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.
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.
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.
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.
