Then you could say the same thing about Hightouch and Segment. Segment == Rudderstack for all intensive purposes.
The way it's differentiated is that Rudderstack does event collection + forwarding + some flavor of reverse ETL. In order to be successful with them you'd need to replace your whole stack and do event collection with them. A lot of companies already have an existing stack and they want to buy a best-in-class Reverse ETL player (something that takes 5 min to set up) and that's where we come in!
We tend to believe we have a pretty good reverse-ETL product too which can be used standalone without event collection. Best is class is a moving target anyway and upto customers to judge :)
However, I do agree on the point around focus. Our positioning, go-to-market, pricing, use cases etc are centered around building the end to end customer data infrastructure. There are folks who already have pieces of the stack or don't need a full CDI (e.g. non PLG B2B companies) and only need reverse-ETL.
The market is enormous so I believe we both will do great. Congrats on the launch.
Agree RE: focus. Rudderstack is a bundle and there is a place for that.
Hightouch is 100% focused on activating data from the warehouse. Everything we build is Reverse ETL or built on top of Reverse ETL - that means we spend every waking minute thinking about progressing the Reverse ETL space, just like Fivetran are laser-focused on SaaS data ingest or Snowplow on behavioral/event data ingest (other parts of the Rudderstack bundle)
We're a big fan of RudderStack's drive. As an ex-Segmenter, I can say that competing with that team is not easy. Best of luck! We will continue watching from the sidelines :)
Thanks Tejas for your kind words :) We too have nothing short of enormous respect for what you guys have achieved. Looking forward to you and team to push innovation in this space forward.
On a high level, ETL/ELT is about sending data from your SaaS tools into your data warehouse (you are reading from different tools). Reverse ETL is about getting data from your warehouse into tools (writing into different tools). Building ELT is a fundamentally different technical challenge than building Reverse ETL. Aspects like types, rate limits, and destination state (knowing whether data already exists in a destination) are unique to Reverse ETL. Visibility becomes challenging too as some destinations have unique quirks, like API contracts where you write to them but you don’t know if the write was successful or completed until later. Writing to tools also requires references between objects (foreign keys onto existing data, like mapping Companies and Opportunities in Salesforce) that aren’t necessary in the ELT world.
From a product perspective, the UX is very different as well. Reverse ETL requires a lot more user input (ex: mapping which fields to update in a tool), whereas ELT typically mirrors data using a standard schema (without much user customization involved).
Great partnership, though I have to wonder if Fivetran will ever build this functionality out in their core product (though when I asked them to consider this a few years ago I think they politely shoved that suggestion into the trash can, glad you have proven out this space). I think you are quite right that this space is going to be huge, wish could invest in you!
But the TLDR is that Hightouch has more developer focused features (like a live debugger, alerting, version control with Git, and more here: https://hightouch.io/data-features/), a dedicated UI for business users to visually filter models (called Hightouch Audiences), more transparent pricing, as well as more integrations (70+) that are also deeper and customized for each tool.
Yes, Clickhouse is a top priority source for us to build next to enable real-time analytics (we already support Rockset as a source used by customers like Seesaw). Would love to learn more about your use case for Clickhouse: feel free to reach out to hello@hightouch.io!
Thanks so much for your support from the very beginning! We've only been in market publicly for a little over a year now actually. We figured better late than never (and it still feels early for us!) :)
We're partnered with a travel agency with GDS access. Additionally, we use various other OTAs that give us the full range of inventory for hotels and flights.
In general, travel agents that only use GDS don't have access to budget airlines such as Easyjet or alternative accommodations such as Airbnb or Sonder.
Ok makes sense. So you’re acting as a TMC but without the TA part? I guess the difficulty here is incident support: Say I’ve missed a flight and I need to be rebooked, hotel and taxi notified etc... With a classic TMC I call them on the 24/7 hotline and some agent will do it live for me. In your case the support line would be you right? Because your travel agency might not have access to the airbnb reservations etc. But then isn’t it tricky to intermediate the rebooking discussions between the customer and the agency?
Extra question: how do you manage the non-gds content? Do you ask your travel agency to add remarks to the PNR, or have you built your own database to track these “PNR+extra” bookings?
Sorry, lots of questions but it’s a really interesting idea!
We do the TA part, too. We book flights, hotels, Airbnbs, cars, etc. so we can reschedule everything in incidents, not just one part if customers use us full-service.
And yeah, we have our own database for everything. GDS is just one way to book and a "portal to the airlines" for us
