Have not used the product but have highly enjoyed reading their tech blog, great stuff.
Thanks! Glad to hear it :) Keep your eyes peeled for some really exciting upcoming posts! (there's also a subscribe link at the bottom of posts)
Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator
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Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator
#22I've been a Segment user, and advocate, from the beginning. It was highly recommended in the book Marketing for Developers. One thing I'd like to see is a better free tier for developers starting new projects. Currently, you're limited to 1000 visitors per month. Even indie projects can quickly run up monthly costs of $100+. As a comparison, Mixpanel's free tier gives devs 20 million data points per month.
thanks justin! would you be open to putting a badge on your site (similar to mixpanel's)?
we also have an incubator/accelerator discount for pre-series a, just email friends@segment.com and we can get you set up.
Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator
#23Congrats!
Great people, great product and great contributions to OSS. Well deserved and keep rocking!
Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator
#24We used Segment for application analytics and exception reporting in an enterprise setting. Their .NET libraries were abysmal and had some show-stopper bugs that we wrestled with, particularly broken dependencies. I eventually had to fork the Analytics.NET repo and fix them myself. It was months before I heard any response to the issues or PRs, although they did eventually get merged in. It was just disappointing overall. I don't know why they'd release .NET tooling but have it be broken out-of-the-box, or maintain an open source project but not respond to any contributions.
Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
As we learned in another post, having the name analytics.js can get you blocked by Ad block extensions. Expect analytics.js to not run in your apps.
this is definitely a deal breaker. other than server-side, are there any other work arounds? like roll your own domain proxy or something?
I've looked deeply into this and it works to a point, but you still end up in situations where vital things get blocked.
Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator
#26Had nothing but problems with their product over the years. In 2012, they had a bug in their analytics.js which resulted in me losing about 10k new users. Last year, I was experiencing multi-day delays between an event and it appearing in Mixpanel, Intercom, etc. Prior this year, I was using Branch and then realized how many sacrifices you make when you use Segment – they will never be up to date with all the most re…
Shoot. I'm sorry this happened. I'd love to chat more about your experience with Branch SDK/APIs recently. I found your email in another HN comment and will reach out shortly. On the other two issues... Analytics.js launched on HN in December 2012. It had some bugs in its early form, but it has certainly become a lot more stable in the five years since then. Today it runs without issue on 500m+ browsers and hundreds…
Latency can be more or less questionable depending on when the stopwatch button is pressed. For example, in VR, the gold standard is "motion to photon" -- anything else is just not representative of what actual latency means for actual users (i.e. getting motion sick). There are many definitions of latency, so it's important to choose the right one (the one that matters for your users).
For us, latency means the time between when the _event_ actually occurs in real life (user clicks on a button) and when it showed up in all of our analytics integrations (Mixpanel, Intercom, etc.). As developers, this is the definition of "latency" that really matters for us because it represents the minimum time before we can take action on our users' behaviors.
The reason I'm very skeptical is because what we were actually seeing was orders-of-magnitude differences from the 44 ms "latency" claimed on your status graph and what we were measuring ourselves (~1-10 hours for us) -- not just 10% differences which would have been more than acceptable for our use case.
For example, Intercom support were able to identify a four hour delay from when the /identify actually took place and when Segment sent the event to Intercom. Segment Support then mentioned a race condition with their Intercom integration that they had yet to solve (we ran into this ourselves -- we had to guarantee we called /identify BEFORE calling any /track calls).
With Mixpanel, not only were we experiencing multi-hour delays, we also experienced many nonsensically mis-ordered events when using Segment (even with timestamping -- it turned out that Mixpanel still relied on events being ordered properly within a 2-minute window -- something we were only able to guarantee by directly sending events to Mixpanel ourselves).
Segment's response: "Our infrastructure is built on top of a queue system that accommodates high scalability. The drawback to this is that sometimes events are received by our API in a mixed up order because we have multiple queues feeding events to multiple workers."
These problems were all resolved immediately when we started issuing direct calls to our various analytics providers.
Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator
#27Odd to see hn cheering on segment, but hate on analytics solutions in almost every other thread. Is it okay because anything yc does is good, or is enabling analytics different than using analytics somehow?
It's not that surprising. Hn isn't a single being.. it's a bunch of individuals with differing opinions. Some are web devs who like usage analytics, some email from the command line because they're afraid of web browsers.
I'm very confused because you replied to your own comment as if you were a different person.
Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator
#2890% of this money is going straight to AWS.
Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator
#29I'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.
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.
Re: Segment raises $64M led by Y Combinator
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that surprising. Hn isn't a single being.. it's a bunch of individuals with differing opinions. Some are web devs who like usage analytics, some email from the command line because they're afraid of web browsers.
I'm very confused because you replied to your own comment as if you were a different person.
It's not surprising, soared isn't a single being... :-)