[killerpixler]

Interesting tool indeed. You made a good point about RudderStack and synergies there. I'm curious to see how hightouch is going to diffentiate from something like RudderStack, which has a boatload of reverse ETL functionality of its own. I mean event stream data and moving data from your warehouse back out to tools is pretty their mantra

[kashishg]

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!

[soumyadeb]

RudderStack founder here.

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.

[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 :)

[soumyadeb]

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.