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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

#51

Post by polote »

malisper wrote: post #45
ThePhysicist wrote: post #40

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 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…

> None of them have been able to successfully copy it yet.

Not true, Contentsquare has been doing it before Heap and still doing it at least as well as Heap, actually they even offer retroactivity of website background

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

#52

Post by polote »

slap_shot wrote: post #47
malisper wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abl…

They probably store the XPath of each click, and when an event with the same XPath is created they browse through all the past click with this specific XPath

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

#53

Post by slap_shot »

polote wrote: post #52
slap_shot wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abl…

They probably store the XPath of each click, and when an event with the same XPath is created they browse through all the past click with this specific XPath

Of course. But my question pertains _how_ the event data is stored. Heap stored the event data in Citus, and OP worked to optimize their PostgreSQL for queries across the data. Freshpaint doesn't query the data (in the aggregate form that Heap does), it simply needs to find events that qualify as defined events and forward them to their destinations.

I'm just asking if PostgreSQL is still the right tool for that.

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

#54

Post by slap_shot »

xmly wrote: post #49
slap_shot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who is going to pay for anlaytics.js? Segment, the maintainers of analytics.js, did $50MM in revenue last year.

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

#56

Post by xmly »

slap_shot wrote: post #54
xmly wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who is going to pay for anlaytics.js? Segment, the maintainers of analytics.js, did $50MM in revenue last year.

That is because they have a backend service. The revenue is generated through the backend service, not the js client.
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