2022 Data Activation year in review

Halls are decked, cheer is spread, resolutions are…drafted (?!). And one more thing: it wouldn’t be a proper end-of-year reflection without a lookback blog post. Just today, we sent out an email to our customers titled ️⭐️ 2022 in Review: Your Year with Hightouch which consolidates all of their data activation stats and use cases into a shareable infographic.

Here’s what I got in my inbox—this graphic describes Hightouch’s own Hightouch usage:

Hightouch's usage of Hightouch in 2022

It’s been fun to provide this kind of customized look back to our customers (and to use Hightouch to make it happen! 🤙) ICYMI, check out our Playbook on how you can build your own Spotify Wrapped-like campaign! It’s a lot more approachable than you might think!

The State of Data Activation

This exercise got us thinking…we’re sitting on some pretty one-of-a-kind data ourselves that unearths a lot of interesting industry trends. Namely: the state of data activation (and really, how today’s organizations are bringing data teams and business teams together with actionable data). Below are some snapshots of where the industry sits today and how Hightouch is building a future where anyone can take action on their data. It’s truly incredible to witness the ways you are all pushing the bar with data activation, and we remain humbled by the creative ways you’re moving beyond BI to bring actionable data to your organization.

Most-used Sources and Destinations

Below is a look at the relative popularity of various sources and destinations based on the number of workspaces syncing data to and from them.

Top Data Sources

Top Destinations, by Category

As you can see, the majority of our customers' use cases for data activation support marketing, sales, and ad initiatives. What's more...users are activating data into multiple destinations to achieve their varied business goals.

The Hightouch Reverse ETL Engine: By the Numbers

Here's an aggregate snapshot of what passed through the Hightouch Reverse ETL engine this year.

Aggregate 2022 Metrics from Hightouch Reverse ETL platform

We didn't have enough space in the above infographic to show all the commas in those stats—but we helped our customers query 1,923,349,425,886 rows of data this year. That means we passed roughly 3.7 million rows of data through our sync engine every single minute 🤯.

And it's not just our scale that's impressive. Our sync engine reliably delivers these updates to over 125 downstream tools. Even with destination rate limits in place, our customers count on us to ensure their downstream tools stay up-to-date with the latest customer data...and fast.

It’s been quite the year! On top of these high-level metrics, there’s been a ton of innovation, growth, and FUN here at Hightouch. Let’s dive right in…

Hightouch Platform Innovation & Momentum

We’ve made huge strides in our platform to make Data Activation easy and frictionless for data teams and business teams alike. Our changelog tells the story, but our engineering team is full of savages (in the best possible way). We released hundreds of platform improvements this year—both big and small—some of the most notable being:

• Destination Catalog: We added 71 new destinations to our destination catalog, to close out the year at a total of 144!
• Audiences: Our Audiences platform is now an end-to-end platform for marketers, which includes the original audience builder plus five new features launched this year: Traits, Splits, Priority Lists, Breakdowns, and Overlaps. With this full suite of capabilities, Hightouch can now turn your data warehouse into a true CDP, thus the launch of our marketing campaign: CDPs are Dead.
• Platform Governance: We now offer industry-leading Enterprise-level governance features such as access control, audit logs, SSO, data masking, and more. With many Fortune 500 customers, this has become table stakes for our platform.
• Hightouch Notify: It’s never been easier to get notified where you work, with Hightouch Notify as a standalone framework in the Hightouch platform. We also launched new destinations like Microsoft Teams.
• Partner Connect: You can now find Hightouch in the Partner Connect Portals for both Snowflake and Databricks, offering customers one-click setup for both of those sources!
• Core Platform Feature Launches: We released a bunch of features that make Hightouch the best Reverse ETL platform for data engineers, including a full suite of dbt integrations, new observability features including a live debugger and warehouse sync logs, and a full, customizable toolkit of developer destinations (think: HTTP requests, message queues, serverless functions), among many others.
• Faster, Better Onboarding: We’ve invested in making the self-serve onboarding experience delightful, intuitive, and FAST. In the last 90 days, it has taken new users a median of 23 minutes to fully complete onboarding—that’s everything from configuring a source and destination, setting up a model, and scheduling your sync. The time to value is incredible, and we continue to push further here to make Hightouch more accessible and easier to use.

Our roadmap for next year is equally insane, and we can’t wait for you to start using our newest features. Most importantly, if there’s anything you want us to work on, please reach out. The reason our roadmap is so aggressive is simple: our customers ask for it, and we build it. We truly believe that our community should have control over the roadmap, so don’t hesitate to pitch even more farfetched ideas.

Building a Global Brand

There is one thing that cannot be replicated: brand. Our brand is not the colors and aesthetic on our website nor the marketing phrases we use. It’s the culture and the feeling our users get when they talk to us. The emotion that we instill in our teammates and they instill in our customers is something we value deeply and would not trade for anything else.

You may have noticed that we did in fact “rebrand” our website! I hope you like electric green and forest green because you will be seeing a lot of that 😉. Check out this moodboard to see what’s coming next.

We also built out our exec team, including adding a VP of Engineering, VP of Marketing and Growth, VP of Sales, and a soon-to-be-announced VP of Data and Finance!

We acquired two companies, Workbase and WhatIs, this year, as well.

Establishing a new category in an already busy market is no small feat, but we are proud to have been recognized by partners and thought leaders in the community. Some highlights were being chosen as Snowflake’s Partner of the Year, followed by Fivetran’s Partner of the Year. And even though we’re still a young company, we were recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor alongside many public companies, which was definitely a pinch me moment!

By the end of the year, our spirits were high, and we invited the whole team to our San Francisco office (yes, somehow we’re leasing this entire building pictured below), on the same week where we crossed 100 headcount. We host these on-sites twice a year and are very excited to continue doing so because the bonds created are priceless.

The Hightouch team at our San Francisco on-site, October 2022

Customer Inspiration

All of this progress is in service of our customers. We are inspired every day by the use cases our customers are finding for data activation. Here are a few notable customers stories from the year:

• PetSmart, a big box pet supplies and services retailer, creates scalable, personalized digital customer experiences across millions of customers and their pets with Hightouch and Snowflake
• IntelyCare, a healthcare staffing and training workforce management platform, leveraged their modern data stack of Hightouch, Snowflake, and Fivetran to grow 300%—during COVID—and find $1 million in marketing spend savings
• PrestaShop, an open source e-commerce platform based in Europe, leaned on Hightouch, BigQuery, Looker, and Fivetran to increase their Net Promoter Score by 7 points. They also enjoyed a 33% improvement to MTTR by syncing modeled customer data directly to Success teams in Zendesk
• Chalhoub, a luxury goods company operating in the Middle East, increased ad revenue by 40% and lowered customer acquisition costs by 30% by activating custom audience segments with Hightouch and BigQuery
• Ramp, a finance automation platform, automated 25% of their sales pipeline with targeted customer outreach by using Hightouch and dbt

This is just a small snapshot of the hundreds of companies who trust Hightouch to sync valuable data from their warehouse into business-critical apps. Can’t wait to continue to add to the list in 2023 and beyond!

It’s Still Day 1

We are entering this holiday season with a sense of gratitude for this incredible community and excitement for what’s to come. In our hearts, it still feels like Day 1. I still feel the energy of “we can make anything happen that we set our minds to” and “every single hire counts.”

As we look back on 2022, we have a lot to be thankful for, but even more to look forward to. Wishing you and yours a restful and reflective holiday season and looking forward to what 2023 has in store.