[cm2012]

Zapier is a god send for the non developer portions of a company.

I work in marketing. Marketing projects are inherently speculative, you don't know what they will achieve until they're done. Add to this that dev teams at every company have full sprints planned for months. Getting a marketing project done through the dev team is months of exertion and sweat.

Or... get Zapier approved by security, get platforms plugged in officially, nice and tidy. And then the marketers can do what they need in the platform, and they're able to iterate and learn at a much faster pace. It changes the whole game.

[iamacyborg]

As a Marketing Ops guy, this gives me pause.

> nice and tidy. And then the marketers can do what they need in the platform, and they're able to iterate and learn at a much faster pace. It changes the whole game.

The reality is, marketers will frequently plug in any and every thing they can without thinking about the broader context. Sure you can plug all this stuff together, or you can spend a bit of time with ETL and rETL tools and develop a stack that isn't reliant on a bunch of third party silos.

[boc]

Is your goal to have a martech stack that doesn't rely on third party silos, or is your goal to have your lead-gen form populate your Airtable CRM for your new experimental acquisition campaign?

The marketer is being asked to acquire users, not make it look pretty behind the scenes. In the testing phase, it's way better to use Zapier to get things done fast. Then you can revisit and scale later with a proper solution if it turns out to be a productive campaign.

[iamacyborg]

My goal is to ensure some degree of process sanity exists to ensure data processing complies with the law and that systems interoperate effectively.

I don't think anyone using Airtable as a CRM has those sorts of concerns, however.

[boc]

Right - it sounds like you're processing data at a very different scale from the typical Zapier user.

[iamacyborg]

Yeah, potentially, though I think you’d be surprised at the size of teams still using it.

[cm2012]

It's still incredibly useful at billion dollar companies. Even more so since the development process is even harder to get through.

[ouEight12]

> revisit and scale later with a proper solution

But there in is the problem. Most Marketers I've had the pleasure of working with/for will never come back and implement the proper (scalable, secured, etc) solution. By the time this first ad-hoc creation has either failed horribly or taken off, they're off on the next new "idea".. there's no time to property revisit that last one, why would we? It's either dead and forgotten or working as I gloriously intended!

I've actually already seen Zapier go 'full lifecycle' in two separate environments. It went from "cautiously approved" to "banned by both name and by functionality" both times due to the marketing team zapping their collected data off to, lets call them.. overly public output storage locations.

[emteycz]

I would have no idea where to start with rETL and I'm a software engineer... Search turns up some medicine and other non-related stuff.

If it's a typo, then sorry. But ETL is the same beast. I have few ideas where to start thanks to my programming background, but I can't imagine the marketing department guys do any of it.

Non-ideal but less expensive is still better than nothing (or too expensive to stay profitable). Not all operations are huge companies that can afford IT teams working on their behalf.

[iamacyborg]

Basically, reverse ETL, ie get data from the warehouse to operational platforms. The two big players are Census and Hightouch.

https://www.getcensus.com/

https://hightouch.io/

Both offer no-code tools to help non-technical users make use of the data.

[maxerickson]

What does the L mean then?

[me_bx]

E - Extract

T - Transform

L - Load

[emteycz]

Thanks for the links, I'll have a look.

[borisjabes]

it refers to a somewhat poorly named concept known as reverse ETL, something we started working on back in 2018 with our product Census (getcensus.com). We launched it on HN in 2020, though it's come a long way since then :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23034642

[emteycz]

Nice, definitely solves some problems I had in the past. I'll keep your product in mind, I like it very much.

[bduerst]

Think of rETL as an on-demand data lake that doesn't actually store any data (for the most part).

Yeah you can pull data and create snapshots to preserve views, but given the direction privacy and regulatory environments have been going with user data, it's incredibly sexy to be able to not have to dump data in yet another data warehouse just to use a new tool.

[eru]

Perhaps the proper programming term might be co-ETL or co-data-lake? (Where we use 'co' in the same sense as eg http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/10/duality-for-haskellers/ )

[bduerst]

>or you can spend a bit of time with ETL and rETL tools and develop a stack that isn't reliant on a bunch of third party silos

This is the real future of 'unbundling'.

I love reading this article because while it sets up the problem and solution proposition quite well, all I could think of was how the author is proving reverse-ETL engines (& not their own platform) are the best investment right now.

[georgesequeira]

At the end of the day, most business owners don't want to connect all these tools together. It just allows them to accomplish business outcomes. What makes their job hard is keeping track where all the data is and how to know if things are working.

Solutions to that problem can take shape as a CRM (and keeping it updated) or something as dumb as a dashboard of dashboards.

[ethbr0]

Agreed. It's a common trap of technologist thinking: if we gave people better access to primatives, they'd have more power to assemble what they wanted!

In fact, it's "assembling" that most people hate. Which is why products that sacrifice power to limit assembly tend to be successful.

[eru]

> I work in marketing. Marketing projects are inherently speculative, you don't know what they will achieve until they're done. Add to this that dev teams at every company have full sprints planned for months. Getting a marketing project done through the dev team is months of exertion and sweat.

Slightly off-topic: you basically just described why spreadsheets were such a huge deal when they were first introduced in the 1980s.

[disgruntledphd2]

And also why the world still runs on Excel.

[eru]

Yes, definitely!

Excel is actually a relatively decent programming language when you want to quickly _write_ a business application.

The big problem occurs when you want to _read_ the application. Alas, reading is necessary for maintenance and debugging and reviewing/auditing.

[KnobbleMcKnees]

> Add to this that dev teams at every company have full sprints planned for months. Getting a marketing project done through the dev team is months of exertion and sweat.

I'm confused by this, can you clarify?

This sounds like the exact opposite of agile sprints (assuming you're talking about agile)

[guitarsteve]

It doesn’t sound too far off from what I’ve seen. The details of the sprints may not be worked out, but a dev team might have several months of high priority project queued up and marketing might be deemed lower priority. So getting extra work done from another team can sometimes take a very long time.

[mylons]

i agree that this is mostly what i see too. but it’s not agile, it’s people claiming they’re agile and doing something else.

[ahtihn]

I fail to see how it's not agile? Roadmaps aren't against agile. If marketing is low priority and there's a large backlog of high priority work, marketing related work is never going to be considered when planning a sprint.

The only way around this is to have more dev capacity or to prioritize marketing work.

[jtwaleson]

We outsource a lot of the marketing tech and website related work so marketing is not blocked by our own development team. We don’t see marketing tech and our Wordpress website as our “secret sauce”. The devs are just focused on product development.

[iamacyborg]

Does your product not generate data that would be useful for the marketing team?

[jtwaleson]

Yes, and we do try to prioritize work on data exporting :)

[dijonman2]

This is typical of product driven organizations. Has nothing to do with agile itself.

[JacobThreeThree]

Yeah, it's a question of prioritizing which projects make it into the pipeline. Marketing automation is often subordinate to automation projects for other departments like Finance and Operations when it comes to prioritization.

[dnndev]

This is exactly the kind of comment I was hoping to see. May I ask, what kinds of things are you using zapier for that are not just nice to haves. Something that you would say it pays for itself (increases revenue somehow)

[cm2012]

Facebook and LinkedIn leads ads to Marketo/Hubspot/Salesforce, Facebook Conversion API from Salesforce to FB are vital connections for B2B companies.

[georgesequeira]

Would love to hear more about your experience with these platforms. Thought they were mostly plug-n-play these days. Could I email you?

[tucaz]

I would love to get an answer to this question as well. I keep comings back to Zapier and the likes hoping I will find a useful use case but can’t. It seems that all it does is add stuff from email marketing forms to Google spreadsheets.

[crisnoble]

Even if that was literally all it could do, it would easily be worth $50/month for marketing teams.

[dsaavy]

For more complex things Zapier falls flat IMO. I've been using Make.com (formerly Integromat) and it offers way more flexibility and it's easier to configure for more complex automations.

[jimmySixDOF]

Not to mention Make has a much better entry level cost point:

1 Month (billed Monthly):

---Zapier $29

---(5 triggers / 750 events)

---Make $11

---(unlimited triggers/10,000 events)

[bag_boy]

Google form > email action was my best use case

[dshanahan]

Great convo, thought I'd share some valuable zaps I've used over the last few years to save $$$ on headcount, dev time, and burn/debt on unproven ideas/experiments.

- Slack - pipe all kinds of events into special #channels to cross teams can check one spot for external happenings: new users, new sales, support chats, form/data submissions

- Forms > CRM/Sheets - shouldn't be understated. Using lead page or no-code CRM (webflow my fave) I've swapped out various signup flows to test ideas/friction/followups repeatedly before asking dev to build actual signup flows into the backend app. Can swap paperform, typeform, mailchimp, google forms in under an hour for multiple signup/landing pages w/o any devs.

- Calendar - I use Motion (similar to Calendly) across sales team to speed up meeting flows + use Zaps to pipe those bookings into sheets/Slack/CRM or EMS. Sales team calendars can be public on marketing site (webflow) and bookings generate all the alerts and data we need to just show up to the meetings.

- Leverage SMS channel - One-click surveys, recurring survey campaigns using SimpleTexting or YesInsights and piping results wherever I need 'em. Google Sheet with charted dashboards already set up to auto-update. Great for ecomm, great for call/response feature testing with zero dev required. Can add phone signups via form integration or email campaign.

- Manual issue / todo alerts: Use specific tag in Asana to pipe a ticket into Slack channel when team member wants to surface for manager/teammate - instead of asana firehose

- Light @mention feed - Pipe brand mentions/topics, including web (reddit etc - use F5bot) into sheet or #channel for marketing eyes to check daily

- Twitter bot - built @carryonbagsizes using just Zaps: anyone tweets airline name and gets carry-on bag size restrictions back from the bot (including variations on airline names ie United vs United Airlines)

[Dwolb]

Piping user data into Sheets is literally my nightmare.

Especially if there's any sort of editing or data transform in sheets, there's 0 traceability of the change.

[aaaaaaaaata]

Is there any way to lock a Sheet from edits except for API-based changes?

[georgesequeira]

Zapier makes changes on behalf of a single account. You can change the "share" permission to only allow view for anyone except for the account tied to Zapier which has edit permissions.

[aaaaaaaaata]

...and don't they offer full revision history?

Not sure what the commenter was on about, then.

[xhkkffbf]

Indeed, this unbundling is already happening. Many of the so-called Customer Data Platforms offer a low-code, no-code option for creating and iterating on marketing campaigns. They've already done the work of integrating with the various storefronts and ad platforms.

[duxup]

Yeah I was wondering too. Not that people wouldn't use it, but I wonder about what the transition is from "this is handy" to "I want to continuously pay for this service / enough that it is consistent enough / earns me money back enough to do this and not something else".

[tungle]

set a Google calendar event every working day, then connect Zapier to post to Mattermost to remind my team do to virtual stand-up meeting.

[kevin_thibedeau]

This is how sites get burdened with a half dozen analytics scripts.

[LunaSea]

This would have been true 5 years ago but based on the current pricing, any non-trivial use case is far more expensive than identical internal development and maintenance.

[Dwolb]

One time, when we were much smaller and a team of 10, we had a marketer who also thought they were a developer.

Instead of choosing an off-the-shelf tagging solution like Google Tag manager, they used Zapier + custom injected code into Wordpress + Segment to attempt to hand-roll a "marketing tech stack".

All the data was wrong and all the integrations would break constantly. Eventually we moved on and a team had to figure out how to rip out all the code and deprecate the integrations.

We ended up just moving to a new CMS to start clean.

[rockostrich]

> get Zapier approved by security

How do you manage this when marketing relies on PII to do anything? We just went through a switch over to a multi-channel messaging SaaS from an internal solution that "worked" for 6 years. Handling the PII aspect of things was taken care of by the SaaS being SOC 2 and GDPR compliant, but something like Zapier seems like it gives users the control to move PII into systems that don't have that compliance. Or are there controls around which data can flow where?

[Kalium]

Long story short, you don't. No competent security organization taking their responsibilities seriously is going to issue a blanket approval of something as broad as Zapier.

What you can do is get an enterprise relationship in place, deploy tight endpoint monitoring and management, careful management of permissions at every level, and then make the review processes relatively fast. Not marketing-wants-to-build-a-whole-new-thing-with-lots-of-PII-tomorrow fast, but fast. Having strong systems for generating realistic test data and systems will make this prototyping much easier, though from experience Marketing will tend to dismiss such things.

Marketing's needs and goals are real and important and valid and blah blah blah blah. Mostly their institutional incentives are to barrel ahead as fast as possible with any and every tools available. A security organization's remit is to make sure that this isn't reckless and liability-inducing, which often means dialing back the speed from breakneck to manageable and maybe even doing some token amount of planning around what you hope to achieve.

[cm2012]

Yep, in small companies you get carte blanche, and there are two kinds of big companies. Those that make it work with a process like the above comment (which looks like a great and reasonable set-up), and those that kneecap their marketing departments by rejecting the tools needed for modern marketing.

As a side note, I've worked with 60+ startups. One thing that kills start-ups whenever it happens is giving too much power too early to the "default to no" departments of a company - security, legal, brand.

[Kalium]

It's been my experience that default-to-no is what happens when groups like security try a reasonable process... and find that marketing and similar enablement-first groups handle this by ignoring and bypassing it. This tends to set up a very ugly reckoning at some point. Marketing will lose, but the company overall will lose too.

If marketing ever says "But an enterprise contract with SAML is too expensive! Can't we just use the basic SaaS version?", it's time to check what other processes they're used to ignoring. I'd suggest starting with expense records. There's probably a bunch of vendors handled entirely on a director's credit card.

[ouEight12]

To be fair, the people that run SaaS platforms that extort a 3x multiple to go from "Pro" which just happens to have every feature they offer EXCEPT SAML, to "Enterprise" which, low and behold, adds no value /other/ than SAML all need to line up and die in a fire someplace.

[Forgeties79]

I should look into more features with it. Right now I mainly use it to link my Slack and GitHub presence. Very very useful since I get all sorts of notes from folks on both platforms. It's been critical to avoid having things fall through the cracks. I keep a special private slack channel that has slackbot message me whenever someone pings me on GH and lays out all the relevant info.

[samstave]

Can you please share some example workflows enabled by Zapier that benefits your org?

[nickfromseattle]

1. New demo booked via Calendly --> find/create deal in CRM --> send Slack message to #notifications-sales

2. New app sign up --> webhook to Zap --> create new deal in CRM --> create new contact in email automation platform --> send a Slack message to #notifications-signups

3. New in-app purchase --> Update CRM Deal as 'Won', update Deal LTV --> push Slack notification --> change email sequence from 'free trial' to 'paid subscriber'

4. New Facebook Group member --> add as contact in email automation platform and subscribe to 'Facebook Group' email list

5. New charge in stripe --> update CRM LTV value

[stevesearer]

Not marketing, but we use it to automate some WordPress tasks.

WordPress Gravity Forms submission -> Zapier -> Airtable to assign calendar -> Zapier -> Create WordPress draft

Have someone fill out a structured Google Sheet -> upload to private Gravity Form -> Zapier to process > Create WordPress draft

I'm sure I could spend time figuring out how to do this stuff directly in WP with coding, but it is nice to connect existing things together relatively easily as a first step.