tejasmanohar

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, Soumya! I agree. Congrats on all your continued success at RudderStack as well.

This probably isn't the best place for an extended comparison, but since it's our launch post, I'll try to close the thread with a couple corrections for factuality. If anyone is interested in a deep-dive, email hello@hightouch.io, and I'm happy to set one up personally. And, I'm sure the team at Grouparoo would be willing to do the same ("contact us" at bottom of their website).

    * Add tags to contacts in mailchimp, zendesk or make lists of them in customer.io, Pardot, etc based on segmentation. I believe Hightouch Audiences is more like a filter.

    * Full workflow with branches, PRs, test suite in a repo. I saw Hightouch added git syncing to a known branch yesterday and it looks cool, but it's not the full workflow yet.

If I have to be honest, the biggest thing that customers love about our product is that it works and accomplishes their use cases. Platform features are cool, but from time to time, I have to remind myself that Fivetran has proven that integrations and actually working comes first, and it is volume but not _just_ volume... our philosophy (destinations as a product), design, and progress there is quite differentiated from the space. You can read more in our Series A announcement from a few months ago at https://hightouch.io/blog/series-a

PS: I haven't tried Grouparoo in a while. I do love the concepts, will give it a swing!

Not implicit but - declarative! Our goal is to provide enough context in our docs, app (e.g. autocomplete, automatic schema discovery, etc.), and resources to guide users through this and then recipes on top for common workflows!

We do a lot of validation upfront (at both the schema & data layer), and I think it's still early days there... this is a big opportunity IMO. Great callout.

We find people start with a simple SQL model + sync and then bounce back and forth and edit their queries as they explore our columns.

Good callout. Sometimes, I joke that warehouse ingestion latency is the bane of my existence, but it's improving...

Our average customer runs Hightouch syncs roughly every hour, but we can actually run syncs up to every minute! HT has a lot of optimizations like only sending changes to destinations instead of all data every run.

On the warehouse side, we're seeing a lot of improvements. BigQuery has streaming insert APIs [0] implemented with a parallel database on the backend that's joined at read time. Combined with timestamp partitioned tables (sortable) and our in-warehouse diff'ing, you can actually create a streaming pipeline in Hightouch. Some companies like JetBlue are doing cool stuff with lambda views on top of Snowflake [1]. Our power users at Hightouch are running syncs as fast as every minute.

For wider context, we find 90%+ of business use cases to be just fine in batch. It's amazing to see how many people are still replacing... manual CSV workflows... with Hightouch :)

That said, there are some use cases for truly real-time workflows (e.g. a post-checkout email), and for that, customers either implement outside of Hightouch or lately, we've been fiddling around with letting customers plug directly into streams like Kafka, Kinesis, PubSub - though they lose the power of SQL aggregations _for now_.

Streaming SQL databases like Materialize [2] will fix this fundamentally, and Hightouch can connect to them. Email hello@hightouch.io if you want to try any of the new stuff!

[0] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/write-api [1]: https://discourse.getdbt.com/t/how-to-create-near-real-time-... [2]: https://materialize.com/

Haha thanks. Love some friendly competition :). In all seriousness, though we're focusing elsewhere, the OSS angle is cool.

If you're interested in self-hosted though, just reach out at hello@hightouch.io.

That said, IMO one of the coolest parts of our tech is our "hybrid architecture". Out of the box, no data is stored in Hightouch - it's all in your cloud (warehouse, s3 bucket). This is how fintech (Plaid, Blend, Betterment, + some banks now!) and healthcare brands like Headway use us. We've also done a ton of compliance work and have certificates for SOC2 Type II and whanot.

Cofounder here! Not quite. In Hightouch, you define your model (SQL) and create a sync (point-and-click or JSON/YAML).

The syncs are declarative, not imperative. They don't map 1:1 to API calls by design. You tell us what you want the destination to look like, and we figure out how :). Kinda like how a database creates the best plan for your SQL query before executing it.

Here's an example - https://i.imgur.com/05T5iKK.png. This sync maps your users table to Salesforce "Contacts" and the mapping interface also encodes the foreign key relationship between Contact:Account in Salesforce. Under the hood, we do all the lookups, caching, batch API calls using the bulk API, automatically handle rate limits, and only send changes from your database.

This is one of our key design differences compared to iPaaS tools like Tray, Zapier, Workato, Mulesoft, etc., which tend to just map actions to API calls 1:1. Data integration being declarative is something I'm really passionate about personally... wrote a blog with more examples at https://hightouch.io/blog/the-future-of-data-integration-wha...

Congrats! We at Hightouch [0] ("reverse ETL") are excited to see Airbyte here on HN. We've been following Michel & John for a while now since the YC days, and from the outside, it seems like they've been consistently shipping incredibly quickly ever sinec the open-source project launch.

@mtricot -- You mention that a big value prop of Airbyte is providing an interface for building custom connectors. Have there been interesting learnings on designing an ideal "interface" to provide developers? How does the interface you provide compare to that of Fivetran's Functions offering [1]?

[0] https://hightouch.io

[1] https://fivetran.com/docs/functions

Hightouch.io cofounder here! Thanks for the S/O. Our online presence is quite limited so I'll post a summary here...

We've built an e2e marketing automation platform on top of your data warehouse. Marketers can interactively explore their customer base, run targeted campaigns in downstream email/ad/etc tools, and analyze results leveraging all the data they have in their warehouse.

RE: "messy data" -- Totally agree with bleonard's point that overall, the trend is towards data enablement. That said, I don't think any of the solutions in the markets (even Looker) suffice. I've attended dozens of calls with Looker users who first say that Looker offers self-service exploration but then fail to retrieve fairly basic information via a Zoom screen-share. The truth is it's really hard to do self-service data exploration generically. I think what's lacking from the "BI market" are more verticalized solutions on top of your warehouse (think UIs like Amplitude's funnel analysis, Intercom or Kustomer's segmentation interface, etc.).

To make our product work, we've built UIs that are super focused on particular tasks as well as a pretty nifty graph-based "modeling layer" that sits above your warehouse (which ideally, you use DBT/Dataform on) to abstract over complex JOINs and such.

This whole space is super fascinating to me. Always happy to exchange notes and talk shop RE: marketing, warehouses, customer data, etc. If you have thoughts, hit me up at tejas [at] hightouch.io.

Many of the rules aren't rules. We ran a travel company and used Stripe in the past, which is also one of the disallowed industries. We got approval from Stripe after proving that we have a negligible fraud & chargeback rate due to being focused on business users

I agree with this. Transparency is key here.

Even with the same fare class, the tickets sometimes cost more through the change interface on United.com. We've added more detail to our post-- https://bookwithcarry.com/blog/united-cheap-flights-coronavi...

I can assure you that there was no intentional fudging here, and if there's something we're missing, we'd be the first that would like to know it. Due to all the discussion about fare classes, we've also included information in the blog post about problems in the change flow related to that.

Hey! Really sorry for the delay here. We've taken a step back and updated our original post with a much more detailed example and explanation given the response here https://bookwithcarry.com/blog/united-cheap-flights-coronavi...

Would you mind posting your itinerary? Collecting more examples here...

I'm sorry, but that's blatantly false. The original itinerary is a one-way flight, not a round-trip.

I'll send the original receipt in a few minutes once I scrub all sensitive passenger information.

Author here...

Might be misunderstanding, but United is letting you change the route (X to Y) and dates between flights-- that's not the problem. What's messed up here is that United is not showing you the best prices available on the market when you're actually changing your flight, and that's regardless of what route or type of flight you're changing to.

To summarize, one of our users bought a flight and when they went to change it, United showed us the "new flight's price" as something almost twice the actual online rate if you search on United.com or GFlights.

Author here. Didn't realize this blew up on HN...

We don't know the cause of the difference in price, but we're comparing two basic economy tickets here so if there's any fare difference, United should at least clarify to the user why...

United and other airlines are running ads [0] on how users can book w/ confidence and get free changes so IMO, it's just irresponsible to have things like this slip through the cracks-- intentional or not.

Overall, United has been consistently being anti-user with their policies related to coronavirus. For example, making users wait 12 months to get a cash refund [1] if your flight is delayed by them. Not a great look.

[0] https://twitter.com/tejasmanohar/status/1239332916070473728

[1] https://www.dansdeals.com/points-travel/airlines/united/unit...

Southwest doesn't like the apples:oranges comparison of them vs other airlines / sorting primarily on price like most online travel sites do. This is because they offer other amenities that are not common for airlines, like 2 free checked bags & no cancellation/change fees.

We reflect these effectively and basically give them a big ad on the top of Google Flights so I'm hoping SW will be OK with it :)

Ah yes, chrome extensions aren't on mobile so we just let you enter your email to get an email to install it when on desktop. You can also use the following link when on desktop :)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/book-with-carry/me...

Maker here! I've wanted to see Southwest rates on Google Flights for a very long time, but they've never been there. Last week, my friend and I decided to take matters into our own hands and make them available via a chrome extension.

It was both fun technically-- intercepting Southwest requests & scraping data out of an iframe-- and even more fun to poke around all the deals once it worked. Hope y'all find it useful!

Is it just me or is it hard to get any meaningful insight on the strength of each correlation from the visualization?

Just one datapoint but When I left Segment (400-500 employees), they were still ok Gusto

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

Good point. Travel Point multipliers can be achieved via setting a merchant code (MCC) of travel on charges (stripe, for example, supports this.

The trip insurance card benefit— I don’t think we can satisfy right now. We’re exploring ways to use the user’s own CC with the end vendor (eg airline) rather than us charging the user separately. “credit card tokenization” should work here (Spreedly, TokenX) but it’s non trivial due to how many vendors are in the space

Email me if either of these are stopping you from wanting to use the service, and we’ll figure out a workaround or let you know when it’s solved!

We have customers using SMS and email as well. We’ll highlight those words on the site

Maybe we’ll add a web app chat sometime, too. But would SMS satisfy the use case you’re thinking about? Also, do you not use Slack or do you use it but not want to use it for travel? If latter, why?

FWIW, maintaining support for more platforms is easy when it’s just text, but Slack is very powerful / can have rich UIs (eg a book button or a form in a response).

Not exactly-- it's complicated. Concur is an expensing product that also has a corporate travel booking UI platform that sits on top of travel management companies (TMCs), some of which have their own portals with phone lines and chat services.

Just curious (not trying to sound snarky)-- Do you use Concur? If so, I'm curious if you prefer it to booking travel yourself. In research, we only met one traveler who was satisfied with Concur, and it turned out that they had an assistant using it for them. Our goal is to make a travel tool that's an employee perk and a joy to use, and one that saves the company even more money through saving employee time.

That and also distribution. One of the hardest part of breaking into enterprise is selling, and once big companies have a sales motion in place and locked-in customers (both in data on their platform and internal processes), penetrating crappier products into the market is increasingly easier so the quality bar goes down to some extent.

Hi Varun! I think we have many mutual friends :)

We think Pana is smart. Interviews are definitely a large part of travel expenses in the Bay Area. My guess is by specializing in guest travel, Pana can be used in parallel to other tools at a company, which is a big advantage. We're exploring some similar "parallel" approaches but not completely honing in on interview travel right now.

Have you used Pana as a candidate? How'd you find it?

PS: We're also exploring some other group travel opportunities-- eg conferences, weddings, etc. We think this is a huge market that is nowhere near cracked.

We think both chat and navigational UIs have a time and place. This should really be an essay, but I'll try to keep it short.

Chat isn't being used to say we use chat. Chat allows us to easily use humans on the backend to interpret things that computers are just much, much slower at doing right now and would require a lot of engineering work for a wide breadth of user states that are currently unknown due to lack of data / users. I personally do believe the _ideal_ (golden/dream state) UI would be a "navigational" one that makes a lot of assumptions but states them all, asks a lot of certain dynamic questions, and presents information in different styles depending on context. Humans are quite good at this (most people love Slack'ing their assistant to book travel), but we really haven't found a UI that does this well for travel and don't believe it's the best way to start attacking the underlying problems.

However, I agree that some parts of the travel journey should be a navigational app though and not chat-based. For example, checking an itinerary is better done through navigational UI-- I don't want to reference a chat transcript for that. (TripIt is ok here and works off of your email, we might make something of our own later).

Founder here. Found you on Twitter :). Will reach out