Segment.io 2013年转型赌注：一个分析API而非又一个分析产品

做的是什么生意

Segment.io sold a unified analytics API: developers install one client-side JavaScript or server-side library (Ruby, Node.js, Python, Java, .NET) and Segment routes the data to 20+ providers such as Google Analytics, KISSmetrics, Mixpanel, Chartbeat, HubSpot and Salesforce.

启动资金：$600,000 in seed funding from NEA, General Catalyst and other angel investors.

起因

Four founders — three of them MIT roommates, plus a Rhode Island School of Design student — dropped out to join Y Combinator's summer 2011 batch with a plan to build a competitor to Google Analytics or KISSmetrics. They struggled to get people to integrate with their service, but they had also built Analytics.js, a library wrapping multiple analytics services and APIs, and released it as open source on GitHub. "The open source version started growing by itself," said Peter Reinhardt, "so after a couple of months, we decided to pivot and build what people seemed to actually want: a beautiful, simple analytics API." The team made that shift in December 2012.

经过

By the January 2013 launch, Segment.io supported 20 analytics providers on both client and server side, with a mobile solution planned. The hosted, client-side Analytics.js stayed free, while developers paid for server-side libraries: $30/month for 1 million server-side calls, or $150/month for 10 million plus premium integrations including HubSpot, Marketo, Omniture and Salesforce. The pitch was time: integrations that had taken some customers months with old SOAP-based enterprise APIs could now take hours, and adding or removing providers was a switch rather than a rewrite. Reinhardt called it an investment in being data-driven — removing the barrier to using analytics tools that teams avoided because setup was painful — and the company planned two to three new provider integrations per week.

可借鉴之处

被拒绝的工具可能是楔子：没人想要团队的分析产品，但开发者想要包装库——转型跟随需求而非原始计划。