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Launch HN: June (YC W21) – Two-click analytics reports on top of Segment data

125 points by 0xferruccio ↗ HN
Hi HN!

I’m Ferruccio, cofounder of June (https://june.so). We make it easy to set up dashboards for your most important product metrics.

After a couple of years working in product teams, we realised that most companies measure the same things. So we created a set of templates that help you streamline the process of getting an insight from your data.

With Amplitude/Mixpanel you have to know what you should be measuring and how. Getting to an insight starts from a blank canvas, is intimidating, and requires some expertise. With June, you pick a template, connect Segment, select the right events for your analysis, and get a report.

We currently have 9 templates including Retention, Active Users, and Churning Users. We release a new one every week. We’re also starting to allow you to create and share your own templates.

To try it out, go to https://june.so/templates and pick a template you’d like to try. Connect your Segment account, select the events required for your analysis, and get your insights.

Looking forward to ideas and feedback from the community!

47 comments

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dennismu
okay now i wish we would use segment. what's the main point to use segment? (given that you're building your v1 on top of that)
SigKill9
Segment is a tracker that allows you to pipe the data to any tool that supports segment. That way you can change or add tools without touching the tracking code in your app or service.
0xferruccio
Segment is a product that allows you to write events once and then allows you to send them to whatever tools you want.

If you use amplitude or Mixpanel you're locked in with an SDK and it's harder to switch vendors. With segment you can write events once and decide afterwards where to send them.

This is useful as your company grows and you start using analytics events in BI tools, Marketing tools (like Intercom) and product analytics tools (like Amplitude)

knes
Do you store the data you received from Segment. If so, how ? and how it is "secured"?
0xferruccio
Yes we store the data from Segment as it's just a pipeline.

Data is stored on AWS on a managed DB that is encrypted, always up to date with security patches and never leaves our infrastructure.

If your data is extremely sensitive and this isn't enough you can always remove PII from your Segment settings

That being said if you have any suggestions on things that we could do to be more safe I'm happy to learn

soumyadeb
Can't you run this in top of customers data warehouse? Over 30pc of Segment customers have a data warehouse (the number is over 60-70pc for RudderStack). If you could build these of a customers data warehouse, it can be quite powerful and not face "another SaaS tool" hurdle in companies.

Plus this can be much cheaper than you storing the data (and making 80pc margin on top).

I think decoupling product analytics from storage can be powerful. The BI tools (like looker) do it but they are not great for product / customer analytics

0xferruccio
The onboarding and go to market wouldn’t be this easy if we did this. Over the long run I agree though and we might starting doing this for bigger companies, but for small companies you just want something that is easy to get started with
buremba
I agree with you, most of the CDPs already ingest the data into data warehouses which can answer almost all these questions. We have a similar product and we already have Segment Warehouse integration and Rudderstack seems to be a good fit (maybe even better!) for us as well. Having said that, early stage startups usually don't have a data warehouse so I believe that June would probably work better for them.
emre
Congrats on the launch! Why did you decide to start with Segment? Do you plan to add other services in the future? (GA, Firebase etc.)
0xferruccio
We started from Segment because it makes it extremely easy for us to onboard companies and it allowed us to focus on building the core of our product, our templates!

It also makes it easy for non technical folks to get started if Segment is already in place

seapunk
Congrats on the launch, Ferruccio!

Hope to see you next time we'll go in France.

Do you plan to add alternatives to Segment?

0xferruccio
Oh wow great to see you here :)

We were talking with Freshpaint and have plans to integrate with Rudderstack too at some point.

In fairness every company we talked to either used Segment or Google Tag Manager, or implemented the Amplitude SDK

So those integrations might come first

nefitty
Today my team decided to use RudderStack because it’s open source and cheaper than segment. I’m integrating GA UA API as a destination and it has been a chore, but I’m really keen to help support OSS products as much as I can.
0xferruccio
That’s valid! At scale Segment gets quite expensive, especially if you’re a b2c company
yingninggui
June is super simple to set up! I literally got it up and running in less than 5 minutes. Congrats on the launch team :)
swlkr
Congrats on the launch!
mlejva
Just signed up. Do you retrospectively pull events from the past? Not sure if it's even possible to do with Segment.
0xferruccio
We only do this if you have an enterprise Segment plan.

This generally isn't the case as most of our users are early stage startups

mlejva
Got it. Excited to try out some templates once you have more events after few days!
MaxwellM
Congratulations, this is exciting. Canned solutions are a good way to get young companies from zero to one quickly
rjeli
Congrats on the launch :)
jay_ru12
Pre-packaged analytics is definitely valued for early on businesses that don’t have the time or resources to do in-depth data exploration. However have you considered ways to slice the data at any event property or user trait level, similar to Amplitude’s group by functionality? Also, I see a lot of value in more “pro tips” on recommended segment event payloads and JSON structure for the most optimal data piping to this destination.
0xferruccio
Great point! I think we forgot to highlight that this is a feature in the product. Once you set up a template you can slice your results by cohort, traits and accounts (if you’re a b2b saas company)

On the suggested events that’s also something we’ve been looking in. Segment defined their spec, which is a standard naming convention for events and we were thinking about building on top of it

buremba
It looks like a great SaaS product targeting solo-founders that don't have enough time to build their own reports. The customer data platforms such as Segment enable these use-cases by making the integration seamless enough for everyone so Segment looks like a great choice too, congrats!

It's not an argument but as the companies scale, I see that most of them often feel the need of switching to (or adding an extra layer) a BI tool for flexibility so I hope to see the same trend among the data analysts. It's now trivial to ingest the customer event data into your data warehouse thanks to Segment Warehouse, open-source tools such as Snowplow, and even GA4 which provides a free way to ingest the data into your BigQuery project.

The open-source ELT tools such as dbt can be used to build up similar models for product analytics using SQL. That way, you can use the default definition of `Power Users` out of the box and customize it later on if you need to join different datasets in order to calculate the same metrics as you grow.

I’m actually working on a similar product that works on top of the data warehouse using SQL, you model your event data (or just use integrations) and run ad-hoc funnel & retention queries but I must admit that the onboarding process is not seamless as yours. :)

0xferruccio
You nailed it on our persona!

I also love the idea of your product, for bigger companies a pattern we saw is that it’s hard to do entity resolution across multiple data sources

bhouston
Can I use June to get customer facing dashboards for customer slices of segment data?
0xferruccio
We haven't thought of this. Would love to learn more about your use case! Feel free to email me at ferruccio at june dot so
lessand_ro
That's actually a good idea. I remember I was trying to put our user growth/daily active on our B2C product landing page and I needed to replicate in SQL the Amplitude query (after figuring out how to export data). Being able to embed "customer-facing" templates from June might be an interesting feature!
0xferruccio
something along those lines that i was thinking about was embeddable iframes founders can add to their notion pitch decks or investor updates!
bhouston
Basically we collect analytics on behalf of our customers into segment. We want to provide access to these analytics to our customers, but just their slice of segment that contains their data. Each customer, of which we have a lot, wants their own slice of segment shown to them.
0xferruccio
extremely interesting - i'm not sure we can build this, but there's another YC company that is building this: https://explo.co/
lessand_ro
This looks like the next iteration on analytics products after Amplitude and Mixpanel, solves a real problem for founders and is one of those "why wasn't this built before" experiences. Literally spent days on Amplitude trying to get out a useful chart instead of working on my product, now June.so fixes this.
molsongolden
Were you able to produce the useful charts using June?

>Literally spent days on Amplitude trying to get out a useful chart instead of working on my product, now June.so fixes this.

This is a very compelling pull quote considering the value of your time as a product builder.

quentindty
Congrats on the launch!

I was one of those guys thinking Amplitude was all that I needed. By trying your tool, I realized that indeed analytics weren't supposed to be that hard to setup.

pranav7
Solid! Congrats on the launch
soumyadeb
Founder of RudderStack here. This is awesome - I see this being super useful for our users and would love to collaborate with you guys.

Congrats on your launch.

0xferruccio
That’s amazing, would love to collaborate too. Emailing you!
soumyadeb
Thanks. Looking forward
0xferruccio
couldn’t find your email and followed you on twitter. happy to chat there?
i_robi
Congrats on the launch guys!
spikefromspace
Congrats! Love the idea of pre-built templates and leveraging exists data pipelines via Segment and the onboarding was smooth! I actually work at Segment and would love to share a couple things that might make it easier to understand the reports for Segment customers. Let me know if that will be helpful and can send them over.
0xferruccio
Hey would love to chat :) Pinging you!

We actually also have a couple of questions around throwing error messages back to segment and your retry policies