Zapier: An IFTTT For Business Users
IFTTT, the service that lets you automate common tasks on the web, mostly focuses on consumer services like Dropbox, Twitter, Instagram, and Instapaper. What's missing among IFTTT's 46 supported services, though, are business tools like Campaign Monitor, Basecamp, Asana, Stripe and others.
Context & Ripple Effects
The launch lands the same week IFTTT itself is moving: on June 20, 2012 it rolled out a new look and Belkin WeMo compatibility, pushing recipes from web apps into physical devices while keeping its 46 supported services weighted toward consumer names like Dropbox, Twitter, Instagram and Instapaper. Zapier's pitch is the complement to that trajectory — the same trigger-and-action model pointed at business tools such as Campaign Monitor, Basecamp, Asana and Stripe that IFTTT does not cover.
The pickup trail is telling for a day-one product: alongside TechCrunch, the story ran on Computerworld and on Y Combinator's own Posterous blog, signaling the startup's accelerator lineage and giving the business-automation wedge immediate distribution.
First-order effects
- Business SaaS vendors named in the gap — Campaign Monitor, Basecamp, Asana, Stripe — gain an automation channel they did not have to build themselves, since Zapier's integrations connect their APIs without either vendor writing glue code.
- IFTTT's consumer-first catalog leaves the entire business-tools segment unclaimed at launch, so Zapier faces no direct incumbent in the exact niche it is entering.
Second-order effects
- IFTTT now has a visible rival defining 'automation' around work software rather than consumer apps, pressuring it to decide whether its roadmap follows the WeMo hardware path or starts courting business services.
- If Zapier's model works, every SaaS vendor's integration page becomes contested ground: being reachable through the automation layer turns into table stakes, and vendors may compete to be listed first.
Third-order effects
- The longer-term structure this points toward is a middleware layer sitting between SaaS products and capturing the workflow between them — whoever owns the triggers-and-actions layer owns the customer relationship that individual apps increasingly route through.
- That position carries platform risk for both sides: providers depend on terms set by the automation layer, a dependency that could harden into paid placement or restrictive partner agreements if the category consolidates.
The trend: Web task automation is splitting into a consumer tier built around personal apps and devices and a business tier built around SaaS workflows, with the integration layer emerging as a distinct market of its own.