IFTTT, the service that lets you automate common tasks on the web, mostly focuses on consumer services like Dropbox, Twitter, Instagram, and Instapaper. What’s missing among IFTTT’s 46 supported services, though, are business tools like Campaign Monitor, Basecamp, Asana, Stripe and others. That’s where Zapier comes in. The Y Combinator-backed company (the team is currently in the summer 2012 class) offers what is essentially an IFTTT for business users. The service makes it easy for non-technical users to create connections between 34 APIs that don’t usually talk to each other. Thanks to this, you can, for example, see all your Shopify sales on your Google Calendar or get an SMS alert every time somebody signs up for your Campaign Monitor or AWeber email marketing campaigns.
The service uses a drag and drop interface to make creating these new connections – or ‘zaps’ as the company likes to call them – very easy. You can use numerous filters to specify exactly when Zapier will trigger an action and what that action will look like. One nice feature of the service is that you can also hack your own trickers and actions by using Zapier’s webhooks to build your own integrations.
Zapier being a business tool, the company already has a pretty solid monetization model in place. There’s a free plan that lets you create 1 zap and which only checks your triggers a few times per hour. Paid plans start at $15/month for 4 zaps and fast syncing and go all the way up to $195/month for virtually real-time syncing and up to 50 zaps. The high-end plan also comes with phone support.
The company’s founders, who were all based in Missouri before moving to California for Y Combinator, bootstrapped the service and haven’t taken any investments yet outside of Y Combinator and its affiliates like Start Fund. As Zapier co-founder Wade Foster told me earlier this week, the idea for Zapier was born during a Startup Weekend last year. The service currently processes about 1.5 million API requests per month and has about 1,000 users.
