Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) â an automated, retroactive Segment alternative
Hello HN!
Weâre Fitz & Malis, the founders of Freshpaint (YC S19) (https://www.freshpaint.io/). Our product is a more flexible way of setting up your analytics and marketing tools.
With our javascript snippet, Freshpaint automatically instruments your site by tracking every behavior for you, up front. From there, you can create events for behaviors like clicks, pageviews, etc either through a point-and-click interface or code (whichever youâre more comfortable with). In one click, Freshpaint sends data collected for that event â past or present â to 80+ analytics or marketing tools.
What does retroactive mean? Install Freshpaintâs snippet today. In 6 months start tracking something new, and you'll have the last 6 months worth of data that our product has already collected. We make it easy to backfill that historical data into your tools.
Thereâs two types of people that get the most value out of Freshpaint:
1. The developer that owns data infrastructure at their company, and wants to lighten the load through automation.
2. The non-technical marketer/customer success/PM (or founder!) that makes use of the tools that require customer data.
We both met while working at Heap (YC W13) â Malis led the database team and Fitz led product marketing. When starting Freshpaint, we were inspired by a phenomenon we saw while working with customers at Heap. Even though they used Heap for analytics, we kept seeing companies also writing tracking code for each behavior they wanted to use in other tools, either with a routing service like Segment and mParticle or building direct implementations and their own pipelines. Across analytics, product, and marketing it was common to see a dozen tools that required the same data including tools like Hubspot, Intercom, Fullstory, advertising platforms, data warehouses, and more.
Letâs say you want to see how many users clicked your signup button or played a song in your analytics tools. Or you want to take the users who added an item to their cart and engage them in an automated marketing campaign. First, you have to write code to collect and log each behavior that you want to track. Then you have to send it to your marketing and analytics tools.
This requires a massive engineering effort and itâs distracting to maintain (itâs not uncommon to delay shipping a new feature by 2-3 weeks because of this tax). If you didnât track something or made a mistake, that data is lost forever.
Developers have to do a bunch of work that (1) is not core product development, and (2) they often arenât the ones to get value from that work because theyâre not the end users of this data. Flip this problem around and you have marketers and PMs that are slowed or blocked from their work, and have to distract developers to get unblocked.
This is painful for multiple teams. Fitz experienced this a few years back as part of the growth team at Quantcast, and he always had to work with engineering to instrument what he needed to trigger marketing flows and or get analytics telemetry on his experiments.
We built Freshpaint to lighten the load and streamline the workflow for both groups. How it works:
1. Install Freshpaintâs javascript snippet on your site. It takes 60 seconds, and from that point Freshpaint collects every behavior like clicks, pageviews, etc.
2. Connect 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. Complete integrations list here: https://www.freshpaint.io/integrations. We plan to build more so let us know what youâd like to see.
3. Create events for clicks, pageviews, form submissions, and more from data in Freshpaint. Create events thru code or point-and-click in our UI. Data is retroactively available back to the day you installed Freshpaint, regardless of when the event is created. We also support manual tracking and server-side tracking.
4. Send data to the destinations we support in one click. You can even backfill past data that Freshpaint has collected.
We're eager to hear your feedback, since we know HN has a ton of members who are familiar with this space from all different perspectives!
From my experience working with both Segment and mParticle (and tons of tools they integrate with) this is definitely a need and a great idea!
My only advice would be to focus your primary messaging closer to that primary value prop. I can see how it probably took many iterations to get to âCodelessly connect your site to your stack.â But Iâd guess that the concept of âcodelesslyâ wonât be as exciting to people with the problems youâre solving as something like âCapture all data for todayâs needs AND tomorrows. Itâs like time travel.â Or âA time traveling, no-code analytics tool for the future.â, âThe worldâs first time traveling analytics tool.â, âFuture-proof your analytics with the worldâs first time-traveling analytics tool.â
One other customer acquisition idea- many coâs will already have segment/mparticle and if theyâre opening communication with you then that likely means they want something better but it takes a surprising amount of work to integrate segment/mparticle with many marketing tools so Iâd offer some sort of onboarding assistance if you can otherwise they wonât want to take the risk of embarking on them migration.
Great idea, good luck!
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 ?
I don't have any specific context on this company so won't comment on their offering compared to that of Segment, but I do find the "collect everything" approach to be generally bad and undesirable.
What I want, past any sort of reasonable business scale, is a constrained set of specific events that I have explicitly decided that I want to track. I then want those events to be well documented and well QA'd. The approach of "here we tracked everything for you, now just sort through it" is great if you only want to serve small companies who just don't want to do the work to be more intentional about their data, but at any sort of reasonable scale of people touching data this becomes a recipe for disaster.
This absolutely brilliant. Been using Segment for multiple project on over 1m MTUs and now at a B2B SaaS where we simply canât invest in writing events for every interaction. Youâve perfectly captured our/my pain.
I remember seeing you guys sometime back on Show HN. Any change in your product positioning since then? Any learnings from customers?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21973458
Congrats on building this. This is awesome and much needed.
Sorry, I am not very old :), but I didn't follow up with the tools. I don't know anything other than Google Analytics. So could you please explain as you would explain to a child what those tools do more than GA?
I always found it interesting that YC will fund competitors of existing portfolio companies, but I guess it might make sense from various angles as they increase the chance that one of their funded companies will make it big, and it will probably stimulate innovation.
I wonder though how they handle the potential conflict of interest as I imagine they get updates from both companies and might be asked for advice by both as well.
Regarding the product I think itâs interesting but if retroactive event streaming is the only USP I think that should be easy to reproduce for Segment. Also, I really like that Segment started taking privacy a bit more serious by introducing their privacy hub. Freshpaint is probably not compliant with GDPR as of now, I guess as theyâre focused on the US market that might not matter much though.
I've been using Freshpaint for a few months and really enjoyed it because it's an end-to-end solution. While i's not fully "code-less", it did speed up our analytics deployment process by weeks. I'd highly recommend it to people who are semi-technical (i.e. you know how to code but would rather someone else did it for you). Also support has been tremendous and their release pipeline looks very impressive.
How does the point and click UI generate event targets? At my work we use Pendo which sounds very similar to Freshpaint. Pendoâs 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 arenât designed to communicate the semantics the Product team is trying to capture, and thereâs also no way for Pendo to know that the selector it generated uniquely captures whatever event the user wants - itâs entirely possible that the same selector could occur on a different screen.
Weâve been asked to âstabilizeâ our class names for the product team, so that Pendo doesnât âbreakâ, but we have resisted as fundamentally this is not what CSS is meant for. Nonetheless we now have an invisible, undocumented coupling between our application internals and Pendo.
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.
Iâd encourage you to bless a âdata-freshpaintâ attribute as the preferred way to link events to your system, if the way it currently works is CSS selectors.
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 âbackfillâ as a feature to their existing product? Does your âautomationâ also provide significant advantages over Segment?
Hey sounds brilliant, congrats on the launch.
As soon as I heard of Segment, I knew they were onto something valuable and can only welcome more competition.
Now that I've been nice, allow me to get the plastic pitchfork.
I see no mention of GDPR, I assume you are going to restrict your market to NA for now? What about CCPA?
In the same vein I don't think you have any integration with open-sources alternatives to commercial software that one could host on premise.
That's an odd choice given the shape of things to come wrt privacy.
Without more integrations, it's a hard thing to sell. Salesforce? Dynamic Yield? BounceX? Emarsys?
Also, how does it work with native mobile apps? No catch-all collector?
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 Segment.
One point of clarification: what counts as a user?
We have a product that has both public- and private-facing components. If it's unique IP addresses then we'd be close to your enterprise plan which seems price prohibitive. If it's an authenticated user with a name, that seems much different.
Otherwise looks great and love the point-and-click. Even though creating events is easy, it saves the back-and-forth with development.
Congrats on the launch!
Is there a way to track when a component comes into the viewport?
What's the best practice for tracking component impressions?
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 ?
How does backfilling work? Do all destinations support it completely? Do things like the original IP address and date time get passed through?
Saw your comment on the Posthog post yesterday. Sounds like you felt the pain of scaling at Heap, which bodes well for FP.
Freshpaint looks super useful for two reasons:
1. Heap-style "collect it all" and "define events in the UI" features. Loved these on Heap and it should be the default collector for taking dev out of the "tracking usage metrics" equation
2. More Segment competition. Segment's great, but super expensive for business models where the # of your tracked users doesn't scale with pricing.
I could imagine using this with PostHog for a nice product usage stack.
Would this work for React Native?
Could you compare your product to PostHog that has also launched on HN recently ?
Fantastic idea - congrats on the launch!
Segment + a universal no-code events collector?