Thanks :) Zapier is great, but we think LLMs can make automation way easier than it currently is; I personally end up automating a lot more stuff when there's a good chance it can take ~30 seconds (+/- some tweaking ofc).
Zapier is working on something very similar! We actually did our live launch at the same event as them for their new chat product -- https://central.zapier.com/. We think our UX is actually a lot simpler than there's is at the moment, since they're focusing on fine-grained control.
Also, the best way for them to do this would be pretty close to a ground-up rewrite -- both in terms of frontend/interface, but their model of integrations/connectors is not really compatible with allowing AI to take a bigger role in data transformations.
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.
Yup, great point, & Zapier is working on very similar stuff! Our thinking is that incumbents have some disadvantages here (one example is that their data models for integrations all need to interrop with each other whereas we can delegate the data mapping to LLMs natively). Also, innovator's dilemma is real; we think we have a fighting chance at being a cleaner & faster product just by virtue of being very small and nimble and responsive to feedback.
