Zapier (YC S12), The IFTTT For Business Users, Launches Developer Platform | Hacker News Reader

Zapier (YC S12), The IFTTT For Business Users, Launches Developer Platform

techcrunch.com

83 pointsWadeF28 comments

Here's a direct link to the docs https://zapier.com/developer/ as well as the announcement blog post https://zapier.com/blog/2012/08/01/announcing-zapier-develop...

Very, very excited this is going live today. We're looking forward to the awesome things developers can do with this. We've already been extremely surprised by the creativity of our end-users and are expecting a similar story from our developers.

A few quick ideas:

1. hook your own SaaS app up to Zapier so all of our users (and your customers!) can use it

2. write an integration for a SaaS app you don't own but want to integrate with

3. connect your in-house tools to external SaaS apps through Zapier

Not to be overlooked is how simple they've made the process of integration as a developer. You don't need to write any code to integrate with Zapier.

I originally had a skype chat with Mike thinking that integrating with them would be a back-and-forth dealing with our APIs. Nope. We had Ronin integrated within 15 minutes via a web UI. All you have to do is drag and drop stuff around and fill out a few forms. I think this is the coolest part of what they've built.

Interestingly enough we were split on this decision. We had a few people who thought we should go a straight scripting/API route and our own intuition saying we should add structure through our interface.

In the end we've tried to support the best of both world. You can add your endpoints using our interface and drop down to a scripting API (Javascript) to have fine-grained control over how we prepare requests/responses to and from your server. This gives you a lot of flexibility if you want it but it's not required.

I love this company. Similar to Stripe it's one of those things that when you see it, you're just like "finally someone took away this pain and makes something that makes sense!"

Exactly! The way they're targeting business related processes with their business specific channels enables all sorts of possibilities in terms of automating tasks and such.

LOVE it.

The first time my cofounder tried Zapier, she turned around and said: "Did you see these guys? They are going to be huge!"

Good luck guys! Good job so far.

Funny how I said this was an IFTTT clone a few days back and got downvoted to hell...

Most likely because it is not a direct clone and they interpreted it as if your comment was pejorative.

Congrats guys. We've been using the service for over a month now and absolutely love it. You've given us integrations we'd never have time to do ourselves as a young scrappy startup with entirely too much work to do.

Can you give some examples of what you have been able to accomplish with this?

You might check out a few of our highlights: https://zapier.com/zapbook/reviews/

Differences between this and IFTTT? This costs money, but has a ton more "triggers." Wondering what else there is that sets them apart.

This is great! Always wondered when IFTTT or someone else would start focusing on businesses more. Looking forward to adding our apps!

Small nitpick: there seem to be some "undefined"'s in the "spinning list" of data-triggers.

Yep, we noticed that too. Working on a fix.

If you're writing an API for your app/product/startup, you can build an integration with Zapier's developer platform and kick-start your API program with 60+ integrations right out of the gate.

Anybody here use both IFTTT and Zapier? Been loving IFTTT for being texted filtered road traffic info from Twitter feeds.

That sounds like a really interesting Recipe. Have you shared it?

Not that exact one but it's a modification of another recipe: it's the "text me tweets from this twitter account that satisfy these search terms" recipe, with a local news radio Twitter feed for the traffic and my favourite highways and words like "collision", "blocked", and "reopened" as the search terms.

The only thing that I didn't like about Zapier, in the trial that I did, was that I got a TON of emails from Wade Foster. I realize that you want to be connected to your customers, but an email every few days was a bit overkill. June 22, 24, 28, July 1 and 4. Too much spammy email.

Hi Daniel,

We got a lot of feedback about that and reduced the number of emails we send now. Really sorry about that.

Wade

Zapier front page keeps loading in latest Opera. Otherwise, can't wait to plug in my apps!

Might try another browser real quick. Still working out some kinks in Opera.

There are fixes in the works for Opera (and non-push state enabled browers)

I wonder how they deal with triggers which cause loops...

Most things only happen once every [polling period] so the loop would occur relatively slowly.

lets just hope it doesn't trigger two events on each iteration

yes!

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