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!