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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

#11

Post by wgerard »

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 ?

Completely unaffiliated with any of the parties involved but recently familiar with both Heap and Segment:

Segment (and presumably this solution) is more like an event mux/demux. All your disparate event sources connect in, and you send the data to places like Heap to visualize it. Segment's value is acting as a central, common location for your event data.

Heap's primary value is visualization/analysis for things like retention/etc. You can collect data directly through Heap as well but I wouldn't say that's the primary value of it.

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

#12

Post by vishalzone2002 »

Congrats on the launch. I have been a segment user and I think they also have capabilities to backfill as well as they seem to be moving towards a CDP. I am struggling to see what is the difference here? Or your value proposition is different business/technical model ?

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

#13

Post by malisper »

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 100% "event tracking coverage" out of the box. That's not true at all with Segment and it can take several months to get even most of the events you care about.

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

#14

Post by malisper »

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 tracking in the right place.

If you have the resources to do this, I highly recommend you setup manual tracking. In Freshpaint, we give you the ability to fall back to manual event tracking if you want it. The thing is most teams don't have the resources to write tracking code for everything, so a lot of the time it just doesn't get done. We commonly hear it takes 3-6 months to get Segment fully setup, and even then you have to constantly write new tracking code as you launch new features.

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

#15

Post by malisper »

zebnyc wrote: post #10
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…

Jesus, events tied to css-selectors sounds like a recipe for disaster

It's worked perfectly fine for Heap. Especially since Heap and Freshpaint capture every event out of the the box, if tracking ever breaks due to something like a site redesign, you can recover all the data you missed out on.

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

#17

Post by malisper »

vishalzone2002 wrote: post #12

Congrats on the launch. I have been a segment user and I think they also have capabilities to backfill as well as they seem to be moving towards a CDP. I am struggling to see what is the difference here? Or your value proposition is different business/technical model ?

The big difference between us and Segment is we automatically instrument your entire site. As soon as you install Freshpaint, we are automatically capturing every click, pageview, etc, performed on your site. You can create a new event six months after installing Freshpaint, and you'll have access to every instance of that event since you installed Freshpaint. This means you:

1) Don't have to delay launches so you have time to setup event tracking.

2) Don't have to worry about forgetting to setup tracking. A common problem is a company will ship a new feature and realize two weeks down the road that they forgot to track a key event. They then have to setup tracking for that event and wait another two weeks for data to come up. That jus doesn't happen with Freshpaint. Freshpaint collects every action out of the box and gives you access to that data whenever you want it.

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

#18

Post by malisper »

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 to try to do that, they would suddenly find themselves processing an order of magnitude more data than they are today. If you want to support autotrack, you need to design your infrastruture from day 1 with that in mind.

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

#20

Post by malisper »

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 ?

We're a Segment competitor, not a Heap competitor (we actually support Heap as a destination). A significant number of Heap's users use both Segment and Heap. That's actually one of the big reasons we started Freshpaint. A lot of people would buy Heap for product analytics, but they would still setup manual event tracking for Segment for their other tools. We started Freshpaint so you won't need to setup event tracking at all.
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