
Scaling Zapier to Automate Billions of Tasks - sergiotapia
http://stackshare.io/zapier/scaling-zapier-to-automate-billions-of-tasks?utm_content=stacksharedigest02052016&utm_medium=email
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bryanh
CTO / cofounder of Zapier here - I'm flying today but happy to answer any
questions during layovers. I'm sure a bunch of the team is watching the thread
too, so ask away!

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ahstilde
Hi Bryan,

I'm a student at the University of Virginia and a founder who hopes to use
Zapier to "scale" my business processes as my venture moves from high-touch to
more mass-market products. I took a class called Internet Scale Applications
where we implemented a scalable application with Docker, Django, MySQL,
ElasticSearch, and Kafka. It's great to see that what I learned is immediately
applicable in the industry.

My questions has to deal with problem recognition and tool selection. From my
understanding of Zapier, you guys went into YC after university, with little
time in the industry. As you were scaling, how did you recognize problems in
your technology which were present / were approaching, and how did you choose
tools to address these problems?

I ask because many times the information overload of tool selection can lead
to analysis paralysis. This is most often seen with the "Django, Node, or
Rails" debate of student programmers who want to make something, but I presume
it's a flaw of human nature, and not of youth.

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bryanh
You'll find most successful business folks don't obsess over tool selection -
good enough is good enough, customers don't care about code quality, etc.
Engineers (myself included) tend to want to compare tools and pick the best
one possible to solve a problem and of course - opinions vary.

Both have their place - but err towards the former in the early days.

One could write a book on the subject (and many have!).

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bnj
Chief issue with Zapier is that my use pattern doesn't seem to be represented.
There have been a few times (yesterday, for one) where I've wanted to push
through a large number of jobs really quickly, like manipulating and syncing
some records through some different services- Zapier is so useful in building
the pathway, but getting the job done needs me to sign up for the 20/mo plan
when I'm only interested in using it for one job every few months...

I've wondered about micro-accounts, or even better: accounts with a gradual
replenish rate on the job cap so that for a few dollars a month I can run a
couple of records through every five minutes...

I'm nonsensical now. Going to keep a keen eye on Zapier for the day when
membership becomes economical.

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stevenjohns
Something similar was actually brought up on HN about a year ago as well, and
I gave my experience with feeling that I couldn't find an appropriate Zapier
pricing tier[0]. For me it was the issue with the base plan being just too
much for what we wanted to do (automate Facebook posting from an RSS feed,
about 5 to 10 posts a day).

I actually engaged their sales team looking for a tailored pricing plan where
I could pay a reduced rate for a reduced amount of 'tasks,' and was instead
encouraged to perform a series of referrals/sharing to get free tasks. I
would've been happy with $5 or $10 a month.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9661885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9661885)
\- linked to the parent comment as it was also relevant

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siquick
I used Zapier and its an excellent product but I'm never sure what the
difference between Zapier and IFTTT is?

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mrkschan
@bryan, how do you guys handle workload spike due to the way zapier is working
in a crontab style?

~~~
bryanh
Less of an issue than you'd think with one simple trick: jitter. :-)

Or, we don't guarantee you job runs at 0,5,10,15,etc - we guarantee it runs
close to that interval over a day.

