16 ms·

Zapier: A $5B Unbundling Opportunity

239 points by georgesequeira 4y ago

automationre 4y ago
I think unbundling takes place on two levels. First, zapier competitors. (Full disclosure, I am building a workflow comparison website comparing 25 zapier competitors.) But secondly, I start wondering if native integrations won't become more important and a bigger threat for zapier over time. Currently the typical customer pays for two SaaS services AND for zapier etc. to connect the two. Over time, native integrations can, self built or with the help of white label solutions from n8n embed, make, Paragon and others, make workflow automation solutions less important. I also wonder if Google sheets, notion databases and airtable will not become hubs for automations. Many problems are solved for a fraction of the cost if all SaaS have native, two way automations/syncs to these spreadsheet/databases. (Notion bought automate.io, but hasn't really interested it. Yet.)
alberth 4y ago
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.
- mauricio 4y ago
  A popular use case for SaaS companies isn't even in utilizing Zapier themselves, but rather adding their API to the list of integrations. This can really speed up onboarding for customers -- especially if they already use Zapier.
- tomatowurst 4y ago
  if you have to ask you are not in the need to know, this is an automation tool for non-developers at various organizations
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    >if you have to ask you are not in the need to know Does it really need to be said that we don't all know about every program/service available to us that we could use, and thus could occasionally use someone telling us about them?
- crisnoble 4y ago
  I am a software developer, have a paid professional plan, and am almost out of my "zaps". Here are a two of my favorites: * Non profit community organization wants to sell event tickets. Paypal Order -> Add row to spreadsheet for simple reporting -> Add/Update user in mailchimp with a tag so they don't get future emails asking to buy tickets again. * Small client wants a gated webinar signup. Wordpress Contact Form -> Zapier Endpoint POST -> Add user to Zoom Registration -> Add/Update to mailchimp with a source tag -> Add row in spreadsheet Could these be done without zapier? Sure. But using zapier we can create that within 30 minutes without a server, or even dealing with serverless. Even if someone had those workflows as a one click install for lambda workflow, I would rather use zapier than deal with any AWS overhead. To everyone who thinks that "a webform to google docs" is the most common use case you are probably right. If you think that you could create the infrastructure to do that consistently with automatic retries, logging, error handling, keep on top of API changes from both ends, across dozens of clients, proper authorization and secret management, for cheaper than $50/month, then you are kidding yourself.
- contravariant 4y ago
  I'm not sure we're the target audience to be honest. My experience with bundled 'integrations' tends to be that you spend about as much effort fixing the mismatch between the provided integration and what you want as it would take to write an integration from scratch. In one case it took a bit longer, but in the end it was still necessary to write the whole thing from scratch in order to comply with the terms of use of the API. Which kind of proves my point.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
1minusp 4y ago
How is this different than workflow automation (for non-developers) solutions? Or is the takeaway that any workflow automation is ripe for unbundling?
- georgesequeira 4y ago
  I think it's two things Is the workflow automation tool big enough that subgroups of users are still a big number of users to service Of those subgroups, does one (or more) stand to have a better product experience if someone focused on their core use-cases / workflows. (e.g. Reclaim takes a bunch of calendar automation around scheduling and makes a product that reduces the work needed to optimize your calendar).
- iamacyborg 4y ago
  Ding ding ding. This is what needs to happen. To provide one painful example that I'm currently dealing with, at work we have a Marketing Automation platform, a CRM and a CX tool. Marketing use the MAP, sales use the CRM and customer success the CXM. All 3 have their own data schemas, their own "customer view", their own segmentation tools, they own orchestration (workflows) tool, etc. Everything exists in a silo, and no one can see the big picture. This area absolutely needs disruption, we're starting to see some of it at the MAP level with MessageGears, Vero and Supergrain but it's yet to feed through to those other customer facing functions as far as I've been able to see.
catsarebetter 4y ago
Judging from the startups that linked their saas in this thread, I'd say this article has somewhat of a point
PaulHoule 4y ago
Whenever I see people struggling with "integration" I find they're always using the word "integration".
kfk 4y ago
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 this space, I think good orchestration and good microservices are still a better choice.
- supersync 4y ago
  Check out Make, n8n, workflow86 Agree that coded integrations are still very relevant, but the addressable surface for UI is pretty large now.
  - ngz00 4y ago
    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.
    - iamacyborg 4y ago
      Maybe Airbyte if I understand what you're asking correctly.
      - georgesequeira 4y ago
        Ah right. Yeah, reverse-engineering Airbyte's DSL and just "borrowing" their UI generation may be the move.
    - georgesequeira 4y ago
      I don't know of a solution for ETL DSL -> UI but https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy goes from a DSL to internal web apps. Perhaps some inspiration could be taken from there. Good luck!
cm2012 4y ago
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 plugged in officially, 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.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  I should look into more features with it. Right now I mainly use it to link my Slack and GitHub presence. Very very useful since I get all sorts of notes from folks on both platforms. It's been critical to avoid having things fall through the cracks. I keep a special private slack channel that has slackbot message me whenever someone pings me on GH and lays out all the relevant info.
- KnobbleMcKnees 4y ago
  > 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)
  - guitarsteve 4y ago
    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.
    - mylons 4y ago
      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.
dnndev 4y ago
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.
- someotherperson 4y ago
  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.
  - dnndev 4y ago
    email sent!
    - georgesequeira 4y ago
      also interested, if you're up for it! (also email in profile)
duxup 4y ago
>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 more services heavily reliant on each other...
- tbran 4y ago
  The graphic in this short article [0] that shows the numerous companies "unbundled" from Craigslist is worth the click and will help you instantly understand the concept. [0]: https://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post/345941486/the-spawn-of-craigslist-like-most-vcs-that-focus https://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post/345941486/the-spawn-of-c...
  - starik36 4y ago
    I didn't grok it either and this graphic explained instantly what 6 paragraphs and countless images failed to do.
- dnndev 4y ago
  unbundling = offer higher quality integrations for a specific audience. zapier for marketers would be an unbundled zapier example.
  - duxup 4y ago
    I think I got it now. Thank you.
- chriskelley 4y ago
  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.
jcal93 4y ago
Zapier is really awesome for the non-tech crowd. I think this space is only going to continue to grow. I decided to build https://atlasconnex.com https://atlasconnex.com for developers who need more fine-grained control, but don't want to stand up their own infrastructure. The project is recently launched, so the number of connectors is growing rapidly. One my favorite (again, I'm the developer!) connectors is the "build your own" connector. You define a Python function and declare a period for it to run (once/min up to once/24hrs) and then you can do basically whatever you need inside that function. So if you need to poll an API endpoint, or pull a file from an SFTP server etc., you can create events based on that data that are then processed through transformers and filters and then delivered to their final destination.
Lightbody 4y ago
Hey -- my startup (https://reclaim.ai 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 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/ https://pipedream.com/. Check it out!
- mylons 4y ago
  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.
  - joshmlewis 4y ago
    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-fell-radically-in-2020/ https://aimgroup.com/2021/02/11/craigslist-traffic-revenue-f...
    - Invictus0 4y ago
      I still use Craigslist: it's great for finding apartments and roommates. Usage varies by location obviously but Craigslist is far from dead.
    - subpixel 4y ago
      I'm a new homeowner with kids way out in the boonies, and coming from a city I've had an accelerated need to find and buy ... stuff. Craigslist is just about over. It's a subset of things that are cross-posted to Facebook Marketplace. What Facebook did that Craigslist won't recover from is to align groups with classifieds. I belong to regional groups devoted to selling bikes, boats, furniture, baby clothes, among others. That's where the action is, and while there is cross-posting to Craigslist, that trend is certainly ebbing.
howmayiannoyyou 4y ago
Zapier is vulnerable to disruption both ends of the dev/integration chain (code/no-code), and they have been for some time. Their primary edge (IMHO) is a huge ecosystem of integrations unmatched by their competition. I don't see that edge persisting. It won't be long before OpenAI-esque UI's can generate no/low code integrations and as you'll see below there is plenty of conventional competition. They've had adequate funds and time to implement bulk actions, interface improvements and ecosystem enhancements that would benefit users, but not much has emerged. I use Zapier and some of the providers below as alternatives: Integromat Pipedream Mulesoft Jitterbit Built.io Workato JBoss Celigo Parabola.io Integrate.io IFTT CloudHQ MixMax Regardless, as a private company they're really only beholden to their owners, and they generate enough revenue (and presumably NET profit) that one could imagine ownership perhaps confusing focus for what might (or might not) actually be arrogance.
- malfist 4y ago
  low/no-code ecosystems have been promised to be "just around the corner" for decades now. I'll be really surprised if it ever arrives. Take a look at microsoft's "LightSwitch"
- rezbull 4y ago
  What functionality do you use IFTTT (assuming you made a typo with 'IFTT') for that Zapier does not support?
TameAntelope 4y ago
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.
- jdrc 4y ago
  Also their perpetually young audience means that it's inherently not suitable for lots of kind of communities.
- mritchie712 4y ago
  Good podcast on unbundling reddit: https://thehustle.co/reddit-unbundling/ https://thehustle.co/reddit-unbundling/
IceHegel 4y ago
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.
jdrc 4y ago
zapier sounds like something that doesn't scale, or will be replaced by the platforms themselves. it's like a business on 1000 other people's platforms.
- fabiandesimone 4y ago
  They do 125MM in rev a year. Seems we have different scale systems because that's quite the number.
alooPotato 4y ago
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?
- kamalfariz 4y ago
  Clay is basically Zapier applied to a spreadsheet UI https://www.clay.run/ https://www.clay.run/ You can set up each column to hit an integration. As a cell is populate either by hand or from the result of an integration, it triggers other cells to evaluate.
  - alooPotato 4y ago
    Cool - checking it out!
- robocat 4y ago
  I had designed a similar system for consultant customisation of complicated business rules, although I failed to deliver it. I had intended to: * Have one workbook per business function. One inputs sheet (variables in), one sheet for the formulas, one outputs sheet (variables out). * Use a sort of test driven, self documenting approach. When developing with clients, it is easiest to ask them about specific examples, including simple and complicated ones. Consultants understand business rules when they configure a system, but it is very hard to come back to 5 years later when the business wants something tweaked. Test data inputs and expected outputs was to be included on other sheets, with documentation. And the system would validate the sheet formulas gave the correct outputs for the example inputs. * Use custom formulas for our industry needs with a custom data type for some variable inputs - this is the crux of where I came unstuck with my design (it was kind of SQLish table inputs per input cell, visible in Excel when in design mode). I didn’t actually finish the system, because I was trying to bidirectional integrate directly with Excel using COM, and I just couldn’t get that working because I overcomplicated it. This was a long time ago, and I couldn’t find a suitable non-excel engine to integrate with due to other team constraints. Note that spreadsheets are inherently side effect free functional programming at its finest IMHO: I wanted to avoid any imperative programming. However we ended up with an imperative Visual Basic like design instead which did work, but it takes extremely highly skilled consultants to use it, and is spectacularly inefficient.
samstave 4y ago
Zapier should do a Google and offer a self-hosted "Zapier Engine" box that one can self host... (Anyone recall the Google Search boxes from ~2007? Are they still avail? We installed some at Lockheed in ~2006 or something... never saw the ROI on that thing... but a zapier host on a closed network, I can see the ongoing value of such...
- ncphil 4y ago
  Google started shutting down its GSA (Google Search Appliance) business in 2016, with the latest customers getting shut off by the end of 2018/2019. The promised cloud replacement never materialized, at least for anyone who wasn't also on GSuite/Workspace. GSA was an interesting product that I and others spent 100s of hours mastering. Really hated giving it up, although it was never the panacea for cutting through search results "noise" we had hoped it would be. ROI? Given its short lifespan, I doubt you could get a consensus on that. One thing in its favor over existing cloud based solutions: you had a lot of fine-grained control over the output. You could say that GDPR killed it, but that wouldn't be fair. It could have been queasiness over storing all that internal customer data. Or maybe the infamous short attention span of Google's executives.
  - samstave 4y ago
    I'll say, Our organization failed to properly implement the appliance ; as such, didnt get the best result. (can't blame Goog/the device if we didnt actually implement the thing in best way possible...)
calltrak 4y ago
ghoomketu 4y ago
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-request-cannot-be-completed-because-you-have-exceeded-your-quota-error-13627 https://community.zapier.com/general-questions-3/youtube-the...
- kfarr 4y ago
  In fairness this seems more line a Google issue than a Zapier issue.
- bognition 4y ago
  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.
mbesto 4y ago
Has the author just not heard of Jitterbit or Mulesoft? Tangential rant - I feel like there is this group of 20-somethings that just assume that because they haven't heard of companies like SAP, Oracle, etc. that they just dismiss them as being dumb and boring and then when they analyze a problem space. Yet have no idea how a company like P&G operates at a global scale (hint - they use software like SAP). Jitterbit and Mulesoft essentially sit in that space. P.S. - Pipedream is a super interesting model, but it's not an unbundling play.
- matt3D 4y ago
  Don't forget Microsoft Power Automate (and Logic Apps). For anyone in the 365 ecosystem these become the default, and yet I never seem to see them mentioned alongside the more start-uppy stuff like Zapier and Imtegromat.
  - ncphil 4y ago
    It's mostly because the most economical way to get it is with an enterprise M365 sub, which many companies with under 1,000 users don't have. Even at that level, the unforseen need for additional premium licensing can dampen enthusiasm ("but it worked with my trial subscription!"). Besides, "low code" or "no code" is still programming, and requies that non-IT people to deal with unfamiliar concepts like software support, security and lifecycle management (or to ignore them at their own peril). Logic Apps are a whole other thing. More pro developers should give them a closer look if they aren't already using them.
alimov 4y ago
n8n.io offers something similar to Zapier, but probably not as well rounded.
asim 4y ago
We're playing in this space with M3O (https://m3o.com https://m3o.com) but focused very much on making APIs programmable as opposed to completely doing away with the code.
oldandboring 4y ago
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!
- claudiulodro 4y ago
  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.
  - georgesequeira 4y ago
    Totally, outside of people trying to make a "smarter" excel like Airtable or Rows, different business units will make some "template" that lets them run their orgs in excel. Those "templates" could certainly be better products. Packy talks more about how this is also a platform being unbundled: https://www.notboring.co/p/excel-never-dies?s=r https://www.notboring.co/p/excel-never-dies?s=r
- joshmlewis 4y ago
  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.
mattwad 4y ago
We moved to Discord and most apps only support Slack (looking at you, Datadog and Github!). Zapier has saved us in a couple cases from having to go back to Slack.
tgtweak 4y ago
Zapier has a large moat. I would like to think anything you can bring to the table to compete or add value (maybe flow-based logic rules or inclusion of serverless script-level transforms similar to pipedream) could be cherry picked and added onto zapier with little stress. I'll add that it is relatively trivial to wire your own serverless function into zapier to this end. One thing lacking from the article as a niche proper webhook management (ie hookdeck). There are many industry-niche api-interchange products out there... many predating Zapier and remaining the defacto in that industry. Think logistics, ERP and finance systems. As much of a case that can be made for unbundling - I don't think such can be said for zapier and the breadth of moat they've created. Zapier integrations on a given SaaS usually don't hold a candle to native/direct, but they are certainly universal. I'm very curious to hear a concrete example of a segment/industry and how it could be "unbundled", but unfortunately there is none in the article. SOC/PCI compliance? Remember Microsoft Flow (now called Microsoft Power Automate)? Hundreds of connectors and deep integration into azure/microsoft platform... all underwritten and stamped by Microsoft's level of enterprise. Looking at that ARR growth curve, they've certainly demonstrated the value of wide integration over deep/niche integrations. The only argument to be made here for market displacement is that a cheaper alternative would come about offered as a loss leader by big tech, or an open data interchange standard/paradigm could come abound and disrupt the necessity of this.
- georgesequeira 4y ago
  `I'm very curious to hear a concrete example of a segment/industry and how it could be "unbundled", but unfortunately, there is none in the article.` Alloy Automation is making a better Zapier for E-commerce: https://runalloy.com/ https://runalloy.com/ Anvyl is making a better Zapier for supply chain: https://anvyl.com/ https://anvyl.com/ That being said. I think that you're right! Trying to just take workflows (or zaps) from Zapier is not going to be the best move. These companies have focused on their verticals and started building a product where automation is a feature, not a product. Anvyl for example is a pane-of-glass for supply-chains orders/parts/sourcing along with automation to supplement the experience. I believe Alloy is trying to become an E-commerce CRM. Their wedge has been enabling some tricky workflows that aren't well supported in Zapier.
avipars 4y ago
Are they in direct or indirect competition with IFTTT and also Microsoft PowerAutomate... How much space is in the industry for these no-code automation tools?
adameasterling 4y ago
So I'm pretty sure this is the technology revolution that we're all sleeping on. Like, self-driving cars? VR? Meh. Accessible programming? A safe environment for folks close to a business problem that lets them solve that business problem on their own?! That's cool. Like for me, in my experience as a software engineer, there's basically four types of employees: The tech-naive domain expert, the tech-friendly domain expert, junior coders, and senior engineers. The two ends of the spectrum should stay focused on they're good at: Doing business stuff, or coding on tough problems. It's the two roles in the middle that interest me: Tech-friendly domain experts and junior coders. Right now, in most companies, tech-friendly domain experts could totally figure out a tool like Zapier and do things that they'd normally need an engineer to do. But their company doesn't use something like Zapier, so they can't. They just have to talk to technical people and make them do it. But there lies long debugging loops and, just, slowness. In some companies though, those that have embraced low-code platforms like Tray or Zapier or the product we made (https://docs.middle.app https://docs.middle.app), they've enabled their tech-friendly domain experts to do tons of stuff they couldn't do before, without bothering people like myself, a more senior coder (I can work on platform things!). ALSO, I've found that junior coders have a special role. We've hired non-programmers and taught them Python JUST so they could code new things in the developer side of our integration platform. It's a sandboxed environment with limited risk; they can go crazy coding whatever connectors or other things that those tech-friendly domain experts need. I don't have to be involved, outside of a code review every now and then. I know that they can't break anything other than the narrow thing they're working on. It's neat. Neat stuff.
- catsarebetter 4y ago
  I enjoyed reading this, never thought about it like that
rwhitman 4y ago
I work for a team that specializes in middleware development - eg the cases where Zapier really falls apart and needs a more thoroughly architected solution. I've spent a lot of time inside this topic. The thing that will disrupt Zapier is the software vendors themselves. Most Zaps will eventually be replaced by native platform-to-platform integrations where the middleware has been designed and sanctioned by the 2 parties. Having a one-size-fits all solution is impractical over the long run. Its a temporary fix for a bigger more substantial problem. This is plumbing. You don't use one flimsy universal type of pipe joint for every pipe in your house, otherwise you get leaks. Same thing
gnutrino 4y ago
I’ve had this same thought. The features I get out of Zapier are very useful but lacking some basic functionality that would make it a killer app. Things like branching are missing and rate limits are low. The price is also very high per action which makes it a poor use case for anything that isn’t directly making you money.
sha_burn 4y ago
1. Revenue is only $125m 2. Revenue growth has not plateaued 3. There is user value and multiple value in an all in one offering 4. Distribution will be hard exceptionally hard, going up against a thought leading, financially solvent, Founder led organization with a proven solution. ...Thus, your unbundled solution must be exceptionally better for a few million dollars in aspirational revenue. Otherwise, so distinctly different that it is not really a competitor.
galaxyLogic 4y ago
Is Zapier like an Enterprise Service Bus but for connecting multiple enterprises?
yumraj 4y ago
It’s interesting that some of these unbundling articles have started popping lately. I believe there was recently a Airbnb unbundling blog. IMHO, if anyone wants to unbundle, FB is a prime target. They’ve grown big and acquired companies , and are distracted with the whole Metacrap, that it is high time someone picks use cases apart to do them better and well.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Is unbundling a good way to come up with business ideas? I am not so sure. Sounds more like human pattern matching playing its part. As in "Oh yeah, that business is a bit like a Craig's list section". Unbundling seems like the analysis of what you did, not the plan of how to do it.
artyomavanesov 4y ago
Zapier seems exactly like the type of product that is difficult to unbundle because its value is in its integrations. If an integration (e.g. Gmail and Trello) maps to an addressable market, then the more permutations there are, the larger Zapier's potential market and value is. If you move away from Zapier to some optimized single-purpose integration then you lose the potential value from access to the other integrations. And because of Zapier's enormous library it covers both common and niche use cases. Zapier is different from something like Craigslist because the latter only offers convenience from having different verticals in one place. There is no synergy between them.
koolhead17 4y ago
At scale, like every other tool, using Zapier does not makes sense.
retrocryptid 4y ago
zapier is sort of doomed. it has revenue. there's no way it will ever get intarwebs valuations again.
consoledev 4y ago
Zapier while despise by developers is a very good tool

I think unbundling takes place on two levels. First, zapier competitors. (Full disclosure, I am building a workflow comparison website comparing 25 zapier competitors.) But secondly, I start wondering if native integrations won't become more important and a bigger threat for zapier over time. Currently the typical customer pays for two SaaS services AND for zapier etc. to connect the two. Over time, native integrations can, self built or with the help of white label solutions from n8n embed, make, Paragon and others, make workflow automation solutions less important. I also wonder if Google sheets, notion databases and airtable will not become hubs for automations. Many problems are solved for a fraction of the cost if all SaaS have native, two way automations/syncs to these spreadsheet/databases. (Notion bought automate.io, but hasn't really interested it. Yet.)

alberth 4y ago

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.

mauricio 4y ago
A popular use case for SaaS companies isn't even in utilizing Zapier themselves, but rather adding their API to the list of integrations. This can really speed up onboarding for customers -- especially if they already use Zapier.
tomatowurst 4y ago
if you have to ask you are not in the need to know, this is an automation tool for non-developers at various organizations
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  >if you have to ask you are not in the need to know Does it really need to be said that we don't all know about every program/service available to us that we could use, and thus could occasionally use someone telling us about them?
crisnoble 4y ago
I am a software developer, have a paid professional plan, and am almost out of my "zaps". Here are a two of my favorites: * Non profit community organization wants to sell event tickets. Paypal Order -> Add row to spreadsheet for simple reporting -> Add/Update user in mailchimp with a tag so they don't get future emails asking to buy tickets again. * Small client wants a gated webinar signup. Wordpress Contact Form -> Zapier Endpoint POST -> Add user to Zoom Registration -> Add/Update to mailchimp with a source tag -> Add row in spreadsheet Could these be done without zapier? Sure. But using zapier we can create that within 30 minutes without a server, or even dealing with serverless. Even if someone had those workflows as a one click install for lambda workflow, I would rather use zapier than deal with any AWS overhead. To everyone who thinks that "a webform to google docs" is the most common use case you are probably right. If you think that you could create the infrastructure to do that consistently with automatic retries, logging, error handling, keep on top of API changes from both ends, across dozens of clients, proper authorization and secret management, for cheaper than $50/month, then you are kidding yourself.
contravariant 4y ago
I'm not sure we're the target audience to be honest. My experience with bundled 'integrations' tends to be that you spend about as much effort fixing the mismatch between the provided integration and what you want as it would take to write an integration from scratch. In one case it took a bit longer, but in the end it was still necessary to write the whole thing from scratch in order to comply with the terms of use of the API. Which kind of proves my point.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

1minusp 4y ago

How is this different than workflow automation (for non-developers) solutions? Or is the takeaway that any workflow automation is ripe for unbundling?

georgesequeira 4y ago
I think it's two things Is the workflow automation tool big enough that subgroups of users are still a big number of users to service Of those subgroups, does one (or more) stand to have a better product experience if someone focused on their core use-cases / workflows. (e.g. Reclaim takes a bunch of calendar automation around scheduling and makes a product that reduces the work needed to optimize your calendar).
iamacyborg 4y ago
Ding ding ding. This is what needs to happen. To provide one painful example that I'm currently dealing with, at work we have a Marketing Automation platform, a CRM and a CX tool. Marketing use the MAP, sales use the CRM and customer success the CXM. All 3 have their own data schemas, their own "customer view", their own segmentation tools, they own orchestration (workflows) tool, etc. Everything exists in a silo, and no one can see the big picture. This area absolutely needs disruption, we're starting to see some of it at the MAP level with MessageGears, Vero and Supergrain but it's yet to feed through to those other customer facing functions as far as I've been able to see.

catsarebetter 4y ago

Judging from the startups that linked their saas in this thread, I'd say this article has somewhat of a point

PaulHoule 4y ago

Whenever I see people struggling with "integration" I find they're always using the word "integration".

kfk 4y ago

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 this space, I think good orchestration and good microservices are still a better choice.

supersync 4y ago
Check out Make, n8n, workflow86 Agree that coded integrations are still very relevant, but the addressable surface for UI is pretty large now.
- ngz00 4y ago
  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.
  - iamacyborg 4y ago
    Maybe Airbyte if I understand what you're asking correctly.
    - georgesequeira 4y ago
      Ah right. Yeah, reverse-engineering Airbyte's DSL and just "borrowing" their UI generation may be the move.
  - georgesequeira 4y ago
    I don't know of a solution for ETL DSL -> UI but https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy goes from a DSL to internal web apps. Perhaps some inspiration could be taken from there. Good luck!

cm2012 4y ago

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 plugged in officially, 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.

Forgeties79 4y ago
I should look into more features with it. Right now I mainly use it to link my Slack and GitHub presence. Very very useful since I get all sorts of notes from folks on both platforms. It's been critical to avoid having things fall through the cracks. I keep a special private slack channel that has slackbot message me whenever someone pings me on GH and lays out all the relevant info.
KnobbleMcKnees 4y ago
> 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)
- guitarsteve 4y ago
  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.
  - mylons 4y ago
    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.

dnndev 4y ago

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.

someotherperson 4y ago
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.
- dnndev 4y ago
  email sent!
  - georgesequeira 4y ago
    also interested, if you're up for it! (also email in profile)

duxup 4y ago

>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 more services heavily reliant on each other...

tbran 4y ago
The graphic in this short article [0] that shows the numerous companies "unbundled" from Craigslist is worth the click and will help you instantly understand the concept. [0]: https://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post/345941486/the-spawn-of-craigslist-like-most-vcs-that-focus https://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post/345941486/the-spawn-of-c...
- starik36 4y ago
  I didn't grok it either and this graphic explained instantly what 6 paragraphs and countless images failed to do.
dnndev 4y ago
unbundling = offer higher quality integrations for a specific audience. zapier for marketers would be an unbundled zapier example.
- duxup 4y ago
  I think I got it now. Thank you.
chriskelley 4y ago
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.

jcal93 4y ago

Zapier is really awesome for the non-tech crowd. I think this space is only going to continue to grow. I decided to build https://atlasconnex.com https://atlasconnex.com for developers who need more fine-grained control, but don't want to stand up their own infrastructure. The project is recently launched, so the number of connectors is growing rapidly. One my favorite (again, I'm the developer!) connectors is the "build your own" connector. You define a Python function and declare a period for it to run (once/min up to once/24hrs) and then you can do basically whatever you need inside that function. So if you need to poll an API endpoint, or pull a file from an SFTP server etc., you can create events based on that data that are then processed through transformers and filters and then delivered to their final destination.

Lightbody 4y ago

Hey -- my startup (https://reclaim.ai 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 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/ https://pipedream.com/. Check it out!

mylons 4y ago
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.
- joshmlewis 4y ago
  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-fell-radically-in-2020/ https://aimgroup.com/2021/02/11/craigslist-traffic-revenue-f...
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    I still use Craigslist: it's great for finding apartments and roommates. Usage varies by location obviously but Craigslist is far from dead.
  - subpixel 4y ago
    I'm a new homeowner with kids way out in the boonies, and coming from a city I've had an accelerated need to find and buy ... stuff. Craigslist is just about over. It's a subset of things that are cross-posted to Facebook Marketplace. What Facebook did that Craigslist won't recover from is to align groups with classifieds. I belong to regional groups devoted to selling bikes, boats, furniture, baby clothes, among others. That's where the action is, and while there is cross-posting to Craigslist, that trend is certainly ebbing.

howmayiannoyyou 4y ago

Zapier is vulnerable to disruption both ends of the dev/integration chain (code/no-code), and they have been for some time. Their primary edge (IMHO) is a huge ecosystem of integrations unmatched by their competition. I don't see that edge persisting. It won't be long before OpenAI-esque UI's can generate no/low code integrations and as you'll see below there is plenty of conventional competition. They've had adequate funds and time to implement bulk actions, interface improvements and ecosystem enhancements that would benefit users, but not much has emerged. I use Zapier and some of the providers below as alternatives: Integromat Pipedream Mulesoft Jitterbit Built.io Workato JBoss Celigo Parabola.io Integrate.io IFTT CloudHQ MixMax Regardless, as a private company they're really only beholden to their owners, and they generate enough revenue (and presumably NET profit) that one could imagine ownership perhaps confusing focus for what might (or might not) actually be arrogance.

malfist 4y ago
low/no-code ecosystems have been promised to be "just around the corner" for decades now. I'll be really surprised if it ever arrives. Take a look at microsoft's "LightSwitch"
rezbull 4y ago
What functionality do you use IFTTT (assuming you made a typo with 'IFTT') for that Zapier does not support?

TameAntelope 4y ago

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.

jdrc 4y ago
Also their perpetually young audience means that it's inherently not suitable for lots of kind of communities.
mritchie712 4y ago
Good podcast on unbundling reddit: https://thehustle.co/reddit-unbundling/ https://thehustle.co/reddit-unbundling/

IceHegel 4y ago

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.

jdrc 4y ago

zapier sounds like something that doesn't scale, or will be replaced by the platforms themselves. it's like a business on 1000 other people's platforms.

fabiandesimone 4y ago
They do 125MM in rev a year. Seems we have different scale systems because that's quite the number.

alooPotato 4y ago

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?

kamalfariz 4y ago
Clay is basically Zapier applied to a spreadsheet UI https://www.clay.run/ https://www.clay.run/ You can set up each column to hit an integration. As a cell is populate either by hand or from the result of an integration, it triggers other cells to evaluate.
- alooPotato 4y ago
  Cool - checking it out!
robocat 4y ago
I had designed a similar system for consultant customisation of complicated business rules, although I failed to deliver it. I had intended to: * Have one workbook per business function. One inputs sheet (variables in), one sheet for the formulas, one outputs sheet (variables out). * Use a sort of test driven, self documenting approach. When developing with clients, it is easiest to ask them about specific examples, including simple and complicated ones. Consultants understand business rules when they configure a system, but it is very hard to come back to 5 years later when the business wants something tweaked. Test data inputs and expected outputs was to be included on other sheets, with documentation. And the system would validate the sheet formulas gave the correct outputs for the example inputs. * Use custom formulas for our industry needs with a custom data type for some variable inputs - this is the crux of where I came unstuck with my design (it was kind of SQLish table inputs per input cell, visible in Excel when in design mode). I didn’t actually finish the system, because I was trying to bidirectional integrate directly with Excel using COM, and I just couldn’t get that working because I overcomplicated it. This was a long time ago, and I couldn’t find a suitable non-excel engine to integrate with due to other team constraints. Note that spreadsheets are inherently side effect free functional programming at its finest IMHO: I wanted to avoid any imperative programming. However we ended up with an imperative Visual Basic like design instead which did work, but it takes extremely highly skilled consultants to use it, and is spectacularly inefficient.

samstave 4y ago

Zapier should do a Google and offer a self-hosted "Zapier Engine" box that one can self host... (Anyone recall the Google Search boxes from ~2007? Are they still avail? We installed some at Lockheed in ~2006 or something... never saw the ROI on that thing... but a zapier host on a closed network, I can see the ongoing value of such...

ncphil 4y ago
Google started shutting down its GSA (Google Search Appliance) business in 2016, with the latest customers getting shut off by the end of 2018/2019. The promised cloud replacement never materialized, at least for anyone who wasn't also on GSuite/Workspace. GSA was an interesting product that I and others spent 100s of hours mastering. Really hated giving it up, although it was never the panacea for cutting through search results "noise" we had hoped it would be. ROI? Given its short lifespan, I doubt you could get a consensus on that. One thing in its favor over existing cloud based solutions: you had a lot of fine-grained control over the output. You could say that GDPR killed it, but that wouldn't be fair. It could have been queasiness over storing all that internal customer data. Or maybe the infamous short attention span of Google's executives.
- samstave 4y ago
  I'll say, Our organization failed to properly implement the appliance ; as such, didnt get the best result. (can't blame Goog/the device if we didnt actually implement the thing in best way possible...)

calltrak 4y ago

ghoomketu 4y ago

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-request-cannot-be-completed-because-you-have-exceeded-your-quota-error-13627 https://community.zapier.com/general-questions-3/youtube-the...

kfarr 4y ago
In fairness this seems more line a Google issue than a Zapier issue.
bognition 4y ago
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.

mbesto 4y ago

Has the author just not heard of Jitterbit or Mulesoft? Tangential rant - I feel like there is this group of 20-somethings that just assume that because they haven't heard of companies like SAP, Oracle, etc. that they just dismiss them as being dumb and boring and then when they analyze a problem space. Yet have no idea how a company like P&G operates at a global scale (hint - they use software like SAP). Jitterbit and Mulesoft essentially sit in that space. P.S. - Pipedream is a super interesting model, but it's not an unbundling play.

matt3D 4y ago
Don't forget Microsoft Power Automate (and Logic Apps). For anyone in the 365 ecosystem these become the default, and yet I never seem to see them mentioned alongside the more start-uppy stuff like Zapier and Imtegromat.
- ncphil 4y ago
  It's mostly because the most economical way to get it is with an enterprise M365 sub, which many companies with under 1,000 users don't have. Even at that level, the unforseen need for additional premium licensing can dampen enthusiasm ("but it worked with my trial subscription!"). Besides, "low code" or "no code" is still programming, and requies that non-IT people to deal with unfamiliar concepts like software support, security and lifecycle management (or to ignore them at their own peril). Logic Apps are a whole other thing. More pro developers should give them a closer look if they aren't already using them.

alimov 4y ago

n8n.io offers something similar to Zapier, but probably not as well rounded.

asim 4y ago

We're playing in this space with M3O (https://m3o.com https://m3o.com) but focused very much on making APIs programmable as opposed to completely doing away with the code.

oldandboring 4y ago

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!

claudiulodro 4y ago
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.
- georgesequeira 4y ago
  Totally, outside of people trying to make a "smarter" excel like Airtable or Rows, different business units will make some "template" that lets them run their orgs in excel. Those "templates" could certainly be better products. Packy talks more about how this is also a platform being unbundled: https://www.notboring.co/p/excel-never-dies?s=r https://www.notboring.co/p/excel-never-dies?s=r
joshmlewis 4y ago
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.

mattwad 4y ago

We moved to Discord and most apps only support Slack (looking at you, Datadog and Github!). Zapier has saved us in a couple cases from having to go back to Slack.

tgtweak 4y ago

Zapier has a large moat. I would like to think anything you can bring to the table to compete or add value (maybe flow-based logic rules or inclusion of serverless script-level transforms similar to pipedream) could be cherry picked and added onto zapier with little stress. I'll add that it is relatively trivial to wire your own serverless function into zapier to this end. One thing lacking from the article as a niche proper webhook management (ie hookdeck). There are many industry-niche api-interchange products out there... many predating Zapier and remaining the defacto in that industry. Think logistics, ERP and finance systems. As much of a case that can be made for unbundling - I don't think such can be said for zapier and the breadth of moat they've created. Zapier integrations on a given SaaS usually don't hold a candle to native/direct, but they are certainly universal. I'm very curious to hear a concrete example of a segment/industry and how it could be "unbundled", but unfortunately there is none in the article. SOC/PCI compliance? Remember Microsoft Flow (now called Microsoft Power Automate)? Hundreds of connectors and deep integration into azure/microsoft platform... all underwritten and stamped by Microsoft's level of enterprise. Looking at that ARR growth curve, they've certainly demonstrated the value of wide integration over deep/niche integrations. The only argument to be made here for market displacement is that a cheaper alternative would come about offered as a loss leader by big tech, or an open data interchange standard/paradigm could come abound and disrupt the necessity of this.

georgesequeira 4y ago
`I'm very curious to hear a concrete example of a segment/industry and how it could be "unbundled", but unfortunately, there is none in the article.` Alloy Automation is making a better Zapier for E-commerce: https://runalloy.com/ https://runalloy.com/ Anvyl is making a better Zapier for supply chain: https://anvyl.com/ https://anvyl.com/ That being said. I think that you're right! Trying to just take workflows (or zaps) from Zapier is not going to be the best move. These companies have focused on their verticals and started building a product where automation is a feature, not a product. Anvyl for example is a pane-of-glass for supply-chains orders/parts/sourcing along with automation to supplement the experience. I believe Alloy is trying to become an E-commerce CRM. Their wedge has been enabling some tricky workflows that aren't well supported in Zapier.

avipars 4y ago

Are they in direct or indirect competition with IFTTT and also Microsoft PowerAutomate... How much space is in the industry for these no-code automation tools?

adameasterling 4y ago

So I'm pretty sure this is the technology revolution that we're all sleeping on. Like, self-driving cars? VR? Meh. Accessible programming? A safe environment for folks close to a business problem that lets them solve that business problem on their own?! That's cool. Like for me, in my experience as a software engineer, there's basically four types of employees: The tech-naive domain expert, the tech-friendly domain expert, junior coders, and senior engineers. The two ends of the spectrum should stay focused on they're good at: Doing business stuff, or coding on tough problems. It's the two roles in the middle that interest me: Tech-friendly domain experts and junior coders. Right now, in most companies, tech-friendly domain experts could totally figure out a tool like Zapier and do things that they'd normally need an engineer to do. But their company doesn't use something like Zapier, so they can't. They just have to talk to technical people and make them do it. But there lies long debugging loops and, just, slowness. In some companies though, those that have embraced low-code platforms like Tray or Zapier or the product we made (https://docs.middle.app https://docs.middle.app), they've enabled their tech-friendly domain experts to do tons of stuff they couldn't do before, without bothering people like myself, a more senior coder (I can work on platform things!). ALSO, I've found that junior coders have a special role. We've hired non-programmers and taught them Python JUST so they could code new things in the developer side of our integration platform. It's a sandboxed environment with limited risk; they can go crazy coding whatever connectors or other things that those tech-friendly domain experts need. I don't have to be involved, outside of a code review every now and then. I know that they can't break anything other than the narrow thing they're working on. It's neat. Neat stuff.

catsarebetter 4y ago
I enjoyed reading this, never thought about it like that

rwhitman 4y ago

I work for a team that specializes in middleware development - eg the cases where Zapier really falls apart and needs a more thoroughly architected solution. I've spent a lot of time inside this topic. The thing that will disrupt Zapier is the software vendors themselves. Most Zaps will eventually be replaced by native platform-to-platform integrations where the middleware has been designed and sanctioned by the 2 parties. Having a one-size-fits all solution is impractical over the long run. Its a temporary fix for a bigger more substantial problem. This is plumbing. You don't use one flimsy universal type of pipe joint for every pipe in your house, otherwise you get leaks. Same thing

gnutrino 4y ago

I’ve had this same thought. The features I get out of Zapier are very useful but lacking some basic functionality that would make it a killer app. Things like branching are missing and rate limits are low. The price is also very high per action which makes it a poor use case for anything that isn’t directly making you money.

sha_burn 4y ago

1. Revenue is only $125m 2. Revenue growth has not plateaued 3. There is user value and multiple value in an all in one offering 4. Distribution will be hard exceptionally hard, going up against a thought leading, financially solvent, Founder led organization with a proven solution. ...Thus, your unbundled solution must be exceptionally better for a few million dollars in aspirational revenue. Otherwise, so distinctly different that it is not really a competitor.

galaxyLogic 4y ago

Is Zapier like an Enterprise Service Bus but for connecting multiple enterprises?

yumraj 4y ago

It’s interesting that some of these unbundling articles have started popping lately. I believe there was recently a Airbnb unbundling blog. IMHO, if anyone wants to unbundle, FB is a prime target. They’ve grown big and acquired companies , and are distracted with the whole Metacrap, that it is high time someone picks use cases apart to do them better and well.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Is unbundling a good way to come up with business ideas? I am not so sure. Sounds more like human pattern matching playing its part. As in "Oh yeah, that business is a bit like a Craig's list section". Unbundling seems like the analysis of what you did, not the plan of how to do it.

artyomavanesov 4y ago

Zapier seems exactly like the type of product that is difficult to unbundle because its value is in its integrations. If an integration (e.g. Gmail and Trello) maps to an addressable market, then the more permutations there are, the larger Zapier's potential market and value is. If you move away from Zapier to some optimized single-purpose integration then you lose the potential value from access to the other integrations. And because of Zapier's enormous library it covers both common and niche use cases. Zapier is different from something like Craigslist because the latter only offers convenience from having different verticals in one place. There is no synergy between them.

koolhead17 4y ago

At scale, like every other tool, using Zapier does not makes sense.

retrocryptid 4y ago

zapier is sort of doomed. it has revenue. there's no way it will ever get intarwebs valuations again.

consoledev 4y ago

Zapier while despise by developers is a very good tool