
Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – Automated, Retroactive Alternative to Segment - malisper
Hello everyone!<p>We’re Fitz &amp; Malis, the founders of Freshpaint (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freshpaint.io&#x2F;). We make it dead simple to collect data from your site and implement tools in a single click and without code.<p>With our Autotrack javascript, Freshpaint automatically instruments your site. Then you can use our point-and-click interface to visually create events after the fact, and send that historical data to any of your analytics or marketing tools.<p>Customer data powers nearly the entire analytics, growth, and marketing stacks of today’s B2C and B2B businesses. But what’s crazy is that customer data is captured and managed using technology that is literally over 25 years old: Let’s say you want to see how many users clicked your signup button or played a song. Or you want to take the users who added an item to their cart and engage them in a marketing campaign. You have to manually write code for each and every event to capture and log that behavior. Then you have to send to it your marketing and analytics tools.<p>Segment is great because it allows you to collect data once and send it to a bunch of different tools, but Segment is still built on legacy technology. It still requires a massive engineering effort to stand up and maintain. Just last week someone told us that at unicorn-level grocery delivery company, it takes 2-3 extra weeks to ship anything because of this tax.<p>Freshpaint automates the challenges here so that engineering can focus on building product, implementations can be done in minutes not weeks or days, and you can make your stack work for you instead of the other way around.<p>We were inspired by a phenomenon we saw while working with customers as early Heap employees. We saw that lots of customers loved Heap for product analytics, but that was only a small slice of the stack. Across analytics, product, and marketing it’s common to see a dozen other tools that require customer data. We kept seeing the same data pipelines and integrations built using the legacy approach of manual code.<p>We built Freshpaint to instrument your entire site and hook up your stack in just a few clicks, without having to write any code.<p>How it works:<p>1. Install Freshpaint’s Autotrack snippet on your site. It takes 60 seconds, and from that point Freshpaint collects every click, pageview, etc.<p>2. Connect over 70 destinations like Google Analytics, Amplitude, Hubspot, Fullstory, Intercom, and a data warehouse. This is done by copying and pasting an API key or account ID. See our integrations here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freshpaint.io&#x2F;integrations<p>3. Create events in Freshpaint. Our UI provides a point-and-click way of creating events. Data is retroactively available back to the day you installed Freshpaint, regardless of when the event is created.<p>4. Send data to any destination in one click. You can even backfill historical data.<p>5. Use all that time you saved to ship something new, build an awesome feature you can upsell, or plot your next marketing campaign to take over the world.<p>Great technology is not just about product. We commonly hear from Segment users that it’s really expensive for what you actually get. Search HN and you’ll see tons of complaints and even horror stories about their pricing like this comment here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19221872. With all the work that’s required after you purchase, we agree! On top of automating all that work, our pricing is designed to be much more friendly.<p>We look forward to feedback from the HN community!
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ernestipark
I remember evaluating Heap (granted, a long time ago, so I'm sure it's evolved
a lot since then) and the auto-tracking capabilities and retroactive analysis
sounded awesome, but in practice it wasn't as valuable or easy as I thought. I
found that in general, knowing the questions you want to answer and
structuring your tracking around that to be far more useful, and that actually
being able to take mountains of generic behavioral data and making sense of it
wasn't that easy and a ton of work in and of itself. E.g. retroactively
finding clicks to a single 'signup button' is easy, but a lot harder when that
button is on many different pages and you want to group them or segment them
in certain ways, or the implementation changes in some places, etc. In the
end, it seemed like it was doing engineering work just to parse the data back
out so it seemed more sane to structure in a better way ahead of time.

I'm curious what steps have been taken in the past several years to improve on
this and how Freshpaint is approaching this. I think it's a really interesting
problem and if done well, could be massively valuable. Good luck!

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soumyadeb
We have been thinking about this a lot in my company (RudderLabs - where we
have built an open-source product around auto-tracking). Totally agreed that
managing/using all this auto-track data can be really overwhelming and
sometimes it is just easier to just generate the events via code. Your
maintainability point is also very important - with events generated via code,
you have a single owner for updating the website and updating the events as
opposed to auto-track where the responsibilities are split between website
developer and marketer.

However, there are interesting use cases that are only possible via auto-
tracking. Let's say a particular link on your website is broken (e.g. takes to
an old sign-up page which is broken). You will be able to identify that that
broken click "automatically" because the ratio of successfully signed up vs
not-signed up users would be very low for people who click on that vs those
who don't.

You can automatically highlight many such interesting insights by doing some
basic stats counting. If you throw more advanced MLish stuff, you can find
really interesting (but sometimes hard to explain) insights.

Happy to chat more if you want. Email in profile.

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JakeWilson801
Such a cool idea. I got a deep dive Postgres training from one of the their
founders at my company and he was insanely knowledgeable. We currently are
having these problems with Segment as well. I'm going to try and push to see
if we can switch off of this from Segment. Congrats on starting a company that
is solving a crazy pain point. I saw something saying that you need a minimal-
loveable product nowadays and this is it!

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mschaecher
Perfect timing as we have a huge need for this for an upcoming launch.

Question...will you be able to replay/backfill as you add new integrations?
For example, Klaviyo is a huge hole in your integrations right now especially
for marketing and ecomm. If I install Autotrack now, set up a few events and
then a month from now you add Klaviyo, I can just replay everything into
Klaviyo?

Also FWIW, I was an early user at Segment (was in their seed deck as case
study), Klaviyo, and many others. I'm a technical marketer so can be helpful
as beta tester and user research. reach out directly if you'd like to connect
michael@futuremood.com

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soumyadeb
Congrats to Freshpaint on your launch. The product looks super-cool.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Rudder ([https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-
server/](https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server/)), an open-source
Segment alternative.

We have the feature that you are asking for. We have an auto-tracking JS SDK
which captures all events and dumps into S3. You can map these dom-level raw
events to virtual events via a simple javascript transformation function. We
also have replay so you can retroactively do the mapping and send old events
to different destinations.

What we don't have is the nice UI to create virtual events from the raw
events, that Freshpaint has built. Looks super cool!!

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nlh
Ah ha! Your quoted "horror story" comment is mine, so I guess I'm obligated to
check Freshpaint out. Will do :)

You mentioned that you were early Heap employees. At one point it looked like
Heap was heading in this direction as well (with their own warehouse &
destinations and sources, etc.) But I just checked their site out and it looks
like they're back to going all-in on "capture everything ananlytics". Is that
accurate?

So I suppose it would be fair to say Freshpaint:Segment :: Heap:Mixpanel (et
al)?

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malisper
Heap has changed directions a lot over the last several years. When I about a
year ago, they were going all-in on product analytics. They were focusing a
lot on new kinds of analysis features. The last project I worked on was their
path analysis feature[0].

> So I suppose it would be fair to say Freshpaint:Segment :: Heap:Mixpanel (et
> al)?

Yep! You hit the nail on the head.

[0] [https://heap.io/paths](https://heap.io/paths)

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eswardhinak
We use freshpaint to connect to Amplitude. The setup was super fast and we had
product analytics set up within minutes! The auto-track is a life-saver so
that we can confidently ship a feature and then come back and set up product
analytics after the launch, while knowing that we aren't missing any old data.
The team is very helpful with a ton of experience in the analytics space, so
rest peacefully knowing you're in good hands :)

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UnbugMe
This is a really cool product. Very impressive that you were able to build to
many integrations with such a small team. Any advice on how you did that?

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malisper
Thanks!

The secret is that most APIs that accept event data are pretty much identical.
They have some method or endpoint where you send a JSON dictionary of
properties. Once we had had the core event processing down, it wasn't hard to
quickly add a lot of integrations.

~~~
UnbugMe
Ah, interesting...

I've looked a bit at CRM integrations and they all do things slightly
differently in ways that make it hard to factor out common pieces. Glad to
hear that isn't the case in the event data space.

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modarts
How do you prevent collecting PII/passwords/other sensitive data to avoid
situations like Mixpanel's Autotrack fiasco?
[https://mixpanel.com/blog/2018/02/05/update-autotrack-
data-c...](https://mixpanel.com/blog/2018/02/05/update-autotrack-data-
collection/)

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nilkanthjp
We use Freshpaint for our site (heraldhq.com) and loved how we could backtrack
analytics events. Excited to see where this goes.

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omarchowdhury
Does the $300 a month pricing kick in at the first instance of 3,001 unique
site visits in a given 30 day period?

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malisper
No. We know that sometimes companies have random spikes that don’t correlate
to sustained user growth. Higher pricing would kick in after the 2nd month of
being above the volume limit.

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gorkemcetin
> Tracking code is dead. Technology has evolved.

That is definitely not the case and this sounds like a cheap marketing wording
on your web page. You may be visiting a prospect and may learn it from them
the hard way how tracking code crushes "autotrack-and-collect-anything"
approach by leaps and bounds.

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ajsharp
> unicorn-level grocery delivery company

At this point you can just say Instacart :)

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julee04
Very cool! Does this work on mobile as well?

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singingwolfboy
Any time I hear about a hot new analytics company, my first thought is always:
how do I opt out?

Freshpaint, how do I opt out of your data collection? Now, into the future,
and also for any historical data that you might have collected about me.

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malisper
We respect Do Not Track. If you have Do Not Track enabled, we won't collect
any data from you. Unfortunately Do Not Track has a number of fundamental
issues and I'm not aware of any better way to signal you want to opt out.

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jamiequint
You really shouldn’t support DNT, it’s a useless “standard” that’s half-
deprecated (Safari is removing support in 2020) and will potentially introduce
significant bias into your customer’s data.

