Making Big Shifts, presented by Marketing Reboot, with your host Josh Anderson.
Hey everybody, welcome back to Making Big Shifts by Marketing Reboot. I'm your host Josh Anderson, where we talk to the really big entrepreneurs making really big shifts and the real results that followed. Today, super excited. I've been trying to set this up for a while now and I finally got him on here. We have Wade Foster, the CEO of Zapier. So, welcome to the podcast, Wade.
Yeah, stoked to be here, Josh.
Super excited to have you, man. And before we kind of go into it, can you just set up a little bit about what Zapier is, how big you guys currently are, and what you guys are doing?
Sure. You know, Zapier is the AI automation orchestration platform. But more plainly, what that means is we help you build agents and we help you do automation with all the different tools that you use at work. So, we connect into everything. 9,000 different apps. Salesforce, Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Slack, G Suite, Microsoft, you name it. Like we can hook into everything.
Nice. Well, and how big of a company are you all right now?
Couple hundred million in revenue, team's 800 folks strong, been at it for, you know, 15 years now.
Yeah. And that is where we want to get to. So, that's a great segue, Wade. Thank you for that. So, you're from Missouri, right around where I'm from as well. Both went to Mizzou. After Mizzou, you went out to California and started working there, right? So, tell me through that story, that process of leaving central Missouri and then going out there and founding Zapier.
Yeah. Well, so, you know, I founded it with Bryan and Mike and we were in Columbia, Missouri for folks not familiar with the area, which is where University of Missouri is. And so, we were just out of school. We built the first version at a hackathon, a Startup Weekend. And we decided, hey, this is pretty fun. Let's keep working on this thing. And so, you know, we're in the middle of Missouri, there's no such thing as venture funding or anything like that. So it's got to be a nights and weekends project. Like just got to figure out how to, you know, see, we still need day jobs. So, for about 6 months, that's kind of how we worked. But we were always intrigued by YC, Y Combinator. In particular, we liked Paul Graham's essays. He's just one of the best writers on startups and technology in general. And he started YC and we felt like, well, man, if we had a chance to go through that, that could be pretty impactful for our ability to scale the company.
And in fact, we'd applied once before. We applied right after that Startup Weekend and just got the default rejection. But 6 months later, we applied a second time and we just made a lot more progress. We had 1,000 users who'd paid us money. We had like 10,000 people on a launch list. We had an actual product that worked. We had some YC companies that were using us for some stuff. And so, when we went and applied again, we felt like we had a better shot. And there's tons of learnings around the interview process and all sorts of funny stories with that, but long story short, we got accepted that time. And decided, hey, let's go pack up and move out to California. And so, we did that.
And you know, like it felt that you asked for some interesting stories around that. Probably the more interesting one was my wife at the time. She was like, sure, go do this. You should definitely apply. This would be great. And I remember when we got the acceptance call, I remember calling her because she was still back in Missouri. And I called her and said, hey, good news. We got in. Like, you know, we're going to move to California. And I remember her just melting down and being like, no, I didn't actually mean that. You know, she was trying to be the supportive wife and everything. And I was like, oh, crap. I thought we were on the same page. Turns out we were not. But to her credit, she was like, all right, let's give it a go, let's try. And it turned out to be one of the best things. We lived out here for 9 years and just had a blast while we were out here.
Yeah, that's awesome. So, I guess even going back further during the hackathon, how did this idea come up to begin with?
Well, so Brian and I, we were working at Veterans United, in Columbia. And I was working in the marketing department. And I was in charge of this email marketing implementation for Marketo. And I'm not a particularly good engineer. I was like teaching myself how to do some stuff. I could do some real basic things, but not good at all. And so I'm trying to implement this Marketo API with our internal CRM. And the API documentation is in, like, it's this old-school SOAP WSDL API. The docs are in a PDF format. Needless to say, I'm just having a bad time.
Now, Brian, he happened to be trolling through some software forums. Like, I think he was on maybe the Mailchimp forums or the Dropbox forums or I forget exactly which ones, but he started to notice this common theme, which was that every one of these forums, there was a question pattern that came up over and over again. And it was, when are you going to integrate with X? And X could be just about anything. And you'd click into those threads and you'd see a bunch of customers going, yeah, plus one. I want that. Me too. Yeah, can you build that for me?
And eventually a product manager would chime in and say something like, hey, thanks for all the feedback, everybody. We'll take a look at it.
Yeah, it's on the list. Which if you worked in these companies, you know that's code for never going to happen. And so Brian messaged me on iChat and was like, hey, I think we can make something that would be a real simple integration tool for non-developers to hook up these different softwares that they're using.
And immediately I'm thinking of this Marketo implementation that I'm doing and going like, oh god, if this thing existed, I would just use that instead of banging my head against the wall in this thing. And so that's kind of where the initial idea was seeded.
Yeah, I mean it was your own personal experience plus reading the market. So that's totally, I mean then who is the genius that came up with the name Zapier?
Well, so you know, funny enough we're at this Startup Weekend and you need a name. And so we're just kind of sitting down trying to figure one out real quick. And I remember thinking, well, we're hooking up APIs. It'd be pretty cool if we could have API in the name of the word. Be like a nice Easter egg. IER, that's like a pretty common ending in English. So IER would be pretty nice. I was like, what can we do with that? Is there any interesting words that we might be able to come up with that will work pretty good? And immediately thought snaps. We should go Snappier. So looked up the domain. Domain was available for 10 bucks or whatever. So we bought it. We're off to the races.
Then after the weekend finished and we decided we're going to actually go work on this thing, we figured we probably ought to go do like a proper trademark and all that stuff and figure out, hey, is there something to do? And after that search we're like, well, I don't know if we can do the snap thing anymore. We probably need to go do something else. And of course within like 2 minutes we were like, Zaps. Zaps are a good replacement. It's shorter. Zaps have the same... it says the same stuff. But of course, we were also nervous because it's got one p. It's not actually Zappier. It's like Xavier.
So we're like, oh man, people are going to say this thing wrong, right? So we ended up spending like, I don't know, another 2 weeks trying to find a better name, debating the heck out of this thing. But we just kept coming back to Zapier over and over and over again. And so, it was the one that stuck.
Yeah. Once you... That's actually funny you mentioned the p thing. Like before I actually came up here I was talking to my wife and I was like, I know it's called Zapier, but in my head I want to say Zapier every time just because of the way... And I was like, I'm going to do it on this podcast. And boom.
So what, you know, the weekend when you first started the hackathon, now you have like, okay, this is a good idea. When did it go to like, we actually might have something here? You know what I mean? Like when did that unlock?
Well, you know, so I had worked at a small startup before Zapier. And I was hired to do marketing. But basically, I was the only person trying to get customers. And so I was doing marketing, sales, everything. And I remember working on that product. The product was slick. Like good engineering, great design, easy to use. It was a professor that had built an essay grading software. This was of course before AI existed. And so nowadays, that's like super cool. But in 2010, that was like kind of a far-fetched thing. And so you had all these fancy ontologies and things like that going on. But anyway, I'm tasked with selling this stuff.
And I remember beating my head against the wall. I tried everything. I was trying direct sales, cold calling, biz dev, email marketing, SEO, social. Like I literally was looking at everything. How do you get customers on the internet? What can I do? I was literally trying everything I could come up with. And I mean, so much so that I was like, they're going to figure out I'm bad at my job, and they're going to fire me. Like there's no way I'm going to keep my job. I shouldn't have kept my job.
But for whatever reason they did, and the more I worked on it, the more I started to think, huh, I don't know that the problem is actually the sales and marketing. Or at least that's maybe the story I told myself. I was like, maybe just no one wants this thing. Like, maybe we're just building a product that doesn't have good product market fit, et cetera.
So, anyhoo, some time passed, we're working on Zapier now. And it's interesting. I remember emailing the very first person I emailed after the weekend. I'd found this guy on a forum, this guy named Andrew Warner, who ran this podcast called Mixergy at the time.
And he happened to have a forum post on one of those sites where he was like, hey, can I get a PayPal Highrise integration to do da da da? And so, I emailed him, was like, hey Andrew, you still looking for something that does this? Like, we're kind of working on a thing that can help you make this stuff happen. He emails back, and he's like, no, I actually got that sorted, but did you actually build something? I'm kind of curious.
And so, I was like, okay, what else is he using? How else can I pitch this guy? And I remember thinking, well, it looks like he's using Wufoo on his site for his contact forms, and it looks like he's using AWeber for his email newsletter. Like, I'll email back and see if I can get his form software to hook up with his email software. And so, I said, yeah, we're building a tool that integrates everything, stuff like PayPal Highrise, Wufoo AWeber, so on and so forth, right? And he emails me back, and he's like, ah, I need Wufoo and AWeber. Like, I really really need that. Can I use it?
Now, here's the kicker, the product's not very good at all. Like, the code is rough, the design is rough. It's not ready for primetime. But, it does work. It does work. You can set up his app. It's just going to be pretty rough.
And so, I was like, well, what the heck? Let's go see what he thinks of this thing. And gave him access to it and everything. And he emails me back a day or two later and he's like, hey wait, this is great, but I don't know how to set it up. I guess I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, it is really rough. So, we jump on Skype. And yeah, Skype at the time. This is...
You're talking about all these old things that are bringing back to me, man.
I know. This whole interview is like you can carbon date Zapier based on this interview. So, you know, I start to step him through setting up his app. And I mean, I got to tell you, Josh, it's rough. Like, one problem after the next after the next after the next. But, look, again, it does work. So, we get to the finish. We're like, okay, let's go test it. And so, he goes and puts a test submission into his contact form, goes and refreshes AWeber. It works.
And he's like, wait, this is awesome. Like, this is literally going to change how my business works. How much do I owe you? Like, I'm ready to pay you. We hadn't even talked about that. And so, just off the cuff, I was like, well, you know, it's 100 bucks for the beta. We're not really sure how long the beta's going to be, but we'll make sure that you have access for as long as we're in beta. He's like, great, where do I send it? We don't have a bank account or anything like that. So, I was like, well, here's my PayPal address. So why don't you PayPal me some money?
And so that to me, that very first call, that actually was a moment where I was like, I think we've got something. Because I had that experience of trying to sell something that was slick. It was actually good. And I'm beating my head against the wall. And this was the exact opposite experience where I'm like, man, this product is rough. Like it is not that good. And yet, at the end, he was like ready to give me actual money in like the most janky way possible.
And so that's where I was like, holy cow, like I think if we actually can make this good, there might be something to this.
That's amazing. So, and as you're scaling this now we're out in California scaling, hopefully scaling here, how hard has it been going from one customer to 100 to 1,000 and so forth? Did you see peaks and valleys of that journey the whole time?
Well, you know, I think the interesting thing is once you have product market fit, once you feel like you have a repeatable go-to-market motion, you definitely have lots of problems. But they're different archetype problems. Yeah. You have all of the scaling problems. Like they're the good types of problems. You have problems of success. And so, our first decade was mostly filled with that kind of stuff. Problems of success. Where it's like, this thing worked and now people have a million and one feature requests. When are you going to integrate with this? When are you going to integrate with this? This app doesn't work quite so well. This is kind of buggy. This isn't working so well.
You're scaling the team. I can't find enough people in support. I can't find enough people in engineering. We're not hiring and onboarding fast enough. Then you got a team and it's like, well, this team doesn't know what that team is doing. This person doesn't get along with that person. Just all these types of things that just start to... you know, they're problems for sure, but they're the good kind of problems. You're like, oh, this stuff is working and so because it's working, we're inheriting all these other things. And so that was, I think, most of the experience of Zapier on the way from 100 customers to 1,000 customers to 10,000. And of course, there was different tactics that had to change at different altitudes. Like certain customer acquisition channels would get saturated. We'd have to do new ones to make up for that. But yeah, when you really get something that's working well, you're just trying to chase the ball rolling down the hill and your job is to keep up.
Well, that brings me to the next question is there's so many different ways that Zapier could have went, right? In terms of like, you know, getting a million and one product requests and there's especially with today a lot of ways that it can go. During that initial formation foundational period, how did you decide what not to chase and which lane to truly stay in?
Well, you know, I think the one I'll tell you the one I most regret. I think the thing that we resisted for a long time was how much do we want to make Zapier fit for the enterprise. And this was a place where I mean I live and breathe startups. I live and breathe small business. That's a thing that I understand. I feel it in my bones. I'm very passionate about. And you could feel it all across the internal DNA of the company.
And so we just resisted it. We're like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And truth be told, we should have actually said, no, you know what? We want to go support enterprise. And it took us, we probably should have started doing that in like 2017, 2018, etc. But it took us until probably 2021, 2022 to get serious about it. And look, Zapier is a fantastic platform for enterprises now. But I'm having to get out here and tell the story and tell people like, hey, this is not the Zapier you remember. This is a Zapier that you can push it. You can scale with it. You can go a lot further with it. And so, that's one where I do wish we would have jumped on it sooner. And in fact, most of the biggest regrets, I would say, are errors of omission. They're places where you sort of say, ah, I shouldn't have done that. Or I should have said yes to a thing when I actually said no.
Coulda, shoulda, woulda, you know?
Yeah, coulda, woulda, shoulda, but so far it's worked out for it. So, let's go back to your founders a little bit. What did each of you bring to the table? Like, how do you guys, have you been a good fit?
Yeah, I mean, Bryan, Mike, and I, we've always been a pretty good team. I think part of what made it work was one, sort of shared values, shared principles. Like, we're all kind of Midwestern, grew up in Missouri, just kind of cut from the same cloth, you know? Similar work ethics, all that sort of stuff.
From a skills perspective, I think the other thing that made it work really well was we had complementary skill sets, but yet enough overlap to appreciate each other's work. So, Bryan was the architect of Zapier. Like, he built all the hard infrastructure, technical challenges were his through and through. Mike was a great product thinker, solid front-end engineer, could build out all the UI experiences, all that sort of stuff. And I was your classic hustler. Like I was willing to do anything on marketing, sales, support, anything and everything.
