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Comment by freeqaz | Hacker News Reader

I ran a startup that I shut down a few years ago that was designed to do something very similar to this. It is dead now but the site is up at https://refinery.io (docs have screenshots)

What I figured out is that... it's really hard to get this type of thing right. The more generic something is, the less useful it is. Zapier is a pretty amazing tool but it's also incredibly difficult to write all of their integrations. This tool suffers from a lot of the same problems (integrations are where the value is).

It's cool to see others talking about this though. It makes me want to Open Source the core tech we used to build Refinery (including the half-baked version that uses Temporal for long-running action sequences).

Thanks for the reminder about this!

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> The more generic something is, the less useful it is.

Funny how different people reach different conclusions :)

In my experience, tools and services that don't generalize enough (or allowing it rather), are less useful in the long-term and just solves something short-term. But it's easier to get traction if you solve something short-term, as it's often easier to market something that is more focused.

In this case, our "niche" was Jr. Devs that could write some code but couldn't get something deployed very easily. Kind of like Heroku.

The angle of it being "generic" was that it required that you knew how to code. We didn't really give you many pre-defined "building blocks" to get started with. We tried to find a "niche" within that space (like a web scraper) but we just never got it quite right without needing to re-think everything we'd built.

Since then, we've ended up doing Open Source security tooling instead[0]. We wrote up the first technical blog post about the recent log4j vuln[1] and that's been valuable for helping us identify "niche" problems that companies struggle with.

Building a startup is hard work!

0: https://github.com/lunasec-io/lunasec/

1: https://www.lunasec.io/docs/blog/log4j-zero-day/

I'm CEO of robusta.dev (an automations tool for Kubernetes) and this has been our experience too.

People don't want the ability to write their own automations - they want something that just works out of the box.

Very early on we realized this based on feedback and pivoted to focusing on out of the box alert insights (powered by automations we wrote) and not write your own automations.

I don't know what the equivalent is for the web.

> People don't want the ability to write their own automations

I don't think that is true. People do want their own automations, but only when necessary. And as always, it should be as effortless as possible. That's the main fail where most of those tools struggle.

> they want something that just works out of the box.

Why not both? Personally, I want something gives me everything for the common tasks and services, but also has room to let me grow into the direction I need to go. This does not mean I want to build everything myself, or even start at zero. But between zero customizing, and doing everything yourself, there should be a common ground that allows me find my sweet spot.

And there are many good tools which do feed into this desires and are working well.

Yes, you're right.

I should have elaborated more. We give you the useful content out of the box but you can customize to your heart's content and write your own automations.

All the APIs used to create the out of the box content are available for you too.

Wow, Temporal is an interesting find.

I thought of creating a similar tool just for marketing automation. I built a landing page [0], but haven't had the time to talk to potential customers.

[0] https://h11g.com/

Temporal is awesome. It's definitely not the "easiest" tool to use in the world, but it is very powerful.

I threw you over an email. I'd be happy to chat and help share my lessons about this. :)

It kind of reminds me of Yahoo Pipes

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