17 ms·

First, it was Craigslist, next it's Zapier

453 points by kamerontanseli 6y ago

gunshai 6y ago
I know this is completely off topic, but "The Ashley Madison Agency --------> Casual Encounters" made me laugh.
- TechBro8615 6y ago
  I chuckled when I noticed that the "adult" section was one of the only purple links on the page.
  - code_duck 6y ago
    ‘Rants and raves’ is the sole purple link in the image, as far as I can see.
  - transitivebs 6y ago
    Hmmm, not too hard to imagine what "adult" SaaS would look like :)
- zankly 6y ago
  LOL. Stirred up some good memories of adult Craigslist back in the day. I must have posted “Psssst! Hey you, college girl... need cash?” over 200 times.
gkop 6y ago
This resonates with me, just having implemented Dead Man’s Snitch style alerts with plain Amazon CloudWatch. Higher abstraction level tools are valuable.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Would you mind sharing more about this? I’m interested!
  - gkop 6y ago
    My recent use case is needing an alert if a certain metric of my system exceeds a threshold or is not present. The simplest viable alerting tool might take these parameters: * alert threshold * comparison operator * expected datapoint interval (in units of time) * whether to consider missing data breaching (boolean) * if missing data is breaching, margin of skew allowed (in units of time) (assume the tool magically has access to metric source, that’s not important) I’m not sure whether the concept was named prior to this tool [0], but this tool’s name has become a colloquial term: a “Dead Man’s Snitch” style of alert. Once familiar with the idea, I found an exception-monitoring vendor [1] that I was already using at the time had built this feature in. I quickly found use cases and was broadly able to eliminate large volumes of “cronspam” and email filters in favor of the much more elegant construct — because it was so easy to implement and maintain, it was viable for a whole long tail of second class system metrics that otherwise didn’t deserve proper instrumentation. CloudWatch on the other hand is lower level and more flexible (naturally with higher learning curve). It fundamentally provides similar value by offloading alerting state and logic to a trusted managed system, but is distinctly inferior for my use case: * It treats missing metrics as literally breaching the threshold and makes no semantic distinction, which spikes the whole abstraction. You can (only partially) workaround this by splitting the alert into two distinct alerts. * It doesn’t have a “permitted skew in units of time parameter”; you need to do the arithmetic and translate it into their parameters. This spikes the abstraction and makes the alert logic opaque to my team members and future self. [0] https://deadmanssnitch.com/ https://deadmanssnitch.com/ [1] https://www.honeybadger.io/ https://www.honeybadger.io/
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Thank you!
Lightbody 6y ago
I can definitely relate to the point being made here: my startup (https://reclaim.ai https://reclaim.ai) does various calendar automation. We see a number of users sign up for our service after having tried Zapier to solve their problem. Not only is the UX more complex to get the job done, stuff like what we're doing (ex: personal->work calendar sync) is more complex than you think and simple "if this then that" types of workflows start to break down. We have nothing against Zapier (heck I'm a user for some stuff). But there are definitely things it is ill-suited for, despite having an amazing marketing engine that can capture a very long tail of search terms due to the NxM nature of their product. "Fun" fact: one of our users recently found us after screwing up his calendar sync Zap and, on a random Sunday morning, ended up inviting thousands of his coworkers to dozens of duplicate meetings, all from his personal Gmail account. It was his fault (his Zap had several errors in it), but in the end he was much better served by a dedicated solution. I think the author's advice is spot on: there are opportunities in making better solutions for popular Zaps. Just please don't do anything in the calendar space ;)
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- RonanTheGrey 6y ago
  What this post taught me, is that there's plenty of room for solutions in the calendars space. KIDDING!! 100% spot on your analysis though and a real-world anecdote of the unbundling concept.
- RonanTheGrey 6y ago
  I just looked at Reclaim. That's exactly what I tried to do by creating a Google account just to join together 6 other calendars, and that's the calendar I sync to my phone (it works but... meh. definitely a hack. For example, the annual holiday calendar is repeated about 18 times somehow). Definitely taking a serious look at Reclaim.
andrewparker 6y ago
This is a clever twist on unbundling. Well done. Craigslist is misspelled (there is an "s" in it). Giving me a photo credit would be courteous as the author of that image. 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...
- kamerontanseli 6y ago
  Thank you. Sorry for not attributing I plucked it from Google. Will add now :)
  - markstos 6y ago
    Plucking copyrighted images is not an excuse. You should know better.
    - ViViDboarder 6y ago
      I imagine now they do.
    - irrational 6y ago
      Maybe he was one of today’s lucky 10,000. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
    - jjeaff 6y ago
      Maybe Google should know better than to "pluck" copyrighted images from people's sites and display them out of context on their own site while serving their own ads.
- asenna 6y ago
  Just wanted to say kudos for that original and the solid analysis. I've seen it been referred multiple times in the past few years.
- triyambakam 6y ago
  That reminds me of Amazon - I've been "unbundling" my purchases from Amazon due to shipping delays. I still think it's a useful place to find /which/ product I want to buy, but once I figure that out, or if I already have, I head over to the product's own website and buy it there. Examples of my recent purchases - diapers, toys, herbs and spices. In all of these examples the product has shipped within a day and received within a few days.
karaterobot 6y ago
Bash, too! > One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that. — Marc Hedlund (2007) https://web.archive.org/web/20070329031201/http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/sfearthquakes_o.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070329031201/http://radar.orei... Funny that he mentions Yahoo! Pipes, since that was sort of the same idea behind Zapier, et al., though (I guess) too far ahead of its time.
- i_am_nomad 6y ago
  I’ve never read that quotation, that’s amazing. Thanks for sharing it.
- janee 6y ago
  Hmm makes me think...there might be some cool usecases for replacing filesystem related tools/commands with webapps using the native file system API in browsers, when/if it gets released
- k__ 6y ago
  rm became low orbit ion cannon?
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    LOIC is almost certainly `yes`
    - lonelappde 6y ago
      Eh, 'yes' stops talking as soon as the recipient stops listening.
      - yellowapple 6y ago
afterwalk 6y ago
The picture of Craigslist being unbundled shown in the article is really good. Is there a similar pictorial “map” of the space zapier covers?
- kamerontanseli 6y ago
  Unfortunately no... I should have made one! Essentially Zapier would technically cover all integrations. So any sort of data transformation from one app to another.
saadalem 6y ago
Here is a tricky idea to generate ideas : Turn popular Zaps on Zapier into simple, single-purpose apps. https://zapier.com/apps/integrations https://zapier.com/apps/integrations
- kamerontanseli 6y ago
  There's also https://tray.io/connectors https://tray.io/connectors as well where pages like https://tray.io/connectors/asana-salesforce-integrations https://tray.io/connectors/asana-salesforce-integrations have automation templates on them Disclaimer: I work for Tray.io
  - saadalem 6y ago
    Love the product ! But loading the page is very slow !
  - transitivebs 6y ago
    Zaps and tray connectors are great starting points for Micro SaaS idea generation. I wrote about this more in-depth here: https://docs.saasify.sh/#/resources?id=saas-idea-resources https://docs.saasify.sh/#/resources?id=saas-idea-resources
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dvt 6y ago
I think the issue is that techy/engineer-types are big fans of elegance. It's undeniable that services like Zapier are elegant in the sense that they generalize pretty well, they can "do it all" and, in all honesty, they're not too hard to figure out. With that said, there's no true value in elegance. And while generalizing is definitely a good idea for a mathematical proof, it might be a bad idea for a product. I have to admit that a lot of times (especially when building side-projects/toy startups), I second guess myself when it comes to these kinds of product decisions -- "Is this product too simple? Too bare-bones; too much of a one-trick-pony? Would anyone pay for this?"
- siscia 6y ago
  I believe that was separate senior engineers from the other is having passed the phase of elegance. Eventually we want stuff that works, without looking at them. On twitter people were asking what is clean code? My answer to that is that the cleanest code is the code you never have to open in an ide to figure or tweak.
  - eximius 6y ago
    Put another way, elegant code is not always good code.
    - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
      I have written some beautifully elegant code in my time. It's code that I now hate returning to because I don't understand it at first glance. (Granted this was years ago. I don't code that way anymore and haven't for quite some time). I've learned my lesson.
    - deleted 6y ago
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- kamerontanseli 6y ago
  This reminds me of what Don Norman quotes in "living with complexity" around how people buy the microwaves with all the buttons even though it's harder to use.
dr_dshiv 6y ago
“Complexity can be tamed, but it requires considerable effort to do it well. Decreasing the number of buttons and displays is not the solution. The solution is to understand the total system, to design it in a way that allows all the pieces fit nicely together, so that initial learning as well as usage are both optimal. Years ago, Larry Tesler, then a vice president of Apple, argued that the total complexity of a system is a constant: as you make the person's interaction simpler, the hidden complexity behind the scenes increases. Make one part of the system simpler, said Tesler, and the rest of the system gets more complex. This principle is known today as "Tesler's law of the conservation of complexity." Tesler described it as a tradeoff: making things easier for the user means making it more difficult for the designer or engineer.” ― Donald A. Norman, Living with Complexity
- ethbro 6y ago
  It's been recommended many times on HN, and I've got it sitting in my physical book queue: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Thing...
- kamerontanseli 6y ago
  It's one of my favourite books and I thought that it paired quite nicely when talking about software like Zapier or Tray.io that try to solve such a complex thing.
  - spectramax 6y ago
    Zapier is doing something complex? It is literally looking at json schemas and API specs and the connecting fields together. A date-time field is connected to another API's date-time.
    - elliekelly 6y ago
      Have you ever tried to marry two APIs? It’s almost never as simple as it should be. And Zapier isn’t just two, it’s hundreds.
    - 6y ago
transitivebs 6y ago
Amazing post. This "unbundling" is the exact approach we're taking with Saasify. There's a lot to be said for focused, niche SaaS products that do one thing and do it well.
benatkin 6y ago
I wanted to see if it would ask for access to my entire Google Sheets account, so I tried signing into https://gsheet2mail.com/ https://gsheet2mail.com/ and got an error message. Looking at the page again, I saw this, which I missed: > Hi there! We're currently being verified by Google. So just click "Advanced" when signing up to continue :) I tried clicking advanced, and yep, it wants access to all my spreadsheets =) I said no, but I don't want a google sheets to RSS converter right now anyway. This is one advantage Zapier has over unbundled apps - I'm more likely to want to give Zapier permissions to my APIs because it's an established company and it can help with a bunch of different things, than to give access to a new single function tool.
- kamerontanseli 6y ago
  Hi, the author here, That's the read-only scope that's required to query a single spreadsheet on the user's account. The API doesn't allow listing queries unless you also ask for drive permissions (which I don't). See more info here: https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/guides/authorizing https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/guides/authorizing
  - benatkin 6y ago
    I'm famiilar with the Google Sheets API. The way to get fine-grained access to the Google Sheets API is by asking for a specific permission within Google Drive. While it involves two APIs, it's less permissions than giving access to all the spreadsheets in a google sheets account. Another way to go is to use a service account, and have the user share their sheet with your service account's email address.
    - slouch 6y ago
      Hi, I'm not OP, but have built a similar thing. Are you suggesting to use https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file instead of https://www.googleapis.com/auth/spreadsheets https://www.googleapis.com/auth/spreadsheets?
keesj 6y ago
This is what I did with Tweet Photo [1] — It automatically tweets your instagram photos. It started out as a Medium post[2] describing how to set this up with Zapier. Seeing how much traffic it got even years after publishing it, I decided it was worth turning into a standalone service. While the post helped me validate there was demand for such a service. I didn’t validate people were willing to pay for it. So user growth has been good [3], revenue not so much. (less than $1k MRR) Something to keep in mind when you go this route. Be sure to validate people are willing to pay for a solution. Building something aimed at businesses is probably a good idea. [1] https://tweet.photo https://tweet.photo [2] https://medium.com/@marckohlbrugge/a-better-way-to-post-your-instagram-photos-to-twitter-7f3a04a37d89 https://medium.com/@marckohlbrugge/a-better-way-to-post-your... [3] https://tweet.photo/open https://tweet.photo/open
- soheilpro 6y ago
  I have created almost the opposite. A service that screenshots tweets so that you can share them on other platforms. Instagram is not directly supported, but you can use Buffer or other similar services. [1] https://pikaso.me https://pikaso.me [2] https://zapier.com/apps/pikaso https://zapier.com/apps/pikaso
  - chrisfrantz 6y ago
    Now all I want to do is create a zap between your two services and loop a share.
    - _curious_ 6y ago
      Now that I will pay for ;)
jelling 6y ago
I don’t buy it. CL is a consumer facing product that offers a good-enough experience for most categories. The category specific vertical companies mentioned greatly improve the experience / feature set. They are expansive by nature. Zapier is a b2b tool that ties together systems / data sources and reduces it to a common interface for most scenarios. Being reductive and reusable is the chief value. I do not want another integration tool if I can help it.
- paulcole 6y ago
  What exactly don’t you buy? Isn’t the point of the article that if one company provides a good enough experience for many things that doing one of those things better may be a good business opportunity? It may be particularly attractive to the subset of people who rely on that one thing. The point doesn’t seem to be that you need more integration tools. It’s that if one integration is very important to you, you might want a dedicated tool that provides better experience and value.
pbreit 6y ago
Google App Script using the Fetch function to make API calls is incredibly powerful and almost unknown. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/url-fetch/url-fetch-app https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/url-fetc...
- samanator 6y ago
  I know of it. The main issue is it has a 30 second execution script time limit for custom functions [1]. So if you want to build anything that could take longer than that to execute you need to make sure to write to the spreadsheet before 30 seconds elapse and have a recurring scheduled function that completes any unfinished jobs. Gets tedious and failure prone quickly IME. [1] https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/services/quotas https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/services/qu...
  - pbreit 6y ago
    Oh, wow, that's terrible. I guess I haven't run into it. That would be a bit of a show-stopper for many of the projects I am contemplating.
jereze 6y ago
It sounds familiar to me since I too have built a micro-SaaS that could probably make it in Zappier: https://sheet.chat https://sheet.chat to integrate Google Sheets in Slack
- craze3 6y ago
  That is awesome. Have you been able to turn a profit yet? I'm super interested in micro-SaaS's...
  - jereze 6y ago
    Thanks :) I have few paying customers. I run it as a side project in my spare time.
- daiearth22 6y ago
  I like your app very much. My app : www.kiara-app.com (translation chatbot)
akhilcacharya 6y ago
The next question becomes - how do you find out what people are automating on zapier?
- kamerontanseli 6y ago
  You can use Google trends Heres a few I picked up from searching for "Zapier" and looking at the top related queries: - zapier salesforce - airtable - trello - zapier email parser - calendly - sms
northisup 6y ago
Zapier benefits from the interconnected was of its apps where craigslist did not.
nashadelic 6y ago
Python is a great tool in that it is easy for starting developers and useful experts alike. Zapier is a great starting tool but quickly breaks down for anything more complex. If you’re a SaaS app that has complex “use cases” then sending users to Zapier to have them figure it out doesn’t work. Instead, you can build your usecase on a tool like Integry.io (yes, founder here), embed the integration in your SaaS and have a clean UX. Ultimately, you don’t want your users figuring out what triggers, actions, steps, mappings, transforms, validations are. People don’t buy integrations, they just want their tools to work together and tools like Zapier and tray can still be too complex.
- debuggerpk 6y ago
  looks interesting.
- inthewoods 6y ago
  This - I'm planning on churning with a webinar tool because the only way to integrate it with Salesforce and Hubspot is an extremely complex Zap. No thank you.
vinodc 6y ago
I feel that complex workflows are best served by dedicated integrations, but it takes time for developers to build each integration natively into a product. We launched https://kloudless.com https://kloudless.com to simplify the process for app developers to natively integrate an entire category of SaaS services at once (I'm a co-founder). Ignoring platforms like Salesforce, some of the "product" apps that we see adopting native integrations instead of directing users to Zapier include apps that require: 1) synchronous interactive integrations and not just background automation. e.g. a user pulling a lead from Salesforce into a marketing app. 2) complex/multi-step integrations that offer way better UX and much lower support costs to just build natively for users. 3) integrations as a competitive differentiator, or without requiring users to pay for third-party tools. 4) integrations without an API of their own to integrate to. That said, there are always a long tail of apps and use cases so I'm certain we'll see more specialized tooling pop up to handle specific complex workflows.
knes 6y ago
Zapier is great. I use it all of the time, from personal projects to work stuff. However, as soon as you try to do more than couple of things in one zap and have multi zaps routing/transforming data between the same apps, it becomes very easy to fuck it all up (duplicate, trigger wrong things, etc) and Zappier (or other solutions like tray.io for that matter) doesn't provide you any help and the whole things becomes quickly difficult to maintain or manage. A great analalogy would be it's a beautiful gun but makes it way too easy to shoot yourself in foot after the first shot I'm looking for more unbundling and "micro apps" that solve the maintainability of it too.
slouch 6y ago
I'm currently doing this so I can stop paying Zapier. I've built a plugin to append new Gravity Forms entries in WordPress to a Google Sheet & with some more polish it'll be ready to sell.
- contravariant 6y ago
  If you've got a forms application that can't export the data where you want it to, I can't shake the feeling that you're working on the wrong part of the problem.
  - slouch 6y ago
    It certainly can at a click of a button--I want a Google Sheet that updates in real time. That's exactly a flow that Zapier offers.
    - contravariant 6y ago
      Yeah I still can't get over the fact you're using 4 huge code bases just to replicate the functionality of a standard html input form.
      - slouch 6y ago
        The word standard is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. I don't want to re-build Gravity Form's conditional logic or feeds to PayPal & HubSpot systems, so I'm not going to.
drdeadringer 6y ago
I vaguely remember seeing this exact, or almost exact, deal before -- perhaps roughly 10-15 years ago. Perhaps I'm human or crazy. I'm willing to be corrected.
vmurthy 6y ago
Great post! I’ve been reading a book called “Unlocking the customer value chain” [0] which talks about three waves that the Internet brought along : Unbundling , disintermediation and decoupling. This post on unbundling is a great starting point. The trend seems to be towards decoupling which is something that will come once unbundling becomes mainstream or mature. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42934086 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42934086
priyank1 6y ago
How is Zapier different from If this then that ? https://ifttt.com/ https://ifttt.com/
- freeqaz 6y ago
  Way deeper levels of customization, imo. You can setup web endpoints and chain data fairly intuitively between steps. It has its limits but, if you can live with them, it can be very powerful!
- input_sh 6y ago
  For one, it has a business model. IFTTT relies on investors' money to offer service to average Joes like you and me.
- hckr_news 6y ago
  Looks like ifttt services an iot model vs zapier which automates productivity tools
DavyJone 6y ago
I'm the only one that sees this post and most comments by all users as just an Ad? "This is what we did at <linktomynewsaas>". Is this what guerilla marketing and HN have become?
- csallen 6y ago
  You might be the only one who believes a conversation loses all value if someone benefits from it, and who thus reduces an otherwise interesting discussion to "just an ad."
  - deleted 6y ago
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alphagrep12345 6y ago
How do you find out interesting Zap workflows?
caogecym 6y ago
That’s how we came up the idea of a cloud version HTTP scheduler https://ihook.us https://ihook.us. For sure Zapier can do this, but you have to navigate among a ton of integrations to figure out where a scheduler app is, and click though the plus sign to add downstream actions, which could feel complex even for users with engineering background. Seems in a platform where apps/functionalities are commoditized, the complexity of integrating it with your business logic is deferred to the user.
anaxag0ras 6y ago
This applies to Reddit too to some extent: AskReddit => Quora MillionaireMakers => PoolTogether Deals/Free/DiscountedProducts => SlickDeals, HotUKDeals SideProject => Product Hunt BuyForLife => goodcheapandfast.com These are what I could remember top of my head. I'm sure there are others. I think /r/mealtimevideos could be an independent service on its own.
daiearth22 6y ago
awesome post! Thank you. I can see huge white space in non-IT use cases.

I know this is completely off topic, but "The Ashley Madison Agency --------> Casual Encounters" made me laugh.

TechBro8615 6y ago
I chuckled when I noticed that the "adult" section was one of the only purple links on the page.
- code_duck 6y ago
  ‘Rants and raves’ is the sole purple link in the image, as far as I can see.
- transitivebs 6y ago
  Hmmm, not too hard to imagine what "adult" SaaS would look like :)
zankly 6y ago
LOL. Stirred up some good memories of adult Craigslist back in the day. I must have posted “Psssst! Hey you, college girl... need cash?” over 200 times.

gkop 6y ago

This resonates with me, just having implemented Dead Man’s Snitch style alerts with plain Amazon CloudWatch. Higher abstraction level tools are valuable.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Would you mind sharing more about this? I’m interested!
- gkop 6y ago
  My recent use case is needing an alert if a certain metric of my system exceeds a threshold or is not present. The simplest viable alerting tool might take these parameters: * alert threshold * comparison operator * expected datapoint interval (in units of time) * whether to consider missing data breaching (boolean) * if missing data is breaching, margin of skew allowed (in units of time) (assume the tool magically has access to metric source, that’s not important) I’m not sure whether the concept was named prior to this tool [0], but this tool’s name has become a colloquial term: a “Dead Man’s Snitch” style of alert. Once familiar with the idea, I found an exception-monitoring vendor [1] that I was already using at the time had built this feature in. I quickly found use cases and was broadly able to eliminate large volumes of “cronspam” and email filters in favor of the much more elegant construct — because it was so easy to implement and maintain, it was viable for a whole long tail of second class system metrics that otherwise didn’t deserve proper instrumentation. CloudWatch on the other hand is lower level and more flexible (naturally with higher learning curve). It fundamentally provides similar value by offloading alerting state and logic to a trusted managed system, but is distinctly inferior for my use case: * It treats missing metrics as literally breaching the threshold and makes no semantic distinction, which spikes the whole abstraction. You can (only partially) workaround this by splitting the alert into two distinct alerts. * It doesn’t have a “permitted skew in units of time parameter”; you need to do the arithmetic and translate it into their parameters. This spikes the abstraction and makes the alert logic opaque to my team members and future self. [0] https://deadmanssnitch.com/ https://deadmanssnitch.com/ [1] https://www.honeybadger.io/ https://www.honeybadger.io/
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Thank you!

Lightbody 6y ago

I can definitely relate to the point being made here: my startup (https://reclaim.ai https://reclaim.ai) does various calendar automation. We see a number of users sign up for our service after having tried Zapier to solve their problem. Not only is the UX more complex to get the job done, stuff like what we're doing (ex: personal->work calendar sync) is more complex than you think and simple "if this then that" types of workflows start to break down. We have nothing against Zapier (heck I'm a user for some stuff). But there are definitely things it is ill-suited for, despite having an amazing marketing engine that can capture a very long tail of search terms due to the NxM nature of their product. "Fun" fact: one of our users recently found us after screwing up his calendar sync Zap and, on a random Sunday morning, ended up inviting thousands of his coworkers to dozens of duplicate meetings, all from his personal Gmail account. It was his fault (his Zap had several errors in it), but in the end he was much better served by a dedicated solution. I think the author's advice is spot on: there are opportunities in making better solutions for popular Zaps. Just please don't do anything in the calendar space ;)

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RonanTheGrey 6y ago
What this post taught me, is that there's plenty of room for solutions in the calendars space. KIDDING!! 100% spot on your analysis though and a real-world anecdote of the unbundling concept.
RonanTheGrey 6y ago
I just looked at Reclaim. That's exactly what I tried to do by creating a Google account just to join together 6 other calendars, and that's the calendar I sync to my phone (it works but... meh. definitely a hack. For example, the annual holiday calendar is repeated about 18 times somehow). Definitely taking a serious look at Reclaim.

andrewparker 6y ago

This is a clever twist on unbundling. Well done. Craigslist is misspelled (there is an "s" in it). Giving me a photo credit would be courteous as the author of that image. 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...

kamerontanseli 6y ago
Thank you. Sorry for not attributing I plucked it from Google. Will add now :)
- markstos 6y ago
  Plucking copyrighted images is not an excuse. You should know better.
  - ViViDboarder 6y ago
    I imagine now they do.
  - irrational 6y ago
    Maybe he was one of today’s lucky 10,000. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    Maybe Google should know better than to "pluck" copyrighted images from people's sites and display them out of context on their own site while serving their own ads.
asenna 6y ago
Just wanted to say kudos for that original and the solid analysis. I've seen it been referred multiple times in the past few years.
triyambakam 6y ago
That reminds me of Amazon - I've been "unbundling" my purchases from Amazon due to shipping delays. I still think it's a useful place to find /which/ product I want to buy, but once I figure that out, or if I already have, I head over to the product's own website and buy it there. Examples of my recent purchases - diapers, toys, herbs and spices. In all of these examples the product has shipped within a day and received within a few days.

karaterobot 6y ago

Bash, too! > One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that. — Marc Hedlund (2007) https://web.archive.org/web/20070329031201/http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/sfearthquakes_o.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070329031201/http://radar.orei... Funny that he mentions Yahoo! Pipes, since that was sort of the same idea behind Zapier, et al., though (I guess) too far ahead of its time.

i_am_nomad 6y ago
I’ve never read that quotation, that’s amazing. Thanks for sharing it.
janee 6y ago
Hmm makes me think...there might be some cool usecases for replacing filesystem related tools/commands with webapps using the native file system API in browsers, when/if it gets released
k__ 6y ago
rm became low orbit ion cannon?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  LOIC is almost certainly `yes`
  - lonelappde 6y ago
    Eh, 'yes' stops talking as soon as the recipient stops listening.
    - yellowapple 6y ago

afterwalk 6y ago

The picture of Craigslist being unbundled shown in the article is really good. Is there a similar pictorial “map” of the space zapier covers?

kamerontanseli 6y ago
Unfortunately no... I should have made one! Essentially Zapier would technically cover all integrations. So any sort of data transformation from one app to another.

saadalem 6y ago

Here is a tricky idea to generate ideas : Turn popular Zaps on Zapier into simple, single-purpose apps. https://zapier.com/apps/integrations https://zapier.com/apps/integrations

kamerontanseli 6y ago
There's also https://tray.io/connectors https://tray.io/connectors as well where pages like https://tray.io/connectors/asana-salesforce-integrations https://tray.io/connectors/asana-salesforce-integrations have automation templates on them Disclaimer: I work for Tray.io
- saadalem 6y ago
  Love the product ! But loading the page is very slow !
- transitivebs 6y ago
  Zaps and tray connectors are great starting points for Micro SaaS idea generation. I wrote about this more in-depth here: https://docs.saasify.sh/#/resources?id=saas-idea-resources https://docs.saasify.sh/#/resources?id=saas-idea-resources
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dvt 6y ago

I think the issue is that techy/engineer-types are big fans of elegance. It's undeniable that services like Zapier are elegant in the sense that they generalize pretty well, they can "do it all" and, in all honesty, they're not too hard to figure out. With that said, there's no true value in elegance. And while generalizing is definitely a good idea for a mathematical proof, it might be a bad idea for a product. I have to admit that a lot of times (especially when building side-projects/toy startups), I second guess myself when it comes to these kinds of product decisions -- "Is this product too simple? Too bare-bones; too much of a one-trick-pony? Would anyone pay for this?"

siscia 6y ago
I believe that was separate senior engineers from the other is having passed the phase of elegance. Eventually we want stuff that works, without looking at them. On twitter people were asking what is clean code? My answer to that is that the cleanest code is the code you never have to open in an ide to figure or tweak.
- eximius 6y ago
  Put another way, elegant code is not always good code.
  - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
    I have written some beautifully elegant code in my time. It's code that I now hate returning to because I don't understand it at first glance. (Granted this was years ago. I don't code that way anymore and haven't for quite some time). I've learned my lesson.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
kamerontanseli 6y ago
This reminds me of what Don Norman quotes in "living with complexity" around how people buy the microwaves with all the buttons even though it's harder to use.

dr_dshiv 6y ago

“Complexity can be tamed, but it requires considerable effort to do it well. Decreasing the number of buttons and displays is not the solution. The solution is to understand the total system, to design it in a way that allows all the pieces fit nicely together, so that initial learning as well as usage are both optimal. Years ago, Larry Tesler, then a vice president of Apple, argued that the total complexity of a system is a constant: as you make the person's interaction simpler, the hidden complexity behind the scenes increases. Make one part of the system simpler, said Tesler, and the rest of the system gets more complex. This principle is known today as "Tesler's law of the conservation of complexity." Tesler described it as a tradeoff: making things easier for the user means making it more difficult for the designer or engineer.” ― Donald A. Norman, Living with Complexity

ethbro 6y ago
It's been recommended many times on HN, and I've got it sitting in my physical book queue: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Thing...
kamerontanseli 6y ago
It's one of my favourite books and I thought that it paired quite nicely when talking about software like Zapier or Tray.io that try to solve such a complex thing.
- spectramax 6y ago
  Zapier is doing something complex? It is literally looking at json schemas and API specs and the connecting fields together. A date-time field is connected to another API's date-time.
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    Have you ever tried to marry two APIs? It’s almost never as simple as it should be. And Zapier isn’t just two, it’s hundreds.
  - 6y ago

transitivebs 6y ago

Amazing post. This "unbundling" is the exact approach we're taking with Saasify. There's a lot to be said for focused, niche SaaS products that do one thing and do it well.

benatkin 6y ago

I wanted to see if it would ask for access to my entire Google Sheets account, so I tried signing into https://gsheet2mail.com/ https://gsheet2mail.com/ and got an error message. Looking at the page again, I saw this, which I missed: > Hi there! We're currently being verified by Google. So just click "Advanced" when signing up to continue :) I tried clicking advanced, and yep, it wants access to all my spreadsheets =) I said no, but I don't want a google sheets to RSS converter right now anyway. This is one advantage Zapier has over unbundled apps - I'm more likely to want to give Zapier permissions to my APIs because it's an established company and it can help with a bunch of different things, than to give access to a new single function tool.

kamerontanseli 6y ago
Hi, the author here, That's the read-only scope that's required to query a single spreadsheet on the user's account. The API doesn't allow listing queries unless you also ask for drive permissions (which I don't). See more info here: https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/guides/authorizing https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/guides/authorizing
- benatkin 6y ago
  I'm famiilar with the Google Sheets API. The way to get fine-grained access to the Google Sheets API is by asking for a specific permission within Google Drive. While it involves two APIs, it's less permissions than giving access to all the spreadsheets in a google sheets account. Another way to go is to use a service account, and have the user share their sheet with your service account's email address.
  - slouch 6y ago
    Hi, I'm not OP, but have built a similar thing. Are you suggesting to use https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file instead of https://www.googleapis.com/auth/spreadsheets https://www.googleapis.com/auth/spreadsheets?

keesj 6y ago

This is what I did with Tweet Photo [1] — It automatically tweets your instagram photos. It started out as a Medium post[2] describing how to set this up with Zapier. Seeing how much traffic it got even years after publishing it, I decided it was worth turning into a standalone service. While the post helped me validate there was demand for such a service. I didn’t validate people were willing to pay for it. So user growth has been good [3], revenue not so much. (less than $1k MRR) Something to keep in mind when you go this route. Be sure to validate people are willing to pay for a solution. Building something aimed at businesses is probably a good idea. [1] https://tweet.photo https://tweet.photo [2] https://medium.com/@marckohlbrugge/a-better-way-to-post-your-instagram-photos-to-twitter-7f3a04a37d89 https://medium.com/@marckohlbrugge/a-better-way-to-post-your... [3] https://tweet.photo/open https://tweet.photo/open

soheilpro 6y ago
I have created almost the opposite. A service that screenshots tweets so that you can share them on other platforms. Instagram is not directly supported, but you can use Buffer or other similar services. [1] https://pikaso.me https://pikaso.me [2] https://zapier.com/apps/pikaso https://zapier.com/apps/pikaso
- chrisfrantz 6y ago
  Now all I want to do is create a zap between your two services and loop a share.
  - _curious_ 6y ago
    Now that I will pay for ;)

jelling 6y ago

I don’t buy it. CL is a consumer facing product that offers a good-enough experience for most categories. The category specific vertical companies mentioned greatly improve the experience / feature set. They are expansive by nature. Zapier is a b2b tool that ties together systems / data sources and reduces it to a common interface for most scenarios. Being reductive and reusable is the chief value. I do not want another integration tool if I can help it.

paulcole 6y ago
What exactly don’t you buy? Isn’t the point of the article that if one company provides a good enough experience for many things that doing one of those things better may be a good business opportunity? It may be particularly attractive to the subset of people who rely on that one thing. The point doesn’t seem to be that you need more integration tools. It’s that if one integration is very important to you, you might want a dedicated tool that provides better experience and value.

pbreit 6y ago

Google App Script using the Fetch function to make API calls is incredibly powerful and almost unknown. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/url-fetch/url-fetch-app https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/url-fetc...

samanator 6y ago
I know of it. The main issue is it has a 30 second execution script time limit for custom functions [1]. So if you want to build anything that could take longer than that to execute you need to make sure to write to the spreadsheet before 30 seconds elapse and have a recurring scheduled function that completes any unfinished jobs. Gets tedious and failure prone quickly IME. [1] https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/services/quotas https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/services/qu...
- pbreit 6y ago
  Oh, wow, that's terrible. I guess I haven't run into it. That would be a bit of a show-stopper for many of the projects I am contemplating.

jereze 6y ago

It sounds familiar to me since I too have built a micro-SaaS that could probably make it in Zappier: https://sheet.chat https://sheet.chat to integrate Google Sheets in Slack

craze3 6y ago
That is awesome. Have you been able to turn a profit yet? I'm super interested in micro-SaaS's...
- jereze 6y ago
  Thanks :) I have few paying customers. I run it as a side project in my spare time.
daiearth22 6y ago
I like your app very much. My app : www.kiara-app.com (translation chatbot)

akhilcacharya 6y ago

The next question becomes - how do you find out what people are automating on zapier?

kamerontanseli 6y ago
You can use Google trends Heres a few I picked up from searching for "Zapier" and looking at the top related queries: - zapier salesforce - airtable - trello - zapier email parser - calendly - sms

northisup 6y ago

Zapier benefits from the interconnected was of its apps where craigslist did not.

nashadelic 6y ago

Python is a great tool in that it is easy for starting developers and useful experts alike. Zapier is a great starting tool but quickly breaks down for anything more complex. If you’re a SaaS app that has complex “use cases” then sending users to Zapier to have them figure it out doesn’t work. Instead, you can build your usecase on a tool like Integry.io (yes, founder here), embed the integration in your SaaS and have a clean UX. Ultimately, you don’t want your users figuring out what triggers, actions, steps, mappings, transforms, validations are. People don’t buy integrations, they just want their tools to work together and tools like Zapier and tray can still be too complex.

debuggerpk 6y ago
looks interesting.
inthewoods 6y ago
This - I'm planning on churning with a webinar tool because the only way to integrate it with Salesforce and Hubspot is an extremely complex Zap. No thank you.

vinodc 6y ago

I feel that complex workflows are best served by dedicated integrations, but it takes time for developers to build each integration natively into a product. We launched https://kloudless.com https://kloudless.com to simplify the process for app developers to natively integrate an entire category of SaaS services at once (I'm a co-founder). Ignoring platforms like Salesforce, some of the "product" apps that we see adopting native integrations instead of directing users to Zapier include apps that require: 1) synchronous interactive integrations and not just background automation. e.g. a user pulling a lead from Salesforce into a marketing app. 2) complex/multi-step integrations that offer way better UX and much lower support costs to just build natively for users. 3) integrations as a competitive differentiator, or without requiring users to pay for third-party tools. 4) integrations without an API of their own to integrate to. That said, there are always a long tail of apps and use cases so I'm certain we'll see more specialized tooling pop up to handle specific complex workflows.

knes 6y ago

Zapier is great. I use it all of the time, from personal projects to work stuff. However, as soon as you try to do more than couple of things in one zap and have multi zaps routing/transforming data between the same apps, it becomes very easy to fuck it all up (duplicate, trigger wrong things, etc) and Zappier (or other solutions like tray.io for that matter) doesn't provide you any help and the whole things becomes quickly difficult to maintain or manage. A great analalogy would be it's a beautiful gun but makes it way too easy to shoot yourself in foot after the first shot I'm looking for more unbundling and "micro apps" that solve the maintainability of it too.

slouch 6y ago

I'm currently doing this so I can stop paying Zapier. I've built a plugin to append new Gravity Forms entries in WordPress to a Google Sheet & with some more polish it'll be ready to sell.

contravariant 6y ago
If you've got a forms application that can't export the data where you want it to, I can't shake the feeling that you're working on the wrong part of the problem.
- slouch 6y ago
  It certainly can at a click of a button--I want a Google Sheet that updates in real time. That's exactly a flow that Zapier offers.
  - contravariant 6y ago
    Yeah I still can't get over the fact you're using 4 huge code bases just to replicate the functionality of a standard html input form.
    - slouch 6y ago
      The word standard is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. I don't want to re-build Gravity Form's conditional logic or feeds to PayPal & HubSpot systems, so I'm not going to.

drdeadringer 6y ago

I vaguely remember seeing this exact, or almost exact, deal before -- perhaps roughly 10-15 years ago. Perhaps I'm human or crazy. I'm willing to be corrected.

vmurthy 6y ago

Great post! I’ve been reading a book called “Unlocking the customer value chain” [0] which talks about three waves that the Internet brought along : Unbundling , disintermediation and decoupling. This post on unbundling is a great starting point. The trend seems to be towards decoupling which is something that will come once unbundling becomes mainstream or mature. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42934086 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42934086

priyank1 6y ago

How is Zapier different from If this then that ? https://ifttt.com/ https://ifttt.com/

freeqaz 6y ago
Way deeper levels of customization, imo. You can setup web endpoints and chain data fairly intuitively between steps. It has its limits but, if you can live with them, it can be very powerful!
input_sh 6y ago
For one, it has a business model. IFTTT relies on investors' money to offer service to average Joes like you and me.
hckr_news 6y ago
Looks like ifttt services an iot model vs zapier which automates productivity tools

DavyJone 6y ago

I'm the only one that sees this post and most comments by all users as just an Ad? "This is what we did at <linktomynewsaas>". Is this what guerilla marketing and HN have become?

csallen 6y ago
You might be the only one who believes a conversation loses all value if someone benefits from it, and who thus reduces an otherwise interesting discussion to "just an ad."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

alphagrep12345 6y ago

How do you find out interesting Zap workflows?

caogecym 6y ago

That’s how we came up the idea of a cloud version HTTP scheduler https://ihook.us https://ihook.us. For sure Zapier can do this, but you have to navigate among a ton of integrations to figure out where a scheduler app is, and click though the plus sign to add downstream actions, which could feel complex even for users with engineering background. Seems in a platform where apps/functionalities are commoditized, the complexity of integrating it with your business logic is deferred to the user.

anaxag0ras 6y ago

This applies to Reddit too to some extent: AskReddit => Quora MillionaireMakers => PoolTogether Deals/Free/DiscountedProducts => SlickDeals, HotUKDeals SideProject => Product Hunt BuyForLife => goodcheapandfast.com These are what I could remember top of my head. I'm sure there are others. I think /r/mealtimevideos could be an independent service on its own.

daiearth22 6y ago

awesome post! Thank you. I can see huge white space in non-IT use cases.