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Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

georgesequeira.com

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Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#61

Post by emteycz »

iamacyborg wrote: post #52
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…

As a Marketing Ops guy, this gives me pause. > nice and tidy. And then the marketers can do what they need in the platform, and they're able to iterate and learn at a much faster pace. It changes the whole game. The reality is, marketers will frequently plug in any and every thing they can without thinking about the broader context. Sure you can plug all this stuff together, or you can spend a bit of time with ETL an…

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). Not all operations are huge companies that can afford IT teams working on their behalf.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#62

Post by boc »

iamacyborg wrote: post #52
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…

As a Marketing Ops guy, this gives me pause. > nice and tidy. And then the marketers can do what they need in the platform, and they're able to iterate and learn at a much faster pace. It changes the whole game. The reality is, marketers will frequently plug in any and every thing they can without thinking about the broader context. Sure you can plug all this stuff together, or you can spend a bit of time with ETL an…

Is your goal to have a martech stack that doesn't rely on third party silos, or is your goal to have your lead-gen form populate your Airtable CRM for your new experimental acquisition campaign?

The marketer is being asked to acquire users, not make it look pretty behind the scenes. In the testing phase, it's way better to use Zapier to get things done fast. Then you can revisit and scale later with a proper solution if it turns out to be a productive campaign.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#63

Post by bognition »

ghoomketu wrote: post #60

Zapier is also have trouble keeping up with the demand. Their Youtube integration hasn't worked in almost 2 months now and I think it's because Google has stopped giving them enough API quota to meet the demand. The thread has been locked since and I don't think there is any resolution coming. (1) https://community.zapier.com/general-questions-3/youtube-the...

Or maybe the ROI on the integration just isn’t there.

Good integrations are hard to build and expensive to maintain. I’ve seen many sunset or ignored simply because the paying customer base was too small.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#64

Post by iamacyborg »

emteycz wrote: post #61
iamacyborg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Marketing Ops guy, this gives me pause. > nice and tidy. And then the marketers can do what they need in the platform, and they're able to iterate and learn at a much faster pace. It changes the whole game. The reality is, marketers will frequently plug in any and every thing they can without thinking about the broader context. Sure you can plug all this stuff together, or you can spend a bit of time with ETL an…

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).…

Basically, reverse ETL, ie get data from the warehouse to operational platforms. The two big players are Census and Hightouch.

https://www.getcensus.com/

https://hightouch.io/

Both offer no-code tools to help non-technical users make use of the data.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#65

Post by borisjabes »

emteycz wrote: post #61
iamacyborg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Marketing Ops guy, this gives me pause. > nice and tidy. And then the marketers can do what they need in the platform, and they're able to iterate and learn at a much faster pace. It changes the whole game. The reality is, marketers will frequently plug in any and every thing they can without thinking about the broader context. Sure you can plug all this stuff together, or you can spend a bit of time with ETL an…

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).…

it refers to a somewhat poorly named concept known as reverse ETL, something we started working on back in 2018 with our product Census (getcensus.com). We launched it on HN in 2020, though it's come a long way since then :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23034642

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#66

Post by emteycz »

iamacyborg wrote: post #64
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).…

Basically, reverse ETL, ie get data from the warehouse to operational platforms. The two big players are Census and Hightouch. https://www.getcensus.com/ https://hightouch.io/ Both offer no-code tools to help non-technical users make use of the data.

Thanks for the links, I'll have a look.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#67

Post by mritchie712 »

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.

Good podcast on unbundling reddit: https://thehustle.co/reddit-unbundling/

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#68

Post by iamacyborg »

boc wrote: post #62
iamacyborg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Marketing Ops guy, this gives me pause. > nice and tidy. And then the marketers can do what they need in the platform, and they're able to iterate and learn at a much faster pace. It changes the whole game. The reality is, marketers will frequently plug in any and every thing they can without thinking about the broader context. Sure you can plug all this stuff together, or you can spend a bit of time with ETL an…

Is your goal to have a martech stack that doesn't rely on third party silos, or is your goal to have your lead-gen form populate your Airtable CRM for your new experimental acquisition campaign? The marketer is being asked to acquire users, not make it look pretty behind the scenes. In the testing phase, it's way better to use Zapier to get things done fast. Then you can revisit and scale later with a proper solution…

My goal is to ensure some degree of process sanity exists to ensure data processing complies with the law and that systems interoperate effectively.

I don't think anyone using Airtable as a CRM has those sorts of concerns, however.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#69

Post by emteycz »

borisjabes wrote: post #65
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).…

it refers to a somewhat poorly named concept known as reverse ETL, something we started working on back in 2018 with our product Census (getcensus.com). We launched it on HN in 2020, though it's come a long way since then :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23034642

Nice, definitely solves some problems I had in the past. I'll keep your product in mind, I like it very much.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#70

Post by iamacyborg »

ngz00 wrote: post #34
supersync wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Make, n8n, workflow86 Agree that coded integrations are still very relevant, but the addressable surface for UI is pretty large now.

Is there any open source, embeddable alternatives or frameworks? I've got an ETL DSL that is fully serializable and I've been looking to create a UI tool for it.

Maybe Airbyte if I understand what you're asking correctly.
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