Hello, everybody. This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and today I've got Wade Foster, the CEO
of Zapier on the podcast. How's it going, Wade?
Pretty good. Thanks for having me, Cortland.
Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. I'm going to do my best to explain what Zapier is, and
then I would love for you to go ahead and explain what Zapier is in case they do an
awful job. But Zapier allows you to connect practically any apps and products to each other
so that you can automate your work. For example, if you get a new tweet, you can automatically
have Zapier create a draft in your Gmail inbox or add a road to a Google spreadsheet. So
personally, I think Zapier is an invaluable tool for people who don't know how to code
and also for developers. I use it at IndieHackers because it's way faster than learning a hundred
different APIs and coding it all up myself. That's my interpretation of what Zapier is.
Wade, how would you explain it?
That's pretty good. I generally talk about Zapier as like a workflow automation platform
hooks into about, I think we've got 800 different apps now. So tools like Salesforce, Slack,
Google Apps, Mailchimp, Stripe, you name it. If there's a SaaS app out there, it's probably
on Zapier at this point in time. And then like you said, you can set up these little
rules that automate pushing data between various apps and really does help you speed up time,
get the mundane work you've got going on and you can end up building some pretty cool stuff
with it.
Yeah, I think it's one of those tools that now that I'm super familiar with it and I
use it all the time, I wonder how I got anything done without it. I guess I just did everything
by hand and spent a lot of time hooking things up. And yet, it's pretty new. For most of
the internet's history, there was no tool like Zapier. And so I really want to, at some
point in this interview, ask you questions about how you end up marketing a tool that
doesn't really exist and trying to explain it to people who've never heard of it. Because
I'm sure in the earlier days, like trying to figure out what messages resonated with
people is very difficult. But we'll get to that later. Let's start off and the very beginning.
Can you talk about like the earliest days of Zapier when you guys are maybe working
on the prototype or just coming up with the idea?
Yeah, so Zapier started as a side project between me and my two co-founders in Columbia,
Missouri in 2011. And so the way it originally came about was Brian and I, one of my co-founders,
we'd been doing like just various amounts of freelancing, odd web jobs basically. Anyone
that would pay us to do anything on the internet was the type of work we would do more or less.
So in Columbia, Missouri, so not like a super tech centric town, there is some stuff going
on but it doesn't compare to say, for example, like San Francisco. So like basic WordPress
installs, whatever was the type of stuff we would do. And a couple of times things came
up that were like, get this PayPal sales logged in QuickBooks or get this list of leads uploaded
into Salesforce, various things like that. And Brian had this insight. He was like, they're
paying us a lot of money to do this type of work. What if we built kind of a plug and
play out of the box tool that allowed non-engineers to set this stuff up using the various APIs
that existed. And so that was kind of the original idea. And so we ended up taking kind
of that nugget of a thought to a startup weekend and teaming up with Mike, built out like the
original prototype and it seemed to go pretty well. So we're like, okay, let's give this
thing a go. And for like the next basically, I don't know, six to nine months, we worked
like nights and weekends on Zapier just trying to get like a prototype and a beta working.
So kept our day jobs, Mike stayed in school and it was really just trying to like make
something happen with what spare time we had.
So what is startup weekend exactly? Is that a hackathon or something like that?
It's basically a hackathon, you know, 50 something hours or whatever, Friday night to Sunday
night, you bring an idea and you build something more or less.
How did you come up with the idea that or how did you know that non-engineers wanted
to hook stuff up like this? Because it's very possible that you could build it and nobody
would care about it. I mean, were you guys certain at that point that it was a problem
that lots of people had or were you kind of just thinking this would be cool. Let's see
what happens.
We were fairly certain that it was a problem that some people had. I don't know that we
knew that lots of people had it, but we knew that it was something some had because if
you went to the various apps, they a lot of time folks have forums where their customers
talk about this stuff.
So at the time I remember being on the high rise forums and they were asking for a Google
contacts integration and there was like 400 comments on it where there was no Google contacts
integration. And then, you know, you do the same thing on like the Evernote forums or
the Dropbox forums or the Salesforce forums where people would be asking for these variety
of integrations and just looking at the comment history, like a lot of the threads were like
fairly dated, you know, and then there was just comments that kind of trickled in over,
you know, months and sometimes even years of people requesting this stuff.
So to us, that was validation that, you know, if we could build a tool that allowed people
to set up integrations between this stuff, certainly it would solve problems for folks.
Did you ever think in the beginning that this is something that people would pay money for
or did you think it was, you know, a cool project that people would just use?
We're pretty sure that people would pay money for it. We didn't know like how much or anything
like that. But at its premise, it kind of makes sense, right? Companies have a lot of
money. They don't have a lot of time. So if you can automate something for them, you know,
they're willing to pay some money for that. You know, if you can save an engineering resource,
like engineers cost a lot of money. So it made sense to us that like it would be worth
some amount of money for this to exist.
Yeah. And the reason I'm asking you all of these questions about like how you came up
with the idea is because a lot of people get stuck in this loop at that phase where they're
really excited to go work on something and they're really motivated and maybe they've
learned a code or maybe they already knew how to code, but they just don't know what
idea to work on. And they kind of fall into two buckets. One is people who have a ton
of ideas and they're not sure which one's the best or how to think about, okay, which
one should I pursue? And there's some people who think, you know, I don't have any ideas.
I don't have any problems worth solving. Do you have any sort of philosophy about how
to come up with ideas? And did you guys consider other ideas besides Zapier?
Zapier was really the only one that we seriously consider. We had a few different things. You
know, we were kind of, we'd used a lot of SaaS apps like in our day-to-day job. And
honestly, like this observation just came from like hanging around in the forums. Like
the forums of these SaaS apps like are just, it's just literally customer feature requests
like nonstop. You know, each one is just like, I wish your app did this or wish your app
did that, or I wish this existed or wish that existed. So it literally is customers telling
you if you build these things, I will want to use them, right? So from an idea generation
standpoint, like just, you know, hanging out in forums where other products exist is like
a pretty good way to find ideas for stuff that if you're looking for something to build,
you might find something there.
Yeah, I've never heard anyone give that advice before, but it's really good advice because
like you said, people are constantly airing their problems. And they're usually doing
in like a business environment where they have some problem of their business needs
to solve, which means it's likely that they'll pay for it because their business will make
more money or save more time as a result of it.
Well, exactly. They're already paying for those tools too, right? So it's like they've
already demonstrated, you know, I'm going to pay for stuff. I just want these features
to exist and I'll pay it more.
Yeah. So if you're listening and you are trying to come up with an idea, spend some time in
some, some customer support forums for some other software, ideally business software
that people pay for it and see if you can find some insights and some problems there.
And people are probably going to talk about their problems, right? They're not going to
suggest a solution. There's nobody in the forum who said, I want, you know, you guys
to build, I want MailChimp to build Zapier, right? They just said, I want MailChimp to
connect with X and then you guys had to do the extra reach of figuring out, okay, here's
what the ideal solution to that problem looks like for anybody.
Yep, exactly.
Another cool thing about Zapier that is not necessarily the most common thing among the
people that I talked to is that you guys have three co-founders. It's you. And if I'm not
wrong, you were in the beginning, at least kind of the marketing guy and then your two
co-founders are developers. How did you guys meet early on? And what was that dynamic like
of working with your co-founders?
Brian and I met playing music. So he's a bass and guitar player. And I was a saxophone player.
So we played in like a blues and jazz quartet around town. And we both kind of worked on
various things, you know, started doing work together basically as an evolution of being
in that music quartet. So, you know, he would he would do a lot more of the harder technical
work and then I would, you know, help out on some of the technical side and do a lot
of the marketing client sales type stuff, support type stuff. And Brian had met Mike,
I think through like Hacker News of all things. And like there was like someone did a show
HN that was, you know, put your zip code in and they were like the only two people in
Columbia, Missouri. So they met that way, I think. And, you know, Brian introduced Mike
and I, and we all just kind of hit it off pretty well. Like Brian and I had known each
other for a long time and Brian had known Mike for a while. And so, you know, we kind
of had similar backgrounds, similar values, similar approaches to work. So it was pretty
easy for us to collaborate. And we had all had complementary skills, which made it even
better to actually start something together.
Did you say that you played the sax or did Brian play the sax?
I play the sax.
Which one?
Brian's bass and guitar. Mostly tenor, but I play all of them.
Cool. I grew up playing alto sax.
Oh, cool.
I was pretty good as a kid. In fact, I kind of wanted to get into jazz, but like not the
good jazz. I idolized Kenny G when I was like 10 years old. And at some point I was like,
I either want to be Bill Gates or be Kenny G. Those are my role models. And fortunately
I chose the technical coding path, but that's funny to hear.
Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of, you know, jazz musicians in the tech world. I
don't know why that is, but it just seems to shake out that way.
Yeah. Well, maybe there's some sort of theory we could extract here about how playing jazz
and improvising leads to people to being creative thinkers and being independently motivated
to start businesses. I don't know.
I don't know. The narrative fits to me, so it must be true.
That must be true. If you're listening, take up jazz music, please. So the other cool thing
is that you guys were working on this on the side of your full-time jobs. That year wasn't
like some huge success that immediately made you guys enough money to quit your full-time
jobs. And a lot of people in this position find it really difficult to find the time
to come home after work and put in the hours needed to build a business up on the side.
How did you manage this work-life balance type thing where you had to work a job and
actually build and grow Zapier?
There really wasn't much balance, to be honest, but I was at a time in my life where that
wasn't super necessary. So I had just gotten married, and my wife was a first-year teacher.
And if you know anything about first-year teachers, they work crazy hours. So she would
be upgrading until like 10 or 11 p.m. every night and then out the door in the morning
before 7 a.m. So she was working a ton, too.
I actually started working a lot because I needed something to do because she was doing
stuff. So that's really where I started digging in and just getting excited about working
on side projects and doing stuff on the side.
And so when we started Zapier, it really wasn't a big deal to just work a ton after work,
but it was working on stuff that I was maybe more excited about than what was happening
on day jobs. So it wasn't like I had school or kids or anything like that that required
that sort of balance. It was at a time in my life that was a good period where I had
that opportunity.
Would you say the same is true of your co-founders, too? Yeah, definitely. They were both in a
similar situation as well, where putting in those types of hours and working on this stuff
on the side just was fun. It was like a hobby for us, and we didn't necessarily have other
commitments that prevented us from doing that.
Okay, so the three of you guys are working. You're trying to build this product up from
scratch. You've launched it from a hackathon and basically a couple of days of work and
a few more weeks of work after that. What is your job early on at the company as the
marketing guy?
So I was doing a lot of trying to drive up beta customers, more or less, and building
a lot of landing pages out. So our Zapbook was partially built by me. And then I mentioned
those forums earlier where folks were talking about integrations. I would actually start
commenting in those forums. I would say things like that high-rise Google contact thread.
I'd say, hey, you could build something through the APIs. Here's the links to their API docs.
But if you're wanting something a little more out of the box, I'm working on a project where
I might be able to solve this. Go to this link and give me your contact information.
I'll get in touch. And so I would just do that a ton, honestly. You get tired of trolling
through forums. But that's what it took. And I remember putting those links in. And any
given comment would drive maybe 10 visitors over the lifetime of the comment to Zapier.
But of the 10 visitors, five of them would be like, I want to be a beta customer right
now. Which at the time, that's exactly what we needed. We didn't need millions of users.
We really just needed a couple folks to give us a shot. And so that worked out really,
really well in the early days.
It's cool that people reacted so well to you coming into these forums and promoting your
product. Because effectively, a lot of people will go on to Hacker News or into a Facebook
group or on Reddit and promote their product and then just get flamed out of the room.
Because it's like, hey, we've got our own culture here. You're violating. You're just
self-promoting yourself. But unlike company support forums, there really isn't much culture.
It's just people who go there and they don't hang out there all day. They just go there
to solve a specific problem. And so you came in and said, hey, we've got this perfect solution
to your problem. Try this. And people reacted really well to it, it sounds like.
Yeah. Well, I think part of it is to just understand. If you know that self-promotion
is a thing, you should probably be tactful about how you approach those comments.
So for me, it was always, I always tried to promote the APIs first and say, hey, look,
if you are a developer, you can use the APIs. You can get this done. But if you are looking
for something out of the box, I'm working on something. Check it out. I wasn't trying
to be overly salesy or say the thing I had was the best solution or even the preferred
solution. It was just, I got a project I'm working on. If you want to talk, let's talk.
If not, that's cool. There's these APIs was the other way to do it. So it was very just
like casual comments and not hard selling.
The other cool thing about you going on to these forums and finding your first customers
or your beta customers is that it fits so perfectly into this narrative that I see time
and time again of companies getting their start by doing things that don't scale, which
as you know, Paul Graham is really big on. And he should be because it's totally true.
For indie hackers, I had to send out a ton of emails to get my initial interviewees.
And I don't do that anymore, but I had to do it to get it off the ground. And with you
guys, like I'm sure you're not spending your day to day now, you know, on customer support
forums asking people to use your product. But like you said, it's, it's kind of advantageous
to be small. Because in those early days, you don't need to get a million users in the
door, you just need to get five or 10 or 100 people. And you can get that number of people
for any product that you build purely through brute forcing it and being willing to actually
have these one on one conversations with individual customers on support forums or on Twitter
or wherever you can find them.
Exactly. And you just learned so much from going through that exercise, you learn you
get such a good qualitative feedback, because you understand the nuances every step of the
way. And so you can figure out like, what is the actual appropriate way to scale this
up by doing this, you know, basically manual work the entire process?
Yeah, it's like you're validating your idea by talking to all these people while also
getting them onto your platform. Were there any conversations that you have with customers
early on, that led you guys to realize you were making, you know, some sort of mistake
that, you know, helped you kind of course correct?
I remember, you know, my very first, our very first customer happened to be Andrew Warner
of Mixergy. It was from a cold email to him just I found him actually commenting on a
forum saying like, I want to PayPal high rise integration or something like that. And so
I emailed him and said, Hey, by chance, did, did you find this? If not, you know, again,
I'm working on a project, would you be interested in chat? And he was like, I didn't find it,
I would be interested. So we built out what he needed, like that night, and then sent
him an email and said, like, Here you go, check it out. And Andrew is like the nicest
guy ever. And so he mails back and he's like, Hey, Wade, you know, this looks cool. I'm
really excited about using it. Um, do you mind if you jump on Skype real quick and show
me how to use this? So, uh, like it was so bad. Like he wanted it to work, but the app
was at that time was just so bad that he couldn't even figure out like what he was doing. And
I remember like, you know, watching him try and use it. And then me looking at the same
time being like, yeah, this is bad. Like, you know, he, like the fact that he's even
going through this like process with me just shows how much he really wants this. Um, I
remember like you had to, there was this spot. We were setting up a woofoo, a Weber integration.
And, uh, to set that up, you have to pick like which woofoo form do you want this to
work with? And in the dropdown, it showed the IDs of the woofoo form and not the names
of the woofoo form. So like, he didn't even know which woofoo forms he was picking. It's
not like I had to show him like how to figure all this out and stuff. It was just like really
silly. And so I think, you know, going through those calls with our, I did that for probably
like our first, I don't even know how many it was. It was like several dozen customers.
And every time I would just like jot down the things that, you know, didn't work for
them basically. Then I sit down and show the videos to Brian and Mike and say, Hey, here's
the spots on the product that are confusing people. You know, we got to find better, better
UX for this stuff. And so rinse, wash and repeat. Like we just kept doing that over
and over again until eventually less people said, Hey, can you get on the call and show
me how to use this? And instead, it was like, looks great. We love it.
Nice. Let's click one of the important lessons here is that you're getting so much feedback
through these back and forth interactions with customers from from super early on. And
I hear one of the most common stories that I hear is people who spent the last six months
or 12 months of their life working on some project and total isolation without talking
to a single customer or trying to get anybody to use it because they're embarrassed. And
they're like, it's not ready yet needs to get to its final form before I show it to
anybody. And then when they do show it to people, it has all of these problems and nobody
wants to use it. And they realize, you know, retroactively, like way too late, like, Hey,
I probably should have been showing this to people from day one so that they can exactly.
Yeah. And if you're working on a problem that people really care to get solved, they won't
care that it's bad. Like they don't care that it's crappy. They'll just tell you those like,
Hey, I can't use this. Do you think you could add like this feature? Do you think you can
make this more confusing? Like they'll work with you on it if it's that big of a problem
for you. So you shouldn't feel embarrassed to share that stuff because people want the
problem solved. So they'll tell you like, Hey, I need this. And it's really helpful
because then you can be like, Oh, okay, I'll fix that.
Yeah, that's perfect. It's like a, someone was just asking me the other day, like, how
do I, how do I know what features to build next? You know, I've got my minimum viable
product out. What do I build next? And it's like, if you truly built a minimum viable
product, that's like the bare minimum that customers can get away with and just talk
to your customers and they'll tell you for sure what you need to build next to them to
use it. And speaking of customers, you mentioned that you were signing up beta customers, not
beta users. And I know from reading through your past interviews that you guys actually
made people pay for your beta. Why did you do that?
Well, you asked me earlier, you know, did you know that people would would pay for this
stuff? And, you know, I said, we thought they would. And, you know, a paid beta was our
way of proving they'll pay something, right? I you know, you read some comments about this
where it's like, you know, pulling a credit card out is like one of the toughest things.
And so we didn't ask for a lot of money. We made our beta was a one time fee. It wasn't
a subscription. So we just said, pay for our beta. You know, eventually this is going to
turn into a subscription at some point in time. But for now, you'll have access to it
while we're in kind of, you know, beta building, you know, more or less. And I think the very
first folks we charged like 100 bucks to and, you know, it was like, all right, that proved
it. And then after that, we just changed it to like, I forget it was like five or 10 bucks.
And just as a way to get more folks in the door. But we wanted to be talking to people
who are going to be willing to pay. We wanted to weed out like the tire kickers. We wanted
to folks who in that qualitative feedback, we knew we're going to pony up the cash, right?
Those are the problems we wanted to listen to, not to, you know, tire kickers who are
just like curious because the tech is cool or the product is cool.
Yeah. And those people are going to probably give you the worst advice because they're
not actually serious about using your product. So ultimately, if you optimize your product
based on the advice of free users, you're going to build a product that's good for free
users. And that's bad for, you know, the paying customers you actually want to get into the
door.
Exactly. They'll tell you to chase features that are not relevant to solving a business
problem. They'll just be nice, cool things that exist. Whereas, you know, your business
customers, they'll tell you like, this is the stuff that matters for my business.
Exactly. So okay, you're in this early stage posting on these forums, you're getting your
first beta users. What was the next step in the process? Like, when did you guys move
to the next level and say, okay, we've really got a real business here and our beta is really
taking off?
So I think, you know, by the end of, you know, you know, after I had done like those dozen
plus Skype calls or whatever, we got to a point where we had several hundred folks into
the beta, we talked to like tons of folks, and we'd improve the UI and you act such that
we didn't have to like manually onboard people anymore, people could self serve figure out
like how to use the thing. And so that was a good signal to us that it's time to launch.
And so about that same time was when we've applied and gotten into YC. And I remember
our very first office hours, we were telling them this, and they were like, well, why don't
you just launch? Like, it sounds like you're ready. And so literally that week, we launched
happier publicly. So you know, we opened it up, you know, we had an email list, I think
of that point in time of several thousand folks, I think it's about 10,000 folks who
emailed all said like, Hey, you can sign up now, check it out, right? And that was kind
of our transition from like this private beta, you know, side project thing to like, okay,
this is going to be like a real product, a real business. Let's make this go.
How was the Y Combinator experience for you? By the way, for people listening, Wade and
I both went through Y Combinator together. Well, not together. I did it in winter 2011.
I think you guys were 2012.
Yeah, we went through summer 2012. And for us, the thing that was most critical, I think,
you know, we were a side project, right? You know, granted, a very committed side project,
but a side project nonetheless. So yeah, I'd gone full time, I think by the time we've
gone through the YC interview process, and Mike mostly had and Brian, I think was still
employed as well. So for us, though, YC was just like, this ability to give us this incredible
ability to focus on Zapier as the only thing. So we moved away from Missouri away from friends,
family. And so for an entire summer, it was like the three of us just holed up in an apartment
100% focused on Zapier. We didn't do much else other than work on Zapier. And so that
amount of focus allowed us to make incredible strides in a three month period.
Yeah, I felt the exact same way going through it. I mean, you're surrounded by a whole bunch
of other people who are also intensely focused and pretty much talk about nothing besides
their companies and how they're going to grow them. And then you're especially if you move
from out of town just to be there for Y Combinator, you don't have much else to do besides work
on your business. And so you get an amazing amount of work done. And it's sometimes hard
to sustain that after Y Combinator, you know, when you move out or, you know, things kind
of quiet down. I see a lot of businesses that go through I see and slow down tremendously
after after ending it. But on that note, I'm curious what your thoughts are on work life
balance. Because, like you said, your wife was a first year teacher, so you were working
all the time, you go to YC, you do this three month stint of just hardcore work. Were you
ever worried about burning out? And also nowadays, you guys have a really big business. How does
your work life balance, you know, get affected by being such a big company? And do you feel
like you've created a lifestyle that you could sustain for years to come?
So yes, I think I've definitely changed, you know, the work life balance bits of it. And
it was something we had to improve on like when we you know, I think around post YC for
like a year or so was was kind of tough because from work life balance standpoint, because
we were growing a lot, we're adding a lot of customers, but we still didn't have like
a very big team, you know, we were still less than 10 people. So the weight of the entire
company was still more or less on our shoulders. And so that meant working a lot like customer
support tickets don't answer themselves, code doesn't write itself. So you have to be doing
that stuff. Otherwise, you know, the business doesn't move forward. So that was kind of
tough, right? Like I had to figure out like ways to get things done where I could still
have time off. And so I think the agreement at the time that I made with my wife is like,
Okay, I'm not going to work on Saturdays at all, right? But like, I'm still going to be
some longer hours. But then over time, as we were able to staff up the team a little
bit more, there was always this goal to like build a much better work life balance into
the company. And so nowadays, like, you know, we have a we have a good support team, we
have a good marketing team, we have a good engineering team, good product team. And so
the weight of the world isn't on any one individual to do this. And so all of us can put in a
good 40 hours a week, we can go home at the end of the day, see our kids, see our families,
have hobbies and things outside of work. Because at the end of the day, you know, the business
is, it really is a marathon, not a sprint. And so if you don't pace yourself, you will
find yourself burning out, basically. And so you got to you got to eventually find that
balance, I think otherwise, something will something's got to give.
Yeah, I'm like the like textbook poster child of what you should not do, just constantly
burn myself out all the time. I'm like, I got to get there as fast as I possibly can.
I got to get there as fast as I can. And I just work crazy hours and never learn my lesson
and I get burned out and have like two super unproductive weeks every time I get burned
out. On that note, a cool thing about how you guys operate Zapier is that you're totally
remote company, or at least at the very beginning, you guys were you guys still completely remote?
We're 100% remote still to this day.
How did you decide to go that route? And because I know, like at the time, it wasn't nearly
as common as it is now. And it's still really not all that common people most companies
operate you know, in the same locale. What influenced you guys to become a remote company?
So there was a few companies doing it, you know, I think base camp 37 37 signals was
like the most public about it, but also automatic GitHub, Reddit, like there was quite a few
that were doing it. And since Zapier was a side project, we were used to working like
just wherever we were and not being in the same room. YC was kind of a departure for
the norm for us a little bit in that we were all in the same place. But then post YC Mike
moved back to Missouri to be with his then girlfriend now wife as she was finishing up
law school. And so we were like, yeah, you're not gonna kick the guy out of the company
just to, you know, be with the girl he loves. So we've just figured out let's make a way
to remote to work. And so and also when we went to go hire folks, we didn't know anyone
in the Bay Area, we didn't have a network built up, we didn't know anything about hiring.
The advice we'd heard from around hiring your first folks was to just hire folks you've
worked with in the past. And so, you know, I had an old college roommate that lived in
Chicago, who was running a Cubs forum. And I figured if he could deal with unruly Cubs
fan, he could probably do customer service for us. You had an old co worker who was an
engineer that I worked alongside, we knew he was really solid. So he was in Columbia,
Missouri. So, you know, we were just like finding these people we knew who were talented.
And it didn't matter to us where they were. Because, you know, we'd already set up kind
of some systems and processes to make remote work. And and that's kind of what set us down
that path.
Now that you guys are a profitable business, you know, unlike most of the people that I
talked to, you guys have raised money, you went through I see you had, did you guys raise
a seed round or an a round?
We did a seed round. Yep, seed round. And you never raised after that, did you?
Correct.
What are the dynamics of that kind of relationship with investors where you almost immediately
go for profitability rather than, you know, continuing to raise additional rounds of funding?
Because a lot of people listening are leaning towards the bootstrapper lifestyle, maybe
they don't want to talk to investors, and maybe they don't have time to do it. What
are the advantages and disadvantages that you see of being a profitable company that's
also raised money?
Good question. So, you know, for us, we were, we pulled in a million dollars in our seed
round and this was post YC. And the reason we did it, like, you know, our mentality is
mostly to, you know, build profitable businesses, that's always kind of been our, like the thing
that we value. But we realized, you know, we've got a lot of work on our hands. So a
little bit of cash would really help us out a bit, you know, just to get things kickstarted.
So having the money to pay for like two or three employees, you know, someone on support
someone on engineering to help us just kickstart things just a little bit faster and afford
to like live in Silicon Valley. That was basically all we felt we needed. And so that's what
we did. And then the way we approach spend hiring and spending money was we had this
philosophy that at the time we use, which was don't hire until it hurts. So unless we
knew we needed somebody, we weren't going to bring somebody else on. And that helped
us kind of slowly add folks to the team as we grew and forced us to really be intentional
about the types of folks we brought on. With the side note that the primarily way you spend
money in a company is hiring people. There's, I mean, you might do marketing, but really
salaries is what's the most expensive for those of you who are listening. That's really
what kind of kept our spending in check. And, you know, over time, we did add like quite
a few folks, you know, we went from three people to seven to 14 to 30 to 70, right?
So it ended up being actually like a pretty good increase in head count. But that rule
of thumb always made sure that when we were hiring folks, it was when it hurt and when
there was money and revenue coming into the company. So we weren't spending VC money,
we're spending our own revenues and profits. It's funny that you mentioned being able to
afford living in the Bay Area, because it's so ridiculously expensive here. I talked to
a lot of people on Indie Hackers, and a lot of the bootstrappers just aren't in the Bay
Area. They're in Boise, Idaho, they're in Pennsylvania, they're in New Hampshire. And
I talked to Patrick McKenzie about it a few weeks ago, and his theory is pretty straightforward.
If you're going to go to the bootstrapping lifestyle, you can't afford to live in a tech
hub where programmers are making $200,000 a year, you know, and rent is crazy. And on
that note, I also wanted to ask about, you know, the pressure that a lot of people theorize
comes from investors, to drive your company out of profitability mindset and into a pure
growth mindset. Do you feel that your investors are pressuring you to do that in any way? And,
you know, are they happy with your decision to become just a profitable company? Do you
pay them a dividend or something? Are they looking for like, you know, an IPO?
So another good question. So Zapier's investors, the board for Zapier is still Brian, Mike,
and I. So at the end of the day, we still control our destiny and can make the decisions
that we think are best for the company. And, you know, early on, we did get times like,
you know, are there ways that you feel like you can feel more growth, you think you can
grow faster? And the thing we always went back and asked ourselves, because we want
to grow too, right? We want to have a make more money and, you know, have more impact,
like just because you're, you know, VC or bootstrap doesn't mean growth is part of both
of those types of businesses, right? It's not exclusive to one, one type of business.
And so we would go back and ask ourselves and say, like, well, what would we spend more
money? And we always felt like the money we were spending was what we would wanted to
spend. We never felt like we wanted to spend more money. We felt if we spent more money,
we couldn't control it. Like, you know, if we hired more people, it would disrupt the
culture in a way that we couldn't control. So we always were like very measured about
when we spent money to make sure that it was like at a cadence and a pace that the business
could support and not artificially doing it, because that was what you know, some VC thought
was the smart thing to do. And so like, that was our approach to it. And it worked out
pretty well for us.
Yeah, it sounds like it's worked out excellently. And we haven't really talked about revenue
numbers or anything. And I'm not sure, you know, what you feel comfortable sharing. But
just for some context, can you talk about how successful I guess Zapier is today?
Sure. So, you know, we announced a few months ago Zapier has passed 20 million in annual
recurring revenue. You know, that's taken us five, almost six years to get there.
Congratulations, man. That's huge. And how big is your team?
We're about 90 people today.
Whoa, that's awesome. I had no idea you guys are so big.
Yeah, it's definitely grown up a little bit since those three people in an apartment during
YC.
Yeah, for sure. So you guys raised the seed round. Let's go back in time a little bit.
You've raised your seed round. You're now spending your money hiring people rather than
spending it on just like marketing and ads. How did you grow at that point? Was it just
all word of mouth, magical growth? Or were you guys implementing specific growth strategies
and marketing strategies to get the word out about Zapier?
The biggest thing we focused on was getting more apps on Zapier because that was kind
of the factor in terms of who could use our product. The product is used by people who
are using other apps. So if we had an integration for an app, that opened up a new potential
market for us. So every new app we added to Zapier meant we could do co-marketing and,
you know, trade email campaigns and, you know, spin up landing pages and do all these sorts
of things to promote to a new set of folks. So we invested heavily in our developer platform
to try and onboard as many apps as we possibly could because every new app meant more potential
customers for us.
That's awesome. So just by building your product and making it better by adding these integrations,
you guys had the side effect of every new integration was an opportunity to promote
Zapier and promote the integration and work with the partner and doing that.
Exactly. And it really played to our strengths early on because we were a technical, heavy
founding team. So, you know, building those integrations was a lot more natural to us
than doing, you know, sales outreach or something.
Yeah, I was going to say a lot of people listening are developers. And I know that when I was
working on my old app Task Force, like my dream was that I would just be able to sit
down and code and that, you know, the primary driving of my actual user acquisition and
marketing would be writing code. And for so many businesses, like with any hackers, it's
literally the exact opposite. Every day I write code is a day that I'm not getting the
word out about any hackers. And for a lot of businesses, that's the case.
There's a lot in there about how you work with partners and how you promote a lot of
specifics that I think would be really cool to go into. You mentioned that you were doing
co promotion with the partners. You mentioned that you were setting up landing pages, which
I assume give you some SEO benefits. Can you talk about how exactly you promoted Zapier
with these these new partners you're bringing onto the platform and also how that strategy
evolved over time? Because I seem you guys got better at it as you absolutely like we
have a whole playbook on it now where every new partner like we give them this checklist
that's like a menu of things to work through like we know which ones work best, which ones
like are fine, but you know, honestly won't do much. So it's really gotten pretty good.
Early on, it was literally just like trying the things that we'd seen others do. So it
was like, Hey, can can you put us in your app directory because most apps had an app
directory. And then from there it was like, well, Hey, you know, can you send an email
out that announces the integration, right? Because if you send an email out that Zapier
is now on, you know, X app, that was, you know, an announcement that this existed. So
those were some of the early things we did over time. We got more sophisticated about
it. Like we started saying, like, Hey, why don't you talk about integrations as part
of your onboarding email flow and Zapier can be a part of that. Why don't we include, you
know, how to tutorials on how to do this as part of your help docs, you know, and just
really try and, you know, expand the surface area of, you know, Zapier inside of these
partner apps so that it made it a lot more easier to get awareness of Zapier if you're
using those products.
So it sounds like earlier on, you guys were just trying everything, throwing spaghetti
at the wall, which makes a lot of sense because you don't know exactly what's going to work
earlier on. You haven't tried it. Uh, when you did kind of solidify your playbook and
improve it, was it based on things that you tried early on that were just, that works
the best and you just dropped the things that didn't work or was it? Absolutely. Okay. Yes.
So like we knew that the way to think about it is try and get your name in the principal
path that a user is going to be following, right? So if you think about how people use
web apps, will they sign up for it? They get a sequence of emails and then they interact
inside the app most of the day. So it's like, well, can we get Zapier as part of the onboarding
flow somewhere? Cause that's going to be somewhere that every single user sees that was like
for us, like the best place to be versus, you know, it's great to be, have a blog post
about us. That's great, but blog posts get buried. They roll off the feed, um, and disappear
over time. So, you know, it was those types of learnings were things we had to figure
out as we went along. Was there any particular marketing channel or a promotion type that
worked way better than the rest? Um, I mean, email is great, honestly. Um, what's better
than being in like the inbox of saying like, here's the thing that exists. You directly
get outreach to somebody. So email is great. Search is great. Yeah. Really just, just those,
and then word of mouth, having a great product that people want to talk about once you kind
of get to a certain critical mass of folks, like that word of mouth should really start
kicking in from people talking about you. Yeah. Email is consistently underrated as
a marketing channel by a lot of new, new developers and entrepreneurs and founders. Oh yeah. I
mean, email is just like, it's like there's, everyone's talks about, you know, social media,
Twitter, Facebook, you know, Reddit, hacker news, things like that. They're great, but
those are all spiky, right? You know, it's like, if something cool happens, you might
get a lot of traffic, but then it disappears over time. If you're collecting emails, like
that's a chance for you to like get in front of people again and again and again. So what's
your email strategy? Like a Zapier, you mentioned having your partners kind of encouraging them
to promote Zapier to their email lists. You guys also sign people up through your own
email list. And if so, what kinds of emails do you send to people? Well, for us, our email
is really a chance to make Zapier kind of a thing you daily interact with. So, um, Zapier,
our product is somewhat invisible, right? You set up these apps and they work and you
may never have to go to Zapier.com again. So the way we treat Zapier, our email list
is our blog, our learn resources, writing about work, helping people do better work
and try and get people interacting with Zapier on a daily or weekly basis through our content
initiatives so that when you do think about, Hey, I need to automate some stuff like Zapier
can be top of mind. Another area where you guys, uh, I think did a really great job was
with kind of search engine optimization. You would put up these landing pages for every
single integration that you did. And I'm sure that was painstaking work, at least in the
beginning. Like maybe you guys have automated that whole process now, but can you talk about
how your search engine optimization worked exactly and what kinds of things you were
thinking about? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's fairly simple, right? You know, have a landing page
for every integration you support on a single individual integration. Uh, there's not much
traffic to it, um, because there's just not that many looking for it. But as again, as
we added more and more apps that just meant, you know, in plus one more opportunities for
landing pages and that search volume adds up over time. So it's just a really long tail
play of getting as many apps on Zapier so that we can have more landing pages targeting
more types of use cases. And so we would just spin them up as we went along. And it's, it's
fairly automated nowadays. Um, and all those are opportunities again to, to get new customers.
Yeah, for sure. I think like it's cool listening to your story because you have so many different
natural advantages with Zapier that you like really took advantage of and hit really hard
to help grow the application besides just building Zapier itself, right? You've got
the integrations, which seemed to be the backbone of everything that you do. Uh, and then you've
got, uh, things that are a little bit less, you know, naturally arising out of your product,
like your blog, which, uh, I'm aware of your blog gets a ridiculous amount of traffic more
than any hackers does by far. I think, uh, how did you set up your blog and what strategies
do you use to promote it? Well, uh, our blog was not great in the early days. You can actually,
you know, scroll to the very end of it and you can see it's me like writing about basically
like our founding journey. I think a lot of blogs start out like that. It's like you writing
meta commentary about your company, which is fine, but eventually you probably are going
to need to start having more of a strategy about how your blog aligns with what your
customers care about. And oftentimes what your customers care about isn't necessarily
your company journey. Uh, they care about something unique to them, right? And so I
think at some point in time, I'd heard that, you know, Twilio had this strategy, which
was like, make your customers your heroes. And you know, their content strategy was basically
just like case study after case study of like cool things that people were building. And
oh, by the way, Twilio was part of what they built, right? And so that's kind of where
we started to, to move towards. And eventually we stumbled on like this intersection of productivity
and app specific content where, you know, there's a lot of generic productivity advice
like wake up early in the morning or whatever. Right. Um, but we didn't feel like people
want more of that type of content. Like that content exists in spades. What people really
wanted was like deep tactical level stuff. Like here's how to use Trello and Gmail to
like craft an amazing hiring process. Um, and like, here's exactly how to set up your
Trello board and like the filters you need in Gmail and everything, right? Like that
kind of stuff is gold because now you can literally just be like, okay, I'm going to
follow these steps one to 10 and I have a great hiring process set up. Right. So that
was the type of content we wanted to push for was how can we talk about this intersection
of productivity and apps and get people excited about stuff. And so that's the angle we took.
So you'll see when you go visit our blog, like there is very little fluff, just, you
know, puff pieces, almost everything has like very specific types of things a person can
do to improve what they do at work. Yeah, that's really smart. I mean, you're actually
producing good quality content, high quality content that people can't find elsewhere.
And so if they want to read it, they have to come to your blog and then they're going
to like it because it's not just fluff. But on top of that, I think there's kind of like
two aspects of it, right? You have to write good content and you have to figure out a
way to get it into the hands of people who are going to read it. And that can involve
things like search engine optimization, sending it out to your list on email, promoting it
on social media. What have you found to be the most successful ways to promote the content
on your blog? And how did you kind of get that ball rolling in the early days?
Email, emails, like, again, where it's at. So like, once you get that list up, you know,
just work on getting people who read your article the first time and say, like, Hey,
if you want more of this stuff like this, like, we'll let you know when a new article
is coming out, right? Get their email address. And then every time we send that email, those
people would or we'd post a new post, we'd email them, they'd come back and read it.
And then a lot of times that audience of people that were reading it, those would be the folks
that help push it out even further, right? So those would be the folks that would submit
the articles they like to Hacker News or they would set up, they would tweet about it or
share it on Facebook or share it on LinkedIn or wherever. So you would really the email
strategy was a way to get our own users to try and make the content go a little further
and some stuff viral, right? Eventually, you do get a few that will exceed where the baseline
is. So for us, it was always just get more emails to increase the baseline of what content
is and then over time, we'll just get more hits out of it too.
Yeah, I'm looking at your blog right now. And it's like you've got this very non obnoxious
little pop up in the very bottom right corner of the screen. It's like join 50,000 plus subscribers
and get app tips, etc. and put in your email address. And I think it's really cool to have
give us your email and get more content like this is kind of your primary call to action
on your blog posts, because it feeds directly into what you're saying, like it's your best
strategy is to hit people above your email. So, you know, maybe focus on that more so
than focusing on trying to immediately convert them into Zapier users.
Yep, yep, totally.
And we're kind of running out of time. But there's one thing that I think I mentioned
at the beginning that I really wanted to talk about, which is that, in my view, there's
kind of like two spectrums that a company can follow along. You could be like ConvertKit,
for example, where you're entering a crowded marketplace full of a whole bunch of companies
that are very similar to you. And you have to figure out how to differentiate yourself.
But people already know what you are, and they're already searching for you. And then
at the other end of the spectrum, you've got things like Zapier, where, you know, when
you started this company, there was nothing that was really like Zapier. And anything
that was like Zapier wasn't really that popular. And so there wasn't a whole, you know, there
weren't a whole bunch of people searching for, you know, Zapier or workflow automation,
you know, and maybe there have, or maybe there were, and I'm not sure about it. But the question
here is, when you're developing an app like Zapier, how do you communicate to customers
and educate them and let them know what it is that you're building? And how do you kind
of drum up demand for something that's totally new, that doesn't have like a whole bunch
of search traffic on Google?
Yeah, I think you got to figure out what is the problem that your app is solving. And
that way, you can tilt your marketing more towards what I call demand harvesting rather
than demand generation, because you want to be more like, you know, the the ConvertKit
example, right, where you can tap into existing marketing channels, where there's known problems,
and sell that way, because it's going to be just a lot easier to get your message out
there. Versus if you're trying to create an entire new category from scratch, that's incredibly
expensive, no one's searching for it. It's really hard to do that. So as best as you
possibly can try and get yourself into kind of those normal channels. So for us, the way
we approached it was, well, Zapier, the tool is new and novel, the things we're solving
are actually still fairly mundane, or, you know, something that already exists, which
is integrations. So people were already looking for integrations. You know, MailChimp had
an integration directory, Salesforce had the app exchange, Basecamp has their add ons page,
all that stuff already existed. So it's like, how can we just tap into that stuff that already
exists to get new customers and just harvest the nascent demand that already exists today.
So really, that was it from the get go was like, just tap into existing channels, don't
try and reinvent the wheel or create a new category or anything like that. From the get
go.
I love that answer. Because even if you're building a tool like Zapier, which is totally
new, and can't be easily compared to existing tools on the market, you're still solving
a problem, or hopefully you're solving a problem, you really should be solving a problem that
already exists that people are already looking for solutions for. So if you come at it from
that angle, you don't have to say, my product is so new and unique, I have to drum up demand
from scratch. Instead, you could buy the existing wave of traffic from people who are looking
for solutions to the problem that it is that your new product solves. And you can use that
to get your first users and grow from there. I think that's a great place to end the interview.
Can you let us know where people can go to find out more about yourself or your co founders
and Zapier?
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm I hang out on Twitter fairly often at Wade Foster. If you want to
learn more about Zapier, zapier.com with just one P, the about page has some cool photos
of our retreats in the past, check it out where everyone's remote. We got job listings,
if you're curious about coming to work at Zapier, or anything like that. blog is also
really great resource to if you're looking for various apps to use and trying to think
about the workflows you run in your own business. So I definitely check that out too.
All right, well, thanks so much for coming on the show, Wade.
Awesome. Thanks for having me, Kortland.
Bye.
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