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> 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. Th

> 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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
lowdose 7y ago
He should make this effort a marketplace like zapier but let the finance side come from SAAS that let them offer the opportunity to share revenue through a resellers agreement. For customers in zapiers model this would mean zapier would be for free solong there is a resellers agreement in place. This would decouple the adaptation friction on using the service and for zapier this would bundle every SAAS contract on their infrastructure. Even Google offers resellers of SAAS GSuite a whopping 20% revenue share.

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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

lowdose 7y ago

He should make this effort a marketplace like zapier but let the finance side come from SAAS that let them offer the opportunity to share revenue through a resellers agreement. For customers in zapiers model this would mean zapier would be for free solong there is a resellers agreement in place. This would decouple the adaptation friction on using the service and for zapier this would bundle every SAAS contract on their infrastructure. Even Google offers resellers of SAAS GSuite a whopping 20% revenue share.