Bardeen

Bardeen is an AI-first Zapier-type tool for simple, no-code automations that’s built in the browser. By being built in the browser, Bardeen enables users to build new automations and integrations based on what they’re looking at in Chrome or Safari rather than by manually setting up new integrations in a GUI.

Bardeen’s key differentiator from Zapier is its AI-first, text-based workflow where users can describe the task they’d like automated and Bardeen will spin up an integration for them: for example, “Summarize the content of the currently opened tab and make a note of it in Notion”,

Zapier is working on this kind of functionality and it is available for select beta customers, but Bardeen is betting that coming with it out of the box will help them win over potential Zapier users excited to use AI tools to build complex automations faster. Bardeen’s native data scraper and OCR provide the functionality for integrations that are complex for non-technical folks to build themselves in Zapier.

From Feb to June 2022, Bardeen grew its monthly active user base by 4x to more than 20,000.

Bardeen’s core go-to-market strategy and business model is most similar to Zapier.

Zapier aimed to capture the employee/consumer market looking for simple no-code integrations between tools like Google Sheets, Airtable, Gmail, Slack, and HubSpot, gathering a high volume of users and then monetizing on that usage.

To capture as much top-of-funnel traffic as possible, they created a powerful programmatic SEO strategy that got them to 6M+ visitors per month by 2021, creating new pages for each set of integrations on the platform and then getting those pages to rank—“discord twitter integration” (#1 ranking), “shopify square integration” (#1 ranking), “basecamp slack integration” (#2 ranking), and so on).

Bardeen is going after the same slice of potential users—focusing on sales development representatives, biz dev specialists, people in marketing roles, and other relatively low-level folks in organizations, aiming to help them automate their workflows—and they’re doing so with a similar SEO strategy.

But where Zapier more intensely targeted integrations between one app and another, Bardeen’s more AI-focused approach means they’re both targeting app integrations and more open-ended web scraping and content extraction tasks (as well as then migrating that content into other tools like Sheets).

Here are Bardeen’s top keywords with estimated page traffic in parens:

1. paywall bypass (23,255)

2. paywall remover (2,798)

3. notion google calendar integration (2,634)

4. embed google calendar in notion (511)

5. how to scrape data from a website (406)

6. notion extensions (355)

7. pipedrive linkedin integration (353)

8. google sheets calendar template 2023 (298)

9. notion embed (270)

10. extract data from website to excel (246)

The main challenge for Bardeen in successfully turning this into a cheap method of organic user acquisition as it was for Zapier will be that Zapier started doing it when there wasn’t much competition—today, the search engine results pages for terms like “sheets airtable integration” are extremely competitive, and Bardeen doesn’t appear until the 2nd or 3rd page for many of their core integrations that they advertise on their site.