Segment Launches New Program to Help Early Stage Startups Achieve Product Market Fit and Maximize Growth

Startups Will Receive Up to Two Years’ Free Access to Segment’s CDI, Alongside Great Deals for Leading Applications from Google Cloud for Startups, Amplitude, Intercom, Mode Analytics and More

Segment, the customer data infrastructure company, launched the Segment Startup Program, a new initiative that will provide early-stage companies with the financial, educational and business support they need to reach key product milestones and effectively grow their business.

“Having seen thousands of small startups grow into large companies using Segment, we know that even the fastest-growing companies struggle with things such as finding product-market fit, ensuring future revenue streams, and optimizing the sales funnel,” said Ilya Volodarsky, co-founder of Segment. “This is something we certainly experienced ourselves when founding Segment back in 2011, when we were just four friends in a dorm room. Having now grown to the point where we have thousands of customers worldwide and a growing global team, we want to help the next generation of startups get the right data foundations in place, allowing them to build truly customer-first businesses from the very beginning.”

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Helping Startups Master Their Data Early-On

From day one, every startup has to answer fundamental questions about what its value proposition is and what products it should develop and take to market. A business can only answer these questions if it knows what its customers truly want. This means making the most of every piece of data at your disposal.

For early-stage businesses, this challenge is particularly acute because they often lack the time and resources necessary to effectively collect customer data and connect it to the tools and applications that will help turn it into actionable insights. Without implementing a strong foundational approach to analytics during those crucial early stages, the problem gets worse as their customer base grows, seriously impacting growth.

Introducing the Segment Startup Program

The Segment Startup Program is designed to solve this problem by helping early-stage startups use analytics and growth marketing tools effectively so that they can grow their business and reach key product milestones. Qualifying startups receive free access to Segment’s Customer Data Infrastructure – a complete and flexible foundation to gather, manage, and route their customer data to any application with just a flip of a switch.

By offering free access to Segment’s CDI during those crucial early stages, as well as providing educational support and exclusive referral deals with its technology partners, startups will be able to better understand their customers, find the right product-market fit, and grow their company on a strong analytics foundation.

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The Segment Startup Program is open to any venture-backed, early-stage startup that is less than two years old and has less than $5 Million raised in funding. The program consists of three components:

• Segment Startup Deals. Startups receive up to two years’ free usage of Segment’s Customer Data Infrastructure. Participating companies will be eligible for Segment’s Team Plan, which allows an unlimited number of data sources and destinations.
• Partner Startup Deals. Participating startups will gain access to exclusive referral deals from Segment’s affiliated technology partners. This will help them to easily build the full tech stack that they need to understand their customers and grow their business, including leading analytics, data warehousing, business intelligence and email marketing tools. 
• Startup Resources. Segment will also be providing learning materials produced by Segment’s in-house experts to help participating startups improve their understanding of data analytics, product market fit, and how-to make the most of Segment’s technology — all delivered in a way that’s practical for founders, with onsite VC training, guidebooks, and additional web resources.

Over $1 Million in Value for Early Stage Startups

Segment is announcing over 15 new Startup Deals in their catalog, representing around $1 Million in value for an early-stage startup. Initial launch deals include Amplitude, Intercom, Customer.io, Google Cloud, and Mode Analytics.

“We’re delighted that Segment is so focused on helping startups get the right tools and infrastructure in place so early on,” said Sam O’Keefe, Head of Google Cloud for Startups. “Google Cloud provides tremendous benefits for early stage businesses. Solutions like Google BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, and Cloud Dataproc, can bring valuable insights from data, securely share data with other collaborators, and, importantly, scale alongside fast-growing startups.”

Mark Hansen, co-founder at Upsolve, a nonprofit online legal aid organization and current member of the program, said, “It can be challenging to close the knowledge gap around analytics at an early-stage organization. The Segment Startup Program has helped us improve our conversations around measuring goals and the way we operate. Their analytics recommendations have brought the team a real sense of business clarity and understanding of our users.”

Gustaf Alströmer, partner at startup accelerator Y Combinator, added, “Getting analytics right is critical for an early-stage startup. Segment helps businesses set up analytics the way it was meant to be—quantifying product-market fit, understanding customers, and trying new tools— all without redundant or time-consuming work. Beyond that, Segment is helping founders become analytics experts with a variety of educational materials aimed at making product-market fit attainable for early startups.”

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Ilya Volodarsky, Co-Founder of Segment, spoke to us exclusively about this announcement.

Early-stage startup founders have a lot on their minds. Are people using my product? How are they using it? Are they returning to get value week over week?

When we were first starting out, my co-founders and I did not understand how important these questions were or how to use analytics to find the answers. As a result, we spent 1.5 years and $500,000 dollars to, unfortunately, fail in our pursuit of product-market fit.

However, the story doesn’t end there. We realized that there wasn’t an easy way for our early startups to power all of our tools with the same data. So we decided to build a way. Fast forward to today, and Segment has helped tens of thousands of companies instrument and install their first marketing and analytics stack. We’ve seen how critical a solid data foundation and analytics can be to the success of an early startup (we included). And that is why we are launching the Segment Startup Program to help early-stage startups get started on the right track.

Introducing the Segment Startup Program

Early startups have been using our free Developer Plan for years to collect and send data to over 250 tools. But we believe we are well-positioned to help the startup community a lot more.

Today we’re excited to announce the Segment Startup Program, a program dedicated to helping early-stage startups use data to reach product-market fit and grow their business. The program offers startups a free Team Plan (up to $25,000 annual value), which includes significantly more monthly tracked users than the Developer Plan as well as unlimited sources and destinations.

The program also includes exclusive deals from our partners like AWS, Mode, Intercom, and Customer.io, and access to resources on important topics like data collection, analytics, and product-market fit.

• “Getting analytics right is critical for an early-stage startup. Segment helps businesses set up analytics the way it was meant to be—quantifying product-market fit, understanding customers, and trying new tools— all without redundant or time-consuming work.”

• – Gustaf Alströmer, a partner at Y Combinator

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Start with the right data foundation

The Segment Startup Program is open to early-stage startups that are less than two years old and have raised less than $5 Million raised in funding. The program helps companies power all of their apps with the same data, implement their analytics, and install the tools they need to reach product-market fit.

The program consists of three components:

• A free Segment Team Plan (up to $25,000 annual value) that includes unlimited sources, unlimited destinations, and additional startup office hours.
• Access to over $1 Million in software credits from our partners, including marketing and analytics tools like Mode, Customer.io, Intercom, Amplitude, Google BigQuery, and AWS.
• Educational resources including our Analytics Academy aimed at helping early-stage founders getting started on the right path for analytics, product-market fit, customer data, and building a growth stack

“It can be challenging to close the knowledge gap around analytics at an early-stage organization. The Segment Startup Program has helped us improve our conversations around measuring goals and the way we operate. Their analytics recommendations have brought the team a lot of peace of mind.”

-Mark Hansen, co-founder at Upsolve

Getting Started

If you’re new to Segment and meet the eligibility requirements, you can apply online and get started immediately.

If you’re an existing customer who meets our criteria, contact us to let us know, and we’ll get you in the program as soon as possible.

Are you an accelerator, incubator, co-working space, or venture capital fund? We’d love to work together to unlock even larger offers for your startups (up to $50,000 in Segment value). Apply here to join the Segment Startup Program’s network.

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