Application programming interfaces, or APIs, are used by app developers to connect two services together, such as sharing an article you read on Flipboard to your Facebook page. They might sound mundane, but they're the crucial way the online services we use every day talk to each other. Now one Y Combinator startup is harnessing the power of APIs to make your job less boring.
San Francisco-based Zapier makes automatic connections between 117 business applications and services you might use, like entering customer information into Salesforce or sending weekly e-mail newsletters. You choose a series of triggers and actions, defined by an app's API, put them together in a "zap," and sit back and watch the service tackle your mundane tasks, much like IFTTT does for your social networks. While the APIs do the work, you have more time to do your real work.
For example, every time someone adds a file to a shared Dropbox folder, Zapier can e-mail you. Or Zapier can create a Salesforce account whenever you make a PayPal sale. Co-founder Bryan Helmig says that his customers have cooked up a lot of interesting use cases, like someone who sent his Evernote notes to his Kindle by uploading the files to a Dropbox folder. Others have connected several zaps together like a digital Rube Goldberg device, where one trigger sets off a cascade of actions.
For Helmig, the company is all about automating the repetitive tasks that eat into your workday and freeing up data trapped in individual apps. By streamlining how all the different services you use talk to each other, the idea is you'll have more time to do the important stuff that gets you out of bed in the morning. Before starting Zapier, he and co-founders Wade Foster and Mike Knoop were helping companies integrate their many businesses services with one another. "We were doing freelance work to build small integrations, and found that we were reusing the same connectors," says Helmig.
He decided to put together all the integrations that they had made for freelance clients into one service that others could use and tweak over and over again. They founded the company in 2011 and took the idea to Y Combinator's summer 2012 class. Since launching in July and graduating YC in August, Zapier has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from Bessemer Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurveston, and few other angel investors.
While IFTTT is beloved by consumers for its Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook connections, Zapier is focused on small businesses with integrations to Box, Salesforce, Asana, Freshbooks, MailChimp, and many other enterprise apps. Consumers can use the service for free with up to five app integrations; business plans start at $15 monthly for more integrations and faster syncing. Sadly not even the $100-per-month plan can answer every e-mail for you. But it can send them to up to 200 different applications, which might make you feel more productive anyway.
