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Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

georgesequeira.com

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Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#41

Post by KnobbleMcKnees »

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…

> 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.

I'm confused by this, can you clarify?

This sounds like the exact opposite of agile sprints (assuming you're talking about agile)

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#42

Post by Kalium »

rockostrich wrote: post #18
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…

> get Zapier approved by security How do you manage this when marketing relies on PII to do anything? We just went through a switch over to a multi-channel messaging SaaS from an internal solution that "worked" for 6 years. Handling the PII aspect of things was taken care of by the SaaS being SOC 2 and GDPR compliant, but something like Zapier seems like it gives users the control to move PII into systems that don't…

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-whole-new-thing-with-lots-of-PII-tomorrow fast, but fast. Having strong systems for generating realistic test data and systems will make this prototyping much easier, though from experience Marketing will tend to dismiss such things.

Marketing's needs and goals are real and important and valid and blah blah blah blah. Mostly their institutional incentives are to barrel ahead as fast as possible with any and every tools available. A security organization's remit is to make sure that this isn't reckless and liability-inducing, which often means dialing back the speed from breakneck to manageable and maybe even doing some token amount of planning around what you hope to achieve.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#43

Post by IceHegel »

My sense is that most no code tools will face a far greater challenger from AI programming tools like Copilot than from further unbundling through web interfaces. It's just so much easier to set up an automated chain of api glue when you don't have to read the docks.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#44

Post by te_chris »

kfk wrote: post #3

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…

UI is bad for ETL...huh? I hope you're not talking about Stitch/Fivetran, because they're a godsend in my experience.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#46

Post by guitarsteve »

KnobbleMcKnees wrote: post #41
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…

> 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. I'm confused by this, can you clarify? This sounds like the exact opposite of agile sprints (assuming you're talking about agile)

It doesn’t sound too far off from what I’ve seen. The details of the sprints may not be worked out, but a dev team might have several months of high priority project queued up and marketing might be deemed lower priority. So getting extra work done from another team can sometimes take a very long time.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#47

Post by jdrc »

TameAntelope wrote: post #40

Reddit is the B2C version of Zapier here. It's ripe for unbundling. You're safe from Reddit itself because historically they've moved very slowly for some reason (though marginally faster, lately), and you're safe from the big players (Google, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok) because of Reddit's reputation for going after a (now) older, "savvy" customer base that is hard to monetize.

Also their perpetually young audience means that it's inherently not suitable for lots of kind of communities.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#48

Post by alooPotato »

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 non-technical users so doing any logic, even basic if statements, is really cumbersome. On the other end of the spectrum, pipedream and tools like it rely on your users knowing how to code. We think spreadsheets are the perfect balance, most users (at least ours) know how to do basic formulas and understand references.

Spreadsheets are awesome:

- development environment is completely set up for you, no tooling needed

- editor, runtime, debugger are all the same tool

- by default you see the output of all your computation, its a secondary action to see the code

- you can preview the intermediate data results at every step of your computation making debugging a dream

Here's how we're thinking of applying it to the Zapier use case:

- a series of zapier like triggers and actions

- each step is just a 2 column spreadsheet (property name and property value)

- the value can be something hardcoded, a reference to a value in a previous step, or a complicated formula

Anyone tried something like this before?

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#49

Post by dijonman2 »

KnobbleMcKnees wrote: post #41
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…

> 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. I'm confused by this, can you clarify? This sounds like the exact opposite of agile sprints (assuming you're talking about agile)

This is typical of product driven organizations. Has nothing to do with agile itself.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#50

Post by samstave »

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…

Can you please share some example workflows enabled by Zapier that benefits your org?
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