Ask HN: Was integrating with Zapier worth the time/effort?

[akor]

We're having an internal discussion about whether integrating Zapier is worth the effort. We're specifically talking about it as a marketing tool to draw in customers (or at least help convince) so I was hoping to poll the larger community and hear about how integrating Zapier into your company affected sales. I realize this would mostly be anecdata but am interested in hearing anyway. Part of what brought up the discussion is not being able to find a killer use case for our own Zapier account so it makes us wonder if there is a bump in sales after integrating Zapier if it's just customers aspirationally thinking they'll use it or possibly if two companies otherwise are relatively equal that the one having Zapier is "better". Also any thoughts on the integration experience would be helpful as well. TIA

[dstik]

If your question is whether being part of the Zapier integration catalog will drive new customers / business, then I wouldn't count on it being a major growth channel. Though, being listed will serve as additional credibility and will likely have branding and SEO benefits for you.

On the other hand, we found that building a Zapier integration made customer on-boarding faster and smoother, which helped to speed up our overall sales processes. While slightly different from your use-case, our product requires an API integration, so allowing customers to integrate via Zapier instead of requiring development effort to support our APIs has reduced the cost, time/conversations, and resources necessary for our customers to work with us. It also reduces technical support requests.

Finally, seconding what lpellegr said, Zapier has now introduced Partner Tiers, meaning that you need to get your own users before you can graduate to a listing level of beta and then even more users before you get other benefits like a blog post and potentially featured status.

Overall, I'd look at whether these benefits are worth the engineering effort. If your main goal/priority is marketing then there may be other exciting growth/marketing opportunities that would be a better use of time with better ROI. Hope this is helpful.

[QueensGambit]

Can you list the other growth/marketing opportunities for your product that you found were exciting?

[MichaelKovacs]

In general and from my experience, I'd say integrations are more effective at increasing retention than they are at increasing sales.

It's not that integrations aren't valuable to new users, it's just that users will be initially be buying for your core value, as oppose to an integration that is by definition not core.

Yeah, if 2 companies are equal then I suppose the one having Zapier will be better, but that doesn't seem sustainable :)

Once users have spent time in your app, they will start adding integrations that will make your app "stickier" and hopefully increase retention.

[akor]

Thanks for the feedback. It seems as though Zapier has taken over the startup scene which just makes me wonder its value to us.

[lpellegr]

I would say this depends on what your purpose is. If your service has a real value to integrate with multiple other services, or your customers ask for, then it's a time saver and thus you may save money by integrating with Zapier.

However, by experience, do not expect to get customers only because you are part of their catalog. Especially, since they have introduced partner tiers to get promoted (i.e. to appear in their newsletter, use cases, etc.). Previously, all integrations had this benefit, now you need to satisfy some criteria.

Regarding the integration, we made one for Noticeable.io last year, it took us some weeks. The documentation is not that bad but there was several steps that were involving human interactions with Zapier.

[akor]

I personally struggle with how I'd use the Zapier integration (thinking as a customer/client) but I think that about other services. We tried to do a RingCentral / Pipedrive mashup and couldn't make it work the way we wanted (got 75%+ there).

If you don't mind what is the usage like? Did use-cases emerge you hadn't considered. Has it been a headache from a support standpoint? Lastly, are customers confused when you say yes we integrate with X but in order to use it you have to use/purchase Zapier? Again thank you!