Which types of teams and organizational cultures are best suited for using Census, rather than a simpler, no-code data integration tool like Zapier?

I am a user of Zapier. There is a very nice intellectual model for what you can call the "if this, then that" type of "an event happened here, so that event has this side effect and it goes there." In a world where you have a relatively small number of "if this, then that"s to manage, that's pretty straightforward. You can rationalize that relatively reasonably.

The place where this starts to fall apart is when you scale that, when you take that model and you go from one connector to dozens -- hundreds in some of the deployments -- and you're trying to rationalize "if this event fires in Intercom and sends this to Segment, which then is going to put something in an Airtable and so on and so forth." It becomes really hard to reason about what is being sent to where and transformed and that sort of thing.

One of the benefits of Census and the modern data stack approach is you can start to standardize those definitions in one spot. The definition of whether a customer is a VIP or how you calculate MRR -- you can define those once and you can reuse them, not only on the taking action sales motion side of things but also on the analytics side. So the report that's going to the board, the CEO and the CFO can use the same MRR definition that the marketing team is using to classify or target and that the product team is using to rank product features. You can share that definition in one spot, and you can change it in one spot. The way that Census models work, we keep all the destinations that are using it in sync. All the numbers change everywhere by defining it in one spot.

It's a model that simplifies complexity. If you're running your own coffee shop and you just need to make sure that a welcome email gets sent when somebody signs up on your Square, I think Zapier is a great solution. I don't mean to trivialize that. If you're a small-scale software company, Zapier can get you going really quickly. It's just that, when it comes to scaling, we've seen over and over again customers that said, "I can't reason about this. I can't debug this. Events are getting dropped. I don't know who owns this. What's happening here?" Centralizing that into one spot is a way to bring sanity to the chaos.