Reaching the peak of the industry: Our G2 Story
How we leveraged real customer feedback to become #1 in Reverse ETL and transform the CDP landscape.
Gabriella Maffly
September 12, 2023
|5 minutes
It’s easy to see your own company through rose colored glasses, and we can admit we’re no exception. The cure to a big head? Customer feedback. We love G2 because it provides real feedback from real people (excluding the month G2 was hacked by bots).
Our customers have supported us through some major milestones since Hightouch was founded in 2020. G2 has been a great way to check in with the market, and get an honest view of where we stand. Over the past year since we began our G2 journey, our customers have played a huge factor in shaping our product roadmap:
- Our customers wanted to sync data into all their SaaS tools → we created over 200 destinations
- Our customers wanted real time personalization → we released the Personalization API
- Our customers expressed issues with their paid audience size → we built Match Booster
- And when our customers expressed interest in purchasing the missing gaps in their Composable CDP from Hightouch, we built Identity Resolution (and soon Event Collection!)
Today’s blog post is a love letter to our customers. We want to take a moment to reflect on our G2 journey, and how our customers led us to pioneering a new category and disrupting an established one.
Creating a New Category - Reverse ETL
We started our G2 journey by pioneering the Reverse ETL category. In 2021, we coined the term and in the two years since, Reverse ETL has become the industry norm across the data and martech world.
Since G2 recognized the category in the Fall of 2022, our customers have voted us #1 in Reverse ETL every single time (thank you!). The feedback we received was consistent: organizations loved how quickly they could deliver value through Hightouch. In fact, on average our customers have data flowing within 23 minutes of creating a Hightouch workspace. Data teams love the flexibility and security of working in their existing cloud environments, and marketing teams love the self-serve ability to dynamically build audiences to power their marketing campaigns.
This led us to think, how can we add more value to the business?
Disrupting the traditional CDP
The market spoke, and we answered. Companies like Chime, Warner Music Group and Autotrader came to us looking to set up a CDP without the 6 month implementation time. This sparked the beginning of what we coined as the Composable CDP, that allows teams to leverage their existing data stack to drive value immediately.
As we entered the G2 CDP category, our rankings mirrored exactly what we were facing in the market: we were a small fish in a big pond. G2 scoring is based on 2 measurements:
- Market presence (employee size, search volume, etc.)
- Satisfaction score (review count and rating)
As a sub-100 employee startup we couldn’t yet outrank the market presence of the big established CDP companies dominating the category. And technically, we weren't even a CDP in the traditional sense. Hightouch offers components of a CDP, but lets customers pick and choose the products they need to build their Composable CDP. Yet somehow, in just 3 months we completely disrupted the category and entered the leader quadrant.
The reviews and high scores from our customers catapulted us to the top. Our customers awarded Hightouch:
- #1 Fastest Implementation
- #1 Best Estimated ROI
- Leader in the CDP Category
As we continue to provide value for our customers, we know it’s only a matter of time before we take the #1 spot in the CDP category alongside Reverse ETL (🤞), but for now, we're pretty damn proud to see that we're making our customers happy, and bringing them immediate value they’re excited to talk about.
Here are a few select reviews from our G2 profile:
“As I moved away from an all-in-one CDP solution, the integration of Hightouch was instrumental in helping us make the data warehouse become the 'real' source of truth. It has allowed us to be more flexible in the data that we can send to third-party systems as well as back into our application database, which is the true operationalization of data that we needed. Even more so, when we have any form of hiccups in our distribution the team at Hightouch almost feels like they are just another department within our organization. They answer every issue, nearly immediately, and handle it like it the most important thing, even when it's a mistake on our part.”
John Henderson
Chief Technology Officer
, Minno
“Easy to use product that powers multiple data use cases for our business. Very intuitive UX, with constant updates that improve the user experience. Partnership with Hightouch helps us get value out of our existing data that lives in our warehouse, no need for any change to schema or strict rules. The huge variety of destinations means our data team can partner with Marketing, Operations, Growth and Finance team. It has supercharged the value we deliver for our business.”
Benjamin Dyne
Senior Analyst Product and Growth
, SiteMinder
“As I moved away from an all-in-one CDP solution, the integration of Hightouch was instrumental in helping us make the data warehouse become the 'real' source of truth. It has allowed us to be more flexible in the data that we can send to third-party systems as well as back into our application database, which is the true operationalization of data that we needed. Even more so, when we have any form of hiccups in our distribution the team at Hightouch almost feels like they are just another department within our organization. They answer every issue, nearly immediately, and handle it like it the most important thing, even when it's a mistake on our part.”
John Henderson
Chief Technology Officer
, Minno
“Easy to use product that powers multiple data use cases for our business. Very intuitive UX, with constant updates that improve the user experience. Partnership with Hightouch helps us get value out of our existing data that lives in our warehouse, no need for any change to schema or strict rules. The huge variety of destinations means our data team can partner with Marketing, Operations, Growth and Finance team. It has supercharged the value we deliver for our business.”
Benjamin Dyne
Senior Analyst Product and Growth
, SiteMinder
Wrapping Up
In the end, while it's a proud moment to post on social media all our G2 badges, what really matters is the people who got us here. To everyone who has supported Hightouch throughout this journey - thank you. We promise to continue listening to our customers and building products that help you activate your data to achieve great things. What inspires us at Hightouch is not data structures, Reverse ETL, or CDPs: it's what our customers do with that data. We’re proud to play a small part in helping our customers achieve their incredible missions.
That being said, we’re still gonna post these amazing G2 badges all over social media, because you all worked so hard to get us here. So when you see our flashy posts just know what we're trying to say is, thank you. ❤️
