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Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

georgesequeira.com

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Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#151

Post by Dwolb »

aaaaaaaaata wrote: post #139
georgesequeira wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zapier makes changes on behalf of a single account. You can change the "share" permission to only allow view for anyone except for the account tied to Zapier which has edit permissions.

...and don't they offer full revision history? Not sure what the commenter was on about, then.

1) If you're piping data into Sheets, then you most likely don't have good custody practices and aren't limiting edit users to just 1.

2) Sure there's revision history but you can't "roll back just this one change". You roll back _all the changes_ to the state at that time.

3) If the marketer does appear to save new Sheets as major data changes occur, they're not properly branched. You end up with Sheets like "customer_list_v1, customer_list_v1_no_Csuite, customer_list_v2_no_CSuite, customer_list_v2_scrubbed".

As a consequence you can never be sure if the reporting is correct or if the data is up-to-date.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#152

Post by tungle »

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)

set a Google calendar event every working day, then connect Zapier to post to Mattermost to remind my team do to virtual stand-up meeting.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#155

Post by samstave »

ncphil wrote: post #132
samstave wrote: post #51

Zapier should do a Google and offer a self-hosted " Zapier Engine " box that one can self host... (Anyone recall the Google Search boxes from ~2007? Are they still avail? We installed some at Lockheed in ~2006 or something... never saw the ROI on that thing... but a zapier host on a closed network, I can see the ongoing value of such...

Google started shutting down its GSA (Google Search Appliance) business in 2016, with the latest customers getting shut off by the end of 2018/2019. The promised cloud replacement never materialized, at least for anyone who wasn't also on GSuite/Workspace. GSA was an interesting product that I and others spent 100s of hours mastering. Really hated giving it up, although it was never the panacea for cutting through se…

I'll say, Our organization failed to properly implement the appliance ; as such, didnt get the best result. (can't blame Goog/the device if we didnt actually implement the thing in best way possible...)

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#156

Post by eru »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #149
eru wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, definitely!

Excel is actually a relatively decent programming language when you want to quickly _write_ a business application.

The big problem occurs when you want to _read_ the application. Alas, reading is necessary for maintenance and debugging and reviewing/auditing.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#157

Post by automationre »

I think unbundling takes place on two levels. First, zapier competitors. (Full disclosure, I am building a workflow comparison website comparing 25 zapier competitors.)

But secondly, I start wondering if native integrations won't become more important and a bigger threat for zapier over time. Currently the typical customer pays for two SaaS services AND for zapier etc. to connect the two. Over time, native integrations can, self built or with the help of white label solutions from n8n embed, make, Paragon and others, make workflow automation solutions less important.

I also wonder if Google sheets, notion databases and airtable will not become hubs for automations. Many problems are solved for a fraction of the cost if all SaaS have native, two way automations/syncs to these spreadsheet/databases. (Notion bought automate.io, but hasn't really interested it. Yet.)

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