This was both helpful and inspiring to read, thank you for sharing.
- after thousands of lines of code, we realized our Edtech startup did not have product market fit,
so we pivoted to building a Mixpanel competitor focused on segmentation*
- 6 product iterations later, nothing was working. We were trying to decide between a group trip
planner and what eventually became Segment. It was a dark time.*
I'm curious.. when validating ideas, when do you know it's time to move on?
I'd say more generally that finding product-market-fit felt much more like a 'pull' than a 'push' motion. We had been trying for 8 months to convince even a single user to rely on the product we were building earlier, and it just wasn't sticking.
When we launched today's product, we started seeing a lot more pull from customers. We solved one problem that other products did not, which prompted a bunch more requests from customers.
This is a nice "silicon valley in a nutshell" post. Meandering startup skates by on generous funding rounds before finding itself a niche in the surveillance economy, where it is (of course) still not profitable, but congratulating itself for the ability to able to raise further investor money, conditioned on the prospect of expanding monitoring software to ever wider markets (while as a sideline ruining San Francisco for working people). An unusually clear example of startup tools building startup tools.
Always been a huge fan of Segment. At one point I think I had a tiny little mention on the Readme of their Ruby client for fixing an issue w/ Unicorn. I jumped head first into event sourcing after their blog post demonstrating how overkill websockets are most of the time. I consider them to have their shit together.
Then I applied to become an engineer there and had one of the worst experiences of my life with a project. The project involved building a clone of their realtime event debugger with React. I really felt as though I had knocked it out of the park... I even used their Evergreen UI framework. All I got was a very brief thanks but no thanks kind of reply that left a very bitter taste in my mouth.
Hey whalesalad, this is Tido and I oversee engineering here @ Segment. I'm really sorry about your experience and just looked up the interview feedback in depth. I'd be more than happy to hop on a call to discuss the feedback and hopefully provide constructive thoughts, and really sorry we didn't do it right a year ago! LMK if you're interested, happy to chat later today or any time this week — I'll reach out via email now so you have my email!
That sucks, perhaps you were rejected based on culture fit? I wish that these VC funded startups would just admit that they're looking for FAANG engineers and be done with it.
That way we wouldn't be wasting our time applying to do free work at a startup just to get a rejection at the end of it. 2c
This is one thing that irks me a bit. You may be doing real-world code tests where you build something, but they're not using your code for it and they don't have copyright assignment over it (unless you sign that away but I've never seen that).
Real-world problems have often been touted as a solution to useless whiteboard tests but then I've seen a lot of resentment when someone doesn't get a job with it. A month is too much time to spend on an interview project though.
I’d rather build something or do a case study (since I’m on the product side now, RIP sweet mechanical keyboard) then walk through white boarding problems.
I don’t mind a take home assignment that has a reasonable due date, but they should only be given deep enough into the recruiting process IMO.
Big fan of Segment, been wanting to transition some of our stuff over and tap into the kinesis pipeline connectors
The thing that jumped out to me was how well the team managed their psychology. They state that after several pivots they were in the dumps and running out of money...yet their launch copy for Segment was peppy, optimistic and ambitious.
Peter, co-founder/CEO of Segment here... I'm not sure it felt that way in the moment. On December 11, 2012 we were in pretty bad emotional place. I was on the verge of quitting at several points during the prior month, and was hospitalized twice earlier that fall due to stress and anxiety during our search for product market fit.
Obviously, the Show HN on December 12, 2012 turned that around. But it still took us several months to realize we had a tiger by its tail and begin to recover psychologically.
So... for those of you searching for product market fit and not finding it yet, hang in there.
Thanks for sharing this, Peter! S11 represent. I think this sort of thing is tremendously encouraging to hear as everyone that's started a company has gone through phases like this. I know a few having that experience now!
Or looking at it another way, you can stress out for a company for 8 year (in case of segment), or or you can join the company as a c-level exec at year 6 for the same amount of equity
The sort of person who grows a company from Show HN -> Series D is a very different sort of person than the sort of person who can join as a C Level exec.
There's more overlap than I would've suspected - a lot of the Director/VP types that I saw Google hire from the outside (as opposed to promote from within) were folks who had previously founded a company, sometimes up to 4 companies.
Agreed, but that's different again. Once you've done a job like be the CTO or CEO or an exec role at a high growth startup (like Segment) then getting into a role as an exec at a larger company.
Usually the folks who join a (successful) company as a C-level exec at year 6 are those who previously stressed out for 10+ years, either as a founder or working their way up through multiple successful projects at a big company.
If they raised 175, the valuation was likely at least 300 and more likely north of 500. Even 3% is worth $15M and I'd guess they each have a bit more than that.
Realistically, if it's equal splits, they probably each own ~5% of the company (By that stage, the founder shares can be down to ~20%)
If they are raising $175M, their dilution is probably in the ~15% range, putting their valuation a bit north of $1B.
So, each founder probably is worth, on paper, around $50M right now. Again, this assumes equal splits. It's possible that the CEO has more shares by virtue of assuming greater responsibilities.
We originally moved to Boston to be close to universities. It seemed like a better location for convincing our professors to use the edtech product we'd started with.
We made the move back to SF to be closer to our customers (since we had shifted to building an analytics product by then). It was much easier to walk them through the product in-person.
I wouldn't say this is strictly necessary today, but SF does have a nice density of startups if you are building a developer tool.
Yeah, Boston has always felt like a great place for a startup/ young company with all of those universities on the east coast or like, blocks away in Cambridge.
Makes sense though that you wanted to be near your customer base.
So there is the tip: if you ever do any kind analytics project, make sure the reports are send to a different hostname than your marketing/landing page is. Because the analytics host is bound to become blocked by all adblockers and privacy plugins sooner or later.
It's surprising given that there's already a plethora of tag managers out there including the big boys like Google and Adobe and specialty players like Tealium who solve this exact problem. Either Segment has secret sauce or it's just a huge market.
Peter, co-founder/CEO here... tag managers from all these players only solve the issue on websites, but only 30% of the data we manage comes from websites. The rest comes from mobile apps, payment systems, helpdesks, CRMs, email, push notifications, etc. So tag management is an antiquated/web-specific category that we've been ripping-and-replacing now for a few years.
It is also a huge market, with lots of interesting adjacencies that are equally whitespace. https://segment.com/protocols is starting to push into some of those areas.
I'm curious where you see the market moving. I've done a lot of data layer implementations and it's definitely simpler from a site development POV, but it always ends up being a management debacle handing off data layer to the tag management implementation which is a niche specialty. Do you have any white paper or whatever on why segment is a better approach?
Hi there, I head up the channel program at Segment and I'd love an opportunity to answer these questions and give you a demo of our products––I suspect we could work well together. Can I ask you to (1) sign up to become a channel partner: https://segment.com/partners/channel/ and (2) send me an email to get started? vlad@segment.com
I think it’s a huge market and it just wasn’t known how crappy and dev-unfriendly the existing players were. I wonder if the Segment guys had even heard of them when they launched or if they had and then cleverly categorized their product as analytics management or whatnot vs “tag management”.
My adblocker tips its hat on this incredible news! Jokes aside when I used Segment in the past it has always been an incredible "ahhhh" moment of relief for me! Ad astra!
Well this is a wrong metric to check. There are lot of startup which didn't do well on Show HN, but did great as startups. Also, a few which did well on Show HN, but not that great as start up.
I guess we should take Show HN as one of the many metrics available to see if your product is needed by the users.
