The core Zapier product: integrations
The Zapier product is very simple – it lets you connect a tool to another tool without writing code. Imagine I want to automatically send an email to whoever cancels their subscription, asking them what I could have done better.
With Zapier, I simply choose my trigger (Stripe, in this case, who knows when people cancel) and then use their UI to hook it up to an email workflow.
With Zapier, you can do all of this without writing a single line of code. There are something in the range of 5,000 different apps on Zapier, some popular and well supported like Stripe and Gmail, and others less so. Some of these apps are built and maintained by Zapier themselves, while others are created by the developers of those apps, and the community.
What’s an integration?
Just about every SaaS tool’s website will, at some point, mention their “integrations” – what are those?
In short, an integration is just when one system or tool works with another one. In the context of SaaS tools, more often than not integrations fall into one of two categories:
A simple, and common, example of a data sharing integration is between Hubspot and Salesforce. Hubspot is marketing’s system of record, and Salesforce is sales’s system of record – and those teams often need to share data. Marketing might want to run a campaign against existing customers with contracts up for renewals; Sales might want to know who has engaged most with marketing emails so they can reach out for upsells. So Hubspot data needs to be in Salesforce, and Salesforce data needs to be in Hubspot.
And indeed, Hubspot has a Salesforce integration that in their words lets you “Sync HubSpot with Salesforce for a fast, reliable, and powerful integration between your two platforms.” I.e. business speak for the above. Now, in your Hubspot CRM, you can see which customers are up for renewal, and trigger an automated email campaign to them.
Beyond just sharing data, you might need to take action based on data in one tool, inside of another tool. A common one at startups I’ve worked at is sending automatic Slack messages any time something important happens in marketing or sales. At Retool, we had a #big-fish channel where any time a new contact got added to Hubspot who worked at a big company, a message got sent to the channel (as if to say, go get ‘em salespeople).
The funny thing about integrations is that they’re two-sided – in other words, it would equally make as much sense for Hubspot to build an integration to get Salesforce data into Hubspot as it would for Salesforce to build an integration to get Salesforce data into Hubspot. So you’ll often see double integrations – different ones built by respective engineering teams at the integrating companies – with different designs and priorities.
How integrations work under the hood
At its core, when a company “builds” an integration, what they’re really doing is creating automation around another tool’s available APIs. A developer could conceivably use those APIs themselves and built an identical integration; it’s just nicer to not have to do that. In other words, there’s rarely any “secret access” that a tool has to another tool’s data.
I’ll prove this to you. Let’s take a look at that Hubspot <> Salesforce integration we talked about earlier. If you were a developer, how might you get Salesforce data into your Hubspot CRM without the native Hubspot integration? After several hours of sifting through their inanely-organized API docs, I found a simple query to retrieve Salesforce contacts using GraphQL:
query contacts {
uiapi {
query {
Contact {
edges {
node {
Id
Name {
value
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
Armed with plentiful contact data from Salesforce, you’d then use Hubspot’s Contacts API to insert a new contact (or update an existing one) into Hubspot for each one from Salesforce. You could put this code on a server and set it to run every hour, day, whatever suits your fancy. This is admittedly a simplification, but you get the gist – an integration is just APIs from two tools working in tandem.
You’d never actually write this code, because Hubspot has a native integration that does this for you. A native integration is just an integration built by the tool you’re using that does the integrating you need, without requiring you to write any code or query APIs yourself. Over time, these integrations usually get better and better to the point where you’d be an idiot to do it yourself, barring some intense need for customization.
But in many cases, the tools you’re using simply won’t have the integrations that you need to use them properly. But they will have the APIs that let you build those integrations yourself if you’re so inclined. All in all, this can be a good deal of work and is likely not as high priority for your engineering team as customer facing stuff. So what’s a Marketer or Salesperson (or anyone else) to do when they need a custom integration?
The Zapier product: integrations for the people
The Zapier product is very simple – it lets you connect a tool to another tool without writing code. The easiest way to explain it is to show you what it looks like.
As many of you know, we have a paid tier here at Technically. Inexplicably, for reasons beyond my understanding, sometimes, occasionally, every now and then, subscribers cancel their subscriptions. I’d like to understand why they’re canceling, so I want to automatically send an email to whoever cancels asking them what I could have done better. I can do that in Zapier pretty easily.
Stripe is my payment provider, so they have the data on when people cancel. And I’ll use Gmail to send emails from my account. Getting this done is as simple as picking the apps you want to integrate, choosing which events or data you want to trigger based on, and adding the steps you want to take.
I start by choosing Stripe as my trigger app (and authenticate to it, which is not shown here) and pick from a list of different events that Zapier recognizes.
In the screenshot below, I’m adding the customer email field from Stripe into the “to” of the email. Zapier takes care of automatically populating these fields so you just need to choose them from a simple dropdown.
Then, I’ll fill in who to send the email from, the subject, and the body, and I’m ready to go.
This is a simple two step workflow, from Stripe to Gmail. But you can add as many steps as you want, using as many tools as you want. You can also format your data in between steps, and add in filters. If we wanted to limit this workflow to only customers in the US, I can add a filter step that limits the currency type to USD:
There are something in the range of 5,000 different apps on Zapier, some popular and well supported like Stripe and Gmail, and others less so. Some of these apps are built and maintained by Zapier themselves, while others are created by the developers of those apps, and the community. Speaking of which…
One thing I would be remiss not to mention is Zapier’s community. They have an active mix of events, help forums, show and tell, and even learning courses. There’s also a directory of contractors for outsourcing your Zapier usage.
To the keen observer, there seems to be a good deal of marketing fluff in this automation space, not from Zapier themselves but from these so-called “experts” who make money off of it. A perusal through LinkedIn and Twitter reveals no shortage of people claiming to save you 20+ hours a week by creating simple automations, “10x automation guys”, etc. I find that there’s a lot of exaggeration – especially on social media – as to what you’d realistically use a tool like Zapier for and how much time it can actually save you. Some have dubbed this the Notion Effect™.
Other Zapier things
Like many of the companies that we cover here at Technically, Zapier started out as a specific tool for a specific thing, but over time they’ve expanded their scope into adjacent product areas.
