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IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
- TomAnthony 14y agoWhat is the monetisation options for IFTTT? They've now received $8.5M in funding, but charge nothing for the service, AFAIK? I'm interested to know how that is going to make a return for the investors. (I love IFTTT, and think it is a great service - just interested to know/learn)
- justhw 14y agoArticle states it will become a SasS. Perhaps charge $5 month and so on depending on how many updates/connections you make. It can also provide an all-in-one api for developers working with the products supported on IFTTT.
- TomAnthony 14y agoInteresting. $5 per month = $60 per year, so if they got 50,000 users it would still take almost 3 years to make the money back, excluding running costs. I'm often a bit surprised at how such companies can prove to be a good investment - I feel like there is something I'm missing in the numbers.
- n9com 14y agoBecause they don't need to be profitable - they'll probably end up getting acquired by a bigger company - thus is the world of VC...
- kryptiskt 14y ago50,000 paying users sounds awfully unambitious for a VC-backed web startup. A projection of a modest Pinboard-like future like that can't possibly be what these firms are basing their investment decisions on. They probably think IFTTT have a shot at getting millions of users.
- slykat 14y agoThey will probably charge for heavy usage and enterprise connections (Salesforce, Basecamp, etc.) similar to Zapier: https://zapier.com/app/signup https://zapier.com/app/signup
- sologoub 14y agoThe integrator market is insanely large. There are very big name players that are effectively system integrators and charge huge sums of money to get different systems to talk to each other. Once they have the platform fully ironed out, the level of application for Enterprise clients is virtually limitless. For example, imagine if you could build a workflow by dragging and dropping to connect your Salesforce.com implementation with your back-office provisioning applications, based on a conditional logic and then send out SMS confirmation to the client, make a SFDC case note and update a bunch of statuses... all without writing a single line of code. Enterprises already pay for this through the nose. They will keep paying, because it's worth it. Enterprise customers also LOVE control. If they can have a business analyst do the work, instead of hiring an army of 3rd party integrators, they will over pay for it. If they can keep everything in-house at a reasonable cost, they will.
- josh2600 14y agoEnterprise usually means proprietary data structures. If IFTTT could go from SAP to ADP that would be worth a lot of money. Don't get me wrong, IFTTT can do a lot of cool stuff, but Enterprise is inherently difficult because of proprietary everything. Implementing a layer of abstraction means abstracting away this complexity through code to create a simple interface. IFTTT has a simple interface, but expanding into systems in the Enterprise won't be easy.
- pdog 14y ago"For example, imagine if you could build a workflow by dragging and dropping to connect your Salesforce.com implementation with your back-office provisioning applications, based on a conditional logic and then send out SMS confirmation to the client, make a SFDC case note and update a bunch of statuses... all without writing a single line of code." That third paragraph sounds like an important thing, but also sounds like a hellhole I'd never want to work at :)
- acangiano 14y agoOn this topic, HN what are your coolest or most useful IFTTT recipes?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- slykat 14y agoIf you are in the Bay Area, finding housing can be a pain and the key is to e-mail a listing immediately after its posted so you can skip the open house and view it privately. This recipe allows you to get e-mailed as soon as Craiglist has a new listing: https://ifttt.com/recipes/79 https://ifttt.com/recipes/79
- justhw 14y agoThere are some neat recipes on IFTTT: https://ifttt.com/recipes?sort=popular https://ifttt.com/recipes?sort=popular
- tarr11 14y agoInteresting. None of these things compel me to use IFTTT.
- justhw 14y agoThey're not for everyone. For some, it saves time and effort immensely. Others use it for discovery. Me and you just watch from the sidelines.
- mehdim 14y agoTrue, IFTTT recipes are often too limited, because targeting non developers, they limit a lot inputs and ouputs of APIs. But all these APIs can do lot more. The reason why there we made webshell.io , "IFTTT for developers", enabling developers to script APIs in Javascript, with the whole expressivity of a a scripting language for more advanced APIs scripts(recipes) :)
- icebraining 14y ago
- jobowoo 14y agoFrom a 30,000 foot level how does IFTTT and Zapier differentiate from each other? IIRC, Zapier is focusing more on business-related APIs but those are lines that I see eventually becoming very blurry.
- hayksaakian 14y agoThey are already quite blurry.
- roycehaynes 14y ago@jobowoo, Zapier is for business, as IFTTT is for, well, users of (mostly) social networking type products. You can tell the clear difference by looking at the services provided by Zapier vs IFTTT.
- roycehaynes 14y agoZapier seems well positioned to help companies sync data, and create streams of info between web APIs, IMO.
- philip1209 14y agoTaking this a step further, I see B2B (Zapier) as being more reliably monetizable than B2C (IFTTT)
- brackin 14y agoI don't think it's as much of a problem for IFTTT as they're currently the dominant player with in my opinion the best product. If they don't sell to the enterprise then Zapier will be able to strike in that market.
- goronbjorn 14y agoHow does Andreessen Horowitz reconcile being an investor in both IFTTT and Zapier (by virtue of Start Fund)?
- groby_b 14y agoHedging their bets?
- goronbjorn 14y agoThey've publicly said that they won't invest when there are conflicts, e.g. Instagram and Picplz https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Andressen-Horowitz-invest-in-PicPlz-when-they-were-already-investors-in-Instagram/answer/Marc-Andreessen https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Andressen-Horowitz-invest-in-P...
- smalter 14y agoI imagine that investing in both by virtue of Start Fund is considerably different from leading a round for both (as in the case of Picplz and Instagram). There's a much higher level of involvement when you're a company's lead investor.
- dmor 14y agoThink of Start Fund is like a blind startup index fund. But now that Andreessen Horowitz has made a significant investment in IFTTT I'd imagine they're unlikely to make any future investment in Zapier unless their business changes quite a bit.
- mdanger 14y agoDumb question: isn't IFTTT one of the companies that HN always cautions against building (one dependent on the availability of others' sites/APIs)? Or does that only apply for sites dependent on 1 other service?
- Finster 14y agoWell, they don't rely on a single API, though. They've implemented dozens of API's. They also have some of their own API's, as well. If it were a case of relying on 1 or 2 mission-critical API's then I'd be worried.
- borlak 14y agohttps://ifttt.com/wtf https://ifttt.com/wtf hmm
- mrlase 14y agoAs a side note about IFTTT, why is their font size so large?...
- Causalien 14y agoBeen using IFTTT since the beginning and asking them how I can throw money at them because I need them to remain functional. I use them to backup all my social media onto my wordpress blog which in turn is a record of everything that happens to me in my life. Cheap quick scraper for a few websites to monitor items that I want to buy and get cellphone notification the moment they are posted. It's a good glue.
- bdickason 14y agoIFTTT is powerful because it allows your average user to 'mash up' (sorry for the lame term) API calls without any programming knowledge whatsoever. There's alot of potential out there for simple user-friendly integrations between services. I'm really excited to see how they progress... democratizing platforms is a great business to be in.
- bosky101 14y agothis is fantastic news for IFTTT. IMHO the 'internet of things' possibilities seems most promising.
- grinich 14y agoCongrats to Linden and the IFTTT team!