluto
When I said that sites don't realize the value they generate, I didn't mean
that they don't get something else out of the deal. Google Analytics is a
genuinely useful service, for example.

I suspect that a lot of sites aren't thinking hard about the tradeoffs,
though. The benefits of using these services are immediate and obvious,
whereas the costs are rather more subtle.

I heard a fascinating talk last year by John Gruber about ways of monetizing
content outside the usual sell-tracking-rights-and-accept-ad-bids model.
(Check out what he does at
[http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/](http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/).
The whole site seems to be entirely devoid of third-party tracking.)

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akramhussein
Fan of Segment. Their team are super helpful. Recommend it. I've not really
found a reason yet to not like them. Sure sometimes you need a lit bit of ad-
hoc work, but the benefits outweigh the costs in my opinion. Sometimes the
engineers aren't in charge of the decision making process on analytics, so
selling management an "insurance" policy, which is how I see Segment, is very
powerful to get things done. Service provider not working out for you? Switch
it. No code changes.

Also, I don't believe the argument you can get away with one provider.
MixPanel told me they don't do emojis in email subjects because their CEO
doesn't approve of it. Don't want to get anyone in trouble, but I kid you not
I have that email and instantly made me look elsewhere for email service - why
should 1 person dictate my companies marketing strategy? Segment prevented a
lot re-work for this.

Anyway, in short, Segment is good for the market because it means services
have to up their game as lock-in isn't as strong...except for Segment's!

~~~
baudehlo
The system is great. Only reason I have had to dislike it is that they would
forward messages out of order. I think that might be fixed now after I told
them to look into lamport clocks. It caused some problems with forwarding to
Intercom.

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mderazon
I really wanted to like the product, they are a great team and the potential
sounds amazing. But for me, I found that while they do cover the basics in
each product they integrate with, often I want to use special features that
they either don't offer or that it becomes to cumbersome to use. I am talking
mainly mobile SDKs where each service offer something else like Mixpanel's a/b
testing and intercom in app messages etc.

They cover a whole spectrum of products so different in their value prop that
I think just can't capsulated with a single api

~~~
austenallred
Give it time

~~~
mkatz0630
no need when theres better solutions out there already.

~~~
Fremulon
Haha, shameless plug by mParticle CEO. Good luck with that!

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tootie
Omniture hasn't existed for years. I'm sure an Adobe exec starts twitching
every time he sees that.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Not half as bad as anyone who has ever had to use that god-awful product.

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hu_me
Love the tool using it since beta. Its an obvious pain point brilliantly
executed. Between segment and google tag manager the analytics instrumentation
has become exceedingly easy and better documented in the last 3 years.

And I know from experience lock in is immense, once you add an analytics tool
there is no turning back. With segment you can play the field more easily,
ofcourse while being locked in to segment :)

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cpeterso
> _Initially, the team was building a competitor to Google Analytics or
> KISSmetrics, but they had also built a library called Analytics.js that
> wrapped all the analytic services and APIs together.

They released an open source version of this library on GitHub, and it just
started growing by itself. That forced them to reconsider their focus. What
people actually wanted, as it turned out, was a simple analytics API._

I'm not sure I follow this description of the company's pivot. What is the
difference between their own analytics service and an abstraction over another
company's service? Why do media companies need to use so many similar
analytics services, e.g. the 30 odd trackers on many news sites?

~~~
dangrossman
> Why do media companies need to use so many similar analytics services, e.g.
> the 30 odd trackers on many news sites?

Let's see what we can find on CNN right now:

Clicktale, analytics for their design team with things like click heat maps
and scroll maps.

Optimizely, A/B testing to compare the results of layout changes by serving
variations of each page to portions of their traffic.

Turner corporation's internal analytics tools, for who knows what.

A tag for PostRelease, which distributes media for content-based advertisers,
like advertorials and videos.

Usabilla, a tool for surveying user satisfaction.

Dynamicyield, which personalizes page content to specific visitors.

Krux Digital, which is about tracking people across multiple devices for a
better measure of how many real people are on the site, and then segmenting
that data for the advertising sales team.

Moat, which measures viewability of ads, i.e. what portion are actually seen
by people rather than just being loaded below the fold.

Scorecard Research, which is audience measurement and surveys.

Chartbeat, which is real-time analytics specifically for the editorial team.
It shows them what stories are hot and trending at that specific moment, which
directs what headlines get pushed up, what journalists get assigned to cover,
what stories get pushed off the front page, etc.

Outbrain, which adds the "more stories you might be interested in" type stuff
to the end of each article, which are actually ads.

The rest are tags for serving banner ads through Google, their own ad server,
and various exchanges.

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octref
Don't know much about the business side but huge fan of TJ as a Nodejs dev.
Congrats!

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dtft
I use Segment at work and think it's great. Their enterprise options are
pretty hefty and impressive, good on them for raising the round!

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chaseadam17
We use Segment and love it. It keeps our code simple and makes it easy for us
to turn on and off services (especially for non-technical team members), their
debugger makes QA'ing instrumentation really efficient, and their team is
amazing and really helpful.

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qq66
What creates the requirement to send data to multiple analytics services?
Wouldn't you want to send it to one capture and analytics service and then
funnel that into whatever line-of-business applications you need?

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curiousjorge
meh. to me the offering of segment carries very little benefit. it's great
being able to swap in and out of different SaaS but honestly, I did not find
the value offering to be significant because you end up fiddling with less
than 3 or 4, 10 at extreme cases.

Ultimately, I ended up going with Mixpanel because they offered pretty much
everything I wanted in analytics. I have integrated Segment everywhere but
ended up ripping it all out once I realized that I had bought into the
marketing.

