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Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

georgesequeira.com

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Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#81

Post by KaiserPro »

duxup wrote: post #9

>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…

I suspect what the author is trying to say in plain english is that Zapier is prime for being copied to a more focused business case.

ie, ITTT/zapier have proven that this idea works, lets copy+paste one but aimed at some other more specific business/scenario like catering or some junk.

Its a more jazzy version than "lets make an uber, but for farts."

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#82

Post by oldandboring »

The article describes an idea that there are startup opportunities to be found by identifying horizontal platforms (e.g. Craigslist) that cover a lot of ground and build something that handles just one use case (e.g. job posts) covered by that platform. The article calls it "unbundling".

A while ago I was involved in a startup that attempted to compete with a dominant horizontal platform in this manner (Craigslist, in fact). The ideas were fine, the people were good, but we had a lot of trouble getting traction. Turns out, Craigslist is where the people are, and if you want to build a marketplace, you need people. Features turn out to be secondary. It's unsurprising to me that, in the end, the best competition for Craigslist came from another big horizontal platform with tons of people: Facebook.

I'm not actually trying to say that "unbundling" can't ever work. Maybe Zapier is ripe for it, as the author suggests. This is just what happened to come to mind when I read this story.

Interesting overall. Thanks for the post OP!

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#83

Post by jtwaleson »

mylons wrote: post #72
guitarsteve wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i agree that this is mostly what i see too. but it’s not agile, it’s people claiming they’re agile and doing something else.

We outsource a lot of the marketing tech and website related work so marketing is not blocked by our own development team. We don’t see marketing tech and our Wordpress website as our “secret sauce”. The devs are just focused on product development.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#84

Post by joshmlewis »

oldandboring wrote: post #82

The article describes an idea that there are startup opportunities to be found by identifying horizontal platforms (e.g. Craigslist) that cover a lot of ground and build something that handles just one use case (e.g. job posts) covered by that platform. The article calls it "unbundling". A while ago I was involved in a startup that attempted to compete with a dominant horizontal platform in this manner (Craigslist, i…

I feel like Facebook Marketplace was really the only way to disrupt Craigslist because it is where the users are. There were lots of products that tried over the years with varying degrees of success, but mostly failure. I'm not saying it is a better replacement either, but as far as I can tell it's effectively stolen most of Craigslists utility. I joked the other day that the only people left on Craigslist now are scammers and older people.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#85

Post by joshmlewis »

mylons wrote: post #75
Lightbody wrote: post #30

Hey -- my startup ( https://reclaim.ai ) got mentioned here. Super cool! 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 sol…

i don’t think the author is suggesting Zapier will go away. like craigslist is still thriving and probably has a long future ahead of itself.

Craigslist is still thriving? I don't know anyone who uses Craigslist to list stuff for sale now, FB Marketplace seems to have taken the majority of traffic. They've apparently lost almost half of their revenue in the last couple of years (COVID being a contributing factor I'm sure but it started declining in 2019). Total monthly visits is also down half from 2017. I believe the golden days for Craigslist are over.

https://aimgroup.com/2021/02/11/craigslist-traffic-revenue-f...

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#86

Post by KaiserPro »

chriskelley wrote: post #15
duxup wrote: post #9

>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…

The article is saying that Zapier is ripe to be unbundled. Meaning it does many different things across many verticals, and that some of them are big enough that a company could be created around building a more specialized / better version of zapier just for a specific vertical.

Unbundled implies that the company it's self splits up and focuses on a specific "vertical"

In this instance I would argue that the author is saying clone the idea but make sure the APIs offered are for a specific subsection of an industry.

Or more succinctly: jump on the bandwagon in the style of hipstermatic/instagram gold rush.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#87

Post by claudiulodro »

oldandboring wrote: post #82

The article describes an idea that there are startup opportunities to be found by identifying horizontal platforms (e.g. Craigslist) that cover a lot of ground and build something that handles just one use case (e.g. job posts) covered by that platform. The article calls it "unbundling". A while ago I was involved in a startup that attempted to compete with a dominant horizontal platform in this manner (Craigslist, i…

I think the canonical example of 'unbundling' is every startup that does a thing that could be done via Excel and streamlining the experience around one use-case: time tracking for freelancers, inventory management, etc. I hear there's been a bunch of money made around making SaaS out of things that used to be done in Excel sheets.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#88

Post by skeeter2020 »

joshmlewis wrote: post #84
oldandboring wrote: post #82

The article describes an idea that there are startup opportunities to be found by identifying horizontal platforms (e.g. Craigslist) that cover a lot of ground and build something that handles just one use case (e.g. job posts) covered by that platform. The article calls it "unbundling". A while ago I was involved in a startup that attempted to compete with a dominant horizontal platform in this manner (Craigslist, i…

I feel like Facebook Marketplace was really the only way to disrupt Craigslist because it is where the users are. There were lots of products that tried over the years with varying degrees of success, but mostly failure. I'm not saying it is a better replacement either, but as far as I can tell it's effectively stolen most of Craigslists utility. I joked the other day that the only people left on Craigslist now are s…

Disruption is still very regional. Where I live Kijiji (Ebay) is dominant, in other locales it's still Craigslist. FB Marketplace is still an "and also" player but not dominate here

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#89

Post by ahtihn »

mylons wrote: post #72
guitarsteve wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i agree that this is mostly what i see too. but it’s not agile, it’s people claiming they’re agile and doing something else.

I fail to see how it's not agile? Roadmaps aren't against agile. If marketing is low priority and there's a large backlog of high priority work, marketing related work is never going to be considered when planning a sprint.

The only way around this is to have more dev capacity or to prioritize marketing work.

Re: Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

#90

Post by hikerrrr »

oldandboring wrote: post #82

The article describes an idea that there are startup opportunities to be found by identifying horizontal platforms (e.g. Craigslist) that cover a lot of ground and build something that handles just one use case (e.g. job posts) covered by that platform. The article calls it "unbundling". A while ago I was involved in a startup that attempted to compete with a dominant horizontal platform in this manner (Craigslist, i…

Facebook is not the largest 'classifieds' marketplace, at least not everywhere, and it did not disrupt craigslist everywhere.

There are multiple other successes to replicate the classified/craigslist model:

Other good notable and successful local models offerup, maybe somewhat ebay.

FB Marketplace only began to overtake craigslist if there was not another dominant space in the area.

Here in Utah, the dominant newsmedia made a brilliant use of their traffic to bundle their news traffic with a more reputable and useful classifieds. They are still more dominant than FB marketplace in Utah, though used about equal now.

Most local newspapers had the right classifieds model before craigslist became a behemoth, though without exception local papers struggled to capitalize on their traffic and keep the flow towards their classifieds.

Classifieds were always the extra cash that gave pure profit to newspapers for a large part of their lifetimes. News and stuff sorta went hand in hand there for awhile, too bad its random BS FB news that's bundled with classifieds now instead of real reputable news sources.

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