[HN Gopher] Launch HN: DryMerge (YC W24) - Automate Workflows wi...
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Launch HN: DryMerge (YC W24) - Automate Workflows with Plain
English
Hi HN! We're Edward and Sam, the founders of DryMerge
(https://drymerge.com), a tool to automate workflows with plain
English. For example, a user can say "When I get an email from a
potential customer, add their details to a google sheet and send me
a text", and DryMerge sets that up end-to-end in seconds. Other
examples might be "When I finish a Google Meet with a customer,
record any issues reported in Linear", or "Every morning at 9 am,
text me a summary of my calendar events for the day". Here's a
video walkthrough: https://youtu.be/S4L3B21vXGY. We initially set
out to build a dev tool for API integration, and while building in
the integration space, we realized existing workflow automation
tools have a few key limitations. They still force users to do a
lot of work like: Navigate through a sea of menus; Break down their
workflow into discrete steps; Manually configure data
transformations. This led us to explore how we could make workflow
automation way simpler by letting users describe what they want in
plain English and having AI take care of the automation setup,
replacing no-code GUIs or scripts. Under the hood, DryMerge has
two key components: - A semantic layer that uses LLMs to interpret
the user's request and map it to a series of pre-defined triggers
and actions (we've built hundreds of these integrations). - A data
plane that orchestrates the actual execution, complete with smart
field mapping, conditional logic, and human-in-the-loop checks.
When a user describes a workflow, our semantic layer generates
multiple candidate plans, scores them, and selects the best based
on prior successful/failed workflows. It extracts key entities and
fields needed, and auto-generates a simple form for the user to
fill in any missing details. Users can then iteratively describe,
tweak, and test their workflow in the same chat. The data plane
then subscribes to the relevant event streams, executes the
workflow steps, and handles gnarly aspects like pagination,
retries, and rollbacks invisibly. We allow the semantic layer to
delegate some values for runtime dependency injection from the data
plane, to handle open-ended logic like classifying an email as
urgent or summarizing a Google Meet transcript. We integrate with
14 common services -- we'd love for you to try it out and share
what you think. Check it out at https://drymerge.com/app.
Author : samuelbrashears
Score : 111 points
Date : 2024-03-22 16:15 UTC (6 hours ago)
| aitoehigie wrote:
| Someone taking on Zapier. Great!!!
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Thanks :) Zapier is great, but we think LLMs can make
| automation way easier than it currently is; I personally end up
| automating a lot more stuff when there's a good chance it can
| take ~30 seconds (+/- some tweaking ofc).
| passion__desire wrote:
| This could also be used by IFTTT.
| dpflan wrote:
| Why wouldn't Zapier work on this same idea? Use of LLMs is
| becoming commodity.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Indeed, zapier already has this [0]
|
| 0 - https://zapier.com/#:~:text=Start%20a%20workflow%20as%2
| 0fast...
| samuelbrashears wrote:
| Zapier is definitely trying, but they're not there yet.
| That feature unfortunately doesn't do much to configure
| the blocks for you (it just selects which to use) --
| you're largely left to sift through the same menus to set
| it up.
| dpflan wrote:
| Zapier has actual experienced software engineers and real
| budgets, would not rule out their ability to perform the
| same: text to IFTTT like auto-execution. Or consider your
| company right now, your current company is essentially a
| single team at Zapier, and you've got some free-way to
| mix research and product development. I suspect this is
| more an acquisition target -- small team develops larger
| idea in better way, Zapier says thanks and hooks it into
| their own stack, networks, and customers.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It took Zapier ~12 years to become a ~$5B company and
| build the book of revenue supporting such a valuation.
| For the right price, certainly, cash out (time value of
| money/time). But it's also reasonable to build and see
| how far you can run organically, depending on what you're
| optimizing for as a founder. You might be able to run
| faster because you're not carrying a decade of technical
| architecture to today's market, regardless of current
| cashflow and engineering capacity.
|
| Zapier is a great company from a product and financial
| fundamentals perspective, big fan in all honesty, but I
| wouldn't sell upstarts short (that they can't execute).
| dpflan wrote:
| That's the whole point of a startup. And we know startups
| fail. And Zapier is a YC company. This is a 2 person team
| using LLMs, I doubt they are building their own, nor
| building some "foundational connect-the-internet" agent
| nor have built for any scale beyond an internship. Still,
| they are definitely going to make something, and good
| luck to them.
| samuelbrashears wrote:
| Zapier is working on something very similar! We actually
| did our live launch at the same event as them for their new
| chat product -- https://central.zapier.com/. We think our
| UX is actually a lot simpler than there's is at the moment,
| since they're focusing on fine-grained control.
|
| Also, the best way for them to do this would be pretty
| close to a ground-up rewrite -- both in terms of
| frontend/interface, but their model of
| integrations/connectors is not really compatible with
| allowing AI to take a bigger role in data transformations.
| Takennickname wrote:
| Thanks, we heard you the first five times. Maybe little
| the upstart get some light.
| maineldc wrote:
| If the question is asked multiple times, why wouldn't
| they answer it multiple times?
| jzig wrote:
| To stay DRY, naturally ;)
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Yup, great point, & Zapier is working on very similar
| stuff! Our thinking is that incumbents have some
| disadvantages here (one example is that their data models
| for integrations all need to interrop with each other
| whereas we can delegate the data mapping to LLMs natively).
| Also, innovator's dilemma is real; we think we have a
| fighting chance at being a cleaner & faster product just by
| virtue of being very small and nimble and responsive to
| feedback.
| fuddle wrote:
| I'd avoid linking directly to a login/signup page without any
| context. It's better to link to your home landing page.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Speaking of which, scrolling on the home landing page
| (https://drymerge.com/) is a bit broken on mobile Safari.
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Thanks for the bug report! We'll get right on it
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| Yeah, I was put off immediately when I clicked the link and got
| presented with a sign-in screen. I was expecting a homepage
|
| Edit: Homepage link https://drymerge.com/
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Great feedback, thanks! Just edited the link in the post.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Hey! Curious when you two started building.
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Hi! We were in dev tools up until early January, did some soul
| searching, and started building the current version of DryMerge
| in early February.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Wow that's incredibly fast! You must have been absolutely
| grinding. I pitched this idea to a friend a couple of years
| ago, but it wasn't the right time for me to found.
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Haha February was an absolute blur, many sleepless nights
| :). Great to hear that the idea is shared, hope we can
| deliver a big part of your vision -- would love to chat
| through any thoughts or feedback you have!
| aster0id wrote:
| If this takes off, IFTTT and Zapier will just create their own
| versions of it (if they're not working on it already).
|
| This is why I feel new startups that are trying to disrupt
| established tech companies using LLMs are doomed/have no moat or
| technical advantage. Incumbents have the manpower and
| distribution to replicate everything in house. Not to mention the
| incentive to add "AI" to their service description which will
| boost their valuation automatically.
| swalsh wrote:
| Welp, guess pack it in boys. No use in trying to compete.
| spxneo wrote:
| I actually thought parent made a very valid point, not to
| throw stones at OP, this is good execution congratulations,
| this tech isn't that tough to build for a company like Zapier
| and you are right that it already offers a mature set of
| workflows.
|
| We are at "spray and pray" phase of this AI/LLM bubble. Very
| good insight.
| samuelbrashears wrote:
| Zapier is already trying! We actually did our live launch at
| the same event as them for their new chat product --
| https://central.zapier.com/. At the moment though, they're
| pretty focused on fine-grained control and GUI configurability,
| which makes a lot of sense for their existing technical user-
| base. We're focusing on a super simple UX for less technical
| users.
| jaggederest wrote:
| I feel quite differently about this kind of startup. Multiple
| incumbents show that it's a large enough market to support
| additional players, and the incumbents often have restrictions
| on their behavior that a new company can avoid. Finding a new
| niche can lead to competing with the "big boys" with a fraction
| of their overhead.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| Super cool! I think this could also be a natural progression for
| ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.
|
| With GPT-5, we might see similar capabilities where integrators
| would simply provide relevant APIs and documentation, while the
| AI figures out the automation steps and orchestration.
|
| Plugins and custom GPTs were early (failed) attempts in this
| direction.
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Thanks, and totally agree! We play around a lot with the idea
| of creating an action layer for LLMs that's abstract enough for
| sampling/inherent stochasticity not to cause too many
| intermittent failures. I think when that infrastructure's
| solid, it'll be really easy for integrators to deliver cool
| functionality (as you said :) )
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I think this could also be a natural progression for ChatGPT
| and Microsoft Copilot._
|
| FYI, Microsoft's adopting AI for natural language authoring and
| other capabilities into Power Automate.
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/products/powe...
| einarvollset wrote:
| This is cool, but it is not obvious to me if this is a web app or
| a native Mac or what - some screenshots, a video or at least a
| description of how and where this runs would be helpful to get
| people over the hump of doing the signup I suspect.
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Thanks! And gotcha, apologies that it was unclear! DryMerge is
| a web app that runs in the browser, here's a demo video of it:
| https://youtu.be/S4L3B21vXGY.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Are there any open source projects that is tackling Natural
| Language -> workflow definitions? Note, I think it already works
| pretty well out of the box, just have GPT generate some yaml
| definition
| toddmorey wrote:
| I love the straightforward simplicity. Curious if you can explain
| the name. (DryMerge may be a concept I'm unfamiliar with.)
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Haha so originally we were in dev tools, and we liked the idea
| of merging APIs without hassle. So we thought a fitting name
| was something like DRYMerge (Don't repeat yourself, merge). We
| really liked the name and decided to keep it after our pivot.
| tmaly wrote:
| I was hoping this was going to be a series of DCGs in Prolog and
| not LLMs
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| LLMs are the future of workflow automation. Determinism is the
| problem space. Workflow runners, API integrations/auth, access
| controls, sidecar services to fill in gaps between API
| integrations for ETL are the known quantities and somewhat
| straightforward.
|
| (imho, two cents)
| Redster wrote:
| UX note, but I love that the sign-up is so fast. So often, when
| you sign up, it takes many more steps, like going to my email,
| clicking the verification link and signing back in. But here, I
| type in my email and password and bloop! I'm in! Surprisingly
| satisfying.
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Appreciate it! We think the most important thing for a product
| like this is minimizing time to value, so glad to hear the
| sign-up is smooth :)
| thoughtlede wrote:
| Cool stuff.
|
| 1. For dynamic injection of arguments in your data plane, do you
| use LLMs?
|
| 2. What did you find you cannot do yet because of LLM limitations
| (and not because of lack of third-party integrations)?
|
| 3. I haven't looked closely into your product, but is every
| "effect" of a workflow something that only the requesting user
| can see? Is this how you ensure bad or wrong things are not
| hurting other people or systems that are outside of user's
| control?
| samuelbrashears wrote:
| 1. Yes! This is useful for parsing unstructured data or
| inferring an argument (sometimes we can simply define a static
| data transformation through jq).
|
| 2. Anything too complex (e.g. 5+ steps) tends to be unreliable.
| Also, any workflow where potential failure/unexpected behavior
| is too risky to leave up to an LLM.
|
| 3. The only actions we take are with our user's tools, so many
| workflows are simply organizing their information between their
| apps. However, e.g. gmails could be sent externally so we have
| guardrails/sanity checks to mitigate risk there.
| thoughtlede wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| What happens right now when the workflow fails mid-way? Do
| you ensure atomicity or durable execution?
| samuelbrashears wrote:
| We do a fixed number of retries, including redoing any AI
| arguments. We've thought about making it atomic/more
| durable -- it's tricky, given that most steps interact with
| external systems e.g. Google Sheets, and while not
| typically "destructive" (Google Sheets has version
| history), undo-ing is often difficult.
| thoughtlede wrote:
| Yeah. Rollbacks or reruns are hard when dealing with
| external systems. Actions need to be idempotent for
| reruns to work.
|
| One thing you may focus on is making workflows more
| durable: Checkpointing and sending to users summaries of
| last checkpoints when things fail.
|
| The last thing you want a non-tech user (your target
| customer) is to figure out what's the state of a failed
| workflow.
| samuelbrashears wrote:
| Great idea -- we're looking at showing workflow history
| and this is a good addition.
| keepamovin wrote:
| This looks cool. Merging AI and RPA seems a good space to be in.
|
| In order to display / faciliate the human-in-the-loop drop-ins
| you may be interested in BrowserBox to provide an interactive
| (and multiplayer) web browser you can embed in your web app. You
| can check out a demo of it live here:
| https://browse.cloudtabs.net/signupless_session
| voiceblue wrote:
| Is there a reason you're limiting yourself to English? This works
| perfectly for example:
|
| [Mei Shi , omoshiroimimunorinkuwoSong tsutekudasai. ]
|
| This also works just fine:
|
| mujhe roj' do caar cuttkule iimel kr denaa /
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Great point! Multi-lingual is entirely possible and something
| that we want to implement; luckily all the chat stuff already
| works great because of LLMs, and we'll try to ship multi-
| lingual UI elements fast as well.
| timr wrote:
| But is the meme in Japanese?
| lecha wrote:
| Congrats on shipping! Feature request: Make it easy to expose
| triggers and actions from internal enterprise tools. Zapier makes
| this possible via an API/webhook, but it's not trivial. Many
| workflows and business processes rely on internal tools that
| aren't designed to support workflow automation. If you find a way
| to automate processes that use those internal tools, you may
| create a bigger differentiator/moat.
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Thanks! And 100%, this is something we'd love to do with
| upmarket businesses. We have primitives for integrating raw API
| calls into the workflow layer as well as ingesting
| documentation to create dynamic "blocks" per-business, so it's
| fully possible and a really cool use case. Definitely agree
| though -- it's hard to get right.
| luckydata wrote:
| I tried it and doesn't work at all. Good luck folks!
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| This is very vague feedback. Can you be more specific on what
| exactly you asked it to do and what it output that didn't work?
|
| I am not affiliated with them, was just curious on what your
| experience was.
| bugbuddy wrote:
| I am afraid to try because I am scared that it might just
| accidentally misunderstand me and delete all files.
| samuelbrashears wrote:
| Before creating a workflow, we present you a plan that you
| can confirm, so we won't delete stuff without your approval.
| techietorontos wrote:
| I love the UX and the concept. Will likely sign up as a customer.
|
| FYI: In good faith, I asked some simple javascript questions and
| stuff like "who is michael jordan" and got answers from the LLM.
| Perhaps adding some additional guardrails to ensure queries are
| workflow based could save you some tokens.
|
| Great work!
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Appreciate it, and glad to hear you like it :). That's a great
| point, we've experimented in the past and it's a tricky balance
| between making sure there's no false negatives (actual
| workflows that we can automate get denied), so we defaulted a
| little more permissive, but we're gonna take another crack at
| it!
| philjr wrote:
| For those in the know... what are the best patterns out there
| for doing this at the moment?
| djyaz1200 wrote:
| Congrats on the launch, I wish you all the best! My $0.02 is that
| the big money market for this category of capability is for
| adversarial integrations. There are ancient CRM's like RedTail
| that serve 100K+ financial services professionals that will not
| integrate with anyone.
| samuelbrashears wrote:
| Interesting -- we've definitely been building only on top of
| APIs. We've looked at automated form filling in the past, so
| it's something we're thinking about.
| Octopuz wrote:
| Looks cool. Which 14 services does the free account support? In
| the video I see SMS, Slack, Notion, Gmail, Google
| Sheets/Meet/Docs/Calendar/Drive, Salesforce, Hubspot, GitHub. I
| think Salesforce and Hubspot are in the $25/month subscription?
|
| I would appreciate 'whenever I post on X or Mastodon add this to
| a sheet and put text and URL in its own column'
| samuelbrashears wrote:
| We've opened everything up to free tier for the launch! And
| thanks for the suggestion :)
| babyshake wrote:
| How does this compare to AgentHub, AutoTab, Creo? Not to pit YC
| companies against each other, but it might be helpful to
| understand if similar products have important differences or are
| targeting different users.
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Great question! First off, we absolutely love the guys at all
| those companies, they're building awesome stuff.
|
| DryMerge differentiates by focusing on plain english chat as an
| interface. The reason that's important is because it's
| accessible to more non-technical folks, lowers time to value (a
| lot easier to say what's on your mind than drag &
| dropping/building), and allows for cool semantic filtering like
| "Angry emails", "Investor", or "Potential customer" which we've
| found opens up a whole bunch of cool new possible automations.
| We also heavily focus on event-driven workflow automation (we
| have a lot of triggers).
| nicknow wrote:
| Really great concept and execution seems to be pretty good. I'm a
| likely paying customer except that you don't support Microsoft
| 365. So I can use it for all my personal stuff which is GMail but
| none of my businesses which all run their email through Microsoft
| 365.
| edwardfrazer wrote:
| Awesome! We're rolling out Microsoft 365 really soon, starting
| this week :). Would love to hear about what services and
| workflows are most important for you.
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