This Trio Built Zapier One of the Biggest Tech Companies To Automate Workflow

Welcome back to Founder Mindset.

Today I came up with another awesome founder story. The aim is to help you guys learn something useful to implement in your side hustle, business, or idea.

Today I am going to talk about Zapier, a company considering getting web apps to “talk to each other”?

The above 3 fellas are the founders of this company. In June 2011, they created a prototype of Zapier in just two days at a weekend hackathon.

Since then the company:

Here’s how it all started, let’s deep dive into their amazing story.

Back in 2009, Wade Foster (person in the middle) was doing his day job but wanted to start his own company. He didn’t know if he had the skills at 24 years old to make it happen.

Around the same time, Foster also re-connected with college jazz enthusiast, and friend, Bryan Helmig (person on the right). They began freelancing together in their spare time while pitching ideas back and forth.

After spending 8 months manually forcing emails, databases, and customer loans to sync, the big idea eventually came!

For this, the duo then recruited Mike Knoop, another friend from college, and Zapier was born.

For the next 6 months, they balanced their day jobs and late-night coding sessions up until 3 AM. Finally, they made the prototype in a startup weekend hackathon.

While Helmig and Knoop were iterating the prototype, Wade started marketing it.

He visited help forums of popular products like Evernote, Salesforce, and Dropbox to see what integrations customers were requesting.

However, Wade knew this growth strategy was not scalable. So, he scheduled as many Skype calls as possible and asked customers which products they wanted to integrate and would manually assist with each one.

These calls began to take shape in Zapier’s culture of customer support.

The earliest versions of Zapier broke all the time, but it was a learning experience. Wade sat with every customer who complained throughout the call and made the problem get fixed.

That level of service for early customers surprised a lot of people.

Because their customer relationship was great, they got people to pay to try their unfinished product. The reason behind this was that the team at Zapier wanted serious customers who gave them specific feedback on which things weren’t working out.

After talking to tons of folks, the trio had improved the UI and UX so they didn’t have to manually onboard people anymore. People figured out how to use the thing.

About that same time was when they’d applied and gotten into YC Summer 2012. The three co-founders quit their day jobs. For the next three months, the trio did nothing other than write code, build products, and talk to users.

To scale Zapier to the next level, the trio started focusing on getting more apps. The idea was if they had an integration for an app, that opened up a new potential market for them.

Hence they invested heavily in the developer platform and onboarded as many apps as they could.

The team found a way to use SEO to capture traffic, setting up landing pages for as many app-to-app connections as possible so that Zapier would show up in search results as shown below:

They had a landing page for every integration Zapier supports. As they added more and more apps, there were N plus one more opportunities for landing pages.

One thing that made early inroads for Zapier and continues to do so today is how they put customers at their highest priority. Recently customers requested Zapier to start charging “pay-per-task” instead of only monthly subscriptions.

And they did just that:

Everyone at Zapier has a common job, which is customer support.

The benefit of having everyone (even engineers) spending time speaking to customers directly sharpened their product thinking.

The team became far more customer-centric since day 1 and the culture continues to thrive.