Background of Getting Started with Wade Foster

Name: Background of Getting Started with Wade Foster
Uploaded: 2019-03-11T17:59:32+00:00
Duration: 2 min 14 s
Channel: Wade Foster
Description: In this interview segment, Wade Foster recounts how he and co‑founder Bryan (Brian) launched Zapier in October 2011 as a side project while freelancing…

11 Mar 2019 · 2 min

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2:14

In this interview segment, Wade Foster recounts how he and co‑founder Bryan (Brian) launched Zapier in October 2011 as a side project while freelancing in Columbia, Missouri. Their work building one‑off integrations revealed a common pain point: businesses needed a way to automate connections between web services without hiring developers or dealing with complex APIs. Wade’s personal frustration with the Marketo API and his admiration for emerging SaaS tools like Wufoo, Mailchimp, SurveyMonkey, and Basecamp inspired the vision of a web‑based platform that anyone could use to set up automations. The team began working remotely from homes, coffee shops, and other informal locations, relying on online collaboration tools such as chat, pull requests, and GitHub. Their early growth led to acceptance into Y Combinator’s summer 2012 batch, marking the only period when the three founders operated from the same physical space. The narrative highlights the spark of empowerment through SaaS, the challenges of building a startup outside a traditional VC hub, and the evolution from a modest side project to a funded startup.

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I wanna hear a little bit of story time. So tell us a little bit about kinda how you started down this path and kinda what was that spark for you?
Yeah, so we started this business in October of 2011, so a little over 7 years ago. And it was in Columbia, Missouri, and it started as a side project. So it kinda came out of some of the work that Bryan and I were doing freelancing. We'd built some one-off integrations for some folks, And then Brian had this realization that, you know, instead of hiring developers, it would be great if people just had software that made it really easy to set up these automations and connections between these services without having to know how to code, without having to understand APIs and all the intricacies involved in doing that. And at the time, my day job, I was dealing with the Marketo API and struggling. And I was like, wow, this would, this would help. Like I've seen our customers, our clients, our freelance clients really benefit from this. I can personally benefit from this. I was loving the sort of empowerment that SaaS software was giving to businesses. You know, things like Wufoo, Mailchimp, SurveyMonkey, Basecamp. Those were things that were sort of popular in that era. And to me, that was like a revelation that you could just log on to a website and like plan all your work through it. It was so cool that small businesses have the power, and to be a part of that sort of journey seemed fun to me. Um, now the interesting part of this is, you know, it's a side project. Columbia, Missouri, you don't go raise money there. There's not VCs on every corner. Uh, and so we start working from our homes, we work from coffee shops, we work from places that just make sense, and we get used to working online via chat via pull requests and GitHub and other virtual tools. That's where we— that's where the beginnings of Zapier started. And then as we sort of grew, you know, once we— we did go through an incubator, Y Combinator, in the summer of 2012. And that was the only time period where the three of us, the whole company at that time, three of us were working out of the same spot.