How to use Zapier and other automations with an existing backend infrastructure

  • 8 January 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 56 views

Userlevel 5
Badge +5

Hey all,

I have a very general question and would be interested especially from the people who used to work in a company or a start up with an existing infrastructure and an existing backend. I think Zapier and the general no code tool landscape allows us to do many things extremely fast but I would be interested in your opinion about:

  1. When to move over an automation setup that you solved with Zapier to your native stack?
  2. Your experience with aligning a Zapier setup with your tech peers?

Just to make this more concrete:

Imagine you want to create a new marketing funnel and you need to make sure that your users can schedule appointments. For this you can use the tool calendly. However, you also need to send conversion events of calendly to your automation platform for example customer.io. I can do several things now: I can create a UI that completely uses the interface of calendly or I can create something myself (with more branding possibilities).

 

Also I need to make a request to the customer.io API to get information about the ID of a customer since I only have the email usually when a customer uses calendly and for integrating it into the marketing platform I would need the existing ID. For that I can either use the Zapier webhook and integrate it like this or I can make an actual request via backend. 

 

As you can see both FE and BE I can solve with or without code. The question is when do you decide to do what. I would be happy to discuss this!


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2 replies

Userlevel 6
Badge +7

Hi @Ennes I would love to do a webinar about this because the answers are not so easy! So if we find some people who want to discuss this feel free to tag me :)

 

Short answer:

 

We suppose clients to start lean and test funnels to grow and when Development Day/Sprint Is cheaper then the SaaS monthly costs for 3 month, then changing can be attractive. BUT yet only approx 5% clients hit that value. And customstacks are long run really expensive!

We are talking about 10.000 of people passing threw these automations a month. And clearly Zapier is build to scale this big! So maybe you never need to change - since you can track way better in other appointment tools than calendly it's a for us a matter of costs and business goals when and if to change.

 

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Hey @Wemakefuture!

Not sure we’re quite ready to tackle a webinar, but I recently posted in the Zapier Experts group about looking for content contributors amongst the experts. If this is something you think you could effectively communicate via writing, please feel free to reach out to me!