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Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

georgesequeira.com

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Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#141

Post by eru »

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…

> 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.

Slightly off-topic: you basically just described why spreadsheets were such a huge deal when they were first introduced in the 1980s.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#142

Post by eru »

bduerst wrote: post #77
emteycz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have no idea where to start with rETL and I'm a software engineer... Search turns up some medicine and other non-related stuff. If it's a typo, then sorry. But ETL is the same beast. I have few ideas where to start thanks to my programming background, but I can't imagine the marketing department guys do any of it. Non-ideal but less expensive is still better than nothing (or too expensive to stay profitable).…

Think of rETL as an on-demand data lake that doesn't actually store any data (for the most part). Yeah you can pull data and create snapshots to preserve views, but given the direction privacy and regulatory environments have been going with user data, it's incredibly sexy to be able to not have to dump data in yet another data warehouse just to use a new tool.

Perhaps the proper programming term might be co-ETL or co-data-lake? (Where we use 'co' in the same sense as eg http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/10/duality-for-haskellers/ )

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#143

Post by robocat »

alooPotato wrote: post #123
robocat wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Why did you decide to separate the input, formula and output into different sheets?

I just presumed splitting out the roles would make everything clearer and debugging easier. For the concept to work, the rules engine had to interact with the workbooks inputs and outputs, and that seemed like something that could have subtle mistakes and hard to debug by the consultants if everything were on a single complicated sheet.

Consultants are less familiar conceptually with functions, and this way I could get them to label variable inputs and label outputs. I expect consultants wouldn’t structure things unless given a format. The “formulas” sheet could be pretty wild and complicated: many consultants are more results focused than OCD organised. I didn’t want to have formulas etcetera mixed up with parsing the inputs and outputs. Also that way the spreadsheet can easily and unambiguously define the inputs and outputs for the engine to grab the names/definitions from.

I can think of other ways to do it, but it was just what seemed the most likely to work for multiple reasons.

One goal was to avoid recalculations by tracing the dependencies (yay spreadsheets) and using memoisation for the outputs, and versioning the results, and versioning the consultants’ formulas (i.e. the workbook was the unit of programming change, one reason to not put too much in each workbook). Auditing where values came from, and why values changed if formulas were modified, was one desire for the engine.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#144

Post by yumraj »

It’s interesting that some of these unbundling articles have started popping lately. I believe there was recently a Airbnb unbundling blog.

IMHO, if anyone wants to unbundle, FB is a prime target. They’ve grown big and acquired companies , and are distracted with the whole Metacrap, that it is high time someone picks use cases apart to do them better and well.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#145

Post by quickthrower2 »

Is unbundling a good way to come up with business ideas? I am not so sure. Sounds more like human pattern matching playing its part. As in "Oh yeah, that business is a bit like a Craig's list section". Unbundling seems like the analysis of what you did, not the plan of how to do it.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#146

Post by jtwaleson »

iamacyborg wrote: post #110
jtwaleson wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We outsource a lot of the marketing tech and website related work so marketing is not blocked by our own development team. We don’t see marketing tech and our Wordpress website as our “secret sauce”. The devs are just focused on product development.

Does your product not generate data that would be useful for the marketing team?

Yes, and we do try to prioritize work on data exporting :)

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#147

Post by artyomavanesov »

Zapier seems exactly like the type of product that is difficult to unbundle because its value is in its integrations. If an integration (e.g. Gmail and Trello) maps to an addressable market, then the more permutations there are, the larger Zapier's potential market and value is. If you move away from Zapier to some optimized single-purpose integration then you lose the potential value from access to the other integrations. And because of Zapier's enormous library it covers both common and niche use cases.

Zapier is different from something like Craigslist because the latter only offers convenience from having different verticals in one place. There is no synergy between them.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#149

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

eru wrote: post #141
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…

> 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. Slightly off-topic: you basically just described why spreadsheets were such a huge deal when they were first introduced in…

And also why the world still runs on Excel.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#150

Post by subpixel »

joshmlewis wrote: post #85
mylons wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don’t think the author is suggesting Zapier will go away. like craigslist is still thriving and probably has a long future ahead of itself.

Craigslist is still thriving? I don't know anyone who uses Craigslist to list stuff for sale now, FB Marketplace seems to have taken the majority of traffic. They've apparently lost almost half of their revenue in the last couple of years (COVID being a contributing factor I'm sure but it started declining in 2019). Total monthly visits is also down half from 2017. I believe the golden days for Craigslist are over. h…

I'm a new homeowner with kids way out in the boonies, and coming from a city I've had an accelerated need to find and buy ... stuff.

Craigslist is just about over. It's a subset of things that are cross-posted to Facebook Marketplace.

What Facebook did that Craigslist won't recover from is to align groups with classifieds. I belong to regional groups devoted to selling bikes, boats, furniture, baby clothes, among others. That's where the action is, and while there is cross-posting to Craigslist, that trend is certainly ebbing.

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