These guys are onto something big with this, extremely excited to see how quickly they can move with it. Please keep sharing updates/integrations with us on hn!
Mind to share your mind about how "they are onto something big"? Unless there is a hidden feature somewhere, I really don't see how it's big or why YC invested in it. Sure, it's useful. Sure, it's cool. But I'm afraid that it doesn't solve a big enough problem. Obviously, I'm saying that based on my own experience and knowledge:
- As a developer, integrating the various analytic libraries is trivial. Installing it? (npm install mixpanel) is mostly trivial too. Yes, it'll take a couple hours, but it will still take several hours to set up Segment too. (One might argue that's not true, but that's wrong. Even if you include the Segment.io code, you still need to provide a bunch of options and understand very well all the other analytic libraries.)
- As a manager, I don't want yet another 30$ or 150$ / month when I'm already paying that for the other analytic services. Also, I know for a fact that I can easily find a dev to set up all the analytics for less than 200$.
- As an investor, I ask myself: What's their unfair advantage? It seems like everyone could do such a service and even provide an open-source version of it.
So, yeah, I'm a bit lost. I feel it's a big like Grove.io. I really liked the idea and found it very useful. But I didn't see how it'd work as a business. But then, there are hundreds of huge companies that I don't even get their business model. (Twitter?) So, please don't take this comment as a rent, but more as an eye-opener for me to learn about where I'm thinking wrong : )
I worked with Peter and Ilya last week on putting this into our site. The client-side code took about half an hour, including setting up our segment.io account. The backend code was equally simple (but took longer as there were more calls to replace).
There are a couple major benefits to this service:
1) Your marketing guy can go in and turn different analytics products on/off without touching code.
2) One call to track() pushes events to all of your enabled services. You don't have to add/remove calls to change which services they go to.
3) The backend code is asynchronous. This is a huge win, because you can call it in code handling a web request without worrying about it slowing down the user experience.
4) You don't have to deal with crappy APIs from companies like Marketo. We were able to remove a couple hundred lines of code that dealt with talking to marketo, in favor of one line of code that talked to Marketo via segment.io.
The main problem with analytics/metrics is that they're all useless - or very close to it. Each of them is horrible about getting data out in order to correlate it with other services.
If segment.io can consolidate metrics data, provide uniform interfaces for getting data in/out, and can start partnering with other services that should be using this data but can't (there are several dozen), they can turn useless metrics data into immediately (possibly automatably) actionable data.
Just a personal vision, and I have no idea if that's where they're goin or not, I just know that needs to happen, and the team behind segment.io has the chops to pull it off.
You might want to check out our service, Klaviyo, and specifically https://www.klaviyo.com/features/integrations. We do exactly what you're describing around connecting your data with data from the all services you use. I definitely think it's the future and the future is coming sooner rather than later.
I also agree that metrics are not nearly as powerful if you can't tie them directly to action. Which is why we built our own, fully featured email solution so you can go from metrics, to important people to engagement automatically.
That's where we think things are headed and it's going to be incredibly empowering.
The use case I have thought of so far is providers who work with multiple companies (providing web interfaces for them), and therefore are required to integrate with those companies' analytics services. When you are on boarding new clients, or adding analytics to existing ones, a service like this could be extremely useful to cut down on development time.
