2023 Rewind: celebrating a year of growth

As we close out 2023, we want to thank our customers and reflect on an incredible year at Hightouch.

We founded Hightouch to help every company realize the untapped potential of their data. We saw the rise of cloud data warehouses like Snowflake and Databricks and realized that while these technologies were disruptive for analytics, we could help them positively disrupt how companies use data across marketing, product, sales, and more. This year, we've seen a rapid expansion of warehouse-native technologies and have been thrilled by the results we've achieved for our customers.

Reverse ETL takes off

Our original product, Reverse ETL, had a simple premise: to help companies sync data from their warehouse to business systems like CRMs, e-mail, advertising tools, and even databases.

A few years ago, "reverse ETL" was basically unheard of. Today, Reverse ETL is a standard part of data and marketing stacks across the enterprise. It's changed the way companies view the data warehouse– from a database for BI & analytics to the central nervous system of a business.

Hightouch's Reverse ETL platform continues to be voted #1 on G2 and has reached a tremendous scale. In 2023, we queried 17 trillion rows– up from 2 trillion rows in 2022. On top of that, we activated 285 billion customer records to downstream tools. With this, we've continued paving the way for enterprises to activate their data with utmost scale and reliability with features like streaming Reverse ETL, enabling real-time use cases off the data warehouse, and robust observability capabilities.

"We migrated from another Reverse ETL vendor to Hightouch because the pricing simply wasn't scalable, and the platform was missing key features for our data team. Hightouch is light years ahead of any Data Activation platform." -Garrett McClintock, Analytics Engineering Manager at Heap.

Composable CDP goes mainstream

That said, we never intended to stop there. Before founding Hightouch, we were early engineers at Segment, the leading Customer Data Platform (CDP) that Twilio acquired for $3.2B. At Segment, we realized the need for CDPs was greater than ever– a company's ability to leverage its customer data could create fantastic customer experiences and meaningful business impacts.

Unfortunately, we also recognized that the existing CDP architecture was not working. It wasn't just us: Gartner reports that over 60% of CDPs don't deliver value, and Forrester reports that 90% of marketers say their CDP doesn't meet their needs.

We've been evangelizing the idea of a Composable CDP and onboarding enterprises to the Hightouch platform since 2020. In 2023, this idea of Composable CDPs went from "buzzword" to mainstream. Companies that invest in their data warehouses increasingly realized they can power superior personalization with customer data by using the Composable CDP– with far faster time to value. This trend is only getting stronger with the rise of ML/AI.

We've worked tirelessly this year to support the Composable CDP on the data warehouse. We already had Data Activation solved with Reverse ETL– so we continued to push the art of the possible with new products like event collection and identity resolution that give the warehouse the remaining functionalities that traditional CDPs offered.

"We evaluated CDPs but quickly realized that no solution would allow us to activate our existing data in Snowflake. Hightouch bridges the gap between data and marketing so we can access all our first-party data and use it to build audiences." -Cynthia Caridad, Director of Lifycle at The Zebra.

Our next chapter: doing more with customer data

So, what's next? This is a question we get a lot. In just three years, we've pioneered two industry categories– Reverse ETL and Composable CDP. It's a bit crazy to think about.

Before I say more, I want to make one thing clear. Hightouch is not a "data tool." We exist to help our users drive tangible, meaningful outcomes. We've never been satisfied just syncing data places. We always seek to understand why users want to sync their data places and what they do next. This curiosity and focus on business impact is core to our DNA as a company.

For example, we heard from hundreds of performance marketing teams that the first-party data we were activating for advertising was powerful but needed more reach. With third-party data, companies could optimize their reach, targeting, and ultimately, return on ad spend (ROAS). Our users had to rely on data onboarding tools like LiveRamp to leverage third-party data in advertising, which has a wide range of complaints and variable results. In response, we built and launched Match Booster, which enriches customer data in-flight to ad platforms. It's faster, better, AND cheaper than traditional data onboarding solutions. That's the power of the data warehouse and Composable architecture.

In 2024, we're excited to continue deeply understanding how customers use their data across their business and build "superpowers" like Match Booster. We also want to help users close the loop to understand and optimize what's really working across their business, marketing campaigns, and more.

We've been honored by the continued support and engagement with our customers worldwide throughout all these changes. We share their stories whenever possible because they're the highest form of education.

We're thrilled for next year. We will continue investing in new capabilities and products that deliver exceptional outcomes and make Hightouch the ultimate solution for customer data. Thanks for joining us on this incredible journey.

Onwards,

Tejas, Kashish, and Josh