Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by TomAnthony on Thursday December 20, 2012 @04:53PM
(#4950286)
What is the monetisation options for IFTTT?
They've now received $8.5M in funding, but charge nothing for the service, AFAIK? I'm interested to know how that is going to make a return for the investors.
(I love IFTTT, and think it is a great service - just interested to know/learn)
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by sologoub on Thursday December 20, 2012 @06:33PM
(#4950674)
The integrator market is insanely large. There are very big name players that are effectively system integrators and charge huge sums of money to get different systems to talk to each other.
Once they have the platform fully ironed out, the level of application for Enterprise clients is virtually limitless.
For example, imagine if you could build a workflow by dragging and dropping to connect your Salesforce.com implementation with your back-office provisioning applications, based on a conditional logic and then send out SMS confirmation to the client, make a SFDC case note and update a bunch of statuses... all without writing a single line of code.
Enterprises already pay for this through the nose. They will keep paying, because it's worth it.
Enterprise customers also LOVE control. If they can have a business analyst do the work, instead of hiring an army of 3rd party integrators, they will over pay for it. If they can keep everything in-house at a reasonable cost, they will.
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by josh2600 on Thursday December 20, 2012 @06:58PM
(#4950749)
Enterprise usually means proprietary data structures. If IFTTT could go from SAP to ADP that would be worth a lot of money.
Don't get me wrong, IFTTT can do a lot of cool stuff, but Enterprise is inherently difficult because of proprietary everything. Implementing a layer of abstraction means abstracting away this complexity through code to create a simple interface. IFTTT has a simple interface, but expanding into systems in the Enterprise won't be easy.
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by pdog on Thursday December 20, 2012 @11:21PM
(#4951470)
"For example, imagine if you could build a workflow by dragging and dropping to connect your Salesforce.com implementation with your back-office provisioning applications, based on a conditional logic and then send out SMS confirmation to the client, make a SFDC case note and update a bunch of statuses... all without writing a single line of code."
That third paragraph sounds like an important thing, but also sounds like a hellhole I'd never want to work at :)
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by TomAnthony on Thursday December 20, 2012 @05:16PM
(#4950417)
Interesting. $5 per month = $60 per year, so if they got 50,000 users it would still take almost 3 years to make the money back, excluding running costs.
I'm often a bit surprised at how such companies can prove to be a good investment - I feel like there is something I'm missing in the numbers.
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by kryptiskt on Thursday December 20, 2012 @06:12PM
(#4950610)
50,000 paying users sounds awfully unambitious for a VC-backed web startup. A projection of a modest Pinboard-like future like that can't possibly be what these firms are basing their investment decisions on. They probably think IFTTT have a shot at getting millions of users.
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by jobowoo on Thursday December 20, 2012 @04:57PM
(#4950319)
From a 30,000 foot level how does IFTTT and Zapier differentiate from each other? IIRC, Zapier is focusing more on business-related APIs but those are lines that I see eventually becoming very blurry.
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by roycehaynes on Thursday December 20, 2012 @06:31PM
(#4950670)
@jobowoo, Zapier is for business, as IFTTT is for, well, users of (mostly) social networking type products. You can tell the clear difference by looking at the services provided by Zapier vs IFTTT.
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by brackin on Thursday December 20, 2012 @11:11PM
(#4951450)
I don't think it's as much of a problem for IFTTT as they're currently the dominant player with in my opinion the best product. If they don't sell to the enterprise then Zapier will be able to strike in that market.
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by dmor on Friday December 21, 2012 @12:38AM
(#4951646)
Think of Start Fund is like a blind startup index fund. But now that Andreessen Horowitz has made a significant investment in IFTTT I'd imagine they're unlikely to make any future investment in Zapier unless their business changes quite a bit.
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by smalter on Thursday December 20, 2012 @09:48PM
(#4951256)
I imagine that investing in both by virtue of Start Fund is considerably different from leading a round for both (as in the case of Picplz and Instagram). There's a much higher level of involvement when you're a company's lead investor.
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by bdickason on Friday December 21, 2012 @01:39AM
(#4951774)
IFTTT is powerful because it allows your average user to 'mash up' (sorry for the lame term) API calls without any programming knowledge whatsoever.
There's alot of potential out there for simple user-friendly integrations between services. I'm really excited to see how they progress... democratizing platforms is a great business to be in.
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by mdanger on Thursday December 20, 2012 @06:21PM
(#4950641)
Dumb question: isn't IFTTT one of the companies that HN always cautions against building (one dependent on the availability of others' sites/APIs)? Or does that only apply for sites dependent on 1 other service?
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by mehdim on Thursday December 20, 2012 @05:38PM
(#4950490)
True, IFTTT recipes are often too limited, because targeting non developers, they limit a lot inputs and ouputs of APIs.
But all these APIs can do lot more.
The reason why there we made webshell.io , "IFTTT for developers", enabling developers to script APIs in Javascript, with the whole expressivity of a a scripting language for more advanced APIs scripts(recipes) :)
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by icebraining on Thursday December 20, 2012 @05:41PM
(#4950509)
The only recipe I have on IFTTT is one that watches their own Twitter stream and shoots me an email whenever they talk about new channels ;) For now, it's way too limited.
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by slykat on Thursday December 20, 2012 @05:03PM
(#4950345)
If you are in the Bay Area, finding housing can be a pain and the key is to e-mail a listing immediately after its posted so you can skip the open house and view it privately.
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by bdickason on Friday December 21, 2012 @01:38AM
(#4951769)
I was a HUGE user of the 'Favorite tweet' -> 'Send Link to Readability' which allowed me to queue up a reading list before hopping on the subway in the morning.
Unfortunately, the Twitter Favorite hook has been discontinued and now I read more books on my kindle :(
Re:IFTTT raises $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer
by danteembermage on Thursday December 20, 2012 @09:30PM
(#4951201)
I'm using a dumb phone with perpetual battery life. I use IFTTT to send me texts 15 min ahead of my outlook calendar appointments. I also text notes to their number which push to my Evernote. I also had all a close friends tweets sent to my email since I don't really use twitter, but I turned that off eventually.
They've now received $8.5M in funding, but charge nothing for the service, AFAIK? I'm interested to know how that is going to make a return for the investors.
(I love IFTTT, and think it is a great service - just interested to know/learn)
Once they have the platform fully ironed out, the level of application for Enterprise clients is virtually limitless.
For example, imagine if you could build a workflow by dragging and dropping to connect your Salesforce.com implementation with your back-office provisioning applications, based on a conditional logic and then send out SMS confirmation to the client, make a SFDC case note and update a bunch of statuses... all without writing a single line of code.
Enterprises already pay for this through the nose. They will keep paying, because it's worth it.
Enterprise customers also LOVE control. If they can have a business analyst do the work, instead of hiring an army of 3rd party integrators, they will over pay for it. If they can keep everything in-house at a reasonable cost, they will.
Don't get me wrong, IFTTT can do a lot of cool stuff, but Enterprise is inherently difficult because of proprietary everything. Implementing a layer of abstraction means abstracting away this complexity through code to create a simple interface. IFTTT has a simple interface, but expanding into systems in the Enterprise won't be easy.
That third paragraph sounds like an important thing, but also sounds like a hellhole I'd never want to work at :)
It can also provide an all-in-one api for developers working with the products supported on IFTTT.
I'm often a bit surprised at how such companies can prove to be a good investment - I feel like there is something I'm missing in the numbers.
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Andressen-Horowitz-invest-in-P...
There's alot of potential out there for simple user-friendly integrations between services. I'm really excited to see how they progress... democratizing platforms is a great business to be in.
If it were a case of relying on 1 or 2 mission-critical API's then I'd be worried.
This recipe allows you to get e-mailed as soon as Craiglist has a new listing: https://ifttt.com/recipes/79
Unfortunately, the Twitter Favorite hook has been discontinued and now I read more books on my kindle :(
Anything I Buffer-Tweet automatically gets bookmarked in Diigo. Really helpful for having a list of bookmarks that I thought was interesting.
I use them to backup all my social media onto my wordpress blog which in turn is a record of everything that happens to me in my life.
Cheap quick scraper for a few websites to monitor items that I want to buy and get cellphone notification the moment they are posted.
It's a good glue.