Hi, I'm Wade Foster, creator and co-founder of Zapier. AMA!
Hey Indie Hackers! I'm Wade Foster, the co-founder & CEO of Zapier, a workflow automation and productivity tool that helps you connect all the business software you use. I've helped scale Zapier to $35M+ ARR and 2M+ users on just $1.3M raised with a 150-person fully distributed team.
Ask me anything!
I'll be here to answer today: Wednesday, April 18!
What did your MVP look like?
It was a really rough version of what we have today. Here's an old screenshot. Note that IDs are exposed without human readable fields. It was rough, but folks still loved it.
https://cdn.zapier.com/storage/photos/0a3a7efb3f6918be1096d8dac5c1c6f5.png
It's conceivable that a whole buisiness has already been built pretty much solely by doing Zapier plumbing. Are you aware of any examples, and if so which ones did you find the most interesting?
What is the coolest Zap you've ever seen built on Zapier?
Indeed this does happen! We've seen many folks build prototypes with Zapier before.
The work Pieter Levels has done is nothing short of impressive. Here is a twitter thread where he built a luggage shipping startup using Zapier and a handful of other tools.
Where do you see the future of workflow automation platforms going?
There's been an explosion in the number of tools we use and each tool tends to perform a narrower function, better.
I expect this means workflow automation will feel even more like legos than it does today. The end user can reach for pluggable components to build custom workflows and experiences without having to adopt a huge monolithic app.
Which roles were your first 3 hires and why?
How important is your free plan for growth? What % convert to paid and how long are they on the free plan before upgrading?
Our first three hires were customer support, engineer, and engineer. Early on we had a philosophy not to hire until it hurt. So the roles we hired for first were where we were seeing the biggest bottlenecks.
As for the free plan, it's super important for helping folks learn the product. Zapier is a new type product that isn't always immediately easy to understand. The free plan gives folks a bit of a chance to play and reach that first aha! moment.
What does the future of Zapier look like? What are you most excited about moving forward? And how did you develop that vision?
We want to help everyone be more productive at work. So we're working hard to make Zapier more accessible and easier to understand.
If more folks understood how the various tools they use at work, Zapier included in that toolkit, they could be way more successful.
For example, just this morning the team at Museum Hacks shared how Zapier had help them make $350,000 in revenue.
That's some serious ROI on having a better understanding of how your tools work.
Thanks for doing this @wadefoster ! Couple questions surrounding the distributed team + corporate culture:
What was it like on boarding your first few customers and connecting their platform with another? Did you walk them through the process 1-on-1 or were your first customers able to figure it out pretty easily on their own?
For the first customers I did the implementation for them via Skype. The product was so rough at that time that they were definitely not able to set it up without my help.
But the lessons learned from watching them struggle were invaluable because we were able to translate that into product improvements.
Wade, what has had the biggest impact on your churn rate?
Better onboarding.
A lot of folks focus on churn in the wrong spot. They'll try and fix the issue at the tail end of a customers lifecycle. But the place you can disproportionately impact churn is by making sure they are successful up front.
Your competitor IFTTT exists from 2009. You decided to create Zapier in 2013 (or earlier?) What method(s) did you use to check that there is a place for your service on the market?
Wade, most important question I can think of: How did you grow your remote team, especially at the beginning when the company was less than, say, 2 persons? How soon did you start implementing some form of structure in the HR department?
Have a good attorney that you can help you understand basic employment law. Get a payroll provider. We use TriNet. It works and keeps us in compliance. Have an accountant/bookkeeper that can help you sort through compliance issues.
Past that you don't need too much when you're small.
How do you determine what price is the best one? For example, why is the "Starter" package $20/month?
A lot of testing and experimentation. Pricing is one of the most unintuitive things you do when building a business.
Hi Wade, thanks for doing this!
You guys have an amazing blog that brings in tons of search traffic, partners who work to co-promote their integrations, and die-had fans (like myself!) who spread Zapier through word-of-mouth. How do you anticipate your growth strategies evolving as you continue to scale up? Are you still experimenting here, or will the status quo be good enough to take you to where you want to go over time?
How did you get regular feedback for Zapier?
Customer support. We do All Hands Support at Zapier and this keeps everyone on that same page and getting feedback on what customers new and old are feeling.
What's an example of a Zap that best shows the power of Zapier? Any favorites? Cheers
I have a Zap setup that automates the template for our monthly executive deep dive. It's scheduled to run at the beginning of the month. It creates a google doc in a specific drive folder that all the executives have access to. It auto-formats the doc with placeholder info for where execs need to fill in their relevant details. It creates a calendar invite for everyone. Then it pings the Slack channel to let the team know the meeting minutes template is available for them to add their sections.
I love this Zap because it's not super fancy. But it takes a really annoying thing I have to do each month and just does it for me.
Wade, thanks for taking the time for this! I'm surprised to learn you've only raised $1.3M! I'm assuming you 1) Could have raised more if you wanted to and 2) Doing so would have allowed you to grow and scale even faster than you have. Is this right? If so, why have you chosen not to take further rounds of capital? Cheers.
Yes we could have.
This is a false assumption though. I think it's important to consider what you'd do with the extra funding and how that would translate to growth. Some of the biggest growth rounds these days are to build war chests and not fuel growth.
Take this C round Drift announced yesterday. They hadn't touched a dollar of their B round. So fueling more growth isn't what is driving that decision.
We've always felt like dilution didn't make sense if we didn't have a clear way to translate the extra $$$ into more growth. We've always been able to do what we need with revenue to fuel more growth.
What are your main marketing channels? I can see marketing being a challenge for something that is so innovative and new.
We drive traffic through our 1000+ partners.
Hey Wade
Looking forward to your AMA, big fan of Zapier ;)
A lot of things I admire about Zapier from growing with little investment to having an entirely remote team to having an awesome product.
My question is on Zapier being fully remote.
What has been the most significant hurdles you've had to overcome as your team grew from 10 to 50, to 150 when it comes to having a fully distributed team.
How did the challenges of being an entirely remote team change as you grew?
Thanks
Kieran
The feedback mechanisms and communication mechanisms change over time.
Early on you know everyone really well and are well integrated into the day to day work. People share lots with you be default. This makes it super easy to change process to improve the day-to-day working environment.
As you get bigger you aren't well integrated in the day-to-day work and for a given person the day-to-day work might be quite different.
As a result you have to shift how you get information. I rely a ton on employee surveys, manager reviews, 360 feedback, skip level 1:1, and IC panels to learn how work is going across the organization.
Wade in a 10 person company would hardly recognize the work Wade does in a 150 person company.
What was your motivation to make Zapier? Did you dream to just work on something fun (doesn't matter Zapier or any other "startup") that will pay your bills to not work in an office (freelance)? Or you were dreaming about great success? :) Or why you just kept doing all this?
Our initial goals were pretty modest. We wanted to:
Build something to help people.
Have fun building it.
Make enough money to do this all the time.
Over time we realize more about the opportunity in front of us and our ambitions have grown. I think this is pretty healthy too.
Hi @wadefoster, thanks for AMA. I'm a big fan and active user as a digital marketer.
When you launched the MVP, probably there was no such an active growth / product community like PH, HN, IH to announce something. So how did your growth adventure switch to another level, I mean which instruments have accelerated your growth without using a paid solution like AdWords?
Wade what are the most popular tech stacks you see people using to build APIs that plug into your platform?
I used Zapier. Really great. Congrats. You have to be really good programmer with business acumen
Hi Wade,
Thanks a lot for making Zapier. I love it. <3
Questions - How did you manage to grow such a large community through your developer platform? What was the initial traction like? Now that it's so huge what are your plans for 2018 and years to come?
We built all the initial integrations ourselves. Then we started having people ask how their apps could be on Zapier. That was the signal to us that a developer platform might work. So we built it and indeed people did build on it.
Hi Wade,
Thank you for your time, I have two questions:
What was your original vision of Zapier? What problem were you going out to solve? Were you always going to be a productivity tool?
Starting out, how did you communicate your value to potential customers? Especially when Zapier can be used for both professional and personal life?
Our original goal was to help people get more out of their tools by making integrations more accessible. We've slightly shifted how we think about this, but this is a big part of what attracts folks to Zapier even today.
We mostly circumvented that conversations by instead talking about all the integrations we offered. If you needed an integration, Zapier was the place for you. As a result people who didn't need or understand integrations didn't use us early on because the value prop was unclear. But that was ok when we were starting.
Hey Wade! Hope you and the Zapier team are doing well. Two questions:
Question #1: What would you say is your superpower as a tech co-founder? What would you say is Bryan and Mike's superpowers as a tech co-founder?
Question #2: When Zapier announced your seed investment, a life changing event occurred in your life. I'm curious how that has shaped you both as founder and family guy?
Hi Royce!
And importantly we share values. We are customer obsessed. We think about company building in the same ways. This means we avoided many of the common co-founder pitfalls.
Zapier is a cool name, how did you come up with it? Do you have any advice for people who aren't great at naming things?
Hi Wade - Andy from Tettra (https://tettra.co) here. Thanks for doing this AMA. You were on my wish list for IndieHackers AMA guests from a few months ago and glad to see you here.
Have a two part question for you:
I'm sure you had the opportunity to raise venture capital at points. What made you decide to forgo the traditional route of most startups to instead fund via revenue and do you feel like that path has hampered your growth at all?
Do you have an lessons learned or advice on how to still grow fast without outside capital?
How did you get companies to build on your API, instead of you having to build for them?
How do you mean this?
Zapier has an API. Companies build their own connections to Zapier. In the beginning Zapier had to build the connections, now the companies do it. How did that work?
I think they still make some of them, you can listen to their podcast on IH.
Hi @wadefoster thank you for been here! here is my question !How did you get your first 10 clients?
If you had to start over today and you couldn't work on Zapier, what would you work on?
How did you come up the idea of the product, what is the technology stack and how does the integrations work?
If anybody is actually in SF, can we get join them for a meetup or meet & greet?
How do you support a remote design and product ownership team?
Hi Wade, thanks for taking the time out to answer our questions. Huge Zapier fan!
How do you manage running a remote team on a complex product like Zapier? Are there any tools you find help with keeping everyone aligned?
What are the three most used integrations?
Examples:"Google Sheets to Email" or "TypeForm to MySQL"
How did come up with the idea of Zapier? Were there any competitors at the time?
What were your initial user channels?
Hey Wade! Thanks for the AMA! What's the best way to ensure businesses understand the value you're providing for them, even if this value cannot be directly translated to monetary value? But it indirectly does.
... especially in the MVP stage.
What do you think the future of services will look like?
Was workflow automation the product you wanted to make or was it an offshoot of another idea?
When did you decide that you would rather build something than work for someone?
Wow $35M ARR! How do you see the future of code free tools like Bubble.is, and how does this relate to your plans for Zapier?
Hey Wade, thank you! How to run growth experiments in a remote environment? There's some experimentation pratices that are crucial to Zapier? Thanks a lot!
What's the most difficult element of operating and growing a business in an open-ended market like workflow automation?
How did you get your first customer?
Check out the podcast he did with Indiehackers!
Hi Wade!
What was the transition like from your small and nimble team at Columbia Startup Weekend to your current remote team and location in San Francisco?
(BTW ... lived in Columbia for 10+ years ... love the town)
How did you come up with the idea and what was the first iteration of the product like? How many iterations did you go through before getting to the product which is closest to today's Zapier? Thanks!
Hey Wade thanks for answering questions on here. Love what you guys do and how you've made your company.
What's the criteria for creating new Zapps or connections to services?
And what are the ones that you have found most useful?
How much does Zapier use it's own product?
Thanks again!
Hey Wade, love the interview with John on CredoCast! Thanks for taking the time :)
What was the #1 thing you learned while scaling Zapier?
What was Zapier's lowest point and did you guys overcame it?
Cheers Wade!
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