StartThis Idea #4: "How Do I Automate This?" Community

As automation platforms like Zapier and Tray.io explode in growth, a new opportunity emerges...

An online Q&A forum where automation vendors can directly help knowledge workers determine the right automation platform to solve their problems

Categories: Online Communities, SaaS, Automation

Skills needed: Software development or no-code, basic understanding of how to build an online community

Note: I started a prototype of this using Tribe.so. Pretty sure I also bought howdoiautomatethis.com at some point. Email me if you would like to take it over - no cost!

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The Pitch: 

Automation tools and integration platform as a service (iPaaS) vendors are becoming a pillar for knowledge workers who us software every day. As the number of pieces of software a worker has to use increases, so does the need to have other services to stitch them all together.

The first wave of these tools includes Zapier, Tray.io, PieSync, and IFTTT. A second-wave of platforms - e.g. Internal.io, Blendr.io, DataBread, Parabola.io - is emerging now for more specialized uses.

While these tools hold amazing potential, the challenge starts to become figuring out which ones to use for your specific tasks.

• What’s the best tool to sync my customer data across my CRM, Help Desk, and product?

• How can I automatically track and assign leads from my landing page?

• What should I use to automatically post content to my LinkedIn?

• What are the best tools to use to create an MVP for my 15th side project?

There are now dozens of options to explore, and it usually takes a considerable amount of time to properly investigate each one.

The solution here is quite simple: give users a place to outline what they’re trying to do, and let the vendors themselves respond.

Users get answered quickly without wasting hours on research and testing. Vendors benefit from showcasing their services, and also uncovering new unsolved use cases.

Though it may seem like a small niche play today, this community becomes exponentially more valuable for every new automation platform that comes onto the market. If you can capture the initial audience and network effects of a strong community, it should make for a very meaningful business!

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Background:

As a user of many SaaS tools and creator of too many side projects, I have personally wasted a considerable amount of time exploring automation/iPaaS systems. What’s worse is that it often ends at a dead end; I end up concluding there isn’t a way to do what I want and give up.

I’ve also spoken to a number of platform founders in this arena, who have lamented that it is becoming increasingly difficult to attract new users. Even though many of these platforms solves unique problems in different ways, they are starting to become commoditized to the end user.

In any market, when you reach a point of saturation, there is an opportunity for intermediaries. Software Advice, G2 Crowd, etc, have tackled this for the broad software market. Wholesalers and distributors capture this in hard goods. It’s not hard to see where this is going in the automation arena.

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Data points & research:

From the Blissfully 2020 SaaS trends report:

[T]he unique number of apps in usage per company is up about 30% year over year, with companies averaging 137 in 2019 vs. 2018. The average small business uses 102 different apps, while each mid-market business uses an average of 137 apps. Enterprises have, on average, 288 different SaaS apps in usage across their businesses.

The iPaaS market is currently growing at 40.4% per year, and is expected to reach $10.3B by 2025.

More SaaS = More iPaaS, resulting in more noise for users to sift through to solve their problems!

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Strategy notes:

This is a two-sided marketplace, but involving vendors makes the path to growing this community quite clear. Start by reaching out to vendors, and try to get a group of complimentary services rather than direct competitors. Founding vendor members don’t pay anything for 6 or 12 months. Create a landing page that highlights the vendors who are actively using it and are ready to answer users’ questions. Tribe.so is one easy tool to make an MVP for this.

Start with vendors who focus on startups and freelancers, and work your way up market to enterprise over time. Startups are your more likely first adopters, and also tend to have less complex use cases to solve. (Email me if you want help creating a list of vendors!).

Once you have a handful of vendors onboard, encourage them to promote it themselves. This is a lead strategy for them, and also gives them content to repurpose in the same way Quora is often used. As long as you haven’t onboarded a lot of direct competitors, vendors should be happy to promote this as a no-hassle way for users to get introduced to what they do.

Ensure content is optimized for SEO - discoverable content will be an important long term user acquisition strategy. Since most users are likely to use this transactionally - for one-off questions or needs - any kind of push marketing will likely have too high of a cost of acquisition. You want users to start to find you, and to refer new users on their own. Eventually, you can build out a more robust content strategy around this.

If you can grow to a meaningful amount of usage, you should be able to start charging vendors a SaaS subscription to access this community. You could charge per user seat, or create plans around the number of answers given by a vendor across all users.

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Possible names or taglines: HowDoIAutomateThis.com, AutomationStation, ConnectMySaaS, automagician.com (apparently it’s available… for $3,000)

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Start it!