Hi Bryan,

I'm a student at the University of Virginia and a founder who hopes to use Zapier to "scale" my business processes as my venture moves from high-touch to more mass-market products. I took a class called Internet Scale Applications where we implemented a scalable application with Docker, Django, MySQL, ElasticSearch, and Kafka. It's great to see that what I learned is immediately applicable in the industry.

My questions has to deal with problem recognition and tool selection. From my understanding of Zapier, you guys went into YC after university, with little time in the industry. As you were scaling, how did you recognize problems in your technology which were present / were approaching, and how did you choose tools to address these problems?

I ask because many times the information overload of tool selection can lead to analysis paralysis. This is most often seen with the "Django, Node, or Rails" debate of student programmers who want to make something, but I presume it's a flaw of human nature, and not of youth.

You'll find most successful business folks don't obsess over tool selection - good enough is good enough, customers don't care about code quality, etc. Engineers (myself included) tend to want to compare tools and pick the best one possible to solve a problem and of course - opinions vary.

Both have their place - but err towards the former in the early days.

One could write a book on the subject (and many have!).

Do you have any notes/slides from that class? That class sounds very practical and interesting!

Great product! Quick question: any plans to implement two way syncing between systems? At the moment you can only create new "items" via a trigger or action; being able to sync would be a very powerful feature and would result in a huge increase in usage from our customers.

Two way syncing with our ethos of mass connections would be very difficult - not that we are against it - we'd love to support more update actions vs only create actions. The devil is in the details there - but don't expect Zapier to focus entirely on two way syncing anytime soon. Our recent multi-step zap launch supporting complex workflows is our main focus.

For syncing between [some] real-time systems, check out https://sameroom.io

Love the tool. We're using it daily to automate a significant amount of our business processes. I'm actually giving a presentation for our organization on Zapier (and Asana, which is our primary integration) next month and would love to touch base with your team so that we can get the details right! [email protected] if you want to get in touch.

Zapier needs a face... Love the company and always thought that the human connection is what was missing.

How so? We have an skilled support team (including engineers) working with customers everyday which is what we think of as our primary human connection.

I have first hand experience on how awesome the support team is and salute them for the great work they no doubt do every day.

I don't mean to offend in any way it was more of a general feeling I got when using the service and having known Zapier for a while now.

Since the dawn of business time humans have done business with other humans and even in the digital age I don't think that has changed.

To see a friendly face on the homepage that has worked hard to get the business to where it is. Who I know is working hard to look after my data and make sure it gets from A to B.

Again just a gut feeling I had when I saw the homepage. Apologies for the 180 of the questions you had been expecting! Keep up the awesome work dude :)

Thanks for the comment - that was a nice explanation. We will see what we can do!

Not OP, but perhaps he means a publically prolific persona who is immediately identifiable with the company. Someone akin to Evan Spiegal and Snapchat, Jack Dorsey and Square/Twitter, etc.

I'm not inclined to agree, but I'm just trying to elaborate.

Also not OP, but perhaps (s)he's looking for something like Clippy to put a face on the digital assistant?