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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#31

Post by mrwnmonm »

malisper wrote: post #3
mrwnmonm wrote: post #2

Sorry, I am not very old :), but I didn't follow up with the tools. I don't know anything other than Google Analytics. So could you please explain as you would explain to a child what those tools do more than GA?

Fitz wrote a blog post on the analytics and marketing tools we recommend startups use [0]. It goes through a number of the different tools and why or why not you would want to use them. You should check it out. [0] https://www.freshpaint.io/blog/yc-stack-recommendations-for-...

Thanks <3

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

#32

Post by malisper »

kareemm wrote: post #29

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 expe…

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

Yep! At Heap I had to build a system to ingest a ton of data and process queries over that data that returned in seconds in real-time. For Freshpaint, we need to ingest the same amount of data, but without the need to query it. I honestly think building Freshpaint has been several times easier than building Heap.

Early on, I had a conversation with Heap's CTO about Freshpaint. He said something funny along the lines of "I wish I could work on this because I would absolutely destroy this problem."

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

Definitely! This is one of the things Fitz and I noticed before starting Freshpaint. It seems like until now, Segment hasn't had any real competitors. Segment is kind of now known for being overpriced.

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

#35

Post by soumyadeb »

I remember seeing you guys sometime back on Show HN. Any change in your product positioning since then? Any learnings from customers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21973458

Congrats on building this. This is awesome and much needed.

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

#37

Post by jakearmitage »

fitzrocks wrote: post #24
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 s…

What about bots?

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

#38

Post by divbzero »

kareemm wrote: post #29

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 expe…

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379373 "direct link to that PostHog comment"

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

#39

Post by divbzero »

malisper wrote: post #18
divbzero wrote: post #9

Congratulations on your launch! I use Segment and can easily see the value in backfilling historical data when adding new data destinations. Also impressed with the respectable set of integrations [1] you have implemented already. [1]: https://www.freshpaint.io/integrations What would be your plan if Segment added “backfill” as a feature to their existing product? Does your “automation” also provide significant advan…

> What would be your plan if Segment added “backfill” as a feature to their existing product? Does your “automation” also provide significant advantages over Segment? I don't think it's possible for them to provide the same kinds of backfills we provide. At least not without completely redesigning their infrastructure. In order to support retroactive backfills, we capture every user action up front. If Segment were t…

From other comments by you & Fitz, the “define events in UI” feature is also very intriguing as a value prop.

Thanks! Look forward to trialing this soon.

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

#40

Post by ThePhysicist »

I always found it interesting that YC will fund competitors of existing portfolio companies, but I guess it might make sense from various angles as they increase the chance that one of their funded companies will make it big, and it will probably stimulate innovation.

I wonder though how they handle the potential conflict of interest as I imagine they get updates from both companies and might be asked for advice by both as well.

Regarding the product I think it’s interesting but if retroactive event streaming is the only USP I think that should be easy to reproduce for Segment. Also, I really like that Segment started taking privacy a bit more serious by introducing their privacy hub. Freshpaint is probably not compliant with GDPR as of now, I guess as they’re focused on the US market that might not matter much though.

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