This is exactly the kind of comment I was hoping to see. May I ask, what kinds of things are you using zapier for that are not just nice to haves. Something that you would say it pays for itself (increases revenue somehow)
I would love to get an answer to this question as well. I keep comings back to Zapier and the likes hoping I will find a useful use case but can’t. It seems that all it does is add stuff from email marketing forms to Google spreadsheets.
For more complex things Zapier falls flat IMO. I've been using Make.com (formerly Integromat) and it offers way more flexibility and it's easier to configure for more complex automations.
Great convo, thought I'd share some valuable zaps I've used over the last few years to save $$$ on headcount, dev time, and burn/debt on unproven ideas/experiments.
- Slack - pipe all kinds of events into special #channels to cross teams can check one spot for external happenings: new users, new sales, support chats, form/data submissions
- Forms > CRM/Sheets - shouldn't be understated. Using lead page or no-code CRM (webflow my fave) I've swapped out various signup flows to test ideas/friction/followups repeatedly before asking dev to build actual signup flows into the backend app. Can swap paperform, typeform, mailchimp, google forms in under an hour for multiple signup/landing pages w/o any devs.
- Calendar - I use Motion (similar to Calendly) across sales team to speed up meeting flows + use Zaps to pipe those bookings into sheets/Slack/CRM or EMS. Sales team calendars can be public on marketing site (webflow) and bookings generate all the alerts and data we need to just show up to the meetings.
- Leverage SMS channel - One-click surveys, recurring survey campaigns using SimpleTexting or YesInsights and piping results wherever I need 'em. Google Sheet with charted dashboards already set up to auto-update. Great for ecomm, great for call/response feature testing with zero dev required. Can add phone signups via form integration or email campaign.
- Manual issue / todo alerts: Use specific tag in Asana to pipe a ticket into Slack channel when team member wants to surface for manager/teammate - instead of asana firehose
- Light @mention feed - Pipe brand mentions/topics, including web (reddit etc - use F5bot) into sheet or #channel for marketing eyes to check daily
- Twitter bot - built @carryonbagsizes using just Zaps: anyone tweets airline name and gets carry-on bag size restrictions back from the bot (including variations on airline names ie United vs United Airlines)
Zapier makes changes on behalf of a single account. You can change the "share" permission to only allow view for anyone except for the account tied to Zapier which has edit permissions.
1) If you're piping data into Sheets, then you most likely don't have good custody practices and aren't limiting edit users to just 1.
2) Sure there's revision history but you can't "roll back just this one change". You roll back _all the changes_ to the state at that time.
3) If the marketer does appear to save new Sheets as major data changes occur, they're not properly branched. You end up with Sheets like "customer_list_v1, customer_list_v1_no_Csuite, customer_list_v2_no_CSuite, customer_list_v2_scrubbed".
As a consequence you can never be sure if the reporting is correct or if the data is up-to-date.
Indeed, this unbundling is already happening. Many of the so-called Customer Data Platforms offer a low-code, no-code option for creating and iterating on marketing campaigns. They've already done the work of integrating with the various storefronts and ad platforms.
Yeah I was wondering too. Not that people wouldn't use it, but I wonder about what the transition is from "this is handy" to "I want to continuously pay for this service / enough that it is consistent enough / earns me money back enough to do this and not something else".
