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Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

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Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#91

Post by switch11 »

polote wrote: post #90
XCSme wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important This is like saying food is a scam and useless and that it's only important when you eat it. I do agree that just tracking analytics, without doing anything with the data, is useless, just like storing food in the basement and letting it rot. Disclaimer: I have never used segment before, nor I had the need for…

(I'm only talking about Enterprise) > This is like saying food is a scam and useless and that it's only important when you eat it. Yes but everyone knows it for food, for analytics people expect it to solve their problem, which it will not do by itself > As far as I know, changing analytics tools for the average business involves just changing a JS snippet on their site, nothing complicated. Well not really, first ex…

I reluctantly but wholly agree with everything polote wrote:

Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important. Most of analytics/ab testing software are just giving data (which is sometimes not even accurate) to customers, so that the people in the analytics team have a job to do. But the reality is that only a very small fraction of those teams know how to use the data to drive more revenue. So if you want to work in analytics there is this HUGE market which today is not addressed by anyone, its how to make more revenue from a website.

*

I've searched high and low for analytics software that will let me

A) Measure the key things and come up with 80/20 Pateo Principle insights

B) After implementing changes, help measure the impact

Yet all analytics software seems designed to just capture stuff

That's all they do - 'capture stuff'

There are no provisions to leverage that data to actually make more money, or make your product better, or anything of substance

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#92

Post by noway421 »

Sebguer wrote: post #33
bertjk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(real question) Why is transactional email considered a cesspit?

A few reasons that all connect to each other. The biggest, most foundational one is that spammers are highly sophisticated criminal organizations, and will constantly be trying to figure out how to leverage your product for spam. If they are successful, it is extremely costly for you (primarily in terms of IP reputation, which is very difficult to maintain) and cheap for them. If they are unsuccessful, well, they'll…

I sort of disagree that it's commoditised, since the most popular email API would have the moat of being included in every spam filter whitelist. By choosing Sendgrid, paying them for the service and getting their IP ranges you guarantee that you get the greatest chance of getting your email delivered. That commands a premium.

Yeah you can go for Amazon SES or Mailgun or something, but they are used to spam too, Amazon SES to an even greater extent.

You are also guaranteed to get whatever the latest email innovation of email delivery they come up with as one of the early adopters. If they decide to deprecate SMTP and build something more secure, private, easier to authenticate and identify, you get that for "free" without having to change your code.

I see Sendgrid as a relationship maintainer between developer and Gmail/Outlook/Yahoo/long tail of other email providers. You pay them and they make sure your emails show up in those inboxes.

Sendgrid has issues with hacked accounts, which is probably their biggest struggle right now, but even then they have things like reputation. A hacked account would very quickly dip their reputation and be excluded from delivery anyway, without affecting the platform at large. They push 2FA tho, and I think some sort of automatic api key rotation system would be a nice remedy too.

Ultimately, Sendgrid maintains risk on per-account basis. Email providers understand that too, even though SMTP as a protocol and spam filters don't necessarily reflect that. Sendgrid as a platform is never under threat, individual Sendgrid accounts are.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#95

Post by agustif »

soumyadeb wrote: post #70
peter_mcrae wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed really good fit. I bet a large % of Segment's customers were using Twilio endpoints. Really nice combination of a data hub / last mile across multiple channels...fully expect they will continue moving up the stack towards a CRM / Marketing automation solution.

Segment published a report on tool usage. "SMS and Push" was @ 12% and was not in the top-10. Even in the "SMS and Push", there was Braze/Iterable etc but no Twillio. https://segment.com/blog/customer-data-platform/ This is not surprising. The personalized SMS/push notification use cases (for which you need Segment data) are commonly implemented via marketing platforms (like Braze etc) as opposed to directly via Twil…

It's a bit like Amazon with it's branded meatspace products or AWS properties which can be directly sourced/inspired by by their own down-stream / customer data. They don't even need to look into traffic, just look at your best/top paying customers, and copy them

Sigh!

At least Twilio buys Segment, not just copies it I guess..

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#96

Post by XCSme »

switch11 wrote: post #91
polote wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm only talking about Enterprise) > This is like saying food is a scam and useless and that it's only important when you eat it. Yes but everyone knows it for food, for analytics people expect it to solve their problem, which it will not do by itself > As far as I know, changing analytics tools for the average business involves just changing a JS snippet on their site, nothing complicated. Well not really, first ex…

I reluctantly but wholly agree with everything polote wrote: Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important. Most of analytics/ab testing software are just giving data (which is sometimes not even accurate) to customers, so that the people in the analytics team have a job to do. But the reality is that only a very small fraction of those teams know how to us…

I think the main root cause for this is that computers and AI are not smart enough yet to know "what's better" for your business/website.

Each business is unique, offers its own (almost unique) products or services, has a (sometimes hard to understand) user segment on the market, and each visitor is unique too. It is very hard to make some generic software that automatically gives useful tips on how to improve conversions, it can not tell "hey, reduce your price by 10% and start advertising towards cat owners instead of dog owners".

What analytics software does is exactly the point B you mentioned: allow you to measure impact of changes and take (yourself) decisions accordingly. You can decide to A/B test two different pricing strategies and see (based on analytics) which one converts better, but the software won't tell you what the A and B variants of the pricing strategy should be. You can test hypothesis and take decisions based on the resulting data.

> There are no provisions to leverage that data to actually make more money, or make your product better, or anything of substance I think this is due to, as mentioned by polote, the misunderstanding of the point of analytics: its purpose is collect and display data in such way that it can be analyzed (by a human or an external software) which can then take, based on this analysis and hypothesis testing, decisions that will lead to higher conversions. It's the same with people saying ads don't work and are useless: if you just create a poor ad, with wrong targeting, that leads to a shtity landing page trying to sell a bad product, you probably won't give a positive ROI and then blame it on the ad platform because it doesn't tell you why things are not working, but there are so many factors outside their control, it would be impossible for them to give an answer. You can only get an answer by looking in detail at the data of each step and understanding WHY something happens or doesn't happen. This WHY is very hard to tell even by experienced humans, so it would be very hard to have a computer automatically answer this WHY for us.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#97

Post by XCSme »

polote wrote: post #90
XCSme wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important This is like saying food is a scam and useless and that it's only important when you eat it. I do agree that just tracking analytics, without doing anything with the data, is useless, just like storing food in the basement and letting it rot. Disclaimer: I have never used segment before, nor I had the need for…

(I'm only talking about Enterprise) > This is like saying food is a scam and useless and that it's only important when you eat it. Yes but everyone knows it for food, for analytics people expect it to solve their problem, which it will not do by itself > As far as I know, changing analytics tools for the average business involves just changing a JS snippet on their site, nothing complicated. Well not really, first ex…

> Apart from that, it is not really clear to me what you are trying to achieve > To me self hosting and average user is not compatible especially in analytics where the average user barely knows how to use a computer.

This is exactly my point and my goal. First of all, when I mean average user I referrer only to those people that actually have a business/website to use those tools for, not to the average internet user. So, if they already have a website, they probably know at least how to purchase or even edit one (through code, WordPress or a visual editor).

My goal is that for those people, who are already technical enough to have their own website, "self-hosting" of their desired tool is just as simple as using 3rd party tools. It should not be harder to use self-hosted userTrack than it is to use Google Analytics. This is almost possible now, but the server/cloud providers are still working on providing APIs and services for making this more accessible.

Even now, you can go to certain GitHub repositories and click the "Deploy to Heroku" button, and with one click you have your own server running your desired application. The problem is that this is mostly limited to some hosting providers and to a very few applications. This should be possible to do, in an easy, secure and maintainable way for a wide variety of applications and hosting providers.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#98

Post by tootie »

switch11 wrote: post #91
polote wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm only talking about Enterprise) > This is like saying food is a scam and useless and that it's only important when you eat it. Yes but everyone knows it for food, for analytics people expect it to solve their problem, which it will not do by itself > As far as I know, changing analytics tools for the average business involves just changing a JS snippet on their site, nothing complicated. Well not really, first ex…

I reluctantly but wholly agree with everything polote wrote: Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important. Most of analytics/ab testing software are just giving data (which is sometimes not even accurate) to customers, so that the people in the analytics team have a job to do. But the reality is that only a very small fraction of those teams know how to us…

There's a hierarchy of needs. Segment and a lot of related services are geared towards data collection and instrumentation. That part is relatively easy and has a very mature market. The actual valuable part is to gain actionable insights and that remains stubbornly difficult. From what I've seen, it's the kind of work that still requires an experienced marketer with good instincts.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#99

Post by [deleted] »

alexjray wrote: post #43
dmix wrote: post #22

I follow(ed) Segment’s GitHub branches and always felt they adopted the latest and best front end tooling. I usually let them being the testing ground at a real company in between the stuff they developed themselves. This goes from using Metalsmith early for their single page web sites, some coding practices (mono vs micro), some CSS frameworks and design patterns and other library choices when there always seemed li…

Most of that is Ian Storm Taylor. This is what happens when software is treated as a first class citizen and the co founder(s) are technical. It's a specific class of companies like Stripe and Square. The business itself is treated as a software product, internal influences external.

[deleted]
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