Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – Automated, Retroactive Alternative to Segment
Hello everyone!
We’re Fitz & Malis, the founders of Freshpaint (https://www.freshpaint.io/). We make it dead simple to collect data from your site and implement tools in a single click and without code.
With our Autotrack javascript, Freshpaint automatically instruments your site. Then you can use our point-and-click interface to visually create events after the fact, and send that historical data to any of your analytics or marketing tools.
Customer data powers nearly the entire analytics, growth, and marketing stacks of today’s B2C and B2B businesses. But what’s crazy is that customer data is captured and managed using technology that is literally over 25 years old: Let’s say you want to see how many users clicked your signup button or played a song. Or you want to take the users who added an item to their cart and engage them in a marketing campaign. You have to manually write code for each and every event to capture and log that behavior. Then you have to send to it your marketing and analytics tools.
Segment is great because it allows you to collect data once and send it to a bunch of different tools, but Segment is still built on legacy technology. It still requires a massive engineering effort to stand up and maintain. Just last week someone told us that at unicorn-level grocery delivery company, it takes 2-3 extra weeks to ship anything because of this tax.
Freshpaint automates the challenges here so that engineering can focus on building product, implementations can be done in minutes not weeks or days, and you can make your stack work for you instead of the other way around.
We were inspired by a phenomenon we saw while working with customers as early Heap employees. We saw that lots of customers loved Heap for product analytics, but that was only a small slice of the stack. Across analytics, product, and marketing it’s common to see a dozen other tools that require customer data. We kept seeing the same data pipelines and integrations built using the legacy approach of manual code.
We built Freshpaint to instrument your entire site and hook up your stack in just a few clicks, without having to write any code.
How it works:
1. Install Freshpaint’s Autotrack snippet on your site. It takes 60 seconds, and from that point Freshpaint collects every click, pageview, etc.
2. Connect over 70 destinations like Google Analytics, Amplitude, Hubspot, Fullstory, Intercom, and a data warehouse. This is done by copying and pasting an API key or account ID. See our integrations here: https://www.freshpaint.io/integrations
3. Create events in Freshpaint. Our UI provides a point-and-click way of creating events. Data is retroactively available back to the day you installed Freshpaint, regardless of when the event is created.
4. Send data to any destination in one click. You can even backfill historical data.
5. Use all that time you saved to ship something new, build an awesome feature you can upsell, or plot your next marketing campaign to take over the world.
Great technology is not just about product. We commonly hear from Segment users that it’s really expensive for what you actually get. Search HN and you’ll see tons of complaints and even horror stories about their pricing like this comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19221872. With all the work that’s required after you purchase, we agree! On top of automating all that work, our pricing is designed to be much more friendly.
We look forward to feedback from the HN community!
I remember evaluating Heap (granted, a long time ago, so I'm sure it's evolved a lot since then) and the auto-tracking capabilities and retroactive analysis sounded awesome, but in practice it wasn't as valuable or easy as I thought. I found that in general, knowing the questions you want to answer and structuring your tracking around that to be far more useful, and that actually being able to take mountains of generic behavioral data and making sense of it wasn't that easy and a ton of work in and of itself. E.g. retroactively finding clicks to a single 'signup button' is easy, but a lot harder when that button is on many different pages and you want to group them or segment them in certain ways, or the implementation changes in some places, etc. In the end, it seemed like it was doing engineering work just to parse the data back out so it seemed more sane to structure in a better way ahead of time.
I'm curious what steps have been taken in the past several years to improve on this and how Freshpaint is approaching this. I think it's a really interesting problem and if done well, could be massively valuable. Good luck!
Such a cool idea. I got a deep dive Postgres training from one of the their founders at my company and he was insanely knowledgeable. We currently are having these problems with Segment as well. I'm going to try and push to see if we can switch off of this from Segment. Congrats on starting a company that is solving a crazy pain point. I saw something saying that you need a minimal-loveable product nowadays and this is it!
Perfect timing as we have a huge need for this for an upcoming launch.
Question...will you be able to replay/backfill as you add new integrations? For example, Klaviyo is a huge hole in your integrations right now especially for marketing and ecomm. If I install Autotrack now, set up a few events and then a month from now you add Klaviyo, I can just replay everything into Klaviyo?
Also FWIW, I was an early user at Segment (was in their seed deck as case study), Klaviyo, and many others. I'm a technical marketer so can be helpful as beta tester and user research. reach out directly if you'd like to connect michael@futuremood.com
Ah ha! Your quoted "horror story" comment is mine, so I guess I'm obligated to check Freshpaint out. Will do :)
You mentioned that you were early Heap employees. At one point it looked like Heap was heading in this direction as well (with their own warehouse & destinations and sources, etc.) But I just checked their site out and it looks like they're back to going all-in on "capture everything ananlytics". Is that accurate?
So I suppose it would be fair to say Freshpaint:Segment :: Heap:Mixpanel (et al)?
We use freshpaint to connect to Amplitude. The setup was super fast and we had product analytics set up within minutes! The auto-track is a life-saver so that we can confidently ship a feature and then come back and set up product analytics after the launch, while knowing that we aren't missing any old data. The team is very helpful with a ton of experience in the analytics space, so rest peacefully knowing you're in good hands :)
This is a really cool product. Very impressive that you were able to build to many integrations with such a small team. Any advice on how you did that?
How do you prevent collecting PII/passwords/other sensitive data to avoid situations like Mixpanel's Autotrack fiasco? https://mixpanel.com/blog/2018/02/05/update-autotrack-data-c...
We use Freshpaint for our site (heraldhq.com) and loved how we could backtrack analytics events. Excited to see where this goes.
Does the $300 a month pricing kick in at the first instance of 3,001 unique site visits in a given 30 day period?
> Tracking code is dead. Technology has evolved.
That is definitely not the case and this sounds like a cheap marketing wording on your web page. You may be visiting a prospect and may learn it from them the hard way how tracking code crushes "autotrack-and-collect-anything" approach by leaps and bounds.
> unicorn-level grocery delivery company
At this point you can just say Instacart :)
Very cool! Does this work on mobile as well?
Any time I hear about a hot new analytics company, my first thought is always: how do I opt out?
Freshpaint, how do I opt out of your data collection? Now, into the future, and also for any historical data that you might have collected about me.