
From Show HN to Series D - fullung
https://segment.com/blog/show-hn-to-series-d/
======
mdolon
This was both helpful and inspiring to read, thank you for sharing.

    
    
      - after thousands of lines of code, we realized our Edtech startup did not have product market fit,
      so we pivoted to building a Mixpanel competitor focused on segmentation*
      - 6 product iterations later, nothing was working. We were trying to decide between a group trip 
      planner and what eventually became Segment. It was a dark time.*
    

I'm curious.. when validating ideas, when do you know it's time to move on?

~~~
jackt89
[https://blog.ycombinator.com/peter-reinhardt-on-finding-
prod...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/peter-reinhardt-on-finding-product-
market-fit-at-segment/)

Read transcript at 4:48

~~~
jgill
Direct link: [https://blog.ycombinator.com/peter-reinhardt-on-finding-
prod...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/peter-reinhardt-on-finding-product-
market-fit-at-segment/?startTime=288.00&endTime=300.00&btp=929c842d)

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idlewords
This is a nice "silicon valley in a nutshell" post. Meandering startup skates
by on generous funding rounds before finding itself a niche in the
surveillance economy, where it is (of course) still not profitable, but
congratulating itself for the ability to able to raise further investor money,
conditioned on the prospect of expanding monitoring software to ever wider
markets (while as a sideline ruining San Francisco for working people). An
unusually clear example of startup tools building startup tools.

~~~
ironmagma
How is employing people to work in San Francisco “ruining San Francisco for
working people”?

~~~
jazzyjackson
I'm assuming he means 'all the working people besides startup types who now
have to compete in rent and cost of living'

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whalesalad
Always been a huge fan of Segment. At one point I think I had a tiny little
mention on the Readme of their Ruby client for fixing an issue w/ Unicorn. I
jumped head first into event sourcing after their blog post demonstrating how
overkill websockets are most of the time. I consider them to have their shit
together.

Then I applied to become an engineer there and had one of the worst
experiences of my life with a project. The project involved building a clone
of their realtime event debugger with React. I really felt as though I had
knocked it out of the park... I even used their Evergreen UI framework. All I
got was a very brief thanks but no thanks kind of reply that left a very
bitter taste in my mouth.

~~~
kgraves
That sucks, perhaps you were rejected based on culture fit? I wish that these
VC funded startups would just admit that they're looking for FAANG engineers
and be done with it.

That way we wouldn't be wasting our time applying to do free work at a startup
just to get a rejection at the end of it. 2c

~~~
sb8244
This is one thing that irks me a bit. You may be doing real-world code tests
where you build something, but they're not using your code for it and they
don't have copyright assignment over it (unless you sign that away but I've
never seen that).

Real-world problems have often been touted as a solution to useless whiteboard
tests but then I've seen a lot of resentment when someone doesn't get a job
with it. A month is too much time to spend on an interview project though.

------
brandnewlow
The thing that jumped out to me was how well the team managed their
psychology. They state that after several pivots they were in the dumps and
running out of money...yet their launch copy for Segment was peppy, optimistic
and ambitious.

~~~
pkrein
Peter, co-founder/CEO of Segment here... I'm not sure it felt that way in the
moment. On December 11, 2012 we were in pretty bad emotional place. I was on
the verge of quitting at several points during the prior month, and was
hospitalized twice earlier that fall due to stress and anxiety during our
search for product market fit.

Obviously, the Show HN on December 12, 2012 turned that around. But it still
took us several months to realize we had a tiger by its tail and begin to
recover psychologically.

So... for those of you searching for product market fit and not finding it
yet, hang in there.

~~~
brandnewlow
Thanks for sharing this, Peter! S11 represent. I think this sort of thing is
tremendously encouraging to hear as everyone that's started a company has gone
through phases like this. I know a few having that experience now!

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witcherchaos
Series D (with 3 seed rounds) and 4 founders....what does the equity shares
for each founder look like? 3% maybe?

~~~
youeseh
Their equity percentage may have gone down but the value of their equity
probably went up.

~~~
witcherchaos
Or looking at it another way, you can stress out for a company for 8 year (in
case of segment), or or you can join the company as a c-level exec at year 6
for the same amount of equity

~~~
seem_2211
The sort of person who grows a company from Show HN -> Series D is a very
different sort of person than the sort of person who can join as a C Level
exec.

~~~
nostrademons
There's more overlap than I would've suspected - a lot of the Director/VP
types that I saw Google hire from the outside (as opposed to promote from
within) were folks who had previously founded a company, sometimes up to 4
companies.

~~~
seem_2211
Agreed, but that's different again. Once you've done a job like be the CTO or
CEO or an exec role at a high growth startup (like Segment) then getting into
a role as an exec at a larger company.

------
staticassertion
Something I'm interested in - how did the move to Boston go? Why move back to
SF?

I often wonder about the viability of starting a tech company elsewhere. Does
being a VC company impact this?

~~~
calvinfo
We originally moved to Boston to be close to universities. It seemed like a
better location for convincing our professors to use the edtech product we'd
started with.

We made the move back to SF to be closer to our customers (since we had
shifted to building an analytics product by then). It was much easier to walk
them through the product in-person.

I wouldn't say this is strictly necessary today, but SF does have a nice
density of startups if you are building a developer tool.

~~~
staticassertion
Yeah, Boston has always felt like a great place for a startup/ young company
with all of those universities on the east coast or like, blocks away in
Cambridge.

Makes sense though that you wanted to be near your customer base.

------
kenforthewin
Incredible success story - congrats to the whole Segment team!

~~~
carolarouge
Great story, thanks to OP for sharing and for the inspiration.

But why would you call raising soooo much money a success? It's an achievement
for sure, congrats on that, but certainly not success.

------
yegle
Sorry but PiHole blocked you. And I can see from PiHole's log, your domain is
the most blocked one.

~~~
LeonM
So there is the tip: if you ever do any kind analytics project, make sure the
reports are send to a different hostname than your marketing/landing page is.
Because the analytics host is bound to become blocked by all adblockers and
privacy plugins sooner or later.

------
tootie
It's surprising given that there's already a plethora of tag managers out
there including the big boys like Google and Adobe and specialty players like
Tealium who solve this exact problem. Either Segment has secret sauce or it's
just a huge market.

~~~
pkrein
Peter, co-founder/CEO here... tag managers from all these players only solve
the issue on websites, but only 30% of the data we manage comes from websites.
The rest comes from mobile apps, payment systems, helpdesks, CRMs, email, push
notifications, etc. So tag management is an antiquated/web-specific category
that we've been ripping-and-replacing now for a few years.

It is also a huge market, with lots of interesting adjacencies that are
equally whitespace.
[https://segment.com/protocols](https://segment.com/protocols) is starting to
push into some of those areas.

~~~
tootie
I'm curious where you see the market moving. I've done a lot of data layer
implementations and it's definitely simpler from a site development POV, but
it always ends up being a management debacle handing off data layer to the tag
management implementation which is a niche specialty. Do you have any white
paper or whatever on why segment is a better approach?

~~~
vblumen
Hi there, I head up the channel program at Segment and I'd love an opportunity
to answer these questions and give you a demo of our products––I suspect we
could work well together. Can I ask you to (1) sign up to become a channel
partner:
[https://segment.com/partners/channel/](https://segment.com/partners/channel/)
and (2) send me an email to get started? vlad@segment.com

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jhsu
I love following the segment design team on dribbble
[https://dribbble.com/segment](https://dribbble.com/segment)

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agundy
The images aren't working for me. Looks like they are embedded straight from
Dropbox Paper which is probably is not allowing hot linking.

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coverband
Very inspiring, thanks for sharing!

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orliesaurus
My adblocker tips its hat on this incredible news! Jokes aside when I used
Segment in the past it has always been an incredible "ahhhh" moment of relief
for me! Ad astra!

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MuffinFlavored
What percentage of Show HN posts go on to be successful products? :D

~~~
I_am_ravi
Well this is a wrong metric to check. There are lot of startup which didn't do
well on Show HN, but did great as startups. Also, a few which did well on Show
HN, but not that great as start up. I guess we should take Show HN as one of
the many metrics available to see if your product is needed by the users.

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boiler_up800
Inspiring. Thanks for posting. Their video from startup school is equally
good.

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xenospn
I guess that's how they can afford to give me $25k in credits.

~~~
quickthrower2
I’d assume 25k credits might cost then $250 in hosting costs. Segment ain’t
cheap.

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steinhafen
Amazing story, keep it up!

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aneesv
Inspiring story

