Scaling Zapier to Automate Billions of Tasks | Hacker News Reader

Scaling Zapier to Automate Billions of Tasks

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96 pointssergiotapia22 comments

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!

Zapier needs a face... Love the company and always thought that the human connection is what was missing.

How so? We have an skilled support team (including engineers) working with customers everyday which is what we think of as our primary human connection.

Not OP, but perhaps he means a publically prolific persona who is immediately identifiable with the company. Someone akin to Evan Spiegal and Snapchat, Jack Dorsey and Square/Twitter, etc.

I'm not inclined to agree, but I'm just trying to elaborate.

Also not OP, but perhaps (s)he's looking for something like Clippy to put a face on the digital assistant?

I have first hand experience on how awesome the support team is and salute them for the great work they no doubt do every day.

I don't mean to offend in any way it was more of a general feeling I got when using the service and having known Zapier for a while now.

Since the dawn of business time humans have done business with other humans and even in the digital age I don't think that has changed.

To see a friendly face on the homepage that has worked hard to get the business to where it is. Who I know is working hard to look after my data and make sure it gets from A to B.

Again just a gut feeling I had when I saw the homepage. Apologies for the 180 of the questions you had been expecting! Keep up the awesome work dude :)

Thanks for the comment - that was a nice explanation. We will see what we can do!

Love the tool. We're using it daily to automate a significant amount of our business processes. I'm actually giving a presentation for our organization on Zapier (and Asana, which is our primary integration) next month and would love to touch base with your team so that we can get the details right! info@commoninterestsfinancial.com if you want to get in touch.

Great product! Quick question: any plans to implement two way syncing between systems? At the moment you can only create new "items" via a trigger or action; being able to sync would be a very powerful feature and would result in a huge increase in usage from our customers.

Two way syncing with our ethos of mass connections would be very difficult - not that we are against it - we'd love to support more update actions vs only create actions. The devil is in the details there - but don't expect Zapier to focus entirely on two way syncing anytime soon. Our recent multi-step zap launch supporting complex workflows is our main focus.

For syncing between [some] real-time systems, check out https://sameroom.io

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.

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!).

Do you have any notes/slides from that class? That class sounds very practical and interesting!

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.

Definitely understandable - I appreciate you keeping an eye on us! Hopefully we will deliver that value for you someday.

that's hardly an issue imo, the value you get from those few jobs is under $20 to you. When running a SaaS it's important to make sure you focus on people who's willing to pay you the rate you demand. I just hate it when everyone thinks SaaS should automatically be 19.99/month. I blame 37signals for starting this harmful trend.

If you value your own time -- or your employer does -- this is a no-brainer. Spend your valuable brain on high-return stuff and automated the rest. ($20/hr is ≈ $42k/year)

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 - linked to the parent comment as it was also relevant

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

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

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.

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