Congrats on the launch!
Is there a way to track when a component comes into the viewport?
What's the best practice for tracking component impressions?
Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative
41–50 of 56 posts
Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative
#42I don't have any specific context on this company so won't comment on their offering compared to that of Segment, but I do find the "collect everything" approach to be generally bad and undesirable.
What I want, past any sort of reasonable business scale, is a constrained set of specific events that I have explicitly decided that I want to track. I then want those events to be well documented and well QA'd. The approach of "here we tracked everything for you, now just sort through it" is great if you only want to serve small companies who just don't want to do the work to be more intentional about their data, but at any sort of reasonable scale of people touching data this becomes a recipe for disaster.
Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative
#43From my experience working with both Segment and mParticle (and tons of tools they integrate with) this is definitely a need and a great idea!
My only advice would be to focus your primary messaging closer to that primary value prop. I can see how it probably took many iterations to get to “Codelessly connect your site to your stack.” But I’d guess that the concept of ‘codelessly’ won’t be as exciting to people with the problems you’re solving as something like “Capture all data for today’s needs AND tomorrows. It’s like time travel.” Or “A time traveling, no-code analytics tool for the future.”, “The world’s first time traveling analytics tool.”, “Future-proof your analytics with the world’s first time-traveling analytics tool.”
One other customer acquisition idea- many co’s will already have segment/mparticle and if they’re opening communication with you then that likely means they want something better but it takes a surprising amount of work to integrate segment/mparticle with many marketing tools so I’d offer some sort of onboarding assistance if you can otherwise they won’t want to take the risk of embarking on them migration.
Great idea, good luck!
Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative
#44I don't have any specific context on this company so won't comment on their offering compared to that of Segment, but I do find the "collect everything" approach to be generally bad and undesirable. What I want, past any sort of reasonable business scale, is a constrained set of specific events that I have explicitly decided that I want to track. I then want those events to be well documented and well QA'd. The appro…
Freshpaint works like:
> What I want, past any sort of reasonable business scale, is a constrained set of specific events that I have explicitly decided that I want to track.
and not like:
> here we tracked everything for you, now just sort through it
We collect everything for you behind the scenes, but we will only surface a piece of data if you explicitly ask for it.
This is similar to undo in a text document. While you're editing a document, the entire history is tracked behind the scenes. You don't ever need to pay attention to all of that data unless you explicitly use the undo feature.
Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative
#45I 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 b…
We didn't apply to YC with the idea of Freshpaint. We were initially a Postgres performance optimization tool.
> but if retroactive event streaming is the only USP I think that should be easy to reproduce for Segment
Retroactivity has been the main differentiator between Heap and it's competitors for seven years now. None of them have been able to successfully copy it yet. Mixpanel launched an autotrack feature, but later shut it down.
> Freshpaint is probably not compliant with GDPR as of now
We are GDPR compliant. In fact, Fitz helped form an industry working group on GDPR with the IAB while working at Quantcast a year ahead of GDPR coming into effect.
Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative
#46I've been using Freshpaint for a few months and really enjoyed it because it's an end-to-end solution. While i's not fully "code-less", it did speed up our analytics deployment process by weeks. I'd highly recommend it to people who are semi-technical (i.e. you know how to code but would rather someone else did it for you). Also support has been tremendous and their release pipeline looks very impressive.
Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative
#47I 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 b…
We didn't apply to YC with the idea of Freshpaint. We were initially a Postgres performance optimization tool. > but if retroactive event streaming is the only USP I think that should be easy to reproduce for Segment Retroactivity has been the main differentiator between Heap and it's competitors for seven years now. None of them have been able to successfully copy it yet. Mixpanel launched an autotrack feature, but…
Can you speak to the architecture at all? e.g. an event hits Freshpaint, and 3 months later is is qualified as a defined "event" to be forwarded to 3 destinations - how does it happen?
I ask because I saw your previous comments and saw that 1) you're an expert at optimizing PostgreSQL, and 2) you said that Heap was harder to build because of the queries that users can define in the frontend.
So basically, are you able to leverage PostgreSQL to build something like Freshpaint? I would imagine it is prohibitively expensive to store your event data in PostgreSQL if it's sole purposed is to be categorized and forwarded to other destinations, vs. being queried like it was in Heap.
Amazing work and best of luck!
Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative
#48Segment + a universal no-code events collector?
Because events collector can not make money and usually open source... so have to add one ETL backend.
I'm not affiliated with Freshpaint, but I'm curious what you mean by this.
Event collectors absolutely do make money (albeit none are probably profitable due to being in growth phases right now). Also, very few are open source (Mixpanel, Segment, Snowplow, and Amplitude's tracking libraries are open source, Heap's mobile library is open source, but the backends and visualization platforms are closed and the primary value of the product).
Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because events collector can not make money and usually open source... so have to add one ETL backend.
I'm not affiliated with Freshpaint, but I'm curious what you mean by this. Event collectors absolutely do make money (albeit none are probably profitable due to being in growth phases right now). Also, very few are open source (Mixpanel, Segment, Snowplow, and Amplitude's tracking libraries are open source, Heap's mobile library is open source, but the backends and visualization platforms are closed and the primary v…
collectors, I mean analytics.js...
These js files collect the events from web app and sent them to the backend.
You can charge people on these files, but who is gonna pay?
But once the events are in your backend, customers have to pay for getting them out and for storage as well.
Re: Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative
#50How does backfilling work? Do all destinations support it completely? Do things like the original IP address and date time get passed through?