Let’s say you’re building a software product. When something happens in your product (maybe somebody buys something, or shares a link, or creates an image, etc.

Let’s say you’re building a software product. When something happens in your product (maybe somebody buys something, or shares a link, or creates an image, etc.), some of your customers want something to happen in response. Maybe they want the user to receive an email, maybe they want something to be posted to social media, etc. Normally you would have to integrate with each of those third-party services directly. With n8n, Zapier, etc., you can write one integration and let your customers decide what to plug it into. So you get thousands of integrations “for free” by integrating one service. The same goes in reverse – maybe something happens in a third-party service and your customers want something to happen in your product as a result. Instead of requiring all those third-party services to integrate with you, they can just integrate with n8n, Zapier, etc. Because services like n8n and Zapier provide a common interface between very different services, it sidesteps a combinatorial explosion of integrations needed to wire everything up to everything else explicitly. For instance “when somebody buys something from our Shopify store, I want to add them to a private Slack channel”. Shopify aren’t going to spend time building an integration like that, Slack aren’t going to spend time building an integration like that, and a customer isn’t going to want to commission bespoke software to wire it all up. But if they both integrate with n8n or Zapier, then customers can do it themselves.