Hacker News Reader

Comment by mritchie712 | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, zapier already has this [0]

0 - https://zapier.com/#:~:text=Start%20a%20workflow%20as%20fast...

Zapier is definitely trying, but they're not there yet. That feature unfortunately doesn't do much to configure the blocks for you (it just selects which to use) -- you're largely left to sift through the same menus to set it up.

Zapier has actual experienced software engineers and real budgets, would not rule out their ability to perform the same: text to IFTTT like auto-execution. Or consider your company right now, your current company is essentially a single team at Zapier, and you've got some free-way to mix research and product development. I suspect this is more an acquisition target -- small team develops larger idea in better way, Zapier says thanks and hooks it into their own stack, networks, and customers.

It took Zapier ~12 years to become a ~$5B company and build the book of revenue supporting such a valuation. For the right price, certainly, cash out (time value of money/time). But it's also reasonable to build and see how far you can run organically, depending on what you're optimizing for as a founder. You might be able to run faster because you're not carrying a decade of technical architecture to today's market, regardless of current cashflow and engineering capacity.

Zapier is a great company from a product and financial fundamentals perspective, big fan in all honesty, but I wouldn't sell upstarts short (that they can't execute).

That's the whole point of a startup. And we know startups fail. And Zapier is a YC company. This is a 2 person team using LLMs, I doubt they are building their own, nor building some "foundational connect-the-internet" agent nor have built for any scale beyond an internship. Still, they are definitely going to make something, and good luck to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com