We're super excited to announce the launch of Pontoon. 🎉

A simple way to describe Pontoon is the following: the open source platform that automates data sharing with customers no matter what cloud they are on.

Scalable, efficient, and automated data sharing

Data sharing is the secret revenue generation playbook used by companies like Heap, Segment, Mixpanel, and others to generate incremental revenue while reducing churn. If you’re unfamiliar, data sharing is sending structured data to a customer’s data warehouse, without anyone needing to build a data pipeline.

The classic example most people are familiar with is Heap, which grew Heap Connect into an eight-figure product line used by nearly half their paying customers. Those that used Heap Connect churned at half the rate of those who didn’t use it.

This strategy was instrumental in Heap’s run up to $960 million valuation before being acquired by Contentsquare.

Data sharing platforms are hard to build

Despite being so effective, data sharing platforms are expensive and time consuming to build. The challenges come down to three core issues: data warehouses make it hard to share across competitors (e.g. Snowflake to Redshift), maintaining dozens of connectors is time consuming, and delivering the features data engineers expect — like backfills, alerting, and schema evolution — requires deep expertise in how data teams work.

This is expensive from both a cost and time perspective. As a result, despite Heads of Data loving data sharing platforms, few can actually build one. There’s a small handful of specialized products that can, but charge hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in fees and none of them are open source.

Our team’s story

Pontoon’s founding team previously worked together at Hootsuite, where we led the data team responsible for managing 40+ data integrations and over 50 billion data points.

We were regularly asked to build new data pipelines to pull data from SaaS products that Hootsuite used. Sometimes this was easy, but more often than we liked, we had to turn down the CMO, VP of Sales, or others because the SaaS product didn’t have an API or data export that worked at our scale (you might be surprised at how many SaaS product's data export feature means “we will email you a .csv file”).

"Once a report is created, and an email is sent, it will appear in a recipients inbox with a link to download the CSV" - A real SaaS product we were asked to build a data pipeline for

However, when a SaaS product had a data sharing integration where they would sync data directly to our data warehouse (Redshift), we would use it 100% of the time, even though it usually had an additional cost. We could set up the integration in a day and didn’t need to maintain a data pipeline. This got us thinking “why don’t more companies offer data export?”.

Announcing Pontoon

Pontoon is the platform we wish had existed when we were on data teams. One platform that companies can use to provide data sharing as a feature for their enterprise customers.

The benefits of data sharing can be broken down into three categories:

1. Improved user experience - Enable a better user experience by providing data sharing. No need for users to spend time building and maintaining data pipelines!

2. Incremental revenue (reducing churn) - Adding a data sharing feature can unlock additional revenue streams and reduce churn from large enterprise customers who have data teams.

3. Extending in app analytics - Data sharing is the last mile in helping customers get the most out of the analytics that are already available in a product.

Stay tuned

We’ll be regularly posting notes to the Pontoon website moving forward. This will include updates on our product, memos on the future of data sharing, customer case studies, analysis of high-performing data sharing strategies and a lot more! If you’d like to stay updated, star us on GitHub!