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Zapier has exponentially more integrations than this or anything else, but is surprisingly difficult to use, and more so since they updated their UI. Editing Za

Zapier has exponentially more integrations than this or anything else, but is surprisingly difficult to use, and more so since they updated their UI. Editing Zaps is pure torture because refresh is so difficult. Exception handling is pure pain. In most instances the breadth of API calls is so narrow, and so rarely updated by vendors that you end up switching to a custom integration. I've also noticed vendors rapidly expanding their native integrations, sidestepping the need for a request broker. The "retail" integration space remains underserved and if one of the enterprise players decided to go down-market with a better UI and deeper integrations - they'd mop the floor clean in 18 months.

rogerkirkness 7y ago
We tend to agree re: retail integration, assuming you mean among retailers as opposed to message brokering.
toomuchtodo 7y ago
> The "retail" integration space remains underserved and if one of the enterprise players decided to go down-market with a better UI and deeper integrations - they'd mop the floor clean in 18 months. I think it's a tough market to be "winner" of. Novices are going to want a stupid simple GUI ("wizard mode", as someone else in thread mentioned). Power users are going to want to be able to toss in some code at some point in a workflow to do some fancy ETL you don't support out of the box. When you hit a certain level of complexity, an edge case or integration an automation product doesn't support, or perhaps even an amount of spend that you start looking at annually as painful, it's likely you consider pulling all of your workflows out and have a software engineer build something bespoke for your business line.
- wpietri 7y ago
  Yeah, I wonder if this space is sort of like the to-do/task-management space. It's conceptually one thing, but in practice people have such different needs that no one product can be everything to everybody.
PatrolX 7y ago
> The "retail" integration space remains underserved This is accurate, there's a significant opportunity in this space but it won't stay that way for long. There's a well-known entrepreneur I know with significant exits and capital entering this space that's going after Zapier's market and I'm certain he's not alone.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  > There's a well-known entrepreneur I know with significant exits and capital entering this space that's going after Zapier's market and I'm certain he's not alone. Having seen how the sausage is made and what it takes to build and support such a product, I will say that past success is no guarantee of success in this market. It is a grind, day and day out of dealing with queues, API integrations that fail or degrade either loudly or silently and you have no visibility into them, non-technical users who are are not happy when the magic isn't working, blobs of data that just shouldn't be, spending hours tracking down single edge cases or failures, and so on. It's not "write some code, here's your $1B exit" (but you will be writing a lot of code!). It is constant tending of a complex piece of machinery, and failures are painful (outages somewhat, data loss exceptionally so).
  - PatrolX 7y ago
    I totally agree, it's not easy at all. Anyone attempting to take on this space is going to have their hands more than full and they're far more likely to fail than succeed. Personally I wouldn't even try, mostly because the tools themselves can enable much easier more likely to succeed lower hanging fruit and that's how I use them. If you want to make money "using" these tools then Huginn is your best option and it gives you a competitive advantage over those you're competing with that are using Zapier to do similar things.
- howmayiannoyyou 7y ago
  Zapier can sell equity for an insane valuation IMHO. Money isn't their problem I think. I think - may be wrong - the problem is management. My sense is they are hampered by prior success bias and lack of what I'll call "grey hair" experience that provides insight into the business case their "retail" customers face. Again might be wrong, but something suggests arrogance to me.

rogerkirkness 7y ago

We tend to agree re: retail integration, assuming you mean among retailers as opposed to message brokering.

toomuchtodo 7y ago

> The "retail" integration space remains underserved and if one of the enterprise players decided to go down-market with a better UI and deeper integrations - they'd mop the floor clean in 18 months. I think it's a tough market to be "winner" of. Novices are going to want a stupid simple GUI ("wizard mode", as someone else in thread mentioned). Power users are going to want to be able to toss in some code at some point in a workflow to do some fancy ETL you don't support out of the box. When you hit a certain level of complexity, an edge case or integration an automation product doesn't support, or perhaps even an amount of spend that you start looking at annually as painful, it's likely you consider pulling all of your workflows out and have a software engineer build something bespoke for your business line.

wpietri 7y ago
Yeah, I wonder if this space is sort of like the to-do/task-management space. It's conceptually one thing, but in practice people have such different needs that no one product can be everything to everybody.

PatrolX 7y ago

> The "retail" integration space remains underserved This is accurate, there's a significant opportunity in this space but it won't stay that way for long. There's a well-known entrepreneur I know with significant exits and capital entering this space that's going after Zapier's market and I'm certain he's not alone.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
> There's a well-known entrepreneur I know with significant exits and capital entering this space that's going after Zapier's market and I'm certain he's not alone. Having seen how the sausage is made and what it takes to build and support such a product, I will say that past success is no guarantee of success in this market. It is a grind, day and day out of dealing with queues, API integrations that fail or degrade either loudly or silently and you have no visibility into them, non-technical users who are are not happy when the magic isn't working, blobs of data that just shouldn't be, spending hours tracking down single edge cases or failures, and so on. It's not "write some code, here's your $1B exit" (but you will be writing a lot of code!). It is constant tending of a complex piece of machinery, and failures are painful (outages somewhat, data loss exceptionally so).
- PatrolX 7y ago
  I totally agree, it's not easy at all. Anyone attempting to take on this space is going to have their hands more than full and they're far more likely to fail than succeed. Personally I wouldn't even try, mostly because the tools themselves can enable much easier more likely to succeed lower hanging fruit and that's how I use them. If you want to make money "using" these tools then Huginn is your best option and it gives you a competitive advantage over those you're competing with that are using Zapier to do similar things.
howmayiannoyyou 7y ago
Zapier can sell equity for an insane valuation IMHO. Money isn't their problem I think. I think - may be wrong - the problem is management. My sense is they are hampered by prior success bias and lack of what I'll call "grey hair" experience that provides insight into the business case their "retail" customers face. Again might be wrong, but something suggests arrogance to me.