Zapier's Compounding Advantage | Founders Network

Claude Code, that feels like a bicycle for the mind. I feel like I got the wind at my back. I'm just sailing here. And even when we have problems, it's like, no biggie, let's just try again. And it's just kind of off to the races. It's incredible.

Yeah, so I grew up in central Missouri, Jefferson City, Missouri, kind of a slow, old school government city. It's the capital of Missouri. Not a lot changes there. It's not exactly like a pinnacle of industry. The big employers are the state government, the school system, the hospital system, things like that. It's not like there's a lot of commerce or industry going on there. And so I kind of had what I felt like was a pretty just normal, you know, middle class, middle of the country childhood upbringing. And, you know, ended up going to school at University of Missouri 30 miles north. And, you know, not really very certain of like, what I wanted to do. Entrepreneurship was not exactly on my radar. But, you know, I knew I liked math and science. And so I, you know, went to school to get an engineering degree. And, you know, during school was the great financial crisis. And I was a junior when that happened. I was always a good student. But I remember that summer going to try and get an internship, a job, et cetera, and just nobody would hire anyone. Didn't matter how good of a student you were. It didn't matter if you had good grades or anything like that. They just didn't want anything to do unless you were, you know, exceptional in some degree. I never quite figured out exactly what it was, but it was not me. I'll tell you that.

So, you know, I, but at the time, you know, I was starting to, you know, like Facebook had come out, like I was starting to be like more online, you know, and I kind of came across this idea of, you know, you can build a website and you can put like AdWords on it and like, maybe you can make money on the internet that way. Like, that's kind of interesting. So there's like kind of some mathy stuff around marketing that was like interesting. And lo and behold, I found this tiny little startup in Columbia, Missouri that was run by a professor at the university. They were looking for somebody to do marketing. I don't think they knew what marketing meant, which was great for me because they didn't know how to evaluate if you were good at marketing or not. And for whatever reason, they thought, you know, hey, let's take a bet on this kid. And, you know, I got to work out of the professor's house. There was like seven of us. I was like, oh my gosh, this is nuts. You can just like put a thing on the internet and someone halfway across the world can find it and pay you money for it. Like that's real. That's a real thing you can do. You know, the act of building websites, building software, marketing software, the whole thing was just very, very interesting to me. And so I started to learn to code, learn to design, learn to do all this stuff. I'm not sure I ever got particularly good at any of it, but I just loved all of it and I was wanting to get good at it. And from that, I ended up reaching out to an acquaintance of mine that was at, I had known through the University of Missouri jazz program. So both him and I played music, we played jazz. I played sax, he played bass and guitar. And he was the only person in town that I knew that was not only building software, but was also trying to build companies. Like he had built some sites, he built some stuff, he was making money, et cetera. And I was like, hey, like, I want to learn from you. Like, show me what you're doing. I want to like teach me this stuff. And the trade was they needed a saxophone player for their band. So he says, yeah, I'll do that if you come play my quartet. And so I was like, sure, sign me up. Let's go do it. And so that started what's now been a lifelong friendship between Brian and I, where we just spent all the time gigging around town, playing music, building side projects, building sites. He brought me over to the, there was a mortgage company in town that was one of the fastest growing companies in Columbia. We started working there together. And one day he messaged me the idea for what eventually became Zapier, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Right. And so there's this technical academic term of bricolage, right? Kind of marshaling resources you don't control or direct, like trading saxophone for the band is a great example of like, okay, cool. I'll do that. And then you help me with the startup and then it builds and grows into something from there. Yeah, I mean, I think there's just a lot to be said around spending time with interesting people who are doing things that you think are interesting too. And for a lot of folks, I think that probably happens at work. You're in and around people who are working on the same things as you, but what are you doing outside of work? Where are you spending your time? If all you're doing is just sitting around watching football games, which don't get me wrong, I like watching football games too, you're probably not increasing the surface area of people that you're meeting and doing interesting things and working on interesting things with them.

So we're at the mortgage company and Brian, you know, he's, we're using a lot of the early software as a service platforms, you know, we're fans of like Mailchimp and Basecamp and things like that. So we're just kinda, we're all just kinda poking around and seeing what they're doing. And Brian noticed this trend, which if you would go to their community forums and look through common requests that would pop up almost everywhere, you would see the same flavor of question, which was, when will you integrate with X? And the threads always followed a very similar format. It would be a bunch of customers saying, plus one, me too, I really want this. And then eventually, there would be a product manager that would chime in and say, hey, folks, thanks for the suggestion. We really appreciate the feedback. We're going to take a look at this and see what we can do. Which if you worked inside these companies, you know is code for probably not going to happen. He messages me, and he's like, hey, I think we can make a really simple way for business users, non-technical folks, to build integrations between the SaaS that they're using. And I jumped at this because my day job, I'm working with the Marketo API, doing email marketing. And I'm not a particularly good engineer at this point, never was. But the Marketo API is this old school Soap, WSDL, API, the documentation is in a PDF. Needless to say, I'm not having a very good time. And so if the thing that Brian was talking about existed, I'd be like, I'd just use that. That would be a better path for us. And so it just so happened that there was a startup weekend that was coming up around the corner. And Brian took the idea to that event. We teamed up with Mike, our other co-founder. And we built the first prototype of the product in 54 hours that weekend. Had a ton of fun. They had some prizes and stuff. We ended up winning the competition. But after the weekend, we're like, well, do we want to keep doing this? What do you want to do? And our perspective was like, this was a lot of fun. Let's just keep working on it. Now, we're in central Missouri, mind you. So we're not in situation where you raise your million dollar seed round, you quit your jobs, you just go all in and make this thing happen. That's kind of not like the environment we're in. And so we just looked at each other and said, OK, we'll just do this nights and weekends. So Brian and I have jobs, Mike's still in school. We would, you know, many nights we just meet up at get takeout Chinese, meet up at six o'clock, six thirty or whatever. And then we'd work till midnight one, two a.m. on Zapier. And then we kind of rinse, wash and repeat for months, honestly, is kind of the approach until we had a prototype ready that we felt we could launch.

Yeah, well, I think constraints breed a lot of creativity, and they act as a forcing function to really understand your stuff. I see a lot of founders that will hire really fast, thinking, I need more people to execute on my idea. And what happens is, when you hire all those people, you actually don't learn as fast. When you are forced to do the whole business, build the product, sell the product, market the product, support the product, et cetera, you really understand what makes it special and what makes it click. And then once you understand it, it makes it more obvious where you could use people to help grow the business and help it be more successful. I think I see a lot of folks get that equation backwards where they think I'm going to bring in people to build the business. And I'm like, well, you build the business. You bring in people to scale what you know about the business. But it's real tempting. Companies are hard. All this stuff is hard. And you're like, well, shoot, if I just had one magical person who could come in and handle this, that, or the other, then everything would be different. And generally, I don't find that to be true. I find the magical person is it's you, your co-founder. You are the people that have to bring this idea to life. You have to will it to existence.

We ended up going full-time three, four months in. And, you know, I had my boss at the day job noticed that, you know, perhaps I was a little sleepy during the day and not exactly performing to the highest of my abilities. And so he had came in and was like, hey, Wade, like, you know, he's the owner of the company. He's like, look, you know, if your heart's set on this thing, like, you should go do that thing. So I kind of got a little nudge from him, which was helpful in hindsight. And then we ended up applying to YC, got accepted into YC for the Summer 12 batch. And so Brian and Mike went full time just before that. So that was kind of the impetus for going full time, was we now had like a little bit of money to be able to...

You know, when we got, so we applied to YC twice. First time was right after startup weekend. We got straight rejected because we didn't have anything except for very bare bones prototype. Six months later, we applied again. This time we had about 10,000 people on a launch list. We had a thousand people who had paid us money to get access to the beta. And in that a thousand people, we had a number of YC companies who, when we went to go apply again, we just said, Hey, like, you know, if you like our stuff, could you recommend us? Could you give advice on the application? Could you just kind of guide us through and help us do a good job of this? And I think that probably helped our odds. That plus like we just shown a lot of progress. Like the first time around we were three random people in the middle of the country. This time it's six months of progress. It's like, oh, these people will do what they say they will do.

YC always felt a little different. Big fans of Paul Graham, his essays, read Hacker News a lot. It didn't feel like traditional venture capital to us. It felt like just a different beast. And we did feel like one way YC could help us was a little bit of a badge of approval because the product we were building required so many integrations with people that were based in the Bay Area. And now many of these folks had open APIs and good documentation and we could just go use those anywhere in the world. But there were some companies, some larger ones that had red tape and bureaucracy and you kind of had to like prove yourself a little bit. And we were like, man, it'd be nice if there was somebody who could vouch for us and say, hey, like these folks are legit. And that ended up actually playing out. As soon as we got accepted in, I remember shooting PG an email and saying, hey, we're stuck on this random big tech company everyone has heard of. And he fired off an email. And 24 hours later, yeah.