Look at their investors. When interviewing, ask to speak to the investors. See what they say. When speaking with founders do they have numbers they can show or is it pure show-personship?
Idea generator and fundraising are also a couple of benefits to joining a startup before starting your own.
1. Finding ideas can be hard especially when you start from scratch. Most startups (particularly fast scaling ones) can give you ideas if you look for:
* de-prioritized ideas due to "hyper-focus"
* listening to common problems that customers [0] have that aren't necessarily solved by your company.
* product features built that many other companies would find useful (e.g. collaborative editing infra)
* internal tooling that other companies would find useful
2. Fundraising[1]
Many friends got their first checks from investors that were investors of a startup they previously worked at. And the truth is, if you choose a slow-scaling/zombie startup, you will learn a ton still but honestly, the investors of that company aren't going to be stoked to invest in you if you spin out your own thing.
A quick list of common strategies that worked for them:
* Choose founders who don't treat investors as "dumb money"
* Choose companies backed by great investors
* Join startups that are scaling fast
* Join early (< 40) so you can be part of the "success story"
* Ask to meet the investors throughout your tenure (ideally you are upfront with the founders of the company you join)
* Stay there and be a part of the solution through 2+ tough moments (ie. investors can associate you with the success of the company)
[0] Getting to know potential customers and understanding how to acquire them is also super useful.
[1] You can avoid the fundraising focus by going to YC (or equivalent) because you'll get the necessary clout to get investors knocking. If you're going to a startup anyway to get experience and find ideas, you may as well prep for fundraising.
Zapier makes changes on behalf of a single account. You can change the "share" permission to only allow view for anyone except for the account tied to Zapier which has edit permissions.
1) If you're piping data into Sheets, then you most likely don't have good custody practices and aren't limiting edit users to just 1.
2) Sure there's revision history but you can't "roll back just this one change". You roll back _all the changes_ to the state at that time.
3) If the marketer does appear to save new Sheets as major data changes occur, they're not properly branched. You end up with Sheets like "customer_list_v1, customer_list_v1_no_Csuite, customer_list_v2_no_CSuite, customer_list_v2_scrubbed".
As a consequence you can never be sure if the reporting is correct or if the data is up-to-date.
I don't know of a solution for ETL DSL -> UI but https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy goes from a DSL to internal web apps. Perhaps some inspiration could be taken from there. Good luck!
That being said. I think that you're right! Trying to just take workflows (or zaps) from Zapier is not going to be the best move. These companies have focused on their verticals and started building a product where automation is a feature, not a product. Anvyl for example is a pane-of-glass for supply-chains orders/parts/sourcing along with automation to supplement the experience. I believe Alloy is trying to become an E-commerce CRM. Their wedge has been enabling some tricky workflows that aren't well supported in Zapier.
Totally, outside of people trying to make a "smarter" excel like Airtable or Rows, different business units will make some "template" that lets them run their orgs in excel. Those "templates" could certainly be better products.
At the end of the day, most business owners don't want to connect all these tools together. It just allows them to accomplish business outcomes. What makes their job hard is keeping track where all the data is and how to know if things are working.
Solutions to that problem can take shape as a CRM (and keeping it updated) or something as dumb as a dashboard of dashboards.
Agreed. It's a common trap of technologist thinking: if we gave people better access to primatives, they'd have more power to assemble what they wanted!
In fact, it's "assembling" that most people hate. Which is why products that sacrifice power to limit assembly tend to be successful.
