
The Growth Stacks of 2019 - rafaelc
https://segment.com/blog/the-growth-stacks-of-2019/
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kareemm
This is a great example of a "launch" post:

1\. Provide huge value based on data that only Segment has, which makes the
post worth reading and - more importantly - shareable (though it would be nice
to see the names for every company in each chart, not just one or two)

2\. Segue nicely to calling out their new Developer Center[1], which
streamlines the process of building on Segment.

Very nicely done.

FWIW I explored building on Segment in 2014, and just completed our
integration on their new Dev Center. The latter experience was a lot more
streamlined than the former appeared it would be. Also nicely done!

1- [https://app.segment.com/developer/request-
access](https://app.segment.com/developer/request-access)

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deckar01
The color schemes used in these graphs are not usable for me as a colorblind
person. The green-yellow and orange-yellow are indistinguishable to me. That
seems like an odd choice when there are only 3 colors in the graph. My general
rule is use primary colors and fall back to variations in brightness when you
run out to maximize the distance between the points in the gamut.

~~~
calvinfo
Ah sorry about that, this is a great point.

I generated these via the seaborn palette in matplotlib[1], but agree that
these could be way clearer. I'll see what I can do about changing the line
type on them to make them a little bit more differentiated.

[1]: [https://seaborn.pydata.org/](https://seaborn.pydata.org/)

~~~
anateus
Seaborn has a colorblind-specific color palette:
[https://seaborn.pydata.org/tutorial/color_palettes.html#qual...](https://seaborn.pydata.org/tutorial/color_palettes.html#qualitative-
color-palettes)

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
I feel like that's should be the default? People tend to forgot accessibility,
so defaults matter.

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calvinfo
I'm Calvin, one of the Segment co-founders.

We're excited to share some of our data around the evolution of the growth +
saas ecosystems.

There are so many tools out there, that it's often incredibly hard to pick
one.

We wanted to share the trends about what we're seeing to make it easier for
companies to choose between the thousands of tools on the market. And we
wanted to highlight a few of the new startups that we think are poised to grow
significantly.

We welcome your feedback here! Deeper analysis to come.

~~~
aresant
Calvin - give your content marketing team a raise - or yourself since it's
your byline :)

This is an outstanding breakdown and I loved the "highlight" strategy.

Composition feels a lot more like high quality / expensive financial services
report aka Greenstreet Advisors but targeted to growth ecosystem.

Couple of questions:

1) If you could pick 3 early stage companies in your analysis to be an
investor in which 3 would you select?

2) Do you guys have a data business around anonymous usage beyond this article
or planning to get into the space?

~~~
calvinfo
Thanks, glad you liked it!

1) Honestly, there are a _lot_ more than just three startups here who seem to
be growing actively. In general, I tend to bias towards great product quality
and design, which puts Vitally, Split, ClearBrain, and Kustomer far up my list
(and also a part of the reason we've highlighted them). That said, there are a
ton of other companies in the space doing really interesting things.

2) No, at the heart of it, our revenue comes from our happy customers. We
don't plan to sell or share our user’s data with other companies the way data
brokers do. We just help our customers make better use of their own data for
their own businesses. Occasionally, we’ll create trend reports like this that
show aggregate trends to help our customers make better decisions.

~~~
jhdavids8
Aw, blushing over here :) Thanks for the mention Calvin! We (Vitally) are
thrilled to be one of the first custom-built Segment integrations and look
forward to continuing to work with you all!

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mresposito
Congrats to the Segment team. Here at Candu Labs,
[https://www.candu.ai](https://www.candu.ai), we've just finished integrating
with them and it's been a really great experience. The docs are super clear,
and the Segment's team really worked around the clock to help us get their
integration done. I'd really recommend integrating with them.

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toomuchtodo
@calvinfo: Under Raw Data, it appears a trend line is missing for Zapier.

"Some raw data tools on Segment’s platform, like Webhooks and Zapier, enable
even more tools we don’t support today. Others provide a means for companies
to run their own custom data pipelines, like Amazon S3 and Kinesis."

[https://i.imgur.com/3uXq0T4.png](https://i.imgur.com/3uXq0T4.png)

~~~
cm2012
I think they bundled webhooks into zapier, not sure though.

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buremba
What's the percentage of Segment customers who use Segment Warehouse? I
believe that their Warehouse offering is a deal-breaker for data-driven
startups which want to see the big picture.

We're working on building a product which provides Mixpanel-like UI for
Segment Warehouse users so I would love hearing your experience.

~~~
calvinfo
I can't share the exact number, but it's high (above 33%) across all customers
on our paid plans.

For companies on our business tier, it's even higher (above 66%). Most of
these companies are doing more advanced data analysis, and it's hard to
replace the utility of a warehouse for analysts at a certain point.

~~~
buremba
That's great for us, thanks for sharing! :)

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GuillaumeBrdet
Thanks a ton for putting this together, this seems great! Congrats to the
Segment

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lifeisstillgood
Initially I balked at this - 5,000 different SaaS tools in the Marketing
space. Even a Pointy Haired Boss's head would explode.

But the breakdown and explanations of each area actually made it possible to
understand what each area "does" \- enough to imagine one could write some
code for ones own startup of one needed too - usually a good indicator I am
starting to grok things

It's interesting to see the ways things like BigTable / Query are getting used
for real world, and seeing some of the challenges (the forest / trees problem
of individual users and accounts)

Thank you - worth bookmarking :-)

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YakiPersonyze
Wonderful to see this innovative platform grow, and even better to be a part
of it!

Our process of building Personyze's integration with the Segment platform
recently was easy and truly enjoyable, from start to finish. They have been
pleasant to work with, and have guided us in a very clear and straightforward
manner every step of the way.

I know I speak for the rest of our team when I say that we are proud to be
integrated with Segment, and look forward to expanding the integration even
further, in the future.

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dallerup
Amazing well done Calvin.

Have been a long time Segment user and a big fan of what you guys are doing.

When we recently started our own analytics company dreamdata.io, an multi-
touch, account-based attribution tool we always saw Segment as the top 1 place
to integrate and initially focused on only solving the problem for Segment
customers.

Happy to share that we did the implementation in a very short time and the
partnership team at Segment was really amazing. Implementation, testing, and
documentation all in high quality and when in doubt the Segment team was ready
to help.

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bmahmood
Very excited to see Segment launch their Developer Center in conjunction with
this Growth Stack overview. Our company (ClearBrain) was one of the early
technology partners to build into their Development Center, and it's been a
transformative impact on our business.

As an analytics company, one of the first hurdles to getting a customer
successful is onboarding their data. Every customer has heteregenous schemas
and then you need to wait weeks to collect enough data to find reasonable
results. Segment made this dead simple by providing an API spec with a
standardized schema that just took a couple days for us to integrate with.
Once integrated, you gain access to 1000s of mutual companies using Segment,
who can stream you their data in exactly the same format (a huge win for
analytics efforts and data normalization).

Highly recommend other companies to consider integrating with Segment. The
ease of integration and access to a platform serving thousands of customers is
especially helpful for startups.

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nickwhite99
Amazing article. It’ll be interesting to see what this same data looked like 5
Years ago...

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iloveluce
Congrats to Segment! We (ScopeAI) got a chance to work with Calvin and the
team to build an integration. The processes couldn't have been clearer and the
value add for our customer is huge!

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andygcook
FYI Calvin - The anchor to CRMs in the list of quick links is broken. The ID
on the header is "#c-r-ms" and should be "#crms"

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calvinfo
Thanks, fixed!

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alexeichemenda
Very exciting to see Segment here. It was a breeze to integrate with and use
their data from our clients. Congrats Calvin!

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ambicapter
I can't access this link. Site seems down.

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flukus
Are you running pi-hole or something? I'm getting "uMatrix has prevented the
following page from loading", segment seems to be some sort of spyware
company.

~~~
ambicapter
I am, in fact, set it up this weekend.

