We tend to believe we have a pretty good reverse-ETL product too which can be used standalone without event collection. Best is class is a moving target anyway and upto customers to judge :)
However, I do agree on the point around focus. Our positioning, go-to-market, pricing, use cases etc are centered around building the end to end customer data infrastructure. There are folks who already have pieces of the stack or don't need a full CDI (e.g. non PLG B2B companies) and only need reverse-ETL.
The market is enormous so I believe we both will do great. Congrats on the launch.
Hightouch is 100% focused on activating data from the warehouse. Everything we build is Reverse ETL or built on top of Reverse ETL - that means we spend every waking minute thinking about progressing the Reverse ETL space, just like Fivetran are laser-focused on SaaS data ingest or Snowplow on behavioral/event data ingest (other parts of the Rudderstack bundle)
We're a big fan of RudderStack's drive. As an ex-Segmenter, I can say that competing with that team is not easy. Best of luck! We will continue watching from the sidelines :)
The way it's differentiated is that Rudderstack does event collection + forwarding + some flavor of reverse ETL. In order to be successful with them you'd need to replace your whole stack and do event collection with them. A lot of companies already have an existing stack and they want to buy a best-in-class Reverse ETL player (something that takes 5 min to set up) and that's where we come in!