Live data from Hacker News

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

forbes.com

201–210 of 267 posts

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

#201

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’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…

The thing is that no-code solutions are nothing new or unique; they're a dime a dozen, and have existed almost as long as microcomputers have. What's not obvious is why Zapier's version is (apparently) a revelation. I'm not saying there is no reason, but that's probably where the GP is coming from.

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

#203
post #109
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, Amazon never pays dividends. And you probably cannot really vote on anything with your stock either. So what's the point? There is an interesting article about Facebook with a similar opinion. Zuck owns the majority vote and they never pay dividends. What's the point of owning the stock?

> What's the point of owning the stock? to sell for capital gains when it is higher in the future. Dividends aren't the only way to generate a profit. And for a lot of high income earners, dividends are very tax inefficient as well.

Sounds exactly like Bitcoin!

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

#204
Wait, did I read this right? 1.3m round valued at 5b? Lmao. I haven't heard of such a round before. Why such a small %?

Edit: I read it wrong, false alarm. Zapier managed to reach a 5b valuation given that they only needed to raise 1.3m in funding total. Impressive!

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any other good sources, like books or articles ?

The valuation of current tech companies is way astronomical compared to what is considered normal for mature companies. The average price to sales for S&P used to be between 1.5-2.5 for many decades. However for these newly IPO companies the price to sales ratios are around 10-15. Similarly the P/E ratio for S&P companies used to be in the 15-25 range to the considered normal . However with these internet companies,…

> The average price to sales for S&P used to be between 1.5-2.5 for many decades. However for these newly IPO companies the price to sales ratios are around 10-15.

You’re off by anywhere from 2-20x on the price to sales multipliers. At one point Snowflake had a market cap of nearly 200x the projected sales of the next twelve months. Before rates started creeping up, most SaaS was trading between 20-40x NTM and up to 60-80x on upside spikes.

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

#206

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…

The thing is that no-code solutions are nothing new or unique; they're a dime a dozen, and have existed almost as long as microcomputers have. What's not obvious is why Zapier's version is (apparently) a revelation. I'm not saying there is no reason, but that's probably where the GP is coming from.

It’s easy to use and well integrated into many platforms.

Reminds me of why WhatsApp took off. They spent the time to make it work well on early smart phones when that wasn’t easy.

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

#207

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.

Despite the replies, I thought this was a good take. $5,000,000,000 is a truly unimaginable amount in both senses of the word unimaginable. I couldn’t tell the difference between a $5B and $7B company, for example. And it’s especially hard to tell for a service which is, somewhat by nature, invisible. But my smart, non-programmer friends love Zapier and I imagine many of their customer relationships will be multi-dec…

I think of a billion as (very roughly) half of a cruise liner or half of a casino in the strip in Vegas.

Not sure how accurate that is but at $5b, I imagine zapier as a cruise ship tied up alongside a glittering glass casino.

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

#208
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I pay someone hundreds of dollars to build something that I don’t know how to maintain, when Zapier can do the same thing for free or $20/mo?

Free is free. Your return on investment at the $20.00 per month level is a year or less. So it depends on how long you need it for.

Your opportunity cost for the time spent maintaining, or managing people to maintain it is much higher than $20, if your business has more important problems you could spend time fixing. It’s very obvious that this is true if you’re a yc-type startup, which could be worth $0 or $1B depending on how you spend a few years.

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

#209
post #157
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think someone could make a good living as a Zapier consultant.

There are people who do that, such as https://www.luhhu.com/

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

#210

I am astonished at the valuation. I don't understand how there isn't more competition. It's not that difficult to wire up different APIs. This is great for open source software because it's highly modular, independent development with very low levels of complexity. I don't understand how Zapier has such high prices either. At some of the higher tiers, you could hire someone full time just to what Zapier does since th…

There are competitors.

https://n8n.io/ is the open source version https://tray.io/ is more of an enterprise version, and better for people that are more technical https://www.integromat.com/ is considered the cheaper alternative

Post reply on HN