Wow, congrats to the team @ Segment. This is very well deserved - they created this category. Also, looks that Twillio is investing big time in owning the marketing stack.
Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B
11–20 of 101 posts
Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B
#12Hopefully this means Segment dropping their prices - $120p/m for 10k users is out of the range of a lot of potential customers, and changing around an established analytics setup later on is always a pain.
Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B
#13This seems cheap, segment was doing great especially with sass the way it is now.
Segment (and any other SaaS that wants to own the event firehose) has pricing issues as the customer scales. As a customer you are charged on data volume[0], but your data grows at the rate = (Users x Engagement X Features X Data Sources). That rate can easily be the square of your revenue growth.
This pricing issue makes it easy for Segment's fast-growing customers to justify an in house replacement. This puts huge down-pressure on their "revenue retention" rate and makes it hard to raise more VC or go public.
[0] - Segment technically prices on user volume but in reality it's a mix of users + objects depending on what your sources are
Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B
#14Another finished web product that Twilio can overcharge for! This company is aiming to become the Oracle of SaaS. Stay away.
Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B
#15This seems cheap, segment was doing great especially with sass the way it is now.
Segment (and any other SaaS that wants to own the event firehose) has pricing issues as the customer scales. As a customer you are charged on data volume[0], but your data grows at the rate = (Users x Engagement X Features X Data Sources). That rate can easily be the square of your revenue growth. This pricing issue makes it easy for Segment's fast-growing customers to justify an in house replacement. This puts huge…
So what’s the end state solution? The tools change and/or mature slower than a fast company will grow. Where are you going from here?
Are you eventually running your own cluster? Or, are you paying per Gb per second how GCP bills with decoupled compute / memory / storage? Or maybe with a little bit more overhead with the orchestration cost on top of consumption with how azure bills for ADF.
Just from reading blog posts, Spotify’s move was interesting, regarding their annual “songs you liked” at the holidays, where they sort of ran a hybrid.
Sorry to digress but what is the end state. Is there just a number where it makes sense to hire people and build and/or shift vendors? And if yes, what vendor is “after” stich? Astronomer maybe. Sorry if that’s basic.
Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B
#16This is the same Segment that started out as a single Javascript file that a couple guys threw together before rebranding right? I mean, they're so much more now (or so it seems) but feels like it was just yesterday... and I'm only 26!
Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B
#17Step one towards rebranding Sendgrid as a marketing platform and getting them away from the cesspit that is transactional email.
Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B
#18Step one towards rebranding Sendgrid as a marketing platform and getting them away from the cesspit that is transactional email.
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Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B
#19Twilio feels like a great fit for Segment, all the best to the team and the next steps. Show HN: Analytics.js (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076 via @rauchg https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1314709848030756864
It's kinda nuts. They have some videos on startup school. They basically just threw spaghetti for months building random products for markets they barely understood until they landed on analytics and it just snowballed. This isn't even a brilliant idea. They entered a crowded market with a solution that was just a bit better than everyone else and now have a $3B exit.
Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Segment (and any other SaaS that wants to own the event firehose) has pricing issues as the customer scales. As a customer you are charged on data volume[0], but your data grows at the rate = (Users x Engagement X Features X Data Sources). That rate can easily be the square of your revenue growth. This pricing issue makes it easy for Segment's fast-growing customers to justify an in house replacement. This puts huge…
So what’s the end state solution? The tools change and/or mature slower than a fast company will grow. Where are you going from here? Are you eventually running your own cluster? Or, are you paying per Gb per second how GCP bills with decoupled compute / memory / storage? Or maybe with a little bit more overhead with the orchestration cost on top of consumption with how azure bills for ADF. Just from reading blog pos…
Solution seems obvious, volume discounts in one shape or another.
SaaS companies pricing is often geared towards startups that "can't afford" to control costs, i.e. developer time spent on minimizing cost has a higher monetary and opportunity cost than ignoring those costs in the short term, even if they're piling up at $50/mo for every auxiliary service.
But that strategy does not account for those same startups after they grow enough to take a breath and start optimizing costs.