IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer | Hacker News Reader

IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer

thenextweb.com

97 pointsSeoxyS40 comments

What is the monetisation options for IFTTT?

They've now received $8.5M in funding, but charge nothing for the service, AFAIK? I'm interested to know how that is going to make a return for the investors.

(I love IFTTT, and think it is a great service - just interested to know/learn)

Article states it will become a SasS. Perhaps charge $5 month and so on depending on how many updates/connections you make.

It can also provide an all-in-one api for developers working with the products supported on IFTTT.

Interesting. $5 per month = $60 per year, so if they got 50,000 users it would still take almost 3 years to make the money back, excluding running costs.

I'm often a bit surprised at how such companies can prove to be a good investment - I feel like there is something I'm missing in the numbers.

Because they don't need to be profitable - they'll probably end up getting acquired by a bigger company - thus is the world of VC...

50,000 paying users sounds awfully unambitious for a VC-backed web startup. A projection of a modest Pinboard-like future like that can't possibly be what these firms are basing their investment decisions on. They probably think IFTTT have a shot at getting millions of users.

They will probably charge for heavy usage and enterprise connections (Salesforce, Basecamp, etc.) similar to Zapier: https://zapier.com/app/signup

The integrator market is insanely large. There are very big name players that are effectively system integrators and charge huge sums of money to get different systems to talk to each other.

Once they have the platform fully ironed out, the level of application for Enterprise clients is virtually limitless.

For example, imagine if you could build a workflow by dragging and dropping to connect your Salesforce.com implementation with your back-office provisioning applications, based on a conditional logic and then send out SMS confirmation to the client, make a SFDC case note and update a bunch of statuses... all without writing a single line of code.

Enterprises already pay for this through the nose. They will keep paying, because it's worth it.

Enterprise customers also LOVE control. If they can have a business analyst do the work, instead of hiring an army of 3rd party integrators, they will over pay for it. If they can keep everything in-house at a reasonable cost, they will.

Enterprise usually means proprietary data structures. If IFTTT could go from SAP to ADP that would be worth a lot of money.

Don't get me wrong, IFTTT can do a lot of cool stuff, but Enterprise is inherently difficult because of proprietary everything. Implementing a layer of abstraction means abstracting away this complexity through code to create a simple interface. IFTTT has a simple interface, but expanding into systems in the Enterprise won't be easy.

"For example, imagine if you could build a workflow by dragging and dropping to connect your Salesforce.com implementation with your back-office provisioning applications, based on a conditional logic and then send out SMS confirmation to the client, make a SFDC case note and update a bunch of statuses... all without writing a single line of code."

That third paragraph sounds like an important thing, but also sounds like a hellhole I'd never want to work at :)

From a 30,000 foot level how does IFTTT and Zapier differentiate from each other? IIRC, Zapier is focusing more on business-related APIs but those are lines that I see eventually becoming very blurry.

They are already quite blurry.

@jobowoo, Zapier is for business, as IFTTT is for, well, users of (mostly) social networking type products. You can tell the clear difference by looking at the services provided by Zapier vs IFTTT.

Zapier seems well positioned to help companies sync data, and create streams of info between web APIs, IMO.

Taking this a step further, I see B2B (Zapier) as being more reliably monetizable than B2C (IFTTT)

I don't think it's as much of a problem for IFTTT as they're currently the dominant player with in my opinion the best product. If they don't sell to the enterprise then Zapier will be able to strike in that market.

How does Andreessen Horowitz reconcile being an investor in both IFTTT and Zapier (by virtue of Start Fund)?

Hedging their bets?

They've publicly said that they won't invest when there are conflicts, e.g. Instagram and Picplz

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Andressen-Horowitz-invest-in-P...

I imagine that investing in both by virtue of Start Fund is considerably different from leading a round for both (as in the case of Picplz and Instagram). There's a much higher level of involvement when you're a company's lead investor.

Think of Start Fund is like a blind startup index fund. But now that Andreessen Horowitz has made a significant investment in IFTTT I'd imagine they're unlikely to make any future investment in Zapier unless their business changes quite a bit.

IFTTT is powerful because it allows your average user to 'mash up' (sorry for the lame term) API calls without any programming knowledge whatsoever.

There's alot of potential out there for simple user-friendly integrations between services. I'm really excited to see how they progress... democratizing platforms is a great business to be in.

Dumb question: isn't IFTTT one of the companies that HN always cautions against building (one dependent on the availability of others' sites/APIs)? Or does that only apply for sites dependent on 1 other service?

Well, they don't rely on a single API, though. They've implemented dozens of API's. They also have some of their own API's, as well.

If it were a case of relying on 1 or 2 mission-critical API's then I'd be worried.

On this topic, HN what are your coolest or most useful IFTTT recipes?

If you are in the Bay Area, finding housing can be a pain and the key is to e-mail a listing immediately after its posted so you can skip the open house and view it privately.

This recipe allows you to get e-mailed as soon as Craiglist has a new listing: https://ifttt.com/recipes/79

There are some neat recipes on IFTTT: https://ifttt.com/recipes?sort=popular

Interesting. None of these things compel me to use IFTTT.

They're not for everyone. For some, it saves time and effort immensely. Others use it for discovery. Me and you just watch from the sidelines.

True, IFTTT recipes are often too limited, because targeting non developers, they limit a lot inputs and ouputs of APIs. But all these APIs can do lot more. The reason why there we made webshell.io , "IFTTT for developers", enabling developers to script APIs in Javascript, with the whole expressivity of a a scripting language for more advanced APIs scripts(recipes) :)

The only recipe I have on IFTTT is one that watches their own Twitter stream and shoots me an email whenever they talk about new channels ;) For now, it's way too limited.

It will be always limited, because APIs are for developers, applications for humans. Only developers can levergage APIs to make advanced services.

I'm using a dumb phone with perpetual battery life. I use IFTTT to send me texts 15 min ahead of my outlook calendar appointments. I also text notes to their number which push to my Evernote. I also had all a close friends tweets sent to my email since I don't really use twitter, but I turned that off eventually.

I was a HUGE user of the 'Favorite tweet' -> 'Send Link to Readability' which allowed me to queue up a reading list before hopping on the subway in the morning.

Unfortunately, the Twitter Favorite hook has been discontinued and now I read more books on my kindle :(

True, but Twitter doesn't like 3d party services anymore.

This one is one I use the most: https://ifttt.com/recipes/71205

Anything I Buffer-Tweet automatically gets bookmarked in Diigo. Really helpful for having a list of bookmarks that I thought was interesting.

As a side note about IFTTT, why is their font size so large?...

Been using IFTTT since the beginning and asking them how I can throw money at them because I need them to remain functional.

I use them to backup all my social media onto my wordpress blog which in turn is a record of everything that happens to me in my life.

Cheap quick scraper for a few websites to monitor items that I want to buy and get cellphone notification the moment they are posted.

It's a good glue.

this is fantastic news for IFTTT. IMHO the 'internet of things' possibilities seems most promising.

https://ifttt.com/wtf hmm

Congrats to Linden and the IFTTT team!

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