How Zapier Went from Zero to 600k Users

https://www.groovehq.com/blog/zapier-interview-with-wade-foster

by gk1 • 11 years ago

192 39 11 years ago

minimaxir• 11 years ago

It should be noted that Zapier is (YC S12).

Zapier started at my hometown Startup Weekend! Stoked these dudes are getting the attention they deserve. They're great guys.

zschuessler• 11 years ago

Columbia's Startup Weekend is gaining much attention lately from out-of-towners. I was surprised to see my friends in other states RSVPing to attend, recently.

Cool to see CoMo get attention!

(Also.. hey Bobby! Hope you're doing well in the big city!)

gleb2• 11 years ago

Zapier really does have great support.

When you use them for something, and then a direct integration becomes available you actually feel bad about stopping using Zapier. I think this is largely because of the quality of their support.

If you are a startup and you don't have your founders and engineers doing support, I guarantee you - you are pissing off your customers. And are missing an opportunity to understand what these customers actually want.

I am looking at you FullContact, my current favorite offender here.

ryanSrich2• 11 years ago

+1 on Zapier support. They were super quick when I was having an issue of not seeing a github repo in my available repos.

Disruptive_Dave• 11 years ago

+ another 1. They held my hand on a Mailchimp integration that was not intuitive at all. Very helpful, and makes me want to stick with them more than any advertising will ever do.

lloyddobbler• 11 years ago

Hey, gleb - Kipp from FullContact here. Sorry if our support team wasn't able to address your needs - that's something we never want to hear. Mind dropping me a line at kipp@fullcontact.com and letting me know what the issue is? I'd like to look into it and see what we can do to make things right.

(And agreed, Zapier support is awesome. Wade and the rest of the team do great work.)

Xorlev• 11 years ago

Echoing this, early engineer at FullContact here -- I'd love to know what kinds of problems you ran into with our support team. More often than not, if the issue isn't trivially answerable the support team asks us directly.

We'd both be happy to address your concerns.

vosper• 11 years ago

I used Zapier to set up an automatic reminder on Hipchat for developers to shut down unused AWS machines. It was dead simple, took about 5 minutes, and has worked flawlessly ever since.

benbristow• 11 years ago

What's the difference between Zapier and IFTTT? They seem pretty similar.

MrDrone• 11 years ago

Zapier has a much heavier focus on business apps. Less internet of things, more workflows and invoices.

ryanSrich2• 11 years ago

More enterprise focused. They have better support (because you pay them) and more integrations. You also get more control over your integrations as well.

ultimape2• 11 years ago

For me it's that Zapier has a lot more control over the integration logic - Being able to conditionally operate on Trello fields and Google Sheets columns makes automation much more doable. To me it's like an advanced for of IFTTT when you need that extra power.

I still use IFTTT a lot for device to device work. But for APIs I find Zapier much more comprehensive.

jonkiddy• 11 years ago

I use IFTTT for non-work related personal tasks; mostly moving pictures around and some social media stuff. I use Zapier for business tasks.

ssharp• 11 years ago

I found Zapier by searching for integrations available to the enterprise email marketing platform we use. Unfortunately, they don't support it and I never got to use them in production, but from just toying around with it, it looks extremely useful.

eric_bullington• 11 years ago

Out of curiosity, which platform is that? If they have a standard REST API, hooking it up to Zapier is pretty simple.

cableshaft• 11 years ago

I remember a client at a previous job claiming an app we were developing for them was definitely going to get "millions of users" in only three weeks after release, even with a small marketing budget. I laughed at how crazy unrealistic that was.

I bet they would look at these numbers and scoff, even though it's still an excellent number and I know they didn't even breach 50k users several months after release (I was no longer on the project after that point).

mikeknoop• 11 years ago

The success metrics are quite different for consumer vs business software even though Zapier does ride that line a bit.

Consumer apps tend to care about raw user counts (as a sign of engagement) and B2B software companies focus on paying users.

mmaunder3• 11 years ago

It would be great to get a big list of growth stories, each in 255 characters or less. e.g. Went viral with free web widget, made zero money, realized growth without revenue sucks, pivoted.

dmix• 11 years ago

...why? At least a paragraph would be needed to have some substance and accuracy.

mmaunder3• 11 years ago

Nah. The essence of most growth stories can be described in less than 255 chars. I just described one of mine above.

myth_buster• 11 years ago

It's like design patterns where couple of words would encapsulate a lot of information. If they do anything novel then they would need a bigger book(boat).

russtrotter• 11 years ago

+1 on Zapier! I'm a big fan of the service and platform. With YC news a more tech-focused crowd their web interface for building integrations is really effective. Point-n-click for most stuff, and you can fallback to JS should you need to get more creative.

zemanel• 11 years ago

Zapier is really a great product with a cool bunch of smart people behind it. I freelanced consulting for Zapier customers for a while and can tell you there's some companies solving real business problems elegantly besides notifications, like Salesforce to Salesforce and 3rd party APIs

mooreds2• 11 years ago

I have used and recommended zapier a number of time and actually wrote some custom code to integrate with another startup (Lob): http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1468

My favorite Zapier story, though, reflects how accessible they are. My company has a FAC, and we had just started using Zapier (this was probably 2 years ago). No one knew how to pronounce Zapier, so tweeted Wade and before the FAC was over, had an answer. Obviously a trivial question, but indicative of how they treat customers.

The article has some good actionable advice too.

morgante• 11 years ago

FAC?

georgiecasey• 11 years ago

http://www.acronymfinder.com/FAC.html

i can't guess from that. friday afternoon club? if i was pushed to guess from the context. i'm bemused how anyone can use an acronym like that twice and expect everyone to know what it means. or maybe it's just me and you!

samcheng• 11 years ago

Friday Afternoon Codeathon?

mooreds2• 11 years ago

Friday afternoon club, aka beer Friday aka sit around and catch up over a beer with others at the company.

ilurk• 11 years ago

This article was a great read, full of little nuggets. I highly recommend reading it.

It was also interesting seeing that he really applied Kevin's advice and philosophy (check Kevin's talk for the YC Start a Startup).

welder• 11 years ago

So we come to our partners and we can now say “alright, here are the things that if we both do them, this is going to be successful.” 99% of the time, people are like “thank goodness, let’s do this.”

Would be great to see some examples of these successful marketing campaigns.

hu_me• 11 years ago

they have a pretty detailed guide here with some partner examples https://zapier.com/help/partner-co-marketing-guide/

arthens• 11 years ago

I've used zapier recently and I've found it pretty convenient. My only complain is that their RSS integration lacks the concept of rate limiting. In my case I was using it to process user-events, so I needed a way to introduce some delay between an event an another, but I couldn't find a way of doing it using zapier.

littlewing• 11 years ago

This is the number one best startup story I've ever heard. The keys I got out of it: (1) focus on the customer and the product not the culture itself, (2) charge and make money even if it takes bucking the norm, (3) have work-life balance as part of culture, (4) it's a blessing not to get funded too early, (5) remote workers are acceptable, (6) team building via getting together is very important, (7) use SEO and partner co-marketing.

If I could find anything wrong with this post, it would be that generating content is not always a good idea unless you know what you are doing. Many people can't do it well. It's like telling random people: "Go play some songs for us and then people will listen to your mp3s and you'll get more business." Well... yeah... if you are entertaining enough. Otherwise, it's just going to make you look bad.

How Zapier Went from Zero to 600k Users

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