Really any tool around your business
probably could be better used with rich customer data in it,
and that rich customer data can come from Snowflake.
Welcome to "Powered by Snowflake,"
where I interview technology leaders
building businesses and applications on Snowflake.
I'm your host, Daniel Myers, and today I'm talking
with Tejas Manohar, co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch,
a data activation platform
that helps companies use their data in Snowflake
across their business tools
that sales, marketing, and finance already use.
And it's powered by Snowflake.
Tejas, how are you today?
Doing well, how are you Daniel?
Doing well, doing well.
So tell me, what is, in your own words, Hightouch?
Yeah, so Hightouch is a data activation platform.
And what that means is we help companies
take all the data from their Snowflake,
and instead of just using it for analytics,
by creating BI reports
and answering strategic business questions,
we help them actually activate the data
from their data warehouse for the day-to-day processes
of sales, marketing, and finance teams.
That's awesome. So as a co-founder of this company,
tell me about what made you want to create this company
and how did you actually go about creating this company?
Yeah for sure. So overall, the main reason
we founded Hightouch is really to help companies
activate their data.
So over the last seven to 10 years, we really realized
that all companies have been investing so much
in centralizing all their data in one place,
the Snowflake data cloud, for data analytics,
but when it comes to actually using the data
the main use case for data inside of the data cloud
has so far just been analyzing the data,
answering big strategic questions for the business,
creating reports that are looked at
in meetings and board meetings.
But what we really realized was
there's so many business processes
that are happening across a company
and sales teams, marketing teams,
finance teams on a day-to-day basis,
and those processes can be enhanced
by all the customer data
that's inside a customer's data cloud.
That's what we really aim to help with at Hightouch.
That's pretty exciting.
So looking online it looks like
you are currently at Series B funding.
Tell me more about the growth trajectory of Hightouch today
and when were you founded, things like that.
Yeah, so we really founded Hightouch about three years ago,
and in the last 1 1/2 years things have really taken off.
What we've found is that all companies of all sizes,
all industries, verticals, whether that's healthcare,
media and entertainment, financial services,
are all centralizing their customer data in the data cloud.
And they have all these SaaS tools around the company
like Salesforce, Salesforce Marketing Cloud,
Adobe, Facebook Ads, et cetera,
that could benefit from the data data inside the data cloud
but there's no link between the two.
So once we got Hightouch to the market
and really expressed our positioning
as a data activation platform
to help companies not just do analytics
on top of the data in Snowflake,
but actually activate their data
across all the different SaaS systems in a company
to improve sales and marketing KPIs,
that's when things really started to take off.
So we started the company about three years ago.
It really took off a year and a half ago
and we're used by hundreds of customers
that use Snowflake as their data cloud.
We've raised $40 million Series B late last fall
and have raised over 50 million total
and are aiming to 5X our business this year.
That is incredible and really exciting.
So from here let's see a demo of what you've built.
For sure. So before we dive into a demo
of the actual Hightouch platform,
what I want to do is show how data flow
fits into your overall architecture as a business
and where Snowflake fits into all of this.
So here on this diagram you can see
three phases of your data infrastructure.
First, you have data ingestion.
There's tons of different platforms out there,
like Fivetran for example,
that can help you take data from all your different sources,
whether that's your web events,
your SaaS tools like Salesforce,
advertising platforms, or even internal databases,
and stream these into your Snowflake data cloud.
Once that data is in Snowflake
that's where you can actually munch and crunch this data
using BI tools, as well as build source of truth tables
within your Snowflake,
like tables and views using tools like DBT
that represent things like, what's a customer,
what are the product usage metrics that I care about,
what's the revenue of my business.
Now after you have all that data modeled
inside of your Snowflake here, it's time for activation.
Hightouch is the platform
that you can use for data activation.
So once the data's in Snowflake
if you want to share that data
across all your different business teams,
every business team has a SaaS tool that they live out of.
For sales teams that's Salesforce.
For marketing teams that can be a number of platforms
from something like Adobe to Braze,
to advertising platforms.
For finance teams that might be an ERP system.
And the list goes on.
When you use Hightouch
what you can do is actually take the data from Snowflake
and start moving it to those systems
so that Snowflake can essentially be
the single source of truth
that powers not just the analytics at your business
but also your business operations across these tools.
That's awesome, it really seems like what you've built is,
Snowflake is a key component to the tech stack.
Certainly. So now I'll open up
the Hightouch platform and show
how it actually works under the hood.
So the first thing,
before you can start activating data in Hightouch,
there's a few one-time steps as prerequisites.
The very first step, since the whole platform
that we've built here is actually powered by Snowflake,
is to connect your Snowflake instance.
And when I say your Snowflake instance here,
I'm talking about the customer's Snowflake.
Since we're a connected application that connects directly
to our customer's Snowflake data clouds.
So, for the sake of time
we've already connected a sample Snowflake here
representing an eCommerce customer.
The next step, before you can start activating data,
which again is more like a one-time step,
or something you might do once a month or so, not every day,
is connecting the destinations
that you wanna send data to using Hightouch.
And to give you some context,
these destinations can be any sort
of business tool around your company.
So we have analytics tools
like Amplitude and Google Analytics.
We have databases like PostgreSQL and MongoDB
that you might be using
to power your product or application.
We have a bunch of free-form destinations,
like Google Sheets. A really common use case
of our application is just helping companies
take some data from Snowflake
and slice and dice it a bit more inside of spreadsheets.
And then the biggest category of applications we have here
are marketing systems.
So as you can see, there's marketing tools
from almost every ad network you can imagine,
Microsoft, LinkedIn, Bing, Facebook, Snapchat, you name it,
as well as marketing CRM tools like Braze,
Customer.io, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, et cetera,
and the list goes on.
Really any tool around your business
probably could be better used with rich customer data in it
and that rich customer data can come from Snowflake.
So for the sake of time, we've also connected
a handful of destinations here, as you can see.
Now once you've connected
your Snowflake data cloud and the business tools
that your company's already using to Hightouch,
you need to define what data you actually want to sync
from your data cloud into these tools.
What data points from Snowflake do you want to leverage
across these different SaaS systems?
To do that, there's two ways.
One, if you're a technical user,
like a data analyst or data engineer,
you can go into Hightouch and create a model
on top of your Snowflake data cloud.
So, as you can see here, it's pretty straightforward.
You can define a model via familiar interfaces
that you already use to query your Snowflake data cloud
on a day-to-day basis, like writing SQL.
So here we write a really simple SQL query
to select all the B2B users and this just gets executed
directly on your Snowflake,
just like it would be in any BI tool, like Tableau,
or you can even just directly select a table from Snowflake
without having to even know SQL
if you're a little less technical.
The other way that you can define the data models
that you want to reference in Hightouch
is for even less technical users, like marketing teams
that might know what they want at a high level,
but not know all the SQL syntax
or exactly the column names to get there.
So, as you can see here,
here's an example audience of customers
with an engagement score of less than 25
and you can preview it,
you can change the filters on this audience, et cetera,
all visually. And whenever you do any operation
inside of this UI, so whether that's clicking Preview,
Save, changing the filters,
querying the event history of a user,
all of that gets generated into a SQL query
just like the one we wrote in the models tab and executed
against your customer's Snowflake data warehouse.
So far, we've connected a data source,
our Snowflake data cloud,
we've connected a destination, Facebook Ads,
and define some models and audiences
that show the imported data from our Snowflake data cloud
that we want the rest of our business
to be able to leverage.
The last step is just defining how this data
actually shows up in the tools
that your business teams already use.
So for our example here, we're going to sync
some of these customer audiences that we've defined
from our Snowflake data cloud into Facebook Ads
so we can run a campaign off of it.
So here we'll grab our list of all users from Snowflake.
We've already defined what this is over in the models tab.
And we'll sync it over to Facebook audiences.
Once it's in Facebook, we can use this data
in all sorts of different ways,
whether it's targeting those specific users,
targeting users like them, et cetera.
So it's pretty simple to get your data
from Snowflake data cloud
into any platform around the company.
We'll show you just how here.
You can just simply map over data from Snowflake
into these systems without having to worry about
the APIs behind Facebook or the technical knowhow
of how to actually get data into there.
Hightouch handles that all.
So here you can see, I'm saying first name from Snowflake
should go to first name in Facebook,
last name to last name, email to email,
and I want to give the audience a name, All Our Users,
so that it shows up just like that in Facebook.
Lastly, if there's any sort of transformation needed
to get the data from Snowflake into your destination,
like Facebook, Hightouch can do that for you.
For example, automatically hashing
your PII data for security.
Now that I've defined how I want my data from Snowflake
to look in Facebook in this super easy,
kind of non-technical interface,
I can just define a schedule
that I want this synchronization to run on
and Hightouch will handle the rest.
So here I'm just saying, I want to run this every hour.
There's a bunch of other options
about how to execute these syncs
that can fit into your wider data infrastructure as well.
So now what we've done here
is we've created a model of all our users from Snowflake
and just told Hightouch some basic instructions
on how this should appear inside of Facebook Ads
and boom, the data synced over.
Anytime there's a change inside of Snowflake
we'll replicate that change over to Facebook
in the most efficient way.
We're not going to sync all the data every time,
just additions, just removals,
just deletions, that sort of thing.
And using the Hightouch platform
you can get immense visibility
into everything happening under the hood
in case there's an issue
or something you want to get to the bottom of.
So now that we've connected our Snowflake data cloud,
connected Facebook Ads as a destination,
created a simple customer audience inside of Snowflake
and synced that over using Hightouch,
you can go into Facebook Ads or any destination
and actually activate this data
by running marketing campaigns using the freshest data
from your Snowflake single source of truth.
That's awesome. The platform and application
that you've built on top of Snowflake is immensely powerful.
From here, tell me more about why you chose Snowflake
to build this application.
Yeah, definitely.
The simple answer is that we chose Snowflake
because all our customers already used Snowflake.
And that's where we saw the market heading.
When I was an early engineer at Segment before,
carving out the customer data platform space,
our goal at Segment was really to help companies
centralize all their data into one place
and activate that data.
But what I found was that over the last five, six years
it's really become clear that customers want
to centralize all their data in a data cloud,
inside a Snowflake data cloud,
and not just use it for analytics
but also activate all their data from there.
So that's why we chose Snowflake.
It was really our customers paving the way for us.
That's awesome. So it really seems like
you heavily leverage
the data sharing capabilities of Snowflake.
For sure. So our customers can also use
Snowflake data sharing to merge data
from third-party data sources
or enriched data sets online
to enrich all the first-party data
they already have in their own Snowflake account.
And that's a super common use case
that many of our clients are doing,
especially media companies,
like Warner Music Group or Imperfect Foods,
as they look to activate the best data from Snowflake.
That's really cool. So when choosing Snowflake
was there a certain process that you went through
as a company to land on Snowflake?
Did you go through?
A proof of concept phase or anything like that?
Yeah, definitely.
So honestly, choosing Snowflake was super straightforward.
At the time we were getting off the ground,
we signed up for the startup program online
and because our customers use Snowflake
and had all their data in it,
we knew we wanted to build off Snowflake
to provide the most seamless experience for our customers.
So it was a pretty no-brainer decision,
and the technology was a very self-service,
great documentation, easy-to-use process,
to just start building our platform against
and almost every feature that we demoed today
inside of the Hightouch application is built on Snowflake.
That's awesome. So, a lot of the folks that I talk to
regarding the data sharing capability,
one of the things that they mention is how data sharing
and many times helps eliminate or relieve
the need to have these API layers
on top of just data access.
I would imagine that so much customer data
that you're having to pull and integrate together,
how has that impacted the development speed
for you and your company?
Definitely. So honestly, the fact that customers
have already centralized all their customer data
in one place, like the Snowflake data cloud,
makes it so much easier to help companies,
like Warner Music Group, Lucidchart, Imperfect Foods,
just sign up for Hightouch, connect their Snowflake
and start syncing data
to their different business applications
and solving business problems within a matter of minutes.
If our goal was to help companies activate data
and they hadn't first centralized and modeled their data
in a core data cloud like Snowflake
then it would be months and months, if not years,
of projects to help them first do that prerequisite step
before they could use Hightouch.
So we're really thankful for all the work
our customers have already done in Snowflake
so that we can really just drop into their business
and start solving problems.
That's awesome. So. from here,
six months, one year down the road,
what do your customers have to look forward to,
like what's next for Hightouch?
For sure. So, today Hightouch is already
the leading data activation platform.
We help hundreds of companies just take data
from their Snowflake data cloud
and leverage it across all of their business systems.
But our goal is really
to make data activation capabilities available
to more and more folks at the company.
So right now it's super easy
if you're a data analyst or data engineer to write some SQL,
sync it over to a system like Salesforce
and now you're serving all your business teams
that live in those systems.
But what we want to allow
is, just like there's been kind of a wave
for a self-service data analytics,
we want to allow business users and marketing ops,
sales ops, IT teams to come in
and start activating the data in Snowflake
without necessarily being a data engineer.
And we think we're already 60% the way there,
but with features like Audiences and Traits
and more things that we're adding to our product,
we think we can really get to a state
where data activation is something
that marketing and sales teams can do on a daily basis.
Where should people go if they want to learn more about you
or maybe get in touch with Hightouch?
For sure. So you can go directly to our website,
that's high, just the word "high," touch.io.
So hightouch.io. Pretty straightforward.
You can also find us on Twitter, we're @HightouchData.
Or I'm personally Tejas, so T-E-J-A-S @Hightouch.io.
Thanks, Tejas, for joining me here today.
It's been awesome having you in the studio.
And for everybody, this has been another episode
of "Powered by Snowflake." And if you're looking to build
your next application or business on Snowflake,
check out developers.snowflake.com.
Thanks.