How Segment aced community engagement by driving value through multiple touchpoints

Calvin French-Owen and Ilya Volodarsky class at MIT where they invited successful startup founders to interact with the students and talk about their learning. The beginning of Segment.
Shalini Nair Tekwani
November 20, 2023

How Segment aced community engagement by driving value through multiple touchpoints

Calvin French-Owen and Ilya Volodarsky class at MIT where they invited successful startup founders to interact with the students and talk about their learning. The beginning of Segment.
Shalini Nair Tekwani
December 7, 2021

↩️ Pivoting multiple times to get the product-market fit right

This is the story of a bunch of students at MIT. Peter Reinhardt, Calvin French-Owen and Ilya Volodarsky took “The Founder’s Journey” - a class at MIT where they invited successful startup founders to interact with the students and talk about the learnings from their journey.

One fine day in 2010, Adam Smith, founder of email software company Xobni (Inbox spelt backwards) and machine learning company Kite was visiting MIT for "The Founder's Journey". They were completely blown out and in awe of the entire founder-journey after hearing Adam. In fact, Adam was so grounded as a founder that all three - Peter, Calvin and Ilya ended up believing, normal people like them could be founders as well.

That's where Segment's journey began.

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By spring 2011, after much brainstorming, they landed on an idea that they called Segment and applied to Y Combinator. The product was a tool that would let students flag whenever they were confused while the professor was teaching them. This would help the professors go back and analyse what points in the classroom teaching could be improvised upon, to help students learn better. No doubt, all professors were pretty excited about the idea! They got accepted at Y Combinator and bagged around $600K seed money from them. Reinhardt became CEO; French-Owen, CTO; Volodarsky, president; and they brought on another friend, Ian Storm Taylor (now co-founder), a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, to be the lead designer.

But soon after, the product failed. The students opened their laptops to use Segment, except that they weren’t actually using it, instead, they were actually opening their laptops and going straight to Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, and Gmail, and so on.

They shut it down and started rework on the product. Between fall 2011 and winter 2012, the co-founders worked 80 to 100 hours a week. They created a web analytics tool that would help companies understand their customer's behaviour. Again, this failed - the market was too crowded with a plethora of data analytics companies. It was December 2012, they had just $100K left in their accounts. This was their last chance before they fail completely.

They rewound back to the initial days of the Y combinator and decided to test out their last chance at a product-market fit. They built a product that would send data from the classroom feedback tool they built to customer analytics tools like Google Analytics/Kissmetrics/Mixpanel. Eventually, they open-sourced this product as a growth hack and also added themselves as one of the analytics tools. Soon, people picked up the open-source product. It got a large number of upvotes on Hacker News, thousands of stars on Github and a huge pipeline of signups. They had bagged their golden egg, finally!

https://media.giphy.com/media/lnlAifQdenMxW/giphy.gif

Here's a video where Peter talks about finding the right Product-Market fit at length! 👇

They worked closely with a bunch of customers to evolve the product basis their feedback. About six months after the team launched the open-source library, they had great traction but still had no revenue. So they went out and raised $2M based on the traction. About a year later, they crossed $1M in revenue and had entered a high growth phase.

Segment has come far since then and is now acquired by Twilio in a whooping $3.2B deal! Today 20K+ businesses use Segment's software and APIs to collect, clean, and activate their customer data.

👥 Building a safe space for users to level up their data strategy

The team learnt a lot from their journey of building Segment. Now they wanted to help users level up their knowledge of data strategy and build better products.

They went on to start a community on Slack and now host close to 1800 members on it. Besides the community, they also run a program called Growth Masters to help folks learn from experts in the Product & Growth domain.

The community team engages with the users at multiple touchpoints to keep the community as involved as possible. Here's a look into a couple of initiatives taken by the team to ensure they are always delivering value to their members. 👇

1) Live AMAs with experts in the Product and Data domain

Here's what you can expect from the AMA sessions 👇

  • Members can get specific questions answered during exclusive “ask-me-anything” sessions with featured experts.
  • With data volume skyrocketing, companies need innovative new ways to deliver personalised customer experiences at scale - learn how top companies are innovating their data strategies.
  • Network with some of the most powerful folks around in the data domain.
A sample of the recent AMA session announcement on the community.

2) Segment Community Live Training

Here are a few points on how the team is delivering value to their users through live training modules 👇

  • Walkthrough of how leaders across the industries are using Segment for their data strategies
  • Live demo of how to go about it - makes it easier to be on top of innovative ways to use Segment for respective teams.
A sample announcement of an upcoming community live training session.

3) Webinar and Q&As with the internal team

  • Get a sneak-peek into how the team executes multiple functionalities relevant to your use-cases.
  • Learn more about the product features, get your doubts cleared.
A sample of an upcoming Webinar + Q&A with the members

4) Preview of the product roadmap and upcoming feature launches

  • Be the first to explore multiple features launched and announced on the community through a quarterly product-roadmap walkthrough.
  • Get a peek into the product roadmap to help you plan your data infrastructure.
Announcement of an upcoming product roadmap session.
A feature release announcement.

5) Discuss integrations of other tools with Segment

  • Explore tools that can be integrated with Segment to help shape your data infrastructure. Know more on how to use and deploy them.
  • Learn from peers how they build their data module.
Sample of Slack <> Segment integration announcement.

6) Creating multiple resources and docs to make it easier for members to use Segment

  • Segment has a section called "Recipes" on their blog - to explain how to use various features and popular solutions of Segment to empower multiple teams in your organisation.

7) Growth Masters - Perfect the art of building and scaling products that customers love

  • Growth Masters is a free, on-demand video collection by Segment, that will teach you both the fundamentals and cutting-edge tactics of product management and growth. The video lessons cover a range of topics like finding your viral loop, running meaningful experiments, and perfecting your onboarding flow. These are power-packed lessons led by Gustaf Alstromer (Y Combinator), Guillaume Cabane (Growth Ex Machina), Lex Roman (Founder at lexroman.com) to name a few.
  • Get informative cheat sheets and slide decks - key learnings consolidated into an easily consumable format, decks used by masters and more.
  • Get your ticket to exclusive AMAs with the masters.
  • Opportunity to attend in-person classes and offline networking events hosted across multiple Segment offices around the world.

8) Twilio Signal Annual Conference

  • Big product announcements, interesting live demos, live coding experience - you got it all at the biggest conference by Twilio! Here's a look at how the 2021 conference went! 👇

🤝 Segment’s Community Referral Program

Besides working on community engagement to scale their user community, Segment also focussed on scaling their internal team through a powerful community referral program. They maintained a leaderboard for referrals and organised contests internally. Today they are a team of 700+ employees!

Community Referral Program at Segment. Source

Segment is a great example of how a community-driven company can ace engagement by exploring multiple channels to deliver value to its users. Its collaborative nature helps users build a customised data infrastructure that can be explored by multiple teams in an organisation basis their use cases.

To Summarise:

↩️ Pivoting multiple times to get the product-market fit right: A story of how the co-founder hit failures at multiple levels, pivoted multiple times and on the brink of failure, they found their golden egg.

  • Segment was conceptualised to be a classroom feedback tool. After multiple pivots, it landed on to be as we see it today.
  • Segment has come far since then and is now acquired by Twilio in a whopping $3.2B deal! Today 20K+ businesses use Segment's software and APIs to collect, clean, and activate their customer data.

👥 Building a safe space for users to up-level their data strategy: How Segment engages with the community

  • Live AMAs with experts in the Product and Data domain
  • Segment Community Live Training
  • Webinar and Q&As with the internal team
  • Preview of the product roadmap and upcoming feature launches
  • Discuss integrations of other tools with Segment
  • Creating multiple resources and docs to make it easier for members to use Segment
  • Growth Masters - Perfect the art of building and scaling products that customers love
  • Twilio Signal Annual Conference

🤝 Segment’s Community Referral Program

  • Scaling the internal team to 700+ employees with a powerful referral program.

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What’s a Rich Text element?

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

Static and dynamic content editing

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

Static and dynamic content editing

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

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