They almost deleted their side project. Twilio paid $3.2 billion for it (the Segment story)

Peter Reinhardt and Calvin French-Owen went into Y Combinator in 2011 with a classroom engagement tool for college lectures. Nobody used it. To understand who was even visiting their site, they wrote a small JavaScript snippet called analytics.js. It sent user data to every analytics service at once. They almost deleted it before posting it to Hacker News. Instead they posted it. It hit the front page. The classroom app, their actual YC project, had no users. The snippet had thousands of developers using it overnight. They killed the classroom app and went all in. Segment became the customer data platform that companies like IBM, Intuit, and Atlassian used to route their user data anywhere. In 2020, Twilio acquired Segment for $3.2 billion. The lesson: your real product is often hiding in the tool you built to understand your users.

#startup #founders #ycombinator #segment #startupstory

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