Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 267 posts

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

#161

Post by arn »

narrator wrote: post #103
superbcarrot wrote: post #29

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.

>Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. This is because you lack the most overlooked and most difficult to teach skill in investing: empathy. Zapier lets non-programmers, the vast majority of the planet, do things that programmers do. Many programmers have poor empathy and thus make bad salespeople and investors. If you can understand how most of the planet thinks…

> Who would spend hours watching people play video games

Ask yourself who would spend hours watching people play sports, and it might not seem so foreign.

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

#162

Post by bradlys »

cosmodisk wrote: post #156
bradlys wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once companies start paying $500k-1mil/yr liquid - fine. But as it stands, I make a lot of money off those "uncertain" lottery tickets and demand a lot of them wherever I go.

This is mostly a US only thing, outside of it there are very few places where this would even be an option.

Sure but this company is headquartered and (mostly) founded in San Francisco. So... stock options from such a company would be standard as far as location go.

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

#163

Post by preommr »

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 they charge per task. Especially because it's not like people organizations are setting up different automations with completely different enough times to really justify the continuous cost.

I really thought it would be a very niche product for a very specific type of organization.

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

#164

Post by droobles »

preommr wrote: post #163

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…

brand recognition, I haven't used Zapier but it king of looks like Microsoft power automation.

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

#165

Post by tjbiddle »

I love Zapier and wish them the best. Been using them the past couple years to automate many things in my e-commerce business.

That being said, I come from a software background (As many here at HN do), and I recently found "Integromat" and have completely switched over all my Zapier automations to them. Their price point is much cheaper (Zapier was beginning to charge a few hundred a month for me - and now I'm down to $29/mo with Integromat which could be $9/mo if I wasn't impatient and wanted 1 minute intervals) - but the kicker for me was their UI and just the "programming" mindset that came along with it - I can do many more complex operations.

Just a happy customer - and hoping they have more success to continue improving their product.

Zapier is definitely a better fit for non-tech people, and more simple tasks though.

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

#166

Post by mrkurt »

preommr wrote: post #163

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…

Zapier is basically the biggest "no code" environment on the planet. The people who get the most value out of them don't care about per task prices. They've turned several million people into productive developers.

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

#167

Post by ralph84 »

cosmodisk wrote: post #153
ralph84 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, this should be the headline. Bootstrapped unicorns are somewhat rare. But bootstrapped unicorns with no employee equity is a whole other level.

If it was hiring locally in San Fran, maybe,but it's a fully remote company with many devs in places where things like stock options sound are as distant dream as $100K salary being on the low end of things. Europe is full of successful companies,albeit not necessarily with such valuations, where any stock distribution is unheard of.

> not necessarily with such valuations

Well yes, if you remove the "unicorn" qualifier you can find lots of companies that don't give employees equity. In many European countries the tax treatment of stock-based compensation is quite unfavorable. Which is one of the reasons Europe doesn't have as many unicorns in the first place.

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

#168

Post by freeqaz »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #119
hooande wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why wouldn't someone just hire a developer to do this? My understanding is that the market for contractors is oversaturated right now. You could probably pay someone hundreds of dollars to write software that interacts with web services etc if you look hard enough Like the grandparent comment, it's hard for me to imagine that there are enough people in need of this service to justify a $5B valuation

When I was a non-programmer trying to build a business that needed software, the last thing I wanted was to rely on something I couldn’t maintain myself. For example, I could wire up DNS by hand, but the last thing I’d want is to have to learn Terraform just so I could update my email MX records. Using Herkou because I didn’t want to manage a server was another example. Using something like Zapier to add a row to a s…

Would you mind elaborating on this? I'm not sure what you're saying here. Is Zapier a positive or a negative for you?

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

#169

Post by ng12 »

_jxdz wrote: post #107
ralph84 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, this should be the headline. Bootstrapped unicorns are somewhat rare. But bootstrapped unicorns with no employee equity is a whole other level.

To be fair to them, they do a pretty decent profit share every year. It is compensation based, so it's nothing life-changing (only say, 5-10% of your total compensation) but it was nice! First and only place I've ever participated in profit sharing.

Unless they're paying massive base salaries that sounds pretty low compared to RSUs at a big tech co or the yearly bonus in finance.

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

#170

Post by mikeryan »

ByteJockey wrote: post #114
chii wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's a term for when everyone buys something just because you can sell it to someone else for more later. It's called a bubble.

The term of art is actually “greater fool theory”
Post reply on HN