
First, it was Craigslist, next it's Zapier - kamerontanseli
https://kamerontanseli.ghost.io/first-it-was-craiglist-next-its-zapier/
======
andrewparker
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-c...](https://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post/345941486/the-spawn-of-
craigslist-like-most-vcs-that-focus)

~~~
triyambakam
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.

~~~
moonlighter
Good point, but unfortunately on a lot of vendor sites, the checkout
experience is still sub-par, some require you to create an account (Annoying
if you know it's just a one-time purchase). On amazon, it's click and done.
The shipping delays aren't universal; I recently ordered coffee from there and
it it got delivered within 2 days (prime customer).

~~~
fsckboy
he's talking about receiving his goods a day or more earlier, and you are
talking about a couple of minutes longer sitting in your chair typing in the
account information. Your customer service point does point out a benefit, but
it doesn't address the consumer need expressed in the previous comment.

~~~
triyambakam
Yes thank you for highlighting that point - and in my case it is receiving the
goods weeks earlier, even

------
karaterobot
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.orei...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070329031201/http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/sfearthquakes_o.html)

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.

~~~
toast0
> 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.

An alternate business model is to look at Yahoo product launches from 5-10
years ago, and build what they did but shut down, its time may have come.
Google did this pretty well for a while. You can probably do it for Google
now, too.

~~~
ramraj07
You mean the time is right for a Google Reader alternative?

~~~
scrollaway
Maybe. Might not specifically be RSS-based, though, there's a lot of good RSS
clients out there (I use [https://bazqux.com/](https://bazqux.com/) \- it's
great).

Google Reader I remember sold itself as being an "inbox for the web". I think
Reddit and Facebook are the big competitors for that idea… not RSS clients.
But maybe the time is right for a new take on that idea, one that works more
closely like Reader.

~~~
wyclif
Didn't Feedly already meet this demand? Seems like almost everybody I know who
used Google Reader back in the day switched over to Feedly.

~~~
scrollaway
I don't think this is about a replacement for those who miss google reader;
rather, a reinvention of it, whose time maybe has come.

------
dr_dshiv
“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

~~~
rpdillon
I'm not sure I agree that complexity is always conserved. When I design
systems, I often find that there's intrinsic complexity that I can't seem to
escape, but that my initial designs are often quite poor and also include
incidental complexity. If I'm thoughtful, and I learn the domain well enough,
I sometimes find I can remove that incidental complexity. Alan Perlis had a
couple of epigrams that echo this, I think.

> 31\. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

> 58\. Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it.
> Geniuses remove it.

All that said, I've definitely seen cases where trying to insulate the user
from the reality of what's happening behind the scenes often dramatically
increases complexity. When it's done poorly, in increases complexity not only
for the designer and programmer, but the user as well. One well-known example
is the progress bar. After 30 years of lying to users about how long that file
copy, download, or compile would take, many recent designs simply exclude it
and include an animated spinner instead.

~~~
m463
I'm sort of reminded of the law of cleanliness (or similar)

In order for something to get clean, something else needs to get dirty.

I think taming complexity might be closer to getting something clean.

But I also think -- counter to the "conservation of complexity" thing -- you
can get make a mess and get EVERYTHING dirty.

------
Lightbody
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 ;)

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
As some who occasionally has to gather small groups (~5 people) --we all work
remotely (pre-covid too), so one can't just swing around the corner-- I would
be quite bothered to find my colleagues booked every last minute of their
time, such that it would become impossible to schedule 30 minutes sometime in
the next 2 weeks. Especially knowing that this was used, I would then have to
ping everyone and see if they actually are free at such-and-such a time. I
suppose that's the tool's intent.

Everyone should block off 1-2 hours a day for themselves. Consistently
blocking your entire day could slow down the organization, if meetings are a
place for reaching consensus and decision-making.

~~~
Lightbody
> I suppose that's the tool's intent.

Quite the opposite in fact: we built this for manager-types who have many
meetings and for the very reason you cited need to appear available.

It purposely makes the slots of time that we book “free” until the day is too
full, and only then changes it to busy.

The result is that my calendar, for example, appears free from 11am to 2pm,
but if suddenly that time starts filling up, some time (30-60 mins by default)
gets held for lunch.

In other words: it does exactly as you prescribe (blocks off 1-2 hours),
except without the rigidity of fixed events, making it easier for people like
you to call (hopefully good) meetings.

Give it a try!

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
> It purposely makes the slots of time that we book “free” until the day is
> too full, and only then changes it to busy.

[https://blog.reclaim.ai/posts/2020-03-30-dear-hr-are-your-
te...](https://blog.reclaim.ai/posts/2020-03-30-dear-hr-are-your-teams-ready-
for-remote-work/)

The lunch use case animation might be a simpler way of conceptually explaining
the product, just my 2 cents. Thanks for clarifying there.

Corner case: let's continue the idea of a flex lunch of 30 minutes between
11:30 and 2pm. If my work calendar has no events, and someone schedules a
meeting from exactly 11:30 to 2pm, does it automatically reject? The person
scheduling that meeting would've thought my schedule was free because the time
was marked free, since the flex lunch time is only "claimed" once I'm down to
30 minutes of unscheduled time between 11:30 and 2pm.

My personal intent of blocking this 30 minute slot is never publicly visible
on the work calendar, since it has no concept of that.

It sounds like Google Calendar (or whatever meeting software companies use)
needs to build in these sort of features, since there's no way to do so.
Reclaim helps, but if I'm booking my meeting within Google Calendar, and some
of my meeting participants use Reclaim, I can't see the sorts of constraints
participants are setting on their time.

~~~
Lightbody
Re: your corner case... Currently we defer to the incoming invite and remove
the block IF you accept the 2.5+ meeting invite the overlaps. One exception:
if the invite happens to mention lunch is being served we auto remove it. In
the future we will likely offer the option to auto reject, but we don’t today.

Re: your other comments, you are right that the core platform (mostly dictated
by the iCal standard) cause some of the limits on these workflows. But we
designed Reclaim to do most (all?) of what you’d expect both for you (a
Reclaim user) and others (non-Reclaim users who just stick on the core
platform).

Try it out :)

------
keesj
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...](https://medium.com/@marckohlbrugge/a-better-way-to-post-your-
instagram-photos-to-twitter-7f3a04a37d89)

[3] [https://tweet.photo/open](https://tweet.photo/open)

~~~
soheilpro
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
Now all I want to do is create a zap between your two services and loop a
share.

~~~
_curious_
Now that I will pay for ;)

------
pbreit
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-
fetc...](https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/url-fetch/url-
fetch-app)

~~~
samanator
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/qu...](https://developers.google.com/apps-
script/guides/services/quotas)

~~~
pbreit
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.

------
benatkin
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
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
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
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)?

~~~
benatkin
Yeah. It gives read/write access to one file. The ideal for this use case
would be read only access for one file. I think read/write access for one file
follows the principle of least privilege better than read access for all
files. [https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v2/about-
auth](https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v2/about-auth)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege)

~~~
slouch
I've found that drive.file doesn't work so well with existing Sheets
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61778469/append-rows-
to-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61778469/append-rows-to-a-google-
sheet-using-drive-file-scope)

------
nashadelic
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.

~~~
inthewoods
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.

------
dvt
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
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
Put another way, elegant code is not always good code.

~~~
RonanTheGrey
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.

------
anaxag0ras
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.

------
vinodc
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.

------
transitivebs
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.

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

~~~
toomuchtodo
Would you mind sharing more about this? I’m interested!

~~~
gkop
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
Thank you!

------
knes
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.

------
jereze
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
That is awesome. Have you been able to turn a profit yet? I'm super interested
in micro-SaaS's...

~~~
jereze
Thanks :) I have few paying customers. I run it as a side project in my spare
time.

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

~~~
TechBro8615
I chuckled when I noticed that the "adult" section was one of the only purple
links on the page.

~~~
transitivebs
Hmmm, not too hard to imagine what "adult" SaaS would look like :)

------
saadalem
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
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

~~~
transitivebs
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)

------
jelling
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
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.

------
priyank1
How is Zapier different from If this then that ?
[https://ifttt.com/](https://ifttt.com/)

~~~
input_sh
For one, it has a business model. IFTTT relies on investors' money to offer
service to average Joes like you and me.

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

~~~
kamerontanseli
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

------
caogecym
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.

------
vmurthy
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)

------
afterwalk
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
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.

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

------
slouch
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
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
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
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
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
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.

------
alphagrep12345
How do you find out interesting Zap workflows?

------
DavyJone
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
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."

------
daiearth22
awesome post! Thank you. I can see huge white space in non-IT use cases.

