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I feel like I live in a cave. Over the past 10+ years, I’ve yet to understand what use cases people use for things like IFTTT/Zapier/etc. I clearly must for alone I’m not understanding.
Can someone please help me understand their specific use case. I’m genuinely curious.
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…
The difference is I am not so pessimistic about those UI-based ETL systems because I did a deep dive on the architecture of those and even worked for a startup that built one. I've seen how the industry's fixation on raw performance has kept ETL systems using a relational model that is hell to program for complex jobs -- I pitched a next generation system to a very acquisitive leader in this space and got shot down because my system wasn't friendly to storage locality and SIMD instructions. (That startup had the right idea of passing 'JSON' documents between the lines and the boxes but never settled exactly what the algebra was for those things, how to close event pipelines in the end properly so you always get the right results, ...)
Those "integration builders" though strike me a way of replacing a 10 line Python script with incredible tedium and "you can't get from here to there" experiences. That leads me to say things like "When I hear the word 'integration' I reach for my gun."
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)
What do you use Zapier for? I feel like I live in a cave. Over the past 10+ years, I’ve yet to understand what use cases people use for things like IFTTT/Zapier/etc. I clearly must for alone I’m not understanding. Can someone please help me understand their specific use case. I’m genuinely curious.
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.
>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…
[0]: https://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post/345941486/the-spawn-of-c...
What do you use Zapier for? I feel like I live in a cave. Over the past 10+ years, I’ve yet to understand what use cases people use for things like IFTTT/Zapier/etc. I clearly must for alone I’m not understanding. Can someone please help me understand their specific use case. I’m genuinely curious.
Funny enough: quite a few Zapier employees use us to do calendar automation.
IMO, the opportunity is "and" not "or". Zapier is great (I use it too!) for so many use cases, but sometimes the use case is complex enough and the opportunity large enough that dedicated solutions emerge.
So while some value may strip away from Zapier via dedicated solutions like Reclaim, I think Zapier will also continue to add value by educating more of the world, improving their UX, and connecting with more services.
For the folks looking for coding-style solutions, I'm also big fan of https://pipedream.com/. Check it out!