Segment tracked engineer job changes using LinkedIn URLs for reverse attribution
Guillaume Cabane · Guillaume Cabane: Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder | E1088 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Nov 29, 2023 · at 4:43
Guillaume Cabane, former VP of Growth at Segment, describes an attribution system Segment created to link enterprise sales back to engineers who had previously used Segment's free startup plan at defunct companies.
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“That's what we found at Segment. Really crazy attribution logic, where we found engineers across jobs by, and that's the unique lesson, keying not on the link, not on the email, because the email changes, domain changes, not on the name, that's not relevant, on the LinkedIn URL. Because unless you're a psychopath, you don't change your LinkedIn URL between jobs. It's the same, like, slug, right? And so we just took all the LinkedIn URLs of other people, and we said, hey, has that person came three months ago, four, five months ago? And if yes, did they come through a startup plan? And then we did reverse attribution that way, and we found that a lot of people coming for, like, you know, mid-market enterprise deals had used the product quarters ago at a small startup that had died, And that attribution was worthwhile.”
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