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Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

georgesequeira.com

11–20 of 157 posts

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#11
post #7

This is great news. Just made me realizer we are building the zapier for healthcare. Its a fairly new product, but this puts a label on the beast.

You're building one for healthcare? Mind sharing more details about the company? Email in profile if it's something private but you'd be open to sharing privately.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#12
post #9

>The process of companies building products that strip away use-cases from horizontal platforms is called “unbundling”. Is there a more plain English explanation what this means? I didn't understand their explanation, and then they showed Zapier that seems to be a service that relies on automating some tasks based on one or more other service .... that seems to be very "bundled" in my mind now that you've got two or…

unbundling = offer higher quality integrations for a specific audience. zapier for marketers would be an unbundled zapier example.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#13
post #3

UI based flows for integrations are as bad as UI based flows for ETL. For some reason, we managed to move past UI to code for ETL, but now we are taking the exact same path for integrations. Integrations are complex, you might have complex requirements, polling and pushing needs depending on the applications, fast lookups needs, legacy IT solutions that hold critical data. I don't think we are ready to go full UI in…

How about catering to non-programmers?

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#14
post #8
post #4

Zapier is a god send for the non developer portions of a company. I work in marketing. Marketing projects are inherently speculative, you don't know what they will achieve until they're done. Add to this that dev teams at every company have full sprints planned for months. Getting a marketing project done through the dev team is months of exertion and sweat. Or... get Zapier approved by security, get platforms plugge…

This is exactly the kind of comment I was hoping to see. May I ask, what kinds of things are you using zapier for that are not just nice to haves. Something that you would say it pays for itself (increases revenue somehow)

Yeah I was wondering too. Not that people wouldn't use it, but I wonder about what the transition is from "this is handy" to "I want to continuously pay for this service / enough that it is consistent enough / earns me money back enough to do this and not something else".

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#15
post #9

>The process of companies building products that strip away use-cases from horizontal platforms is called “unbundling”. Is there a more plain English explanation what this means? I didn't understand their explanation, and then they showed Zapier that seems to be a service that relies on automating some tasks based on one or more other service .... that seems to be very "bundled" in my mind now that you've got two or…

The article is saying that Zapier is ripe to be unbundled.

Meaning it does many different things across many verticals, and that some of them are big enough that a company could be created around building a more specialized / better version of zapier just for a specific vertical.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#16
post #12
post #9

>The process of companies building products that strip away use-cases from horizontal platforms is called “unbundling”. Is there a more plain English explanation what this means? I didn't understand their explanation, and then they showed Zapier that seems to be a service that relies on automating some tasks based on one or more other service .... that seems to be very "bundled" in my mind now that you've got two or…

unbundling = offer higher quality integrations for a specific audience. zapier for marketers would be an unbundled zapier example.

I think I got it now. Thank you.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#17
post #8
post #4

Zapier is a god send for the non developer portions of a company. I work in marketing. Marketing projects are inherently speculative, you don't know what they will achieve until they're done. Add to this that dev teams at every company have full sprints planned for months. Getting a marketing project done through the dev team is months of exertion and sweat. Or... get Zapier approved by security, get platforms plugge…

This is exactly the kind of comment I was hoping to see. May I ask, what kinds of things are you using zapier for that are not just nice to haves. Something that you would say it pays for itself (increases revenue somehow)

Indeed, this unbundling is already happening. Many of the so-called Customer Data Platforms offer a low-code, no-code option for creating and iterating on marketing campaigns. They've already done the work of integrating with the various storefronts and ad platforms.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#18
post #4

Zapier is a god send for the non developer portions of a company. I work in marketing. Marketing projects are inherently speculative, you don't know what they will achieve until they're done. Add to this that dev teams at every company have full sprints planned for months. Getting a marketing project done through the dev team is months of exertion and sweat. Or... get Zapier approved by security, get platforms plugge…

> get Zapier approved by security

How do you manage this when marketing relies on PII to do anything? We just went through a switch over to a multi-channel messaging SaaS from an internal solution that "worked" for 6 years. Handling the PII aspect of things was taken care of by the SaaS being SOC 2 and GDPR compliant, but something like Zapier seems like it gives users the control to move PII into systems that don't have that compliance. Or are there controls around which data can flow where?

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#19
post #9

>The process of companies building products that strip away use-cases from horizontal platforms is called “unbundling”. Is there a more plain English explanation what this means? I didn't understand their explanation, and then they showed Zapier that seems to be a service that relies on automating some tasks based on one or more other service .... that seems to be very "bundled" in my mind now that you've got two or…

My understanding of how the term was used is this: Zapier has many use cases. Many customers buy Zapier for one or two use cases, not all the features offered. New startups are emerging that accomplish a subset of the use cases that Zapier addresses.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#20
post #4

Zapier is a god send for the non developer portions of a company. I work in marketing. Marketing projects are inherently speculative, you don't know what they will achieve until they're done. Add to this that dev teams at every company have full sprints planned for months. Getting a marketing project done through the dev team is months of exertion and sweat. Or... get Zapier approved by security, get platforms plugge…

This would have been true 5 years ago but based on the current pricing, any non-trivial use case is far more expensive than identical internal development and maintenance.
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