Launch HN: DryMerge (YC W24) – Automate Workflows with Plain English

[samuelbrashears]

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.

[techietorontos]

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]

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]

For those in the know... what are the best patterns out there for doing this at the moment?

[djyaz1200]

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]

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.

[keepamovin]

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

[thoughtlede]

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]

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.

[Redster]

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]

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 :)

[lecha]

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]

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.

[Octopuz]

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]

We've opened everything up to free tier for the launch! And thanks for the suggestion :)

[fuddle]

I'd avoid linking directly to a login/signup page without any context. It's better to link to your home landing page.

[edwardfrazer]

Great feedback, thanks! Just edited the link in the post.

[Aaronstotle]

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/

[faitswulff]

Speaking of which, scrolling on the home landing page (https://drymerge.com/) is a bit broken on mobile Safari.

[hubraumhugo]

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.

[CharlesW]

> 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...

[edwardfrazer]

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 :) )

[nicknow]

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]

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.

[camwest]

I’m curious how this is different from Zapier which has added a conversational layer (https://zapier.com/ai).

In my experience a lot of people don’t know how to write with a level of specificity needed to map to pre defined triggers.

For example: instead of saying spreadsheet they may say “roadmap” or instead of saying “Notion database” they may say “bug tracker”

This stuff fails in Zapier.

Any chance you handle those cases better?

[edwardfrazer]

Great question! As of now, we handle those cases well since we have 14 integrations, and most words/phrases are easily resolvable to a sequence among them. One thing we're focusing on now that will be more important with a larger scale of integrations is making automation creation conversational, so when there's uncertainty we can clarify in chat with low latency to keep time to value minimal.

We think one of the big differences between Zapier and DryMerge is that we abstract a lot of the data flow/configuration away from the user, which lowers time to value and lets us do cool semantic filtering and other LLM-powered backend stuff.

[samuelbrashears]

"Roadmap" works sometimes, but there's definitely some guess-work. Clarifying with followup questions in chat is pretty valuable, and we're considering presenting the user with multiple plans to choose from when we're unsure.

[toddmorey]

I love the straightforward simplicity. Curious if you can explain the name. (DryMerge may be a concept I'm unfamiliar with.)

[edwardfrazer]

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.

[iot_devs]

I loved the example with Gmail because I am the main hacker behind GabrielAI.

Basically smart filters for gmails and Outlook.

You got to express in plain English which email to filter on and how to create a DRAFT and the tool automatically filters your email and generates drafts or add labels.

It was born out of frustration of replying to several emails, all the same, with content that was already available online. Still need to provide a human and technical-ish touch.

Demo video on: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ALQNDYjLQUU

https://getgabrielai.com

[aitoehigie]

Someone taking on Zapier. Great!!!

[edwardfrazer]

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).

[babyshake]

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]

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).

[tmaly]

I was hoping this was going to be a series of DCGs in Prolog and not LLMs

[toomuchtodo]

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)

[frankdenbow]

Love the concept of this, are there any low hanging fruit of complicated workflows that are difficult to setup that you see as the first use cases? More thoughts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7HXgiRuWzQ

[shmichael]

I would love the ability to record a web flow and scrape data into another flow. Fixes the long tail of apps and sites

[samuelbrashears]

Definitely something we're looking at -- do you have more any details about your use case?

[einarvollset]

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]

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]

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

[mahsima]

Great. Submit it to https://productivity.directory, people can find it easy there

[Cilvic]

Great list! Your "subscribe" button is broken, just opens a new tab for me.

[edwardfrazer]

Awesome resource! Thanks for pointing it out

[luckydata]

I tried it and doesn't work at all. Good luck folks!

[flanbiscuit]

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]

I am afraid to try because I am scared that it might just accidentally misunderstand me and delete all files.

[voiceblue]

Is there a reason you're limiting yourself to English? This works perfectly for example:

「毎時、おもしろいミームのリンクを送ってください。」

This also works just fine:

मुझे रोज़ दो चार चुटकुले ईमेल कर देना।

[edwardfrazer]

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]

But is the meme in Japanese?

[teaearlgraycold]

Hey! Curious when you two started building.

[edwardfrazer]

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.

[rotrixx]

Which tech stack did you use and why? As everyone says that no-code is faster for MVPs

[aster0id]

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.

[samuelbrashears]

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]

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.

[swalsh]

Welp, guess pack it in boys. No use in trying to compete.