Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

How do you deal with data loss if there isn’t a perfect match between the data models? For example, if I’m looking to migrate from GSuite to Microsoft Office365 (or vice versa) and there’s not a 1:1 mapping. Or if the behavior of the same spreadsheet formula is slightly importantly different? These are complicated examples obviously and maybe you’re not tackling them yet, but I think I see (at least as an external observer with limited visibility) a lot of the internal teams really focusing on those corner cases where the data loss path and other migration challenges rather than the happy easy-to-automate piece.

Similarly, how do you see this service scaling beyond a boutique consultancy or outside of a handful of cases where it’s easy? If you’re successful, do you think vendors won’t do everything to make your access more difficult or cut you off completely? If you see it more as a “we force the vendors we integrate to sign a mutual agreement” kind of strategy, how do you see yourselves not becoming a gate keeper and velocity bottleneck for feature development (ie company wants to roll out feature X and now they need to involve you first so that you can write migrations to …?)

It’s an interesting idea so curious to hear your thoughts about the challenges.

This is a good question, and, frankly, the hardest part of our business. We do the work of mapping data, understanding the corner cases, and implementing translations that yield the same results. This is easier when vendors work with us, since they help us with that mapping (and in some cases make changes to their product in order to accommodate.)

That said, if your new platform simply doesn't support the old features, then there isn't much we can do, except for provide you a backup of the original data.

We think that end-users ultimately want a choice in the vendors they use. Our mission is to facilitate that, and if a user wants to move to a new platform then they'll ultimately find a way to do it.

To that end, we see ourselves as a "Switzerland", much like Plaid and Zapier are able to integrate across many competing products. We don't think we'd stand in the way of companies creating new features. If they want to be able to onboard users from competing platforms, then we think we can make that easier!

Amazing product idea, solves a real need. My biggest concern would just be remembering you all exist when needed since this really is not a 'category' so to speak.

Anyway just wanted to chime in that "Switcherland" would have been a funny name given your sensical positioning as neutral. Current name is great though! "Bringing Switcherland in to facilitate" is just something I'd love to say at the office.

Just want to say, love your username. (I give it a C+.)

It's rare that an idea like this comes along. If you can pull it off, it's one of those ideas that are obvious in hindsight. Good luck!

How does this figure into unit economics, in terms of limiting the cost involved in mapping data which is more consultancy (based off your BI use case and per dashboard pricing), migrations by nature tend to be one-off and not really a source of recurring revenue. Curious how to bridge the gap between what you have now to a Plaid/Zapier model, a tough problem no doubt!

Also, I may be misunderstanding your current offering.

This is a really great question. It's not an insurmountable problem, but the compromises need to be understood.

Further, there are lots of things that can be done on the receiver side to smooth out the experience. It is frustrating for customers when a product hasn't thought about how imported content will perform. Often you are left with problems like any edits to the import needing additional fields completed to edit (possibly a significant cost per edit), content can't be fully rendered so appears as an HTML blob in a field, imported data can't be filtered so you can't easily hire someone to fix it without fishing through other data etc.

If you are entering a mature market then importing a competitor's content in a streamlined fashion is a great way to gain adoption and lock in customers. Some markets have lots of competition so you can possibly only target smooth migration of a subset. It shouldn't be an afterthought.

> If you’re successful, do you think vendors won’t do everything to make your access more difficult or cut you off completely?

Vendors should want their schema available for import by new customers. That seems like it should be a good guide for exporting data. As for making export harder, companies will just demand their data and then the vendors will have to do the export; vendors won't be able to keep the data (in almost all cases of companies that have a contract.)

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