Hightouch Series B: What’s Next for Reverse ETL

Value First, The Rest Will Follow

Above all else, we want Hightouch to be a people-first and customer-first company, where everyone genuinely enjoys working together. The main reason we became founders was the ability to choose what we want to work on and who we want to work with.

At Hightouch, our core mantra is: "help customers".

This guiding principle makes it easy for us to frame the decisions we need to make.

As an example, we've made it a company-wide goal to focus on delivering value to customers. We do this by focusing everyone on one common North Star metric: Active Workspaces, which is the number of companies actively using Hightouch to sync data to their tools. The idea is that if everyone focuses on Active Workspaces, eventually those users will convert to customers. Notice how revenue is not the core metric, even our sales quotas are based on the number of customers, not revenue.

To help drive this goal, everyone on our team (ex: engineers, designers, go-to-market folks) talks to customers. We have dedicated Slack channels for all of our customers, regardless of whether they are paying us or not. Everyone told us this wouldn’t scale, and we didn’t care. We’d rather spend the time and money to make it work because we learn so much from customers - they teach us about new use cases for our product every day! In our onboarding emails, we even tell users that we prefer Slack over phone calls.

We treat customers like friends: not as people who buy something from us. Vice versa, customers treat us like friends: not as a vendor selling to them. These relationships are based on trust and they’re the reason our jobs are fun! Some days this could mean showing customers our Reverse ETL platform and helping them use our product, other days it could mean teaching them how to use Zapier or helping them set up a CRM for the first time. Not everyone is ready for Reverse ETL, but because we have conviction that at some point in time everyone will be, we can play the long game, rather than selling on day one.

Contributing to the Data Community

As Reverse ETL is an emerging space, we will continue to invest in more content and educational resources on best practices and use cases. We want to help as many people understand and use Reverse ETL, regardless of whether they build it in-house or end up using Hightouch. We will build our platform in public and explain how we approach technical decisions.

Our growth will enable us to dedicate additional resources to work with the community, whether it’s continuing to contribute to existing open-source projects like Permifrost, or creating new standards and tools that everyone can benefit from.

Final Thoughts

We hope this transparency into our process and story has been interesting. If there’s one thing we’re proud of, it’s the culture and the team that we’ve assembled.

As founders, we don’t solely define the culture here: it’s owned by everyone who’s part of the team. As we look back, some aspects of the culture that we have grown to love are:

• Help customers: Buying SaaS is boring. When a SaaS company genuinely cares and wants to help customers, it’s like a breath of fresh air - we treat customers the way we’d want them to treat us.
• Take care of each other first, business second: if people around you are happy and doing well, work is more fun, and we’ll be able to take care of the business together
• Win together, lose together: your job is not to do your work, it's to help your team do their work.
• We value impact over experience: anyone can excel here, regardless of where they come from.

We couldn't do this without our amazing team or our customers. Our mission at Hightouch is clear: we want to democratize data for everyone, enabling anyone to take action on data.

Join us

With that said, we are hiring! We have over 15 positions open at Hightouch across engineering, design, sales, and marketing. Come get to know us over a cup of tea or visit our office in the Mission in San Francisco! I’m sure by the end of it you’ll see what makes Hightouch special.

https://hightouch.com/careers or just email hello@hightouch.com and we’ll get in touch with you!