Are companies prioritizing native integrations and leaving the rest to Zapier, and is this trend becoming more common?

Guest: There are a lot of integrations and automations that are just going to be categorically better built in the product. I think actually the user experience thing is really big here. Like the user experience of having to go from your product that you're in, go to Zapier, build something, go back to the original product, and go back and forth and set everything up. That is a friction filled user experience. It's not delightful, but it's been the only game in town, so people have been willing to do it, but I think more SaaS products are getting wise to the value of pure interoperability.

They're just going to start building a lot of the most important ones themselves. And my guess is that a lot of the value will be captured in the top 10 integrations. And you can tell that Zapier is a little bit nervous about this, right? Because number one, they don't share with you what your top integrations are. Like they don't keep, they don't give you stats. They don't really tell you. They'll say you can look at your Zapier landing page and you can see a bunch of example integrations there. And they'll wink and say those are the most popular. But it's all obscured, right?

You don't really know, and they're not giving you any numbers. So most popular is a relative term. You don't know whether this is a hundred million users or like a thousand users. But one thing we've found just from doing our own research and building stuff ourselves is that there's some pretty basic jobs to be done. And most of them are covered with—I don't know the exact number, but I'm guessing—10, 15 integrations. And it's things like you would expect, right? It's “I want custom notifications”. Like, “Whenever this happens, I want to be able to notify myself and my team across a few different channels.” That might be email, that might be Slack.

And then I think about your other question, which is, “What's the value of the long tail?” I think it’s really valuable because realistically, we might decide that we're going to integrate with the number one email newsletter provider that our customers are telling us about. We'll spend time to do that. Are we going to integrate with the next 50? No, we're never going to do that. So I think there is a lot of value there, and we will never get rid of our Zapier integration because of that, because it gives you coverage across that long tail.

I think the challenge for Zapier in my mind is more of a UX challenge actually. The user experience is so much worse in my estimation that they need to figure out how to become more native first party. If they can. And I think if they're able to do that, then they protect themselves from companies just building first party themselves.

Because if you could use Zapier to get something that felt a lot like the first party stuff you were going to build anyway, then you might just say, yeah, who cares? I'll just use Zapier.