Breaking free: Minno’s same-day migration from Segment to Hightouch
Minno is a Christian streaming platform that curates and delivers children's content. The platform gives families access to a rich catalog of animated and live-action shows that teach life lessons promoting Biblical values.
Minno, formerly reliant on Segment for event collection, faced challenges with the platform’s limited flexibility and efficiency, especially in handling various user and behavioral events. The rigidity of Segment's specifications and data schema hindered the team's ability to effectively capture custom behavioral events and integrate them with their data warehouse, Snowflake. Seeking a more adaptable solution, Minno transitioned to Hightouch.
The initial migration took the team less than one day, thanks to Hightouch's backward compatibility with CDPs like Segment and Rudderstack. Because Hightouch relies on the data warehouse for data storage, the shift from Segment to Hightouch eliminated redundant data storage costs, leading to significant savings and improved data delivery. Consequently, Minno's move to Hightouch has enhanced operational efficiency and data management capabilities.
Results
Operational Improvements
- Data delivery increased by 100%
- Sync frequency improved by 98.96%
- Increased cost savings by 41%
Greater Flexibility
- More flexible schema (supports any custom object, entity, or model)
- Granular control over event spec
Fast Implementation
- Replaced Segment Connections with Hightouch in one day (really about 10 minutes)
The Challenge
As a content platform, Minno constantly collects rich behavioral events across their experiences to better understand how users engage with the brand. This includes user events (account creation, trial started, subscription created, profile updated) to understand how users interact on the website and video events (played, paused, skipped, buffered, completed) to understand how users interact with content. All of this data is then used to optimize content efficacy.
Previously, Minno relied on Segment to collect these behavioral events and sync that data to downstream ad platforms like Google and Facebook. However, it was difficult for Minno’s team to capture custom events that didn’t fall under Segment’s rigid standard spec. Similarly, Segment’s inflexible schema structure made it nearly impossible to model that data in a way that could be accepted by downstream destinations.
To solve this problem, Minno wanted to leave Segment and adopt a Composable CDP architecture built entirely around Snowflake and Hightouch to achieve greater flexibility, accuracy, and data delivery.
“Anything that falls outside of Segment’s specs is considered a custom event, and the platform has no way of actually guaranteeing those events will make it to the appropriate third-party system. Any data that doesn’t meet Segment’s specs isn’t utilized.”
John Henderson
CTO at Minno
The Solution
Hightouch
Minno used Segment for event collection, but this architecture meant that the company’s event collection system was separate from the data work in Snowflake.
Minno wanted to take advantage of the flexible schema that the data team had built in Snowflake, but doing so would mean replacing Segment entirely. Minno turned to Hightouch Events because it natively works with Snowflake and is backward-compatible with Segment for an easy transition. It only took Minno ten minutes to complete the Hightouch Events implementation!
“The beauty of Hightouch events is that the SDK is built in such a way that you can rip and replace Segment or any other event collection tool in minutes.”
John Henderson
CTO at Minno
The fact that Hightouch runs directly on top of Snowflake (or any data warehouse) means that Minno’s data team can leverage their existing data schema and define their own event spec. Warehouse-centric event collection also eliminates a lot of redundancy because Minno now has one source of truth, so the data team no longer has to hop back and forth between two different systems to model data.
“We’re a video company, but that doesn’t mean our data fits the constraints of Segment’s understanding of what it means to be a video company. With Hightouch, we can control exactly what events we collect and what data we want to push to our downstream destinations.”
John Henderson
CTO at Minno
Hightouch Events has also helped Minno save money. Minno no longer has to pay for monthly tracked users (MTUs) as Hightouch pricing is based on events collected–not users. Moving away from duplicate storage in Segment has unlocked a cost savings of 41%.
Event data syncs to downstream tools are now much more reliable because Minno’s data team has full control over what data they collect and store. Hightouch has improved sync frequency by 98.96%, and data delivery has improved by 100%.
“All of the tooling that Segment sells is designed with a very narrow set of parameters in mind. You have to play by their rules, and the moment you need to do anything out of the box, everything falls apart. With Hightouch, we don’t have to give up ownership of my data, and we have far more flexibility.”
John Henderson
CTO at Minno
What’s Next?
The data team is in the process of further simplifying the event model to scale beyond just video content to deepen the relationship with members and provide data-driven insights to parents about the content their children are consuming. Minno is also in the process of building out a conversational cue feature to facilitate discussion around specific pieces of content.