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Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

forbes.com

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Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#121

Post by devoutsalsa »

namuol wrote: post #110
hooande wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why wouldn't someone just hire a developer to do this? My understanding is that the market for contractors is oversaturated right now. You could probably pay someone hundreds of dollars to write software that interacts with web services etc if you look hard enough Like the grandparent comment, it's hard for me to imagine that there are enough people in need of this service to justify a $5B valuation

Developers are ridiculously expensive and comparatively slow for many tasks.

Also, no developer you’d hire with confidence is gonna get out of bed for an “I can barely explain myself, but all I need is...” job that pays a small amount.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#122

Post by ErikVandeWater »

superbcarrot wrote: post #29

Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. Like if you showed me the wikipedia page for Zapier and asked me give it some value, I would be way off. Or if you pitched the business idea to me, I would tell you do something better with your time.

Why are you assuming the value VCs give it is even close to an honest estimation of its value?

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#123

Post by jojobas »

narrator wrote: post #103
superbcarrot wrote: post #29

Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. Like if you showed me the wikipedia page for Zapier and asked me give it some value, I would be way off. Or if you pitched the business idea to me, I would tell you do something better with your time.

>Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. This is because you lack the most overlooked and most difficult to teach skill in investing: empathy. Zapier lets non-programmers, the vast majority of the planet, do things that programmers do. Many programmers have poor empathy and thus make bad salespeople and investors. If you can understand how most of the planet thinks…

There was already plenty of middleware tools that allowed API to API translation.

They all (and I assume Zapier is no exception) only allow "no code" integration in only the most basic scenarios.

I don't think it has much to do with empathy, much rather unbounded money printing of late.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#124

Post by ghiculescu »

bradlys wrote: post #16

Congrats to the founders for not taking much funding but for employees... this has to suck unless they get to sell their shares to Sequoia as well. (If they even got any options...) Maybe they don't compete for SV talent and most employees aren't used to even getting options as part of compensation. Is there a specific reason a company would have IPO in mind but wouldn't say they are looking to do an IPO eventually?…

Most people would prefer to be paid a good salary for doing good work, rather than uncertain lottery tickets and an obligation to understand how they work.

I think most companies would prefer to operate this way, too.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#125

Post by monoideism »

alexashka wrote: post #30

This company reminds me of library vs service topic on here a couple of days ago. 5 billion dollars for what should've been a free set of libraries and competing UI interfaces to cater to different levels of tech savviness. It's crazy how complicated the simplest things are in tech that these companies even need to exist. Hopefully it's just growing pains, rather than consolidation and a swamp for decades to come, li…

I agree overall that many things suited to libraries have become SaaS, but Zapier and similar are well-suited to being a SaaS. For example, a lot of Zapier's services are triggered by incoming webhooks, which doesn't work so great running on the boss's desktop. Same with cron-triggered services.

You really need to run these kinds of services on a server. And the people who use Zapier typically aren't comfortable setting up a server.

Also, there are some very well-done and rather old open source alternatives to Zapier (Huginn, Node Red, etc) but they run best on servers for the reasons mentioned above, so few non-technical people use them.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#126

Post by RC_ITR »

hooande wrote: post #95
djrogers wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not surprised that people on a developer focused forum would find little to no value in something that enables automation without programming. Y’all can probably automate interactions with hundreds of web based services in your sleep, using multiple languages, with unit tests, and a Turing complete ML-based proxy server for high availability. For the rest of us, Zapier is a little like magic. Granted there are ot…

why wouldn't someone just hire a developer to do this? My understanding is that the market for contractors is oversaturated right now. You could probably pay someone hundreds of dollars to write software that interacts with web services etc if you look hard enough Like the grandparent comment, it's hard for me to imagine that there are enough people in need of this service to justify a $5B valuation

The process of hiring someone for 'Download attachments from this email address to my Dropbox, then create a note in Quickbooks to pay the invoice' is a lot more complicated / expensive than just using Zapier.

I think you're overestimating what people use Zapier for.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#127

Post by monoideism »

mooreds wrote: post #62
isoskeles wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am using Zapier because their service was very easy to implement a webhook for what I needed at the time. However, the price is high enough that they're on my short list of vendors to move on from when I have the time to spend building my own integration (not replacing everything Zapier does, just for my use-case). I suspect I am not their intended customer as I don't get a lot of value out of the dozens (hundreds?…

I'll tell you about the first time I started using Zapier. I wanted to move some data from google spreadsheets to some other system (I don't actually recall what it was, it was 2012). I was on a team of three devs supporting a business critical application. The options for me were: * bump something else to have a dev build out the integration * pay the monthly fee to enable a non technical person to build the integra…

> pay the monthly fee to enable a non technical person to build the integration

I'm just curious how that went. Was a non-technical person able to learn Zapier enough to carry out the task? Were they totally non-technical, or just not a professional dev?

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#128

Post by xwolfi »

narrator wrote: post #103
superbcarrot wrote: post #29

Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. Like if you showed me the wikipedia page for Zapier and asked me give it some value, I would be way off. Or if you pitched the business idea to me, I would tell you do something better with your time.

>Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. This is because you lack the most overlooked and most difficult to teach skill in investing: empathy. Zapier lets non-programmers, the vast majority of the planet, do things that programmers do. Many programmers have poor empathy and thus make bad salespeople and investors. If you can understand how most of the planet thinks…

Dentists lack empathy: they cant understand how most people think and never explain how they think outside of their bubble.

Our startup, Dentir, makes you do things dentists do :p

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#129

Post by sgpl »

superbcarrot wrote: post #29

Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. Like if you showed me the wikipedia page for Zapier and asked me give it some value, I would be way off. Or if you pitched the business idea to me, I would tell you do something better with your time.

I think another thing to keep in mind is that wikipedia pages don't tell the whole story. So you shouldn't feel bad about being way off.

Investors assigning value have access to other metrics not visible to us - customer numbers, growth numbers, revenue and what the revenue growth looks like, internal product roadmaps and other areas of growth, etc.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#130

Post by marketingtech »

swyx wrote: post #116
marketingtech wrote: post #28

Zapier joins Tealium and Segment on the list of billion dollar valuations for powering the next generation of ad tech. As cross-site cookies and browser pixels are increasingly blocked, ad platforms are moving from browser-based tracking to server-side data transfer. Like those other companies, Zapier provides a single integration point that funnels user and conversion data to dozens of marketing companies' server-si…

i'm sorry but you, an account named marketingtech, are extremely blinded by your perspective right now. Zapier charges $599 usd for 100k "tasks" per month. you want to use Zapier for adtech ? LOL.

If you have 100k transactions or even landing page views per month, $599 is going to be the cheapest part of your advertising stack.
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