Hi, I'm Clayton Mas and on the Conquer the Chaos podcast, I talk with inspiring business owners about what it takes to build a great business and a great life. That means more money, more time, more control, more impact, more freedom. So keep listening to hear the tough lessons they learned so you don't have to repeat them.
Welcome everyone to this episode of the Conquer the Chaos podcast. I am Clayton Mas, co-founder and CEO of Keap and your host of the Conquer the Chaos podcast. Today, I'm really excited because we're going to talk about one of the things that's near and dear to my heart, one of the keys to success for entrepreneurs: automation. And who better to talk about automation for small businesses than Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, longtime partner of Keap, and longtime friend of the company. Wade, great to have you with us.
Yeah, I am stoked to be here, Clay. Thanks for having me.
For those who have been under a rock, or don't know what Zapier is, or who call it Zapier by the way, tell us a little bit more about Zapier so that everybody listening knows what it does.
Yeah. Zapier is an automation platform that helps you automate big chunks of your work. You can use it across any part of your line of business. A lot of folks use it for marketing and sales automation, but there's a lot of back-office automation that people are doing for project management and things like that. We started as a big integration library where you could connect tools, and then we quickly realized that it's not just integration that folks are really after. The integration is a toehold to this bigger problem, which is that people are doing a lot of manual, dirty work inside these businesses. If they had software that really helped them streamline the work, and it was easy to do, they'd automate a lot more. So we've been investing a ton in automation over the course of the last five or six years to make it easier for folks to get rid of big chunks of labor inside the organization and allow them to focus on more creative endeavors.
Well, we love what you guys do at Zapier. So many of our customers use Zapier to advance their automation. And if two automation company CEOs got together and didn't talk about automation as one of the six keys to success, I think everybody would wonder what the heck is going on. So we will definitely talk about automation and the use cases and how automation changes the lives of entrepreneurs. I say all the time that automation is the great game changer for small businesses. It's the thing that puts hours back in the day, enables small businesses to get out of the business of trading hours for dollars, and get the freedom they want, not so beholden to the business. And yet, years down the road from when we started our automation companies, many small businesses still think it's a pipe dream. They still think automation is impersonal, technical, and out of reach for them. So today, we're going to talk about the use cases of automation, how to make it more accessible, friendly, and desirable for people to use it, because it will put hours back in your day and enable you to achieve the freedom you want. Let me share one little fun fact as we start. Some people may not know that years ago, when we were at Infusionsoft, we kicked off a Battle of the Apps contest at one of our conferences. This was all these different apps in the ecosystem, and the winner of that first year was Zapier. You guys were the winners, and it was the beginning of a partnership for us that we've been working on together for many years. So thank you for the years. I don't remember what year that was. Do you?
I want to say it was 2012. I remember too because we had about five full-time employees at the time, and the gentleman who built the then-Infusionsoft integration with Zapier was actually a part-time contractor. So when you shared that we were going to win this award, I said, "Well, I need to invite him out to come, because he built it, he did all the work, etc." And he was like, "Well, I've got this full-time day job, it's kind of weird for me to take off." And we had been very meticulous with our money and didn't like to spend a lot, but we were kind of at that point where I thought we could probably hire another person. So when he said that, I said, "Well, would it help if you just worked for us full-time?" And he said, "I think it would." So that's how that guy got a job offer.
That's awesome. I never heard that. That's so great. I love it. Well, let's talk about automation. Why don't you take just a second and share why you believe small businesses—and I know you guys do automation for more than just small businesses, but I think we share a common overlap in that we do it for small businesses—why do you believe that small businesses don't use automation like they ought to?
I think it's probably a couple of things. One is that a lot of small business owners didn't start their business out of a deep-seated love of technology. They started it because they loved gardening and wanted to start a gardening business, or they loved making tacos so they started a taco truck, or they loved selling insurance or whatever. So the technology side of it felt like a necessary evil. So there's a passion challenge for a lot of these folks. And then I think there's an impostor syndrome bit that comes with that, where they think this stuff is pretty technical and they're not sure, and that creates an activation energy hurdle. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, when you and I were starting, the technical hurdles were pretty real. It required somebody willing to roll their sleeves up and learn it. But candidly, 15 years later, you have to learn a few things, but the tooling is really good now. With what's capable with AI too, a lot of times you can just ask the AI, "Hey, I run a gardening business, what are 10 ways I can add automation to my business?" And the AI will give you 10 ideas. They're not going to be the most creative, but they'll give you really good starter ideas, and you'll probably look at them and say, "Well, these three I think I could probably do. That feels right in my wheelhouse." That's often the best way for folks to get started: just break it down to the simple stuff and ask, "Is there a way to simplify this little bit?" You don't have to start with complicated machine learning algorithms. Most people start with, "I'm collecting leads on my website. Sure would be nice if those landed in my CRM, or if I got a text message whenever somebody important came in." So you can start with this pretty basic stuff.
Totally. That's what we see too. We see that people are driven to it more by the pain they're experiencing, the frustration, the menial nature of the work, or the pain of waste—dollars wasted, hours wasted. Small businesses are doing their thing like you said. They have their passion, and they don't even realize that this time and money they're wasting could be addressed. Then it gets to a point where the pain gets acute, and they say, "Okay, hold on. We spent this much money on this marketing campaign and a lot of the leads are slipping through the cracks. If we could just improve the conversion." Or they're hiring people and putting a lot of dollars and hours behind tasks that need to be done. So we find it's the pain that usually gets them to finally go, "Okay, what can I automate?" Most of the time in our experience, people do that in the marketing arena first because it's where it gets the most acute. You spend money on leads, you're trying to generate new customers, and you realize there's a lot of loss there. But I really appreciate your point that there's so much that can be automated, and it's a matter of asking yourself, "What am I doing over and over again?" If you're doing it over and over each week, multiple times a day or multiple times a week, that's a pretty good indicator it could be automated. So let's go to what you see as the most common things. I definitely see on the marketing side, and maybe you see something similar, but where do you see people start to dip their toe in and then go, "Oh, wow, this is amazing"? I'm sure you guys say something similar to what Scott and I have said forever: once entrepreneurs get a taste of automation, it becomes addictive. They start to look at what else they can automate across their business. What are some of the areas where you see people jump in, the use cases that cause the light bulbs to go on?
Yeah, I think like you, marketing automation is probably the one that is most earliest recognized. A lot of times the tooling is better for folks in that realm, and it's often the area that has the fewest engineers attached. So it's prone for a smart, savvy person to sit down and go, "Hmm, what else could I do here?" And to your point, there are actual real dollars lost if you do this poorly. Your conversion rates will be bad, you'll let money slip through the cracks, so there's this drive to make it work better. Within marketing, the most obvious starting spot is around lead generation, lead management, and follow-up lead follow-up. That whole pipeline has a bunch of touch points that are really useful. On Zapier, a lot of folks will have a form on their website, or they're using Facebook Lead Ads, Google Lead Ads, or LinkedIn Lead Ads. They're spending money on those platforms to drive leads their way, and the first question is, "Well, now what are you going to do with it?" The basic one could be, "Just text me when I have a lead so I can call them right away." That can be a simple one if you have low lead volume. As you start to get more leads, you might need to store them somewhere, so you move to a CRM to manage and keep up to date with them. Then you might want to know more about these people, so you do lead enrichment through a service like Clearbit to get their title, company, and other info. Now you have more things in your CRM to work with. Then you can start running a whole campaign off of this. We had a customer, Sticky Chin at Runway, who set up a really cool one. His website started to go viral, and he went from barely getting any leads to getting dozens every minute. He was like, "I know what I can do. I'm going to run this through Clearbit to enrich the lead, then I'm going to send a note to ChatGPT to tell me if it's a free email address or not. Based on all the lead enrichment and if it's a business email address, I'm going to have ChatGPT write the email I want to send to the customer." He fed it all this information and told ChatGPT, "You're an expert sales rep trying to sell this. Be direct and follow these brand guidelines. Don't get cute, clever, or cringe." He gave it all the guidance and instructions. Then he said, "I don't want you to actually send the email out right away. I want you to drop it as a draft inside Gmail, because I'm not ready to have every bit of this automated. I want to go there first." So him and his two sales reps would wake up, see a bunch of drafts ready to go, quickly review, send them out, and get off to the races. I bet over time, he'll start to realize that most of the time he's just pressing send without any edits. Then all of a sudden, you realize that this automation is not only as good as a human, but it's way faster too. You can follow up with customers way quicker than you could with a human. Automation is the only way they could scale. They could throw more bodies at the problem, but costs go up, and they'd have to raise prices. So automation becomes a strategic advantage to sell, and it can all start with that basic idea of, "If I get a lead, maybe I should text myself." You can see the stages of that funnel getting more sophisticated as the company grows.
