A tale of product scoping and how we ended up taking two years to launch our own SDKs 📚 😂

When we started our startup 2 years ago we made the choice to build **exclusively** on a third party data source. 2 years later we've decided to build our own data pipeline. I would have never thought it would take us so long to get there. Here is our story and what we learned along the way 🤗 Hope this sparkles some ideas in the community. ________________ “I don’t have Segment.com installed on my app. Can I still use June?” (June is the name of our product) We heard that hundreds of times since we started our company. Now the answer is YES! You can use our product without Segment. You can still use Segment if you want to, but you don’t have to. I think as a fellow startup founder you’ll appreciate the thought process behind the timing of this decision. We started working on our product (June) two years ago now. We started building it because let’s be honest - most people at a tech company don’t have a clue of how their product is being used. We think that this is because of two reasons: 1. Existing product analytics tools are complex and time consuming to use. 2. People don’t have the time to learn what and how they should be tracking. And even if they do, there aren’t any good resources to know how to act on what they learn. We wanted to build a tool that is easy to use and that would give you the insights you need to make better decisions with the least setup possible. With these easy to use insights calculated in the same way for every digital product, we then built benchmarks that would allow you to compare your product to others in your industry. We then built insights - with call to actions - to help you talk with the right users to get the feedback you need to make a better product. To test that our assumptions were correct we built June on top of Segment. Companies using Segment were a great test market for us. This is because Segment customers already have access to any other product analytics tool they want. This forced us to build something that is both different and valuable enough to be worth switching to. We also had the advantage of being able to connect to Segment data in a couple of clicks, which made it easy for us to onboard thousands of customers. Now that we’ve been able to test our assumptions and validate our product-market fit with thousands of B2B SaaS companies, we’re ready to take the next step. We’re now ready to build June on top of our own data pipeline. This will allow us to build a product that is even easier to use and that will give you even more insights. **💡 Learnings** If you're building a startups and can do it on top of an existing data source, then I would strongly advice to do so. It will force you to focus on the value you can deliver on top of it. It's hard work, sure, but it's real work. Hope this tale helps out! cheers Enzo