The founder straight-up admits in this article that the problems they're solving are largely simple. To my mind, there's no need for a hosted service. Why hasn't Segment been replaced by an open-source project?
I'm not trolling here...I really don't understand the full value.
The issue is that companies need all of this together. And they need it now. Many enterprises have 100+ business units each using 50+ tools and all of that needs to be connected together.
So the issue isn't that building a single connection is hard. It's that managing N interconnected things is N^2 hard, and N^2 gets big very very fast. Wrangling that mess is just way too complicated for an open source project... even though analytics.js is open source, the vast, vast majority of a.js users only use it through Segment.
As for the n^2 problem, yes, I can see that argument, but in my experience, n is always a small number (i.e. 2-10), and they rarely need to cross-communicate in a fully connected graph. In short, piping everything through an expensive, centralized point-of-failure run by strangers seems like such a risky proposition that I can't imagine many companies would have the integration complexity to justify the risks.
But again, people seem to be finding value in it, so maybe I'm missing something. I was honestly expecting you to tell me something about advanced data warehousing or integrated analytics tools or something like that. If you tell me that integrating with segment automatically starts correlating session data across providers, well...that starts to be compelling.
We're in a world where people would rather self-host github to save a few bucks...this is an easier problem.
Analytics.js could be replaced by a self-hosted/bundled solution in theory, but Segment's server-side integrations are an extremely valuable piece of network plumbing. It's awfully nice that I was able to set up a few endpoints on our API (quick) and went through the approval process (sorry, not quick) and now my customers have a super-easy option if they want to point their data hose at us.
All they need to do is install some dashboard, data processing tools and think of what data they want to correlate with other data and if that correlation has any interesting meaning.
But of course having your company listed at a hot startup site is simply exposure or marketing too. Maybe those companies don't even use it, they just want their logo to be shown every where on the 'hot' parts of the web.
And having listed on your site that 15.000+ companies trust you? Why do you still need to raise money then? Start charging people if your product has value.
Also as a private citizen can i request at Segment if you are storing, processing or handling my private data (provided by parties i did business with) in anyway?