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Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative

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Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative

#21

Post by lapnitnelav »

Hey sounds brilliant, congrats on the launch.

As soon as I heard of Segment, I knew they were onto something valuable and can only welcome more competition.

Now that I've been nice, allow me to get the plastic pitchfork.

I see no mention of GDPR, I assume you are going to restrict your market to NA for now? What about CCPA?

In the same vein I don't think you have any integration with open-sources alternatives to commercial software that one could host on premise.

That's an odd choice given the shape of things to come wrt privacy.

Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative

#22

Post by turbostyler »

codegeek wrote: post #8

Curious. Since you both worked at Heap before, is there a potential conflict of interest or Non-compete that you may have/had to worry about ? I don't know the details of Heap or Segment but I am assuming this service is similar to them if not closer ?

Enforcing a non-compete against non-founders in California is pretty much impossible.

Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative

#23

Post by fitzrocks »

lapnitnelav wrote: post #21

Hey sounds brilliant, congrats on the launch. As soon as I heard of Segment, I knew they were onto something valuable and can only welcome more competition. Now that I've been nice, allow me to get the plastic pitchfork. I see no mention of GDPR, I assume you are going to restrict your market to NA for now? What about CCPA? In the same vein I don't think you have any integration with open-sources alternatives to comm…

Hey thanks for the feedback!

For customers that need it, we get necessary legal documents/procedures in place (DPA, etc) to be compliant with local regulations. We also share with customers our documentation that communicates our security measures and how we process customer data. You are correct - this stuff is not accessible on the marketing site, we'll get there :)

In terms of your integrations comment: beyond the integrations we have now, we prioritize new ones based on customer demand. So, yes, if the market trends in the direction you mentioned then we will as well. My personal take is that open source alternatives are currently a small subset and it's unclear to me where the future lies. I also think privacy and security get conflated here sometimes.

Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative

#24

Post by fitzrocks »

curo wrote: post #5

One point of clarification: what counts as a user? We have a product that has both public- and private-facing components. If it's unique IP addresses then we'd be close to your enterprise plan which seems price prohibitive. If it's an authenticated user with a name, that seems much different. Otherwise looks great and love the point-and-click. Even though creating events is easy, it saves the back-and-forth with deve…

When a user visits your site, we give them a cookie with a unique user ID. We determine the number of users you have based on the number of distinct user IDs we've seen.

We're definitely conscious of user-based pricing, and we'll try to work with you to come up with a price that allows you to use Freshpaint across your entire site. We've done this with others that have funky business models where traffic is high in some spots. Otherwise, you can install Freshpaint just on the private component of your site and collect data where it's the most valuable.

Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative

#25

Post by zebnyc »

malisper wrote: post #13
zebnyc wrote: post #7

Firstly, congrats on the launch. Please let me know if I am wrong but it seems the major differentiator from Segment is (3) as you can do the 1,2 and 4 with Segment. And even with (3) the only difference is the way the events are collected (through code / point-and-click). So my question is whether this really needs to be an end-to-end solution / competitor to Segment rather than just an adapter/ wrapper on top of Se…

You're missing out on the whole retroactive piece! When you install Freshpaint, Freshpaint starts tracking every click, pageview, etc. This means Freshpaint is tracking nearly every event you will ever care about from day 1. At any point in the future, you can send any data Freshpaint has collected to your different tools. In the same way that programmers try to achieve 100% test coverage, Freshpaint achieves nearly…

I assumed that companies which used Segment would also integrate with solutions like Kissmetrics and get those analytics automatically through their Segment integration.

What am I missing here? Are you saying that Freshpaint replaces Segment + Kissmetrics?

Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative

#26

Post by malisper »

zebnyc wrote: post #25
malisper wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing out on the whole retroactive piece! When you install Freshpaint, Freshpaint starts tracking every click, pageview, etc. This means Freshpaint is tracking nearly every event you will ever care about from day 1. At any point in the future, you can send any data Freshpaint has collected to your different tools. In the same way that programmers try to achieve 100% test coverage, Freshpaint achieves nearly…

I assumed that companies which used Segment would also integrate with solutions like Kissmetrics and get those analytics automatically through their Segment integration. What am I missing here? Are you saying that Freshpaint replaces Segment + Kissmetrics?

Freshpaint is separate from Kissmetrics. Freshpaint and Segment are both data collection tools. Out of the box Segment collects nothing, while Freshpaint collects everything.

Let's say you want to send a purchase event to Kissmetrics to do analytics on. With Segment that would look something like:

  1) File a JIRA ticket for an engineer to instrument the purchase event.
  2) Wait a few weeks for the engineer to write and deploy the Segment tracking code.
  3) Wait a few weeks to collect enough data to do your analysis.
  4) Run your analysis in Kissmetrics.
With Freshpaint:

  1) Use our UI to create the purchase event.
  2) Send every purchase event that happened since you installed Freshpaint to Kissmetrics. This is possible because Freshpaint tracks every event out of the box.
  3) Run your analysis in Kissmetrics.
Does the difference make sense?

Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative

#27

Post by vosper »

malisper wrote: post #14
vosper wrote: post #6

How does the point and click UI generate event targets? At my work we use Pendo which sounds very similar to Freshpaint. Pendo’s UI generates CSS selectors. Problem is that we use CSS modules and our class names include a hash, so they change frequently. Also our classes aren’t designed to communicate the semantics the Product team is trying to capture, and there’s also no way for Pendo to know that the selector it g…

> I’d encourage you to bless a “data-freshpaint” attribute as the preferred way to link events to your system. If you want to go through with this, you can do this already with CSS classes. You can have classes like "freshpaint-login", "freshpaint-checkout", etc. > IMO the only way this kind of event tracking can be done right is if developers and Product communicate and the devs, who understand the code, put the tra…

True, you could dedicate CSS classes like that. I’m really talking about separation of concerns: CSS is for styling, not communicating user intentions to external systems. A data attribute is better, and you could program the selector-creator to prefer those attributes if it can find them.

That doesn’t help with after-the-fact attribution, though. That’s where using existing CSS classes really shines. With the huge proviso that you have to be sure the CSS selector you’re using really captures (and only captures) the action you’re trying to track. I suspect it’s easy to get this wrong and end up with skewed analytics.

Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative

#29

Post by kareemm »

Saw your comment on the Posthog post yesterday. Sounds like you felt the pain of scaling at Heap, which bodes well for FP.

Freshpaint looks super useful for two reasons:

1. Heap-style "collect it all" and "define events in the UI" features. Loved these on Heap and it should be the default collector for taking dev out of the "tracking usage metrics" equation

2. More Segment competition. Segment's great, but super expensive for business models where the # of your tracked users doesn't scale with pricing.

I could imagine using this with PostHog for a nice product usage stack.

Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative

#30

Post by malisper »

polskibus wrote: post #28

Could you compare your product to PostHog that has also launched on HN recently ?

They're pretty different tools. If anything, you would use Freshpaint to send data into PostHog.

PostHog is an analytics tool. Once you have data in PostHog, you can run queries against the data to produce various charts and graphs. Other analytics tool include Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Heap. The primary reason you would use an analytics tool is you want to ask questions about your users.

Freshpaint is a data collection tool. We automatically collect data from your site such as clicks, pageviews, etc. You can then use our UI to send that data to different tools. We integrate with the large analytics tools and also a ton of marketing tools like Intercom and HubSpot. There are two reasons you would want to use a tool like Freshpaint:

  1) It's easy to collect data. Freshpaint instruments your entire site, so you don't have to.
  2) It's easy to send the data to different tools. Once a piece of data is in Freshpaint, you can send it in one click to any of your analytics and marketing tools.
Does that make sense?
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