Automation Made Easy with Zapier, Wade Foster CEO – HGG181

This is the Average Guy Network, and you have found Home Gadget Geek, show number 181, recorded on August 21st, 2014. Here at Home Gadget Geeks, we cover all your favorite tech gadgets, find their way into your home, news, reviews, product updates, and conversation, all for the average tech guy. I'm your host, Jim Collison, broadcasting live from the Average Guy at Heaton Studios here in a blustery, very warm Bellevue, Nebraska. It's a typical August here, and we post the show with world-class show notes each week out at theaverageguy.tv. If you have questions, comments, or contributions, You can contact the show, just send me an email, jim@theaverageguy.tv. Track me down on Twitter, and many of you have, @jcallison. And now you can call in those questions as well. Still looking for those calls. If you want to call them in, 402-478-8450, and we'll play those questions or those comments right here on the show. Love to have them. And now Home Gadget Geeks is a part of the Geeks Network. Find the links to this show and many other great podcasts out at thegeeksnetwork.com. Join us in chat. Watch or listen live on YouTube and on Spreaker and find all the navigation over at theaverageguy.tv. Alright, we've got a show I've been waiting for for a while. We've been working with Zapier, or I've been working with Zapier as an automation tool over the last, oh, 2 or 3 months. And so I reached out to them and contacted them and asked them if they'd come on the show, and they said yes. And so Wade Foster, I want to welcome you to Home Gadget Geeks. Thanks for coming out.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jim.

Good to have you. Before we jump into that, Christian also asked me— typically, you know, we give him some time off in the summer, and he's super busy with Cyber Frontiers, but when he heard we were having Zapier on, he said, "I absolutely want to be here." So Christian, thanks for coming on Home Gadget Geeks.

Yeah, good to be here and looking forward to it, especially as, you know, I've dabbled with Zapier on some other projects, so it'll be fun to see where it's come along.

Very good. Well, Wade Foster, we want to kick it over to you a little bit. I've got the screen up, and we're going to talk about what I do Zapier in a little bit and have you walk us through kind of best practices and some of those things. I'll walk through some of the stuff I've done. But tell us a little bit about Zapier. You know, all these Silicon Valley startups, they've got a story behind them. So tell us kind of where did it come from, why does it exist, who started it, those kinds of things.

Sure. So I started it with two of my friends. We're just Midwest geeks, if you will, I guess. So we were all born and raised in Missouri, met each other in school at the University of Missouri. Then afterwards, you know, we were working at various startups in town and doing contracting. And one of the things that a lot of small businesses in particular struggle with is, you know, automation process. They've got, you know, okay tools. They're using things like MailChimp and Woofu and Twitter and Facebook and all these different software in their companies, but they don't really work nicely together. And so we were doing a lot of things for these businesses like Hey, can you take my Google contacts and put them in a Mailchimp list for me? Or can you set it up so that like, uh, you know, anytime I post something to YouTube, it goes to Twitter for me, right? Um, and that's like not very fun work for an engineer to do because it's kind of grunt work, but it's really valuable to a business. So we were trying to figure out, hey, how can we build a tool that puts that power in the end user's hand? And Zapier is basically what that has become.

And what was the— so how long ago did you start that? How long and why a move to Silicon Valley? I mean, I could probably guess that, but—

Yeah.

But, yeah, how long ago?

You bet. So we started about 3 years ago, October 4th, 2011 in Missouri. And, you know, it was a side project for us at first. Nights and weekends we'd work on it. And over time, I guess about 6 months, we've gotten a lot of people interested in it. There was over like 10,000 people that had tried or was interested in trying the software. And so, you know, we felt like we really had something on our hands and thought we could, you know, make a go of it. Of course, all these tech companies are in Silicon Valley, so a move to Silicon Valley seemed like the smart move for us.

Pretty, pretty scary to pick up everything, kind of chance on it and head out to, you know, it's a little bit like The Grapes of Wrath, you know, you're headed out to California to start anew. Is that a pretty scary experience or exciting or what?

Yeah, I think a little bit of both. You know, we applied to Y Combinator, which is an accelerator out here. It's funded companies like Dropbox, Reddit, Heroku, Stripe, some companies you may have heard of. And so we were accepted into that, which made the transition a little bit easier, though I did end up having to be away from my wife for about 2 or 3 months, which was definitely, you know, challenging. But on the whole, it's been a It's been a fun ride and we're really glad we did it.

Any, any sticker shock for you when you got out to the Bay Area? I still have a lot of friends. I graduated from high school out there. A lot of friends, pretty, pretty, you know, it's pretty expensive, right?

Yeah.

I mean, especially when it comes to like real estate housing is it's ridiculous.

Yeah. Well, it sounds like you got settled in. You're in, you're in the Mountain View area. Are you with this incubator? Do they, do they provide space for you and all in that kind of stuff? Is that how it works?

Nope, it's just mentorship, a little bit of money, but mostly the network. Honestly, there's about 900 founders that are involved with it. A lot of them have moved on to work at, you know, big tech companies, and so the network is pretty important. Otherwise, we're on our own.

Well, it's, uh, congratulations for making it this far on your own. One of the things that separates you from If This Then That is that you guys charge and they don't. And so I'm kind of wondering, how's that model going for you? I always like companies that charge in some ways because you know they probably have a chance of being around as opposed to those that don't. I'm still not seeing a monetization option for If This Then That. So talk a little bit about that. How's that going for you, pulling on subscribers?

Sure. I mean, one, we're profitable, so that's great, right? Like we know we're going to be able to be around for a long time. The reason we decided to do it was because we were our 3 Missouri guys when we started. There was no, like, funding seemed like an impossible option for us. So we figured, like, we got to find a way to make this, you know, something that people— make it useful to people and make it useful for them to pay money for it. So that's the approach we've always taken is how can we build a tool that makes it, you know, makes someone excited to pay for it.

Very cool. If you just jumped in, we're talking with Wade from Zapier, Z-A-P-I-E-R. That is an unusual name. Where did that— where'd that come from? How'd you guys come up with that?

Yeah, so we— Zapier got started at a startup weekend in Columbia, Missouri. That's where the very first bits of code were written. And we actually came up with the name in about 5 minutes, but it wasn't Zapier. We came up with the name Snappier. So S-N-A-P-I-E-R. So Snaps instead of Zaps. Um, basically we wanted to fit API in the word because Zapier is powered by APIs, all these open APIs— application programming interface, for those of you who are unfamiliar. It's how two software programs can talk to each other. And so we're like, API, well, hey, we can fit an ER on the end of it. What words can we make out of that, right? And Snapier was available, so we bought it and 5 minutes, decision was made. Then about 2 weeks later, we came across a company with Snaps and some similar stuff. So we're like, hey, we better just change it. And Zaps was available. And so we did that. And that was the— that's the story.

And so from that, from a nomenclature standpoint, when we talk about, you know, what you're setting up, those Zaps are the kind of the— and, you know, I hate to use the word recipe because that's what the other ones use, right? But, but Zaps are those formulas. That's just— let's use that, right? The formulas that that you set up to make a combination between one web service and another. And then you've landed on a very boring tasks, which count those to get those done. What are you seeing, certainly talk a little bit about your pricing structure. You do have a free plan, but talk a little bit about your premium offerings.

Sure. So the free plan is, you know, meant for most consumers. They can dip their toes in the water. They can use it and they never have to pay. Pay any amount of money. Once you tip over to like some serious usage, you're probably gonna fall into our paid plans, which range from about $10 to $100 a month depending on, you know, when you signed up and what's available on the site today. The one interesting thing that we do have is around premium services. So there's some services like things like Salesforce or QuickBooks or that are definitive business services that we do charge for no matter what. So if you're going to create an integration between them, you have to be on a paid plan.

I lost that last part. If you're going to be on a service, we just, we just had a little skip on you.

Oh, sorry. So basically there are some services on Zapier that we label as premium. Those are like definitively business apps, things like Salesforce, QuickBooks, things that a business would use, right? And so those we slap a premium label on them and you have to be on a paid plan for Zapier to create integrations between them.

Okay. And, and so starting at the first premium starts at $10. Did you guys just lower your prices or did I— was I mistaken that I thought it was $15 for some reason?

So we, we do have a $10 a month plan available right now.

Okay.

Uh, I don't know how long it'll stay, but it is available.

Was it $15? Was it $15 before?

It was $15. Uh, we changed it about a week or two ago. We lowered the price, lowered the task limits a little bit. Um, just trying out a different pricing to see what folks like the most.

Okay. So as a subscriber, as the 50, I think I'm in at 15 at this point. Did my, did my plan stay the same?

Plan stayed the same for you for the time being.

Yeah.

And I think for that $10 a month, it looks like you get 20 different zaps and about 2,500 tasks. I think I was 20 zaps with maybe 3,000 or something like that.

Okay.

Yeah. It looks like you're at 3,200 right now.

Maybe something like that. And I did some bonus. You have some ways of giving away some bonus. Zaps that I think I took advantage of, or bonus tasks that I took advantage of. Business goes to $50 a month and you get up to 50 Zaps, and then you got a Business Plus plan at $100. What, what are you seeing from your subscribers and in your usage? Certainly you're kind of looking— what's kind of the sweet spot for your average customer that's there? I mean, how many— when we talk about Zaps and tasks, what's the sweet spot?

Yeah, it depends, right? There's some Some people have what I like to call high volume usage even though it's not a lot of Zaps. So say you're like doing kind of basic Twitter monitoring and you want to track every mention of a brand, right? So anytime someone mentions the brand Microsoft on Twitter, like that's going to happen quite a lot, but it may only be one— it's only one Zap. So there's a lot of task volume there. Then there's other scenarios where you might have a lot of Zaps set up. Say you're doing a lot of lead generation and you have, you know, a whole bunch of different forms across a bunch of different websites. You might have, you know, 10, 20, 30, you know, Zaps set up for all those different forms. And then maybe times 2 or 3 depending on where you want to send that form data to. If you want to send it to a CRM or email marketing software, you want to send it to a spreadsheet, do you want to get email alerts? All those kind of act as multipliers for the number of Zaps you might create.

And I know, you know, when we talk about consumer versus enterprise, I mean enterprise really is what brings home the bacon, so to speak, a lot of times. Are you getting a decent amount of enterprise work versus consumer work? Is it split evenly or are you heavy on one side or the other?

So our real sweet spot is small business, honestly. So we have users that span the whole range. So we do have consumers using it. We do have Fortune 500 companies using quite a lot actually, but the sweet spot is definitely in the small business user who is, you know, they've, they've got their business set up and running and they just need some help on the software side to get some stuff done. They can, you know, pay Zapier $15 a month and not have to hire another intern and manage an intern or, you know, they can handle a lot of these tasks in an automated, high-quality Way.

Yeah, no, and that's what I found is they're just easy to set up. And so where typically you'd have to pay somebody to write something in a web server and whatever, you guys are handling all that and, and it's a couple clicks. I'm going to bring up my— and I think I'm okay by bringing up my, my dashboard. I don't think there's anything here that if anybody sees it can do anything with it, at least at this point. But no, a pretty simple, pretty simple— this is my dashboard, a pretty simple look at that. With my zaps, and I've even got one zap turned off down there. Christian and I, at one point I was trolling Twitter for the #cybersecurity, and then I was automatically tweeting back to them, "Hey, come watch our new Cyber Frontiers podcast," which works really great as long as you only put #cybersecurity in the tweet one time, but if that hashtag keeps happening, the zap keeps happening, right? And so there's a little bit of danger. I think that's actually when I tweeted you guys, it was about that. I'm like, Oh man, you can get yourself in real trouble if you're not really careful with that. Do you have— when we talk about those kind of things, do you guys talk about best practices or do you have some stuff for the consumer to say, "Hey, there's some best practices when using Zaps"?

We do a little bit. Truthfully, we haven't been great about like having the training wheels version of Zapier, right? You can't— it's pretty easy to get in trouble, you know, if you're doing things recursively, I guess. That said, we do try and coach a little bit, especially to prevent loops. We have some logic in place that if we start seeing it happen, we try and send you an alert or an email saying like, hey, this looks like, you know, it's going back and forth a lot. You know, are you sure you want to do this sort of stuff to help prevent things like that?

Well, that's good to know. That keeps a guy like me— the Christian wouldn't, wouldn't get in trouble with it. But I'm a guy who would set it up and, and Christian, do you have a question?

Well, no, I was just interested in whether or not there was anything in Zapier in place that could help you kind of what types of throttling and rules you could set up to maybe mitigate that a bit.

Yeah, so there's nothing you can do on our— on your side right now today. We do have some like basic ones on our side that we've set up that like have set up some rules and notifications that go out to people to let them know, like, hey, this seems like above the average for you, or like, this seems high for an account. So you may want to be, you know, check in and take a look. Is this doing what you want? But nothing on your side yet.

So there's nothing in Zapier that would let me say, like, send, you know, apply this rule, and after 10 times of sending this out, don't send out if it matches this rule for another 24 hours?

Correct. That doesn't exist today.

Well, we want that, Wade Foster. So get working on it.

Feature request noted.

That would be, that would be an awesome Twitter tool, or even to be able to say only if this condition is met once in a 24-hour period, or, you know, those kinds of things that— go ahead.

I was gonna say, we do see a lot of folks using custom filters. So those are on step 4 when you set up these apps where you can proxy this. So you can't say like once every 24 hours, but you can find some event that's like rare enough that, you know, it almost is like once every 24 hours. So for instance, you could say only trigger this if like the Twitter's username starts with an A, right? So A is like 1 out of 26 letters. It's like kind of, you know, it's not, it's not perfect, but it does get at some of that stuff.

Well, the common problem is that one where that hashtag gets, gets used across a conversation as a post it just one time and then you have no— it's really difficult to filter that out, you know. Yeah, and you know what, it is a little spammy. So I'm gonna admit that doing that is pretty spammy. So, um, it was just something we were trying out, and of course Zapier was great for that, for that type of automation. It worked out, uh, it worked out really well.

Yeah, that's— I mean, that is, you know, the spam— the click automation is really what I like to call it— is an area where it's easy to get in trouble because it's public. You know, if you're doing things with like kind of back office, like behind the scenes automation, it's a lot safer because it's not going to get exposed. You know, it's going to work the way you want it to. So there's usually rarely any of that sort of consideration, but with Twitter, that's an area where you do have to be a bit— play it safe, I suppose.

Yeah, it is pretty easy to get in trouble. I want to walk through— so I talked about walking through the dashboard. So We've got the zaps that are listed here. I'm doing some Twitter searching. So I search for a particular search string. We do this for Gallup. We're looking for people who are posting their Top 5. And so I've tested some search strings to— and I know I have some pretty good consistency when those search strings come up. Then I tweet them a thank you. Hey, thanks for, you know, I tweet back to them, hey, thank you for, for, you know, for putting your strengths out there, or whatever we do, whatever they're doing there. So usually their Top 5. We— and then I found what's really handy is to take like RSS and push that to Buffer. And let it buffer up for me, and then that gives me some ability to go back through, kind of filter it, maybe add a few hashtags or add some, you know, add an to it so that it notifies them when they get done. I think I might even be doing this with you guys on your blog where every time you guys tweet some, or every time you guys post to the blog, I'm going to automatically do that through my account to recognize you and me too. I go back and read my own, because I have this automation here, I go back and read my own you know, my own tweet stream because I'm like, oh, I wonder what I tweeted today because I'm using automation to capture so much of it. One of the things you mentioned, we use MailChimp, so anytime someone joins the mailing list— by the way, if you're a listener to Home Gadget Geeks and you haven't joined our mailing list yet, you will see Zapier in action when you do that. So go over there, register for it. I won't spam you, one newsletter a month. Sign up for that, I will automatically send you a thank you email back. I could do that through MailChimp, but it was just so cool to do it here. I created the email and sent that back. And then anytime I post to YouTube, it automatically sends it over to our Facebook page. Now you guys support Facebook pages, but not Facebook groups, or at least the last time I checked. You're adding stuff all the time. Groups enabled yet, or is that something you're still working on?

No groups yet, but it is, it's coming.

Okay. Yeah. Well, there's another, another request from us.

Feature request too, right? Feature.

Yeah, that's good. That is something I've popped over to If This Then That. They've got pages and groups, and so when I couldn't get it here, I popped over there to make it work. And then some really cool features around whenever an event happens, like on Twitter, pushing that to like Evernote or a Google Doc or a Google Sheet or some of those. Am I— Wade, am I using this? As you look at my list, am I using this correctly? I mean, are there other things? What else are you seeing being done that's real popular?

Yeah, this is great. I mean, I actually do the exact same thing for Twitter. I dump it into a spreadsheet and track any mention of the word Zapier, and then I see who— how many followers the person that tweeted with. And so I have this big table now that I can sort and see who the most followed people are that are tweeting about Zapier, which is a nice little research tool.

And then what do you do with that, with that data?

What I usually, you know, I'll reach out to those folks like privately, like I'll try and track down their email address and and say, "Hey, thanks for being a supporter," or something. Just, you know, kind of a, you know, be thankful for it.

Yeah.

You know, one thing you guys aren't using I see here is a lot of folks have a— use a chat tool like Slack or HipChat or something like that, or they'll use, you know, SMS or an instant messaging tool like Google Chat. To get notifications. So like things that are happening, if you're in an org, they'll do it with like a group chat tool like Slack or HipChat. Or if you're doing it, you know, solo, it'll be like SMS or instant message. It's a really great way to set up notifications for any of these services that you have. And the cool thing with Zapier is that you can— the notifications can be customized. So a lot of services, they kind of have an all-or-nothing approach to, you know, notifications. It's like, we'll notify you about everything which you don't really want. It's like, or you can turn them off and never get notified about anything, which you don't really want that either. So through Zapier, you can be a bit smart about it and say like, hey, notify me about these things.

Do you find getting access to the APIs for these services fairly easy, or is it a lot of work to get the initial service set up? And then, because you get a lot of— I mean, I've looked through them and man, they dump a lot of information. Some of them do, some of them are fairly sparse. How's that process go with each one? I mean, I'm just scrolling through the vendors or these connections alphabetically. We're only in C and there's still a ton out there. I mean, that's a lot of work to keep track of all these.

Yeah, so one thing you'll actually see on this page here to the left, add an app. So this is actually one key thing about Zapier that's really interesting is that you can add apps to Zapier. So of the 350+ services we support, about more than 200 have been added by people who don't work at Zapier, which is pretty cool. A lot of folks just think it's really helpful for them to integrate their service with a tool like Zapier because now they're exposed to a whole bunch of other tools that they can play nicely with and they'll go ahead and do it.

[Speaker:MARK] By adding it, it's kind of an open source project then, right? If they add it, do I get access to it as well?

Yeah, it's a bit that way. I mean, it's not totally open source obviously, because we are like a for-profit company. Right. But we did borrow the open source ethos and the fact that people can contribute apps to Zapier and, you know, everyone can benefit from that community effort.

So if Christian decides he's doing something and he wants to write a connection to that app, he can do it on Zapier, submit it. Do you guys have a vetting process that you go through just to make sure everything's working properly?

We do.

Yeah. So the, you know, apps can be private for anyone. So you can add one and it can stay private and you're the only one that uses it. But if you do wanna publish it or make it go global, there is like a, a review process where we want you to go through and make sure that, you know, everything is working, you know, top notch before we make it available to everyone.

Sure.

And, and I assume then even once it's written, you can continue to add fields to it. You know, you, you don't necessarily need to bring in the whole fire hose at once.

Absolutely. In fact, we encourage folks to start with just 1 or 2 things that seem like really key. And then if we get good traction, like maybe consider adding some new things that folks are looking at adding.

Yeah, I'm just looking through this. I'm getting distracted already because I'm like, oh, I didn't— I have not necessarily gone through all 350. I guess I had— and I wasn't aware that you had a kind of a community apps platform that opened those things up. So maybe I can talk Christian into writing that Google Groups— or Facebook Groups— Although I imagine with Facebook with the API— well, let me ask you this. So do some of these services, do they resist you when you start doing this automation with it, or are most open?

Most are open. I mean, I'd say 99% we have no problems with. Obviously, there is a rarer case where, you know, we have to, you know, go back and forth and figure out the way that it's going to work and make sure that we're working within the framework that they want. For us to work with. But 99% of the time, it's great for the vendor because, you know, they want to encourage usage of their app because oftentimes usage means they're going to get paid more or it's going to drive their business further and it's a good thing for them, it's a good thing for us, it's a good thing for the users, so everyone wins.

And I assume in most cases these are open public APIs that you're hitting.

Pretty much exclusively. There are a few cases where we're dealing with private APIs, but that's definitely the exception.

Okay. Have you had a— or have they had a company call you back and say, "You're not really using our API right," or, "You're killing us from the API calls"?

We actually have seen folks revamp how their API works because of Zapier. And it's oftentimes where they're like, "Wow, you guys are hitting us with a lot of traffic, but it's very useful." And so they'll switch to what we call webhooks. Which is a push notification rather than a pull service. A pull is where we're being— having to hit them on an ongoing basis, and it's the part that's resource-intensive. But if they switch to a push model, that's a lot less burdensome both for them and for us. We actually prefer it if we do it that way. And so we'll see folks switch to push notifications, which is great too, because also if they switch to push notifications, Zaps become real-time. They're instant Zaps. Rather than having to wait 5 or 15 minutes that the Zaps take today.

Yeah. And can I ask a little bit about your infrastructure? Certainly, you know, as you add more customers, they got to run processes. From— how are you guys set up with your infrastructure and how's that part going?

Sure. So we're all set up on AWS. So it's pretty easy just to scale up and down. I'm not sure the exact count, but we're running hundreds of servers these days. I've divorced myself from that part. It's a black box to me.

Yeah, how big are you guys?

We're a team of 16 right now.

Oh, that's not bad. No, that's not bad. Well, good for you. Christian, I've— you're quiet over there, and it's only because I dominate the conversation, but why don't you jump? What kind of questions do you have, Christian?

Yeah, well, I feel like you did such a good job, you're just making me look flat-footed here. I guess, what is the typical turnaround time for you guys adding a— so like all these individual modules? I mean, once you're getting the API— well, once you're getting the Zapier framework set right, I'm assuming you're dropping in new features as modules. What's the typical development time on one module?

Sure. So it depends, you know, on what the API looks like, but it's actually pretty fast these days. So through the developer platform, I've actually seen apps be added in like less than 10 minutes. There's actually a YouTube video of my co-founder Brian adding Etsy to Zapier in 7 minutes. It's really, really fast if you kind of understand what Zapier is looking for and the API exposes the things you need. More common is maybe an hour or two.

That's still pretty fast. Yeah. I mean, when you, when you get right down to it, when you talk about an hour of creating this connection and then having it up and running and, and, you know, I imagine you guys want to do some testing just to make sure the user experience is great for your users if they're going to, if it's going to become public. Yep. In that sense. Are there many, so there's 350 out here and you're adding them all the time. Are there many private behind that or is that just kind of minority?

There's actually quite a lot. Um, over 5,000 private apps on Zapier. People just hooking in their own like pet tools or internal projects or internal tools, things like that. Behind the scenes that are running on Zapier as well.

And when people say— because certainly it's a lot like If This Then That— when you're compared to them, I assume they're your major competitor at this point. What's the difference? I mean, what do you say? What's your value proposition?

Sure. I mean, the big thing is if you compare the services that we support and the ones that they support. They're doing a lot of stuff with consumer and hardware, that sort of thing, whereas we spend a lot of our time with B2B, SaaS apps for businesses, things like that. So we definitely have a much more business-oriented slant versus their consumer-oriented slant. There's a few features as well that set us apart. You know, we have the ability to add multiple accounts, so you can use two different Twitter accounts, for instance, on Zapier, which you can't do.

That's great, by the way. Thank you. That's an awesome feature. It's, it's a nightmare on If This Then That to only be limited to one account. I got to use different— it's terrible.

Yeah. I mean, you know, when it boils right down to it, we're trying to like help people set up professional automation. So the features we support are built for professionals.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, it's those, those features are nice. I noticed that when I got in there and I changed it and it messed up, you know, I had a whole— I was on with the other guys and I changed it. And of course that messes it all up and you're like, oh man, now you gotta go back in and change them all and fix them. It is a free platform. I mean, that's If This Then That. It is free. Again, I mentioned they don't have any kind of monetization, um, that's out there. Any other, you know, I hate to say this, but who else are you gunning for from, uh, from an automation? You guys the top dog when we talk about enterprise automation? You guys the top dogs?

So I mean, in like the SMB space, this like mid-tier SaaS, for sure. Um, you know, there's like some custom really enterprise legacy guys that are way upstream for us that do solely like Fortune 500 work. You know, you're looking at like the Dell boomies, IBM's Cast Iron product, TIBCO has some products. These are folks that have been around for decades and deal with like on-prem software and legacy tools that you've got integrated. They don't do as much in terms of like SaaS and you know, some of this really easy-to-use software that's kind of built for, I guess, a more modern business.

Yeah.

Let's walk through it. Let's build one real quick. So think about— Wade, think about what your favorite Zap is out there, or maybe the coolest one. Walk me through. Let's— let me flip the screen here so the folks can see what we're doing. And we'll go here and make— we'll go make one from scratch. And it's super easy. Yeah. Think about what kind of— what's the coolest trigger I should pull from?

Well, there's a lot of cool stuff you can do.

I put you on the spot, didn't I?

I know.

I totally put you on the spot.

You know, Twitter is a great one because— okay. So everyone is familiar with Twitter, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It's really easy to—

let's pull Twitter in and we're going to choose a trigger here. 4 different triggers. Say that fast. Search mentions, tweets, favorite tweets, and user tweets. So, I always, in this case, let's do, hey, let's do a search and mention, that's kind of a fun one. So, search and mentions, and then we're going to do some kind of action to that, and I always go Twitter to Twitter, but let's dump this one into a Google Doc, how's that sound?

That's great, yeah.

And we're going to create a new row in a sheet, and let's continue, and then it's going to choose my Twitter account, and I'll choose my, let's choose my Yahoo one, that's my standard, we'll test it here. Make sure it's connecting. Uh, that's a great feature, by the way, just to kind of make sure your, your connections are up and running.

Yep.

And then it's going to ask me where do I want to put that, and, and I only have one Google Doc, uh, tied to this. I'm going to test that, and then we'll come down here now. Um, so we're going to look for a search term, and, and really you've got a bunch of required fields here. Uh, trigger—

oh, because I added a Geo Mention, so this is going to give us Geo's pretty cool.

Okay.

You know, you can do things like if you're a local small business, say, you know, a dentist or something, you know, and someone is tweeting like, "My tooth hurts," you can like track all that stuff and so use it for like lead gen. So that's a pretty cool thing you can do if you want to dig into the geo stuff. Obviously, there's another search— or there's another trigger that's just the generic search trigger.

Yeah, generic. Let's— so when we do this latitude thing here, I have no idea what to put in there. Google Maps. So do I got to go to Google Maps and find it, copy it, and bring it in? Is that what I do?

Pretty much, yeah. So you'll want to go to Google Maps and like find a location. So, you know, you could go find the center of Omaha, right? And then you can like right-click and see what's here, and it'll give you a longitude and a latitude. Latitude.

Let's, um, let's do that real quick here. So it'll find— let's have it find me, and we'll just— we'll make me the center of the universe.

There you go. Here.

That's right. Let's have it do its thing here. Come on. Come on, Google. See if it will— there we go. No, it's not finding me. Of course, you know, when you're doing a live demo— oh, oh, I need to allow up there. Yeah, yeah. Allow it to use my services. So let's, let's— should zero in on my location here. Give it a second. You know, of course, when you're trying, like when you're just doing this in real time, right, it doesn't really matter. But you're trying to get it done and it won't, it will not for whatever reason. It's blocking where, it's blocking location. Well, I could pick anything. So let's, we'll come into Council Bluffs. Hold on here. Let's see if we can at least get close. We'll pick the zoo. So everything, and then I'm gonna choose, which of the options am I gonna choose?

What's here?

What's here? Okay, and then I'm gonna grab this latitude and longitude here. And I'm going to copy that. Let's copy. Do I just copy and paste it?

Yep, that'll work.

Okay.

So I'm going to grab it and I'm just— do I need to separate those out?

Yeah, you'll want to put latitude and longitude.

Okay, and I assume those are in order, right?

So negative would be what? That's to the left of that thing. I don't even know.

Yeah, that's all right. Well, if it's wrong, then we'll get some other part of the world. I'm sure.

Yep, and then you can put a radius in here.

So, okay, so let's go 20. We'll do 20 miles.

There you go.

So, all right, we'll go continue. Continue. Okay, I'm going to pick a spreadsheet. And, uh, let's see, I had created one. And you can see here it just pops in and, and it knows all this, all those, you know, the sheets I have available on my Google Drive, which is really cool. And this Cybersecurity Search one and then I'm going to pick, it's going to go into that, and I'll pick the raw data field we have in there. And then, this is really cool, right? Click on that and it's, these are all the available fields I can pull in from Twitter, right?

Yep, exactly. We, we don't filter anything here, it's the full thing.

And if I, the handle, so these are optional, right? If I want to fill this, but really they're not, I need to move some data around, right?

Yeah, exactly, in Google Spreadsheet you want to jump something in or else you'll just be trying to write blank rows.

The text. Okay, good. We'll do continue and then we're going to test this. This is a feature I really love because I get myself out of trouble by doing it. You give me 3 different samples. You can see both the trigger sample. In other words, this is what we're getting from Twitter, right? When we, when we run the query so you can scroll tons and this is all public API, right? There's no trickery here, public API. And then the second part, I can see the action sample. This is actually what you're going to produce.

Yep.

For me, right? This is the data, these are the fields that are going to make their way into the, to the sample, and then I love this one, it's the Test It, right? Yep. And so, now it's actually going to do it before you go do something crazy publicly.

Exactly.

And so, let's pop over, so we should see now, right, if I go to the Google, if I go to my Google Drive, let's see if I can get that going here. Hopefully, I'm not giving away any top secret information, so we'll go in here, I I want to go to— oh, I'm in the wrong account. Once— okay, let's hope this— we don't lose— I have to switch Google accounts, and that's always sketchy. So let's find the, uh, that was Cyber Frontiers. I'll search for that. Cyber Frontiers.

What did I—

security tweet search. And there it is, there it is on line 22.

Yep.

Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty easy. So in this case, I'll flip back over and I can go continue and then name this thing. I will say, during the show, and I will turn that Zap on. And now anytime that mention comes up, it's gonna— it will do its thing.

Yep, as long as they're mentioned within 20 miles of Jim.

Yeah, yeah, there's probably— there can't be that many. I, you know, I was thinking about what we just did. you know, we went through it kind of fast. The, you know, you really kind of want to test it and, you know, make sure you're getting the right results back and such. Is that— I mean, that's as hard as it is. I mean, it's not much more difficult than that.

Yeah. I mean, really the most challenging thing with Zapier is your own creativity. It's like, what do you want to automate? What should you try and automate? Rather than the actual setup process.

Yeah, what are you seeing, now that I made you think about that, but some creativity. I do, I think I get an email from you guys every day with some new, with some new zaps or are you being proactive by sharing what other people are doing?

Yeah, we're trying to do a lot better job of that. You know, yesterday we launched with, there's a cool new site called Product Hunt which every day has new products that are from around the web or curated by the community there. So we added a Product Hunt, you know, integration, which you can do cool things like, hey, as soon as a Product Hunt has a product there has over 100 upvotes, like, send me a notification. So like, that's a pretty popular new product, I should maybe check it out. So you can do things like that. And of course, anytime some new service comes on, we try and come up with like, what are the novel use cases? What are the things that folks are going to be interested in? And try and make some Zap templates for those.

How many— so you mentioned there's 16 on your staff. How are they kind of split up? How's the division of labor there?

So about, let's see, I think about 8 of us are like engineering product related. 3 are on the support team, dedicated support. Another 3 are on like the marketing and biz team. And I think that covers almost everyone. So that's 14. Myself, which I do a lot of different things, and then one person. I'm missing one other number. I bet they're on the product or engineering.

Yeah. It's tough keeping track of them all. Let me ask you this. I mean, Wade, you're a young guy and you're the CEO of this company.

How—

what's your biggest challenge? I mean, what have you found— first of all, when you're in college, did you think you'd be the CEO of a Silicon Valley startup? And was that kind of a dream? And two, what's your biggest challenge?

I mean, not really. So in college, I went to school, you know, I was always a pretty, pretty smart kid. And so, but I never really knew what I wanted to do. So I went to school for engineering, industrial engineering, and was just kind of like, hey, you know, I can get an engineering job and, you know, they'll pay me, you know, $50K or $75K a year out of college. Like, that seems like a pretty good deal for me. And so that's kind of the path I was on. And I had an internship, then I realized I kind of hated it. So that's when I started really like, just like, okay, well, I got to figure out something I actually like to do. I'm not gonna, you know, live my life hating every last minute of it just to make a few bucks, right? And so, you know, stumbled on the internet and stumbled on tech and like saw a lot of folks doing cool things there and really, really got into it. And so felt like, hey, this is a thing that I could actually, actually enjoy. Eventually, I was like, "I would really kind of like to run— do my own thing." And so that's, you know, I met Brian and Mike and they kind of a bit like-minded and ended up starting Zapier.

Yeah, very cool. And you had mentioned before that you're kind of focused towards the— more towards the enterprise. I'm a consumer guy and it's working for me. So, you know, it definitely works that way. And are you going to, you know, and I assume when you say moving or staying, not maybe emphasizing— I'm struggling with the words a little bit. Android triggers and iPhone triggers. Is that what you mean when you say consumer? I mean, is that what you guys think about these consumer devices? Or what we talk a lot about here, because we're a gadget show, we talk a lot about home automation. Are you guys as interested in that home automation space?

I think so. I mean, really what we want to be is a platform that enables a lot of different things. Like, we're, you know, we're not, you know, we're pretty apathetic. Why don't— apathy, apathetic's not the right word. I guess—

I know what you mean.

—right?—to who uses it, right? So if it's a consumer, great. If it's a business, excellent. Like, we just want to empower people to do the things that we want, you know, from a marketing and biz side. Like, of course we're going to target more towards the enterprise because that's what's going to fund the rest of the business. But the product itself should be useful no matter what you're, you know, kind of the things you're trying to do. So we definitely have, you know, Android, iPhone, or things that we'd like to get added to Zapier.

Yeah, some goals when you, when you think about the number of connections that you have, any goals for 2014 that like you're 350 now, is there kind of a goal out there that you're hoping to be at by the end of the year?

You know, I thought 350 was a lot to integrate with, honestly.

Um, yeah, you got there. Yeah.

The more I see of it, there's more tools launching every single day. I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, we get to 600 or 1,000, and we're still not even close to being complete with the number of apps that need to be integrated with Zapier. You know, the things we think a lot about these days are like, how can we make it even easier? How can we make— teach people the types of apps that they should be creating? Like you said, you asked me like, hey, what's the one I should be creating? What's— you know, am I using it right? People everywhere have those sorts of questions, and we want to make sure that we're answering that in a way that's specific for them.

Yeah. So other Jim in chat, you know, I'm Jim, so we have another Jim in chat. He asked the question, what are some use cases when we talk about like college students or community groups? Have you, you know, it wasn't that long ago you were a college student. Some use cases that you see those kinds of groups using? Sure.

I mean, when I think back to college, the things, the tools I used a lot of were a lot of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Evernote. Wade Foster, dip our toes into some project management tools. They weren't around when I was in school, like Trello or Asana. Those are relatively new, but those are the types of tools I'd be using because they're free or really low cost, and you can hook up, do some really smart things with them, right? Forever, you know, Evernote is fantastic for studying. You keep notes for all your classes. You could make sure to save emails from your professors from Gmail into Evernote automatically. There's a lot of things you can do to put content into Evernote so that, you know, you kind of don't lose track of things in college like I did.

Christian, let me ask you, well, I think the key is anytime you start doing something where you have a step in it, you have to ask the question, hey, could I just automate this, right? I mean, could, could, is this a potential place for automation? Christian, you're, you're, yeah, I mean, you're starting school here in, in a week or two. When you think about some of the school stuff you do, any possibilities for automation on your side? Yeah.

Well, I mean, I just think about things like, you know, the— you know, some of the stuff that we write custom right now, which is, you know, we want to find everything. We want to know what people are talking about, about certain topics. And, you know, that's very relevant in Twitter, but I can see aggregating, you know, multiple social sources and piping that through Zapier to try and get at that same thing. Whether you're doing that to create a Google Doc or whether you're doing that to pipe it into some application you've developed to act on those things. That's pretty cool to have programmable like that.

Any personal, Christian, as you think any, like just personal automation stuff, you know, I know the real common ones are like when I pull in the driveway and my, on my phone hits this certain Wi-Fi, turn on, you know, or Would that be it? Or no, it's based on location. When I hit my location, turn my Wi-Fi on, right? So that— and so it'll connect or turn it off when I go there. Christian, anything you're thinking about in that personal automation space where you're like, man, I can, I can—

if we want to get like creepy or like Internet of Things, we could do like, you know, when, when GPS is at, you know, this building, oh, I'm now in this classroom, or You know, basically you could, you could honestly just build a Twitter account that tweets your location on random intervals so that like, if you want someone to know that like, hey, you're going to this particular event, then you just, you would have to come up with some procedure to regulate, you know, like on your, on your daily calendar, putting in GPS coordinates and then having a Zapier automation that basically says, hey, if this GPS coordination is in my like realm of what I consider to be like public spaces, tweet about it, and that would be pretty cool. And then you could have it set up to tweet like articles and content related to that. So like, for example, if you were taking a trip to like a conference like CES or DEF CON and clearly it sees that, hey, you know, Los Angeles is not where you usually are, and, you know, it would be able to start putting those things together. These are some more probably geek-like projects than they are, you know, everyday user. But when you live with a group of 40 or 50 cybersecurity geeks, that's pretty much the only ideas that come out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, one of the things I always think about too, I think, and Wade, you probably use this, customer testimonials, right? So you're scraping, you're going out there and running— by the way, I'd love to have an unlimited Zapier account for something like that. But you're going out there and scraping the web for that kind of stuff and dropping into a doc so you can go back later to say, what are our customers saying, right, about, and how do I get back to them? Other Jim also asks, if you're integrating with Salesforce or other CRM tools and like Dynamics with Microsoft, what are the security concerns that people need to think about when they're making those automation, you know, when they're doing that automation? That's a great question.

One of the nice things, you know, when you're working with something like Salesforce is they've already thought about a lot of the security concerns for you. For instance, when you go to authenticate and connect it to Zapier, you're connecting to that specific account via OAuth, which is industry best practice for connecting services. That specific OAuth credential comes with the credentials that match your user account. That means that Zapier is only going to be to see what's accessible in your account. Now that said, that means you still need to be smart about it, right? You don't want to, you know, take what's in your own account and send it out and tweet every new lead that you get, right? Like, that, that's not a smart thing to do. So you still have to, like, think through this stuff and be, you know, smart about it. But the nice thing is, as Salesforce admin, you can set up and say, hey, these are the people I trust to do this sort of thing. And give them that power, or these are the ones that I don't think would be smart about it. They should not get the permission level to connect to outside services and things like that.

Yeah, yeah, good to know. It's still, once the data is in your hands, if you're automatically doing stuff with it, you have to think about where the destination is going to do that. Do you guys have an enormous bandwidth bill with all the stuff that's moving around data-wise? And, you know, it's not like you're moving data, but certainly you're flying stuff all over the web. Does that take up an enormous amount of bandwidth?

Oh, I mean, we pay our fair share of money to AWS every month.

Yeah, I bet you do. Wade, I told you 45 minutes, we're at the 50-minute mark. I don't want to hold you too much longer, but I want to give you an opportunity. Anything that we missed, anything coming up that you want to highlight? It's a great opportunity to kind of pimp that to our audience.

Anything else you want to cover? So we got some really cool stuff coming down in the next month. Making Zaps is going to get a lot easier. I would encourage folks to stay up to date. You can follow us on Twitter @Zapier. We also have an updates blog which is at zapier.com/zapbook/updates. You can subscribe to that via email. We'll send out a weekly email every Wednesday morning with the new stuff on Zapier. It'll have the news. That's where we'll announce this news first. If you want to see what the next latest and greatest is on Zapier, that's where you want to go.

Yeah, and I think I actually, you know, I retweet some of your blog stuff. I'm going to go back and verify. I was doing a bunch of them all at once, and I want to make sure I'm getting you guys. And so, yep, I am your blog feed through mine. So if you follow @jcollison as well, if you're a listener and you follow that, if you want to track it anytime you guys tweet, and I assume I'm right now, I am looking at your blog. Is that the best place? zapier.com/blog/feed/latest?

So the blog doesn't actually always— it'll announce the big news, but it won't announce like just smaller news, which is we have a separate blog for that, which is our updates blog, which is at zapier.com/zapbook/updates.

Okay, I'll have to dig that one up and get it in my, uh, and get in my automated space. So I find, like I said, Wade, I find it very, uh, easy for me to— then that's a good way for me to— I mean, I tweet about it. It's good for you guys. It's also good for me because I can go back and review my own tweets. Oftentimes I run this through Buffer, so I capture analytics and I kind of see that. I also can see who's the popular, the more popular, you know, when we talk about some of the companies that we interview here, kind of gives me an idea who's popular and whose tweets are doing well. So I'll look forward to monitoring that for you as well. So some exciting things coming up. Anything else we should, we should know about, Wade?

I think that's it. Of course, if you want to talk to me, I'm on Twitter @WadeFoster, you know, always happy to you know, exchange a tweet through the tweetosphere.

Yeah, and you're pretty open out there. You're pretty— you check your Twitter feed. Not all guys do. I do. Okay.

I'm a pretty easy guy to get a hold of.

All right, very good. Well, I appreciate you doing that. Christian, any last questions from your end? Well, not a question, just a comment.

I always like to see how people's internet presence are doing based off Alexa, and I noticed that Zapier has hit the top 3,000 sites in the United States and is in the top 10,000 global. And despite white curve, it's been like consistently at about 15K for the past 3 months, and then in like the April to January— or April to June time frame has like dramatically jumped. It's a really— it's an exponential graph. You should go out to alexa.com and check that out. So just wanted to congratulate you because that's a huge shift on the internet to happen in that time frame of like 2 and a half months that this graph is showing. So thank you. Up and to the right.

Yeah, Wade, I just— I, I gotta admit, I just was looking up— I'm not— I, I— this is like an or I mean, this is like a huge fail on my part. I'm actually using If This Then That to follow you guys.

As long as you're tweeting our stuff, that's fine by me.

That's a little embarrassing when I come right down to it, but we hide nothing here at TheAverageGuy.tv. I will definitely have to move that over. I had actually maxed out at one point. I had taken all 20 slots that I had, and so I was moving some stuff over. But now you can see, obviously, if you look at my dashboard, I've got some room there. I think I'm at 6. Yep, there you go. And I got some room for some more stuff. Wade, thank you for taking some time tonight. I know away from your family and your young family, but I appreciate you staying late for us and fill us in on Zapier. If I asked you to come back maybe in a couple months when some new things have hit, would you come back and join us? Oh, for sure.

Shoot me an email. We'll see if we can work something out.

Good. Yeah, we'll get you a better microphone too in the process. Yeah, there you go.

Maybe I'll get one upgraded myself. Yeah.

Sounds good, Wade. Thanks for joining us. Christian and I are going to hang out for a few minutes and chat with the community. You can head home. Thanks for— and endure the Bay Area traffic. Sorry about that.

Have a good evening, guys. Thanks, Wade.

Take care. Great to meet you.

Bye.

All right. Christian, any thoughts?

Yeah, no, that was really cool. I think that trying to— he was absolutely— one of the things that really resonated with me was in the beginning he said, you know, "No geek wants to do the grunt work project of having to stitch together just like things that are like so," like quote, "so obvious," which is like, you know, Google has this API and if you do this set of things, it'll let you connect to this and everyone's like, Everyone tries as much as possible to just say, "Pull something off the internet that can do this for me. Like, I don't want to waste the time with it." And the fact that they turned that, you know, geek burden into a whole company is pretty remarkable, I think, because, you know, all these APIs are public. They're readable, and, you know, you can script them. The fact that they've made it really nice to streamline is cool, in my opinion. I think it'll be interesting to see how the pricing model works out for Zapier as it grows as a company. I mean, it's really, like I said, it's impressive that in the 2.5-month time span they've jumped that high in Alexa. I mean, that's not, that's no small feat by any means to have them be in the top 3,000 most sites visited in the United States. So, you know, I think there's a lot of promise for the company and the fact that they have, you know, as a startup have 15 people, you know, actively hired and working and are, you know, retaining clients like the Wall Street Journal and so forth, you know, they should have a bright future ahead of them.

Yeah, no, for sure. And I just love what they do. And I've been using both, you know, I've been using, as you saw a few minutes ago, I threw that up on the screen, both if this Then That and Zapier. if this Then That has been around for a while, and these guys from Zapier are kind of the new kids on the block and are doing I really like their interface, the Zapier interface, a lot better. I mean, it's more sophisticated. It's more— I think it's— you get more bang for your buck. I don't know if you've walked through an If This Then That recipe build in a while, Christian. Have you done that? No. It's not a great experience, you know? Yeah. And so you kind of— it's very web clunky, and it was cool, I'm sure, 3 or 4 years ago. Maybe 5 when it first came out. Probably hasn't been out that long. We're probably thinking 2011 for them as well. So 3 years they've probably been out. And pretty difficult— I don't want to say difficult, but not as intuitive. These guys have set up a really nice UI that kind of walks you through. They got nice little arrows that, you know, kick in.

Yeah, I mean, that's the other thing too is like I remember I was trying to integrate Yammer posts into a WordPress account. I had written this whole API architecture framework for NASA for Yammer, but obviously I can't reuse that code for my own projects. And I was never able to get the agency to release that as open source back to the public, which is a whole nother story for a whole nother day. But, you know, Zapier was literally the only thing on the internet that I had access to quickly that would let me dump Yammer posts into WordPress site. And it was just like, Yeah, once you did it, it was really fast, but you know, it's there. They definitely, and this is what I guess I'm going to add this to, like my, if you've ever watched NCIS and Agent Gibbs has his like rule book of like 200-some number rules that he randomly quotes to his other agents throughout the shows in no particular order, of course. So this is going to be added to my rule book is that, you know, if you fill a niche in the market, you're going to be successful. And they clearly filled the niche of this is a pain in the ass. No one wants to do this and the dividends are paying well for them. So if you're going to do something startup-y, fill a niche and don't be an also-ran and you'll do well.

Yeah. I've been hanging out with Dave Jackson a lot lately on School Podcasting and he is a big believer and he only uses services that have a paid option. He's not a free, he's not, "We always go to the free option." And so using that model, these guys, I bought that $15 plan. And, and I could actually, if they're gonna stay with the 10, I might downgrade it because I don't need as many. I like the 20, but I don't need the full 3,000 tasks that they give me. I thought I was at one point because we were, we were hammering those out on cybersecurity, but doing it wrong. One of the other things I wanted to show you guys here is, as we talk about, so these are integrations, and you can actually integrate with Zapier. You build an integration there. and then they give you some really nice suggestions. So they say start with a popular Zap. And so you can say, you know, email from a new Zapier service, email from Zapier updates, buffer Zapier from a webhook, and Zapier updates from the RSS feed. I should— this is the one I should probably kick in. But you can get those for any of the services. If we come down, you said Yammer, right? So let's pop over and we'll open up Yammer. And so post a message to Yammer from a new RSS feed, create an RSS feed for from a new Yammer message, post a new Yammer message out to a Trello card activity, post a user's tweets to Yammer. So you get some suggestions.

And that's one of 20. You can do the arrow and there's a whole set of things you can do.

Yeah, yeah.

GitHub, moving stuff to— you can do WordPress post to Yammer. It's like right there.

It's like done. Yeah, it's, it's almost overwhelming. I kind of had to do it and then stop for a while because I was You get going on this thing, and actually I worked with Mike Howard when we first started doing this. I turned him on to this a little bit, and he started, I think he started, he went over to the If This Then That side, but he all of a sudden he had like 24 of them, and it's like, yeah, you can. I like to start them, what I did is I started with the tweet ones, and then I said, And I'm just going to monitor this for a while and see if it's the right number, if I'm getting the right stuff. I go back and review the RSS feeds. Like, I think I monitor a TechCrunch feed on automobiles, and some of them are good and some of them aren't very good, you know, and you're kind of like, well, that's not really what I was looking for. You know, I like to— one of the good ones that's been for me is I monitor the NASA large picture feed. By the way, you can just just— that's a— they have that just as an RSS feed, which is awesome. And that one's been real popular. And so instead of having to follow NASA or, you know, what have you, you can follow me and you'll see that from time to time and that'll show up.

So that's been pretty cool. Yeah, for sure.

Anything else along these lines? Maybe we close this up and go into a little bit of post-show.

Yeah, no, I think that's a wrap on Zapier. Of course, we can always do another AMA because there's probably enough people, but we'll defer to the post-show, which you have to come out to the live chat to get.

So that's right. If you're listening, let me, let me cover some housekeeping on the way out here. Just some stuff that's coming up here in the community. And, and so hang tight with me here for just 5 minutes as we kind of roll through the various things we want to talk about. I did mention early on, I mentioned our subscription link, and so if you want if you want to subscribe to the newsletter that I'm creating on a monthly basis, and if you're worried about spam, don't be. I'll barely get it out on a monthly basis with everything that's going on, but it's a great way. I did have somebody contact me the other day that listened to the podcast, and they said, "Hey, I'm not on social at all, but I listen to the podcast faithfully every week, and so I can't do those things that you say on there all the time, and so you appreciate having a newsletter that kind of updates." Well, I'll throw things in there like the podcast during the month, any announcements that we have, any links to stuff that you might want to hear or know about. Subscribe to the new brand new subscribe page if you haven't gone out there to check that out. We're getting some good traffic on our new videos. We have both video small and large for both iTunes and RSS for all the podcasts: Home Tech Tips, Cyber Frontiers, and, uh, and this one, Home Gadget Geek. So if you want to resubscribe to those using the video, maybe on your phone because I didn't have that before It's available for you out there. Go out and get it, but sign up for the newsletter. I've had about 25 of you do that so far, and so not a lot, but we'll just keep doing it. Speaking of that, Christian, I've been reading a lot on these trickle methods, you know, of leaking out where somebody joins and then you send them an email 3 days and 5, and you trickle all your newsletters. I don't think I'm going to do that just because it's going to be some repetitive stuff every month. To just kind of keep you up to date, but there are some ways to do that. I'm just going to send that out through MailChimp, and if you'd like to sign up, I'd love to have you. We are getting super close to the Home Server Show Meetup. In fact, we're 30 days away from getting together in Indianapolis, and love to have you come out. I'm hearing from many of you who can't come. I'd love to hear from some of you who can. We've got 20-some spots still open, $20 to get in, super cheap, if you can get there. And we'd love to have you come out. If you're a listener, I'd love to meet you there. It's going to be a great meetup. Less things going on, more networking. That's kind of what we heard from you after last year, and so we'll be there with some equipment, some tech stuff to talk about, and some presentations, but I'd love to have you come out to the Home Service Show Meetup. There'll be a link to that in the show notes. Say thanks again for supporting the Average Guy Tech Scholarship Fund through Amazon, and so your dollars at theaverageguy.tv/amazon support that. That tech scholarship fund. So appreciate you doing that. That's doing pretty well. And then last but not least, every Saturday morning, 9:30 Eastern— that's AM— 9:30 Eastern, 10:30— I'm sorry, 9:30 Central, 10:30 Eastern. There we go. Ask the Podcast Coach at askthepodcastcoach.com/live. And Dave and Jackson and I are having a good time doing some podcasts, you know, talking about podcasting. And so if you're an aspiring podcaster, you just want to know more about podcasting, or you just can't get enough of and Christian, who can't get enough of me.

I mean, I'm probably the one that gets the most of you out of any given work week. So I, as a firsthand person, I can say probably no one.

You do get a lot of me. I'm sorry about that. And so join us out at askthepodcastcoach.com. If we have a good time, it's a live show. The unique thing about that is you can call in. It's like old-school '80s call-in talk radio. You can call in your questions. We'll have a number, and we'd love to get you call in and ask those questions. So, this will do it for another— another Home Gadget Geeks. I have no idea what podcast I'm on at the moment. I've done so many of them. We do have some— we're back to some community podcasting here over the next couple weeks. We've got guys lined up for next week. Gordon Schmidt's coming back next week. So, we haven't caught up with Gordon in a while. Be good to see him. Kyle Wilcox and Nathaniel Lindley are coming back the week after that. I will be do— oh, and then John Nye is coming back, but not cybersecurity. He's going to talk about his copter, his quadcopter. And actually, Keith Lunsford is going to come on and talk about his hexacopter, or hopefully it will be running by then. Both of them have crashed their copters and are waiting for replacement parts to come. And so those two guys, that will be on September 11th. and they'll be on to talk about that. I've got some shows in the can. If you're an RSS listener and you're listening live and to the RSS feed, I don't know why you would, but if you were, we're running a week behind because I've got some time off coming here in September, and so the feed will not be interrupted, but the live show will. And then we have an interesting one coming up on September 25th. So the guys, the guys, and when I say guys, there's just two of them. At adsy, not atsy, but adsy, A-D-S-Y dot M-E. It's a way to build a mobile app but not have to get it published in iTunes or the Google Play Store. You can have an app just through a link, which is pretty cool, to play both on the iPhone and Android. No Windows Phone yet, sorry. They're working on the major ones first. Just two guys, but Frederick is their marketing guy. He's going to come in from Europe. Up, and he's going to do it in the live time zone, so it'll be 3 in the morning for him when he comes in. So we'll have to cut him some slack. Usually, you know, I'd have to wake up early to do that, but Fredrik is going to come on. So we just booked that over the weekend, and it'll be fun to have him on. We do have an adc.me app that's out there. I'll put the link in the show notes if you want to check it out. You can just, on your phone, just hit the app or hit the link. It'll actually pull up that app in your browser, and you can listen to the latest podcast. That we have out there. Give it a try. Not very sophisticated because I'm not that great at building those, but pretty easy to get them built. And we'd love to have you give it a try. We'll be back next Thursday, 8 PM Central, 9 Eastern, out at theaverageguy.tv live. Christian, thanks for coming out tonight.

Yeah, you bet. Good to be here.

All right, stay around for the post-show. You don't get the post-show unless you're at the live show.

Good night, everybody. Good night.