Oh wow, this reminds of Hightouch (https://hightouch.io) and Rudder (https://rudderstack.com). It's interesting that all of these are positioned around data warehouses, which is generally very messy to deal with.
Overall, there's an interesting organizational dynamic that we've seen around data enablement. Marketing and other operational teams need it and it's often locked in the product space. It's usually not a priority for the eng team because they are focused on the core product, but the data is there. The important stuff (ETL copy of the product db) is usually not a huge mess.
We are inspired by warehouse tools like Looker that made that accessible to more people, giving them autonomy to be successful. Grouparoo takes that one step further to add on top of the data and make it actionable in all the other places that people want it.
In my experience this scenario is very accurate. Add to it the growing usage of tools like Pipedrive, Pipefy, Airtable, that sometimes prod-eng team is not even aware.
As a Rudder and Fivetran user, I can see a very complementary use case for Grouparoo. Where the first two are responsible for unifying events and external data in the DW and Grouparoo to sync user data to other tools.
Overall, we believe events are an overused approach in this space. They clearly have their place for impression data, but product dbs or data warehouses have lots of good stuff that isn't being used enough to drive goals. Then there's all the issues with getting that right in these other tools that no engineer wants to deal with (rate limiting, formatting, schedules, idempotency, etc).
So I hope there's a place because it's the gap we saw and are hoping to solve and share with the community. Email me if you want to chat more: brian [at] grouparoo.com
Hightouch.io cofounder here! Thanks for the S/O. Our online presence is quite limited so I'll post a summary here...
We've built an e2e marketing automation platform on top of your data warehouse. Marketers can interactively explore their customer base, run targeted campaigns in downstream email/ad/etc tools, and analyze results leveraging all the data they have in their warehouse.
RE: "messy data" -- Totally agree with bleonard's point that overall, the trend is towards data enablement. That said, I don't think any of the solutions in the markets (even Looker) suffice. I've attended dozens of calls with Looker users who first say that Looker offers self-service exploration but then fail to retrieve fairly basic information via a Zoom screen-share. The truth is it's really hard to do self-service data exploration generically. I think what's lacking from the "BI market" are more verticalized solutions on top of your warehouse (think UIs like Amplitude's funnel analysis, Intercom or Kustomer's segmentation interface, etc.).
To make our product work, we've built UIs that are super focused on particular tasks as well as a pretty nifty graph-based "modeling layer" that sits above your warehouse (which ideally, you use DBT/Dataform on) to abstract over complex JOINs and such.
This whole space is super fascinating to me. Always happy to exchange notes and talk shop RE: marketing, warehouses, customer data, etc. If you have thoughts, hit me up at tejas [at] hightouch.io.
Founder of RudderStack here. Totally agree that data warehouse is messy but marketing systems are way more messier. In my previous startup, we did a bunch of Marketo implementation and issues I ran into
1) generating a simple report (like how many people came to your website and then opened your emails in last 1 yr) used to take for ever. Storing data was costly.
2) You could not generate complicated reports, say combining marketing + product data (e.g. number of people who came through campaign X and did used the product)
3) You were stuck with their not-so-great UI.
4) Analytics is one use case. Segmentation is another. If you want to create a segment of users (e.g. customers using the free tier of your product and have become active in last 7 days) and sync that segment to multiple destinations like email, salesforce etc, there is not a great way to do that from all the marketing systems.
On the other hand, if you can get all the data in your warehouse, you can use the best of breed tools for storage (Snowflake etc), Visualization (Looker/ChartIO/Tableau) and so on.
But you would need a product like Segment, RudderStack (and now Grouparoo) to get the data into the warehouse and sync it from warehouse back to different destinations.
