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Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

georgesequeira.com

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Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#111

Post by adameasterling »

So I'm pretty sure this is the technology revolution that we're all sleeping on.

Like, self-driving cars? VR? Meh.

Accessible programming? A safe environment for folks close to a business problem that lets them solve that business problem on their own?! That's cool.

Like for me, in my experience as a software engineer, there's basically four types of employees: The tech-naive domain expert, the tech-friendly domain expert, junior coders, and senior engineers.

The two ends of the spectrum should stay focused on they're good at: Doing business stuff, or coding on tough problems.

It's the two roles in the middle that interest me: Tech-friendly domain experts and junior coders.

Right now, in most companies, tech-friendly domain experts could totally figure out a tool like Zapier and do things that they'd normally need an engineer to do. But their company doesn't use something like Zapier, so they can't. They just have to talk to technical people and make them do it. But there lies long debugging loops and, just, slowness.

In some companies though, those that have embraced low-code platforms like Tray or Zapier or the product we made (https://docs.middle.app), they've enabled their tech-friendly domain experts to do tons of stuff they couldn't do before, without bothering people like myself, a more senior coder (I can work on platform things!).

ALSO, I've found that junior coders have a special role. We've hired non-programmers and taught them Python JUST so they could code new things in the developer side of our integration platform. It's a sandboxed environment with limited risk; they can go crazy coding whatever connectors or other things that those tech-friendly domain experts need. I don't have to be involved, outside of a code review every now and then. I know that they can't break anything other than the narrow thing they're working on.

It's neat. Neat stuff.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#112

Post by dshanahan »

dnndev wrote: post #8
cm2012 wrote: 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)

Great convo, thought I'd share some valuable zaps I've used over the last few years to save $$$ on headcount, dev time, and burn/debt on unproven ideas/experiments.

- Slack - pipe all kinds of events into special #channels to cross teams can check one spot for external happenings: new users, new sales, support chats, form/data submissions

- Forms > CRM/Sheets - shouldn't be understated. Using lead page or no-code CRM (webflow my fave) I've swapped out various signup flows to test ideas/friction/followups repeatedly before asking dev to build actual signup flows into the backend app. Can swap paperform, typeform, mailchimp, google forms in under an hour for multiple signup/landing pages w/o any devs.

- Calendar - I use Motion (similar to Calendly) across sales team to speed up meeting flows + use Zaps to pipe those bookings into sheets/Slack/CRM or EMS. Sales team calendars can be public on marketing site (webflow) and bookings generate all the alerts and data we need to just show up to the meetings.

- Leverage SMS channel - One-click surveys, recurring survey campaigns using SimpleTexting or YesInsights and piping results wherever I need 'em. Google Sheet with charted dashboards already set up to auto-update. Great for ecomm, great for call/response feature testing with zero dev required. Can add phone signups via form integration or email campaign.

- Manual issue / todo alerts: Use specific tag in Asana to pipe a ticket into Slack channel when team member wants to surface for manager/teammate - instead of asana firehose

- Light @mention feed - Pipe brand mentions/topics, including web (reddit etc - use F5bot) into sheet or #channel for marketing eyes to check daily

- Twitter bot - built @carryonbagsizes using just Zaps: anyone tweets airline name and gets carry-on bag size restrictions back from the bot (including variations on airline names ie United vs United Airlines)

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#113

Post by kamalfariz »

alooPotato wrote: post #48

Our customers of [Streak](www.streak.com) use zapier heavily to connect to all their other tools so we have a ton of experience with it. We're currently building an alternative for our users natively into our app (we think we can make a more optimized experience for our app). I think we've stumbled onto a pretty key product insight - we're basing our automation tool on a spreadsheet. Zapier is clearly optimized for n…

Clay is basically Zapier applied to a spreadsheet UI https://www.clay.run/

You can set up each column to hit an integration. As a cell is populate either by hand or from the result of an integration, it triggers other cells to evaluate.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#114

Post by robocat »

alooPotato wrote: post #48

Our customers of [Streak](www.streak.com) use zapier heavily to connect to all their other tools so we have a ton of experience with it. We're currently building an alternative for our users natively into our app (we think we can make a more optimized experience for our app). I think we've stumbled onto a pretty key product insight - we're basing our automation tool on a spreadsheet. Zapier is clearly optimized for n…

I had designed a similar system for consultant customisation of complicated business rules, although I failed to deliver it. I had intended to:

* Have one workbook per business function. One inputs sheet (variables in), one sheet for the formulas, one outputs sheet (variables out).

* Use a sort of test driven, self documenting approach. When developing with clients, it is easiest to ask them about specific examples, including simple and complicated ones. Consultants understand business rules when they configure a system, but it is very hard to come back to 5 years later when the business wants something tweaked. Test data inputs and expected outputs was to be included on other sheets, with documentation. And the system would validate the sheet formulas gave the correct outputs for the example inputs.

* Use custom formulas for our industry needs with a custom data type for some variable inputs - this is the crux of where I came unstuck with my design (it was kind of SQLish table inputs per input cell, visible in Excel when in design mode).

I didn’t actually finish the system, because I was trying to bidirectional integrate directly with Excel using COM, and I just couldn’t get that working because I overcomplicated it. This was a long time ago, and I couldn’t find a suitable non-excel engine to integrate with due to other team constraints. Note that spreadsheets are inherently side effect free functional programming at its finest IMHO: I wanted to avoid any imperative programming. However we ended up with an imperative Visual Basic like design instead which did work, but it takes extremely highly skilled consultants to use it, and is spectacularly inefficient.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#115

Post by iamacyborg »

boc wrote: post #109
iamacyborg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My goal is to ensure some degree of process sanity exists to ensure data processing complies with the law and that systems interoperate effectively. I don't think anyone using Airtable as a CRM has those sorts of concerns, however.

Right - it sounds like you're processing data at a very different scale from the typical Zapier user.

Yeah, potentially, though I think you’d be surprised at the size of teams still using it.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#116

Post by Kalium »

cm2012 wrote: post #93
Kalium wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long story short, you don't . No competent security organization taking their responsibilities seriously is going to issue a blanket approval of something as broad as Zapier. What you can do is get an enterprise relationship in place, deploy tight endpoint monitoring and management, careful management of permissions at every level, and then make the review processes relatively fast. Not marketing-wants-to-build-a-who…

Yep, in small companies you get carte blanche, and there are two kinds of big companies. Those that make it work with a process like the above comment (which looks like a great and reasonable set-up), and those that kneecap their marketing departments by rejecting the tools needed for modern marketing. As a side note, I've worked with 60+ startups. One thing that kills start-ups whenever it happens is giving too much…

It's been my experience that default-to-no is what happens when groups like security try a reasonable process... and find that marketing and similar enablement-first groups handle this by ignoring and bypassing it. This tends to set up a very ugly reckoning at some point. Marketing will lose, but the company overall will lose too.

If marketing ever says "But an enterprise contract with SAML is too expensive! Can't we just use the basic SaaS version?", it's time to check what other processes they're used to ignoring. I'd suggest starting with expense records. There's probably a bunch of vendors handled entirely on a director's credit card.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#117

Post by rwhitman »

I work for a team that specializes in middleware development - eg the cases where Zapier really falls apart and needs a more thoroughly architected solution. I've spent a lot of time inside this topic.

The thing that will disrupt Zapier is the software vendors themselves. Most Zaps will eventually be replaced by native platform-to-platform integrations where the middleware has been designed and sanctioned by the 2 parties. Having a one-size-fits all solution is impractical over the long run. Its a temporary fix for a bigger more substantial problem.

This is plumbing. You don't use one flimsy universal type of pipe joint for every pipe in your house, otherwise you get leaks. Same thing

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#118

Post by Dwolb »

cm2012 wrote: 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…

One time, when we were much smaller and a team of 10, we had a marketer who also thought they were a developer.

Instead of choosing an off-the-shelf tagging solution like Google Tag manager, they used Zapier + custom injected code into Wordpress + Segment to attempt to hand-roll a "marketing tech stack".

All the data was wrong and all the integrations would break constantly. Eventually we moved on and a team had to figure out how to rip out all the code and deprecate the integrations.

We ended up just moving to a new CMS to start clean.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#119

Post by Dwolb »

dshanahan wrote: post #112
dnndev wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Great convo, thought I'd share some valuable zaps I've used over the last few years to save $$$ on headcount, dev time, and burn/debt on unproven ideas/experiments. - Slack - pipe all kinds of events into special #channels to cross teams can check one spot for external happenings: new users, new sales, support chats, form/data submissions - Forms > CRM/Sheets - shouldn't be understated. Using lead page or no-code CRM…

Piping user data into Sheets is literally my nightmare.

Especially if there's any sort of editing or data transform in sheets, there's 0 traceability of the change.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#120

Post by ngz00 »

georgesequeira wrote: post #103
ngz00 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any open source, embeddable alternatives or frameworks? I've got an ETL DSL that is fully serializable and I've been looking to create a UI tool for it.

I don't know of a solution for ETL DSL -> UI but https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy goes from a DSL to internal web apps. Perhaps some inspiration could be taken from there. Good luck!

Thats pretty fascinating stuff, thanks for the recommendation.
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