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My initial reaction is that this feels brittle (because people are incentivized to break it) and and hard to scale, but thinking about it more, it might be more
by lkbm 5y ago
My initial reaction is that this feels brittle (because people are incentivized to break it) and and hard to scale, but thinking about it more, it might be more scalable than I'd thought -- e.g., I'll only migrate from Chartio to Sisence once, but Sisence may want to use this service for hundreds of incoming customers.
That said, you'll likely only have a handle of repeat customers for each integration. A couple of Chartio's competitors will want the Chartio integration. A couple of Wix's competitors will want the Wix integration.
(And if Chartio is shutting down, that integration is only useful for a brief period of time, but it could be extremely popular for that short period of time.)
You'll definitely build up expertise in exfiltrating data, and develop as a collection of internal(?) tools to make it easier. I'm just curious if that's enough to make building new integrations cost-effective.
Zapier has a similar limitation and has managed to succeed, but they're more generalized, whereas this is a single use case for each service. I feel like this makes the most sense as a high-end "We build custom migration solutions" service. (Rereading your post, that might align with how you're treating it.)
I hope I'm wrong about the scalability, though! If y'all can make migrations cheap and easy across a broad range of services, that's hugely beneficial to users. It's unfortunate that every service benefits from having a moat. Every user will benefit from the bridges you're building. Best of luck!