EPISODE 180 - CEO and Co-founder of Zapier, Wade Foster

Welcome everybody to episode 180 of WordPress Weekly for Wednesday, February 18th, 2015. I'm your host, Jeff Chandler, in the frigid north coast of Ohio, and joined by my co-host in warm, sunbathing California, Marcus Couch. Marcus, thanks a lot for being back on the show again.

Yes, well, it's our thing, right? I'm in the intro, so I've got to be here.

Yes, that would be interesting if you weren't here. I'd have to answer emails. Anyway, so we have a great show lined up for you this evening. Marcus, why don't you go ahead and tell us who our extra special guest is this evening that we're going to talk to?

Okay, well, you know, Jeff, I was tasked a couple months ago with finding a solution to a WordPress website that people wanted to monitor their orders coming out of WooCommerce. And I just, I didn't want them to get into WordPress. I just didn't want to have to teach them. I didn't even want to give them login, nothing. I wanted to make it as simple as possible so that they couldn't do it. So I found this tool called Zapier, and in literally 60 seconds I hooked it to a Google spreadsheet that they literally use every single day. So I wanted to kind of dive in a little bit deeper as far as what Zapier is, so we invited Wade Foster Wade from Zapier, one of the co-founders, and luckily Wade Foster has joined us here for this show. So welcome, Wade.

Thanks guys, I'm glad to be here.

Awesome. And as I understand it, you too are in California.

Yep, I am in the northern part though. It's not quite as warm, but it's still a lot nicer than where you're at.

You're in the part of California that actually gets rain.

Every so often, not too much.

So outside of what we read here in a little bit of the bio, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself, what it is you do.

Sure, yeah, so as you guys mentioned, I'm founder and CEO here at Zapier. We started about 3, a little over 3 years ago now. Zapier is just a tool that makes it really easy to hook up your apps and get them to do like automation for you. So you can do things, really simple stuff like when a new post comes out on your blog, like automatically post it to Twitter and Facebook and do that sort of thing, to, you know, more complicated stuff like if I get a PayPal sale, then automatically save that into QuickBooks. It really just gets all these apps to work nicely together. Prior to that, I worked in, you know, marketing and, you know, gradually taught myself how to code a little bit and Kind of, I guess, a bit of a digital citizen, I suppose.

How many times have you heard people call it Zapier, which I mistakenly called it last week, but the correct term, the correct way to pronounce it is Zapier, right?

Correct. Zapier makes you happier is the trick. I've heard Zapier, I've heard Zapier, I've heard every combination.

Zapier, that's a new one to me.

Yeah. But as long as folks talk about us, I'm pretty happy.

Is Zapier the first company you launched, or do you have a history of launching companies?

It's the first one that's had any sort of success. I've started some very small— probably the best you could call them were side projects where I've made a little bit of money, weekend beer money. Tickets and things like that, but Zapier is definitely the first one that's had real users and supports. 21 people work here and it's a real company doing real stuff.

Now as I understand it, the company was originally founded and you lived in Missouri, but now you're obviously in Northern California. What was the strategy behind that? Is there a reason for that other than maybe you just wanted to live where it's warmer all year round?

Yeah, so Zapier started in Columbia, Missouri, which is where Brian, Mike, and I went to school at the University of Missouri. Go Tigers! And, you know, as it started to get a little bit of traction, things started going well, we kind of thought of like, how do we turn this into a real company and maybe scale it out? And obviously we're doing integrations with tons of tech companies, and really the place to be for tech is out here in the Bay Area, San Francisco, Silicon Valley. And so Moved ourselves out here, got into the Y Combinator summer batch of 2012, moved out here and kind of been gangbusters ever since, I suppose.

Excellent. Before Zapier launched, describe to me what the idea was. Is it something that you wrote on a napkin or is it something that you identified? How did the idea of Zapier come about?

Sure, it was pretty simple. I did a lot of web consulting basically, kind of just your generic agency, Topshop sort of stuff where small businesses would come to me and Brian and we would, for hourly rates or project rates, do small web projects. They would ask us, and on occasion they would ask us to do this API work. They would say things like, "Hey, can you get my PayPal sales into QuickBooks for me?" or "I've got a bunch of leads on a spreadsheet, can you push these these into Salesforce for me. It's not particularly exciting work for an engineer to do. It's kind of like API grunt work, but it's the kind of stuff that's pretty tough for a small business owner, kind of your average Joe, I suppose.

Not to mention your average WordPress owner, too. They don't want to deal with Salesforce and crap like that.

Yeah, it's really not much fun, to be honest, for anyone. Engineers don't like doing that work either because it's not very exciting. It's just pushing data around. Brian and I felt like there's probably an easy way to build a tool that allows them to actually set these— them being your average WordPress user, web user, app user, whatever average is these days— to push this setup, what we call zaps, which is effectively an integration between two different services. When something happens here, push that data over there. That was really the gist of it. It hasn't changed too much since then. The app's gotten a whole lot better than it was 3 years ago. Our first user could barely use it, had to call me on Skype to figure out how to do it, to set up their Zap. Today, it's pretty easy. In less than 60 seconds or so, folks can hook up 2 different apps and have something pretty useful going for them.

Now as I was looking around and as I understand it, Zapier is built on triggers and actions. What are those? Can you describe those?

Sure. A trigger and action is just like an event that might happen in any sort of web app. You could think of it like publishing a post on your blog, getting an email, someone filling out a form on your website, creating a subscriber in your email newsletter service. Uploading a file to Dropbox or Box or any of these tool versus— it's just like these things that you have to do in an app. And so what Zapier will do is when one of those events happens, it will automatically do another one for you based on what has occurred there. So, you know, if someone fills out the form on your site, you could set it up so that Zapier will automatically take the person who filled out that form and, you know, maybe add them to MailChimp or maybe send you a text message or add them to Salesforce or a spreadsheet or ping you on Slack, like any number of these things Zapier can automatically do for you. It just kind of makes your life a little bit easier by automating some of the stuff that maybe you're importing and exporting or copying and pasting or doing some other more cumbersome way of doing those sorts of things.

It even does easier stuff. Here, let me put it into terms as far as WordPress world. You can start in WordPress and let's just say a function like creating an author, a new author on the site, which doesn't happen often, but it happens. And when, let's just say, when you create an author on the site, you also want to add them as an account on Salesforce. So those two worlds are completely different. It's like, wow, you just built a bridge that can go from here to here. And yes, I probably could have added that in Salesforce myself so that I can contact them later or monitor their lead cycle or whatever. The fact that it just does it kind of behind your back and you don't have to worry about it, you know it's there. That's what I really find fascinating about the platform that you've created.

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty cool. The thing that's always fun for me is when people set these up and then they totally forget that they're even running. Like in this case where you don't create a— it's pretty rare to create a WordPress author. Someone will set this up and a few months later they'll make an author and then it will automatically happen for them and they'll be like, whoa! They didn't even remember that they had it set up, so it kind of surprises them and catches them off guard, which is pretty cool.

And so now, can you break down just, I mean, off the top of your head, I know there's hundreds of them, but how about some of the most popular app integrations that you've seen as far as, you know, a list of what you've got and then some of the more common, I guess, bridges that get built in between in regards to—

Sure. Yeah, the most common things, I guess apps on Zapier are the things that are usually the most common apps on the web. Think like Google products, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, that sort of thing, but also things like Trello and Evernote, email, Twitter. Then it starts to span into some more broader but maybe a bit niche tools, things like Trello and Asana and Basecamp for project management. Like Slack and HipChat for group chat is pretty popular. You know, Dropbox, Google Drive is popular for files. Gravity Forms, WordPress, WooCommerce in the WordPress ecosystem are all really popular. Things like Salesforce, Highrise if you're thinking CRMs. It's really like the stuff that's most popular on the web that tends to be the most popular apps. Now what you do with it kind of varies. So like a very common thing that folks do is when someone fills out a form, add it as a new row to a spreadsheet. So maybe they fill out, you know, a Gravity Forms form on your site, add it as a new row in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Or maybe add them to like MailChimp as a subscriber, or add them to Salesforce as a subscriber, or create a card in Trello. Like that sort of like forms to create something else in some other system is definitely a pretty popular thing to do. You know, other things are kind of simple stuff like, you know, you get an email and then, you know, maybe you mark, like, star it or label it, and that creates like a to-do item in maybe Trello or Asana or some task management service of your choice. So all that stuff tends to be pretty popular.

So basically your slogan for the company, for the service, is automating the boring stuff of life.

Pretty much, yeah. It's like getting rid of all the crap that you don't want to be doing.

There's a service out there that reminds me of that I think is one of your competitors. It's called If This Then That. It's a free service. What does Zapier have that differentiates itself from, let's say, If This Then That type of website?

Sure. The concept is very similar, triggers and actions. What Zapier has is a lot more professional tools for you. We integrate with things like Gravity Forms and WooCommerce and Salesforce and MailChimp and Trello and SurveyMonkey. Woofu and all these tools that you're more likely going to be using in a professional or work setting, whereas IFTTT is much more focused on the consumer side of things. Really what we try to do at Zapier is make it easy for you to get work done. All the integrations we build are built around that. We also allow you to do things like hook up multiple accounts. Say you've got multiple WordPress sites that you're running, you can hook up multiple WordPress sites to Zapier. If you need to be more granular in the level of detail that you fill filter on. Say you don't want to filter on every single post that you publish to WordPress. You only want to trigger when a certain keyword is mentioned in the title or something like that. You can set that sort of thing up with Zapier. While Zapier focuses on simplicity, we also strive to provide a lot more power to the end users so that they can set up, I guess, a little bit more complex workflows, if you will.

And so what, you know, there are tons and tons, as you mentioned, of different apps that you can start as your origination point and finish point on this. What are some of the most unusual requests you've seen for a new app integration?

You know, you can get tons of interesting things. One thing I saw— we came across today which was pretty fascinating was someone was using a form on a website, or maybe it was a project management app, to spin up new subdomains on their website, which I thought was super fascinating. I hadn't thought to, like, ever do something like that. So they would just basically let someone fill out a form, and then instantly it would spin up a subdomain for them to do something on that website, which I thought was pretty crazy and interesting. Then of course we see also the Rube Goldberg sort of ideas where folks will chain all sorts of crazy ideas along. We had a web agency a while back that set up a Gravity Forms form on their site, which is how they get all the leads for their agency. What happens is when someone fills out the form, it directs them to PayPal. When they get the payments that come through, it automatically adds that person to Mailchimp. It automatically puts the payment into FreeAgent for them. It also creates a new project inside of Basecamp for them. It also creates a new folder inside of Drive to store all the documents associated with the project. And then I think it queues up a tweet via Buffer or something pretty mundane as well. But it's like this huge chain of actions that just kind of occur based on someone filling out this form on a site, which that kind of stuff is pretty cool and novel. I always like seeing the real long Rube Goldberg-esque ideas that folks can come up with.

And so for kind of the developer guys out there, what are some of the, I guess, customized integrations? I know you have, you know, variances that you can do in the code. What are some of the more, I guess, let me put it a different way, how far will you let some guys go as far as their own code?

We let you get pretty far. We actually have an app on Zapier that allows you to send or receive generic webhooks. If you're a developer, you could just send us a payload or we'll send a payload to you of just data of whatever you want. You can use WordPress plugins that will do this. I know there's one like HookPress that allows you to do this, like set up hook— oh, Webhooks inside of WordPress. I know there's others that I can't think of off the top of my head to just throw any sort of data so that any event that occurs in WordPress you could trigger off of. Then we also have hookups for most of the popular database types, like MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server. I know WordPress obviously is basically MySQL on the backend. Typically. So whatever sort of tables you've set up in your WordPress account, you could potentially use that as a trigger and action in Zapier. You can get pretty far if you're an enterprising developer. Even if you're not a great one, you can probably hack something together. I know that's where I am.

Is there any kind of mobile integration or apps in that respect that have used your platform?

Zapier itself isn't a super great mobile experience, to be honest. It's mobile responsive. There are a few— any of the apps on Zapier, a lot will have mobile apps or mobile versions of what they use. Think like Gmail or Evernote or Dropbox. They all have mobile experiences. What you can do in the mobile apps are possible to become triggers and actions on Zapier. That's typically how that surfaces in the mobile world.

So you're really just riding on the back of them really. I'm just looking at it from a development standpoint. I have ideas for apps but I have no idea how I would ever get that data into another place. It seems like to me that this would be a great patchwork way to get that done.

Absolutely. We also have our developer platform which is at zapier.com/developer which allows app developers to hook their own tools into Zapier. Companies like Gravity Forms and WooCommerce and Slack and HubSpot have all developed their Zapier apps through the developer platform themselves, which allows them to create triggers and actions and then expose them to their own customers so that they can, you know, their customers can do this kind of automation themselves.

So going back, sort of hinting on that, so when something like Ninja Forms or WooCommerce or Gravity Forms announces that they have support for Zapier through a module, is that something they created?

Yeah, typically they've created a plugin for their system and then they've got an API that can talk to Zapier and they've hooked into us. Once they do that, they can— WooCommerce or Ninja Forms or Gravity Forms or whatever now can work with however many other apps are on Zapier. Today that's 400 but Tomorrow it might be 401. Next day it'll be 400 and who knows what.

So that's pretty cool. So you have this baseline that you keep adding to of services and apps, but you also have products like the Gravity Forms where they built integration, they built an integration app to tap into Zapier. And at least with those companies and products building support for Zapier, sort of takes the load off you guys for having to create all those integrations yourself.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, early on it was just us, like, building as many integrations as we could, and then eventually we got to where, like, it was— we were popular enough that folks, you know, it makes sense, right? Like, you hook into one place and that automatically hooks you up to all the others. It's a lot easier than, you know, trying to build integrations to everything on your own and trying to support the app that you've already got on your hands at the same time.

What's the language Zaps use to integrate with services and products? Is it the same language across the board?

Yeah, basically we talk in APIs, REST APIs. JSON is our preferred data format, though we can work with XML too. You're able to manipulate requests in JavaScript as well if you need to, but if you're using good standard REST-based, RESTful principles, the API you've got should work just fine with Zapier.

That's cool. And as one of the major projects that is currently underway for WordPress, which we've talked about here on the show previous times, is the REST API. There's a group of volunteers working on a REST API for WordPress, and it seems to be like the holy grail all of these WordPress developers are waiting for. 'cause I guess it'll open up a lot more opportunities to interact with WordPress and abstract— and only mess with WordPress in certain points versus— with a lot less code versus the, like, XML-RPC area.

Yeah, it certainly will make things a lot nicer in the WordPress ecosystem. I would expect once that lands to see some really cool stuff.

So what I think is pretty cool is it— You have this community and people are able to create Zaps, which is their unique combinations. Can people browse Zaps created by others? Is there an internal ecosystem community around Zaps that people create?

Yeah, so if you go to zapier.com/zapbook, you can poke around all the apps that are on Zapier. If you click around on the different icons and stuff, you'll see premade Zaps or Zap templates that are pretty much— they're not quite one-click setup but they're pretty dang close. It takes a little bit of the creativity out of the process but for those of you who just like it quick and dirty, that's definitely the way to go because other folks have already done the work for you a little bit which is great.

I'm assigning Marcus Couch a task after the show or a challenge as you say. Let's see how many zaps you could put together— well, not zaps, but how many apps you can string together before you make like Zapier crash, if that's possible.

It'd be pretty tough to make Zapier crash, but I don't want to say you couldn't because I don't want anyone to take that as a challenge.

What do you have on the backend as far as running the entire thing server power-wise?

Sure, you know, there's— I don't know what the server count is at these days, but I know we do several hundred million API calls every week.

Wow.

Yeah, all running on AWS for the most part, so it's getting pretty beefy back there.

Do you ever run into situations where Zapier is making too many API calls to a specific service or specific app and then they cut you off? Are there limits or is there business transactions that go on behind the scenes to allow you to to have so many API calls?

Yeah, this is like a challenge of the industry we're in. Fortunately, Zapier is— for most of the apps we work with, we're the number one API consumer. We have personal relationships with the dev teams behind there. They know that we're building a good product for their end users. If there is this case where we go over their API rate limits or whatever, like we can just ping them and say, hey, you know, we got an issue, can you help us out today? But typically it's not really a problem because the way most people set up their API rate limits is on a per-authentication basis. So it's you as a user that has a rate limit and not Zapier that has an overall rate limit. So it's pretty impo— Zapier, we've set it up so that we only poll or, you know, make API calls at kind of when we have to. So it's pretty rare for us to hit rate limits on behalf of users, though it does happen on occasion.

And have there been people that have used this kind of for nefarious purposes? I imagine so, right?

Yeah, I mean, you know, like any app and service, There's people who will do it for things that are, I guess, less than kosher. We do our best to track those down and make sure that they're not able to do that. With anything, Zapier is automation. It lets you do good things better and faster, but it can also let you do bad things faster as well. We try and make sure that folks who are doing those sorts of things don't get away with it.

—And so, like, what was the— I'm just curious about this— what was the first things that you hooked together that you just kind of, you and your partners, had a look at each other and went, whoa, I think we got something here. Like, what were the two integrations? What did you do?

—So, one of my favorite stories is early on we hooked up PayPal and Twilio so you could get a text message when someone sent you PayPal, which is pretty simple. But what was kind of cool about this was our very first customer, we actually didn't have like a corporate bank account or anything set up. When we actually sold him to use Zapier, he said, "Great, okay, how do I send you money?" I was like, "Well, crap, I really don't know how you're going to send us money." I was like, "Well, you can send it to my personal PayPal account." I set up a Zap then that when I got PayPal transaction or money got sent to me, I got an SMS. Then I kind of forgot about it. Then later that week, Brian and Mike and I went to the local bank, the branch, and we're going to set up a corporate bank account. I kid you not, as we walked into the bank, I got a text message that said, "You've got money." As soon as we opened up that bank account, I had some money to put in it.

Wow, come on, you didn't time that out, you set that up, didn't you?

I wish I could say that I set that up. That was just like one of those freak chance happenings that was like, wow, that was pretty cool.

From what I understand, Zapier is a 100% distributed company, is that right? Yeah, we are.

We've got 21 folks, mostly in the US but a few spread all over the world as well.

So you being co-founder, why did you decide to structure the company in this way when you could— I don't say easily, but you could have had maybe a physical office in San Francisco somewhere, which by the way, do you have a physical office? Do you have something that says, yeah, this is the home of Zapier? It's not.

Slack is our office pretty much for the most part. You log into Slack and that's— you're at work. As for why we did it, when we started Zapier, it was very much like a side project. Brian and I still had day jobs. Mike had school. For the first year, it was just the 3 of us. We weren't going to wait until we could meet in person to actually work on Zapier. Whether it was at night or the weekends or whatever, whenever or at home or at a coffee shop, we were just like, that's when we would get work done. You know, there wasn't really an office, and so it was very much kind of ingrained in like our work habits early on, like you can just get work done from anywhere. And then, you know, after we— I mentioned, you know, we moved to California, got into Y Combinator, we were able to work together for, you know, basically 3 months was the only— those 3 months were the only time in the history of our company where everyone was together in the same spot And after that, Mike actually moved back to Missouri because his girlfriend was still in law school, now his wife. And we hired a friend of mine that I'd worked with in the past who was in Chicago because he was smart and good. And so it just felt very natural to us to just grow as a distributed team. You get access to really smart people all over the world, don't have to, you know, be limited to the people you know that are available to work with you in the, you know, 30-mile radius that you live.

Well, you're, uh, Zapier's in good company because you look at companies like Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, they're over 300 people strong and they're 100% distributed. And if you look at a lot of articles that have been published within the past 2 years, it looks like the future of work is from a distributed environment. I mean, if you look at some of the You know, an immediate benefit offhand is you're no longer limited by geographical area for talent, and you allow them to work from anywhere they want to work from instead of having to relocate their entire life to work in your little office.

So yeah, that's right, that's right, that's right. You know, that's exactly it. And it works vice versa as well, so that, you know, say you are all in one place and you have a really smart person on your team who maybe their spouse gets another job outside another place, or maybe there's a family member that's ill and they have to move. You don't lose a really great teammate just because of outside life circumstances. That's kind of one of the cool things too. I know since Zapier has started, I think we've had maybe 7 or 8 people who have moved across the country physically. And for the most part, like, we didn't really know much about it. Like, they said, hey, I'm moving this weekend, and it was like, you know, they showed up Monday morning just like it was normal.

So that's a pretty cool perk to have.

Indeed. So, and, and in relation to that, how fast has your growth been as far as employees?

Yeah, so, um, let's see, in 2014 We started the year with 8 people and, you know, at the end of 2014 we were at, I guess, 17, and today we're at 21. So it's, you know, it's gone pretty quickly, I suppose, though it doesn't feel like it's been, I guess, super fast. But yeah, it's growing well.

And so what types of roles do those folks play within your organization?

Sure, so I mean, it's mostly like one of three things. So it's either like a product engineering sort of person or marketing, which is mostly writing about Zaps, different ways that you can use them. That's working with our partners and that sort of thing. Or customer support. There's a lot of people who want help setting these things up, and so our customer support team helps out on that.

How many users do you have now, and what was the growth process as far as growing your user base?

Sure, so we have just over 400,000 users today. A lot of it's just been working with our partners to help grow the user base. WordPress has however many millions of installs, and each of these apps has different numbers of users, but a lot of them have a huge amount of users. When you build something that's useful for They're users, they're happy to talk about it and basically give their customers' ears to Zapier for a little bit. That's really helped us grow the user base because we've built something useful for these people's users and customers.

Within the past 3 years of the company's existence, how many APIs would you say, just roughly, that you've had to maybe stop supporting because the service decided, OK, we're just— either it gets acquired by somebody else or they go under.

Does that happen a lot? [Speaker:CHRIS_BROADFOOT] Not really. It's happened. I can probably, on one hand, I can probably think of the number of times we've had to do that where a company has gone under or gotten bought or decided to shut down their API for whatever reason. It's pretty rare to see that happen.

Probably a good idea not to build Zapier support for something that launched yesterday.

Yeah, we definitely want to see demand from folks before they come on Zapier, like the fact that it's going to be useful, that people are already using their app, because it's a lot of work to support more, to do more API calls and work with another tool if there's not anyone who's going to use it. We're like any developer, right? We want to build stuff that's useful, and it's not much fun when you build something that nobody wants to use.

Yeah, and you have Zaps and APIs for services and companies that have been around for a while that are established, versus the Web 2.0 era of like 2005 through 2008 where services were popping up like crazy and APIs were everywhere, and then all of a sudden people were building business on top of those APIs, and once those APIs disappeared, so did several businesses. So I guess it's pretty nice that you, you know, you're, you're way above that, you're way ahead of that. You didn't have to mess around with all those APIs and services causing havoc in the community. For sure.

And, and, you know, I mean, the one reason— and I bring up user base because hopefully this show will help grow that— but The reason I really wanted to bring you on today that really captivated me was the fact that now with this tool, WordPress developers and WordPress designers out there can go to potential clients and go, "Yeah, you know, yeah, I know you want a website design that does this and that, but let's talk functionality over form." You know, where, "Hey, if you want to integrate into Salesforce," I can do that for you, you know, easily. If you want to, you know, put out spreadsheet reports every month or, you know, however long the frequency is or recurrence, you can do that. So to speak to the WordPress, I guess, developers and designers out there, how do you— what sales pitch or what integrations do you think that this community of WordPress benefits with most as far as presenting to clients.

For sure. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things that kind of your WordPress— your average WordPress designer, developer, agency has a lot of these common requests that come up. Oftentimes, maybe the client doesn't have the budget to do it from scratch, or quite frankly, maybe not be interesting to you as the developer/designer to do it. There's a lot of things that Zapier can help with. It could be things, simple things like if someone fills out a form on my site, submit that data to some external service. For instance, helping build up an email list through MailChimp or AWeber or Campaign Monitor or any of these other pretty popular email marketing tools. For a sales process, submitting it to Salesforce, Highrise, BaseCRM, any of the CRMs that are popular. That's one way that's really simple is just have— put forms on sites and have that submit data to these backend office apps that folks are using inside their businesses. Another really popular thing is to help them spread the word a little bit about— they're setting up a WordPress site, and most WordPress sites have a blog. Use that to power notifications for when new posts go out, posting it to Facebook or Twitter. LinkedIn or sending a Slack message or email message to the people who I guess need to know about it. That's a very popular thing to do. Then it could be just all sorts of other things like WooCommerce is a great plugin. You can run the backend of an ecommerce platform through WooCommerce and Zapier and a few other integrations. Push your WooCommerce orders into QuickBooks or Xero. Get their customer data into Salesforce. A lot of just like the simple stuff about pushing data from WordPress and WordPress-related plugins into other backend office tools that kind of are pretty common for the average WordPress developer or designer that would help make their lives a little bit easier. You can set this stuff up in a few minutes versus spending however many hours or weeks wrangling with some nasty plugin PHP code.

Yeah, not only that, but having to learn it to begin with. If somebody has some crazy app that they're stuck in, to be able to not have to worry about going to dig through documentation to figure out what does what and, you know, all that. There have been so many instances in the past, and this is a zap that I'm gonna try out within the next couple days, of like XML product feeds that come over through affiliate networks or merchants or things like that. To be able to create new posts and then even update them. That's something that I'm definitely looking forward to trying to integrate. And I know that, and hopefully within the community that we have listening to the show here, some people out there will try Zapier and at least give us some feedback as far as what they think and what some of the cool zaps that they've come up with. I'm curious to see if we can maybe get a WordPress sub-port or subreddit or something like that within within your community.

That would be great. For sure, yep. I was thinking about creating a Zap where every time the trigger is the dog barking and the action is a Milk-Bone biscuit showing up in his bowl. That would be—

I know the dogs I've got here with me right now would love that.

That would be like life hacking to the extreme, like Zapier in the real world.

So is there some kind of funky integration maybe coming around? They always talk about the Internet of Things, right? Like, you know, is my fridge door open for more than a minute? You know, send me a text. Can we do stuff like that in the future? What do you think?

I think probably, you know, you're starting to see more and more of, I guess, your just more mundane devices in your home be able to hook up to the Internet, whether it's, you know, like a thermostat through Nest or, you know, your door lock via Lockotron, you know, or just these, you know, sensor devices that you find around. I think it'll be pretty common for just like the random things you got in your house to be able to, you know, change the status on them or flick them from one thing to another just via an API call. So it'll be, it'll be interesting to see kind of where it takes us.

Yeah, yeah, like the software on your fridge, you know, as an access point and like If the milk's empty, there's a keypad or something, and it does the action is to put an item into a spreadsheet. That way when you go to the store, it's right there in the spreadsheet. You can probably access it on a mobile device.

Or maybe it even just orders it for you and the milk shows up at your door.

Well, we're not there yet, but probably sooner rather than later. Now, with so many apps and 400,000 users, there's a robust community that you have there, and I was just, you know, out of curiosity, how important has it been to have someone interact and manage that community? Because I understand that earlier this year I think you guys hired a community manager just to concentrate on cultivating and interacting with your community.

Yeah, I think it's a big deal. You know, we've got tons of people who who want to see more out of us. They want to see more triggers, they want to see more actions, they want to learn how to use the tool better. They know that there's a lot of possibilities with Zapier. A big part of our job is just to educate and show people the cool use cases that others are already doing. Allison actually was in our customer support team and had seen this firsthand and has transitioned over to more of a community builder role to really help spread the knowledge about how best to use Zapier with these other apps out there. I think it's something that I guess in 3 years we've existed to this point, we've done probably an okay job at, but I think we can do a lot better with Ruth at the helm helping out there.

I think what a community manager is very important, at least for me, because it's someone who really gets into how people are using your product. Maybe they're the ones that get to see these wacky zaps that we've been, you know, discussing as possibilities. And, and they're also a lightning rod for getting feedback, both good and bad. And that could be translated as long as you have someone there like a community manager that can translate, send that right up the chain to the people in command, to the product developers, and say, hey, look, we've got people who say this is a problem and they're leaving our service because of it, you guys can make that immediate change as a service with the iterations. I mean, I think a community manager is a very important position at something like Zapier.

Yeah, I would definitely agree.

So what kind of, you know, what kind of people out there that are other— I don't know how to describe them, but, you know, other big Silicon Valley companies, you know, these big guys, Salesforce, all the rest of it. Anybody ever scoffed at you? Anybody tell you, you know, go to hell, there's no way this thing is ever going to work? Or, you know, it's not going to work for us? Have you ever had any negative pushback from people like that?

Not too much, to be honest. You know, there are some communities out there that are just more closed off naturally. You know, they don't have an API and they don't plan to have an API. Obviously, if they don't have an API, Zapier can't do anything with it, so it's scoffing us, but it's also scoffing any sort of third-party developers doing anything sort of interesting with us. Squarespace is a community that comes to mind that doesn't have an API. I think they will at some point in time. I hope they will, but that's an area where they haven't focused most of their strategic business on, which is fine. But for the most part, you know, most people are really excited to kind of open up their ecosystems and hook it into other tools and really empower their users to kind of build the workflows and build apps on top of, you know, the functionality they've kind of— or the baseline functionality they've already provided with their app.

Yeah, I've even made just kind of my own pseudo support ticket system that ties into teamwork.com, that creates a new task project to investigate based on the results of a particular form. So, and that's just something for my own use, and I haven't even gotten as far as, you know, sending me a message or, you know, things like that based upon it. But yeah, I agree with you there. If a platform is afraid to develop into an API sense, then they probably have no business being around until they do. And because the integration is probably— if they don't have an API, they don't have the demand for it amongst their user base, or so it would seem.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I certainly think the open ecosystems are really the way to go. It really just empowers kind of— it's what's best for the consumer, and I really just believe I think what's best for the consumer is what's going to win out in the long term.

That's a good way to look at it. Just two more things here to wrap it up. A, if people who are listening to the show who may be developers think, "Man, Zapier sounds like a badass company doing a really cool thing," are you guys hiring? Absolutely. Zapier.com/jobs.

We love smart engineers.

Excellent. I'll link that up in the show notes. Last but not least, describe What's Zapier's pricing model? Is it available to use for free?

Absolutely. Zapier has a free plan. It's a freemium app. As your usage scales up, if you need— I think it's more than 5 zaps, which is a connection between services, or tasks, more than 100 tasks, which tasks are how often the zap fires, then it moves up to paid plans, which start at $20 a month and move up. Really as high as you need it to be.

Excellent. Zapier accounts are— see, I knew it. I knew I'd see it.

You had a bet.

I knew it. Almost made it. I can edit that out. You're not going to, no way. Zapier accounts are free and people can start off with a free account and then as they if they decide, whoa, this is really cool, or they come up with other use cases, they can scale upwards. There you go. Yep. Awesome. So any last questions, Marcus, for Wade before we let him go?

No, but I'm gonna hit him up if I come up with the ultimate zap. I think I need to maybe get into the Zap Hall of Fame or, you know, something.

There you go. Yeah, send me your root gold chain. I want to hear about it. Those are my favorite.

Awesome. So Wade, I just want to say thank you very much for taking some time out of your schedule here to be on the show, give us a little more insight into Zapier, which is a service that I see more and more commercial WordPress products offering through a module. As we were talking earlier, last week we had James Laws on of Ninja Forms, and in January Zapier announced on their blog that You guys had added support for Ninja Forms, so it's really cool. I look at it as from a consumer, now that I understand Zapier, if I'm going to use a— using the WordPress plugin that supports Zapier, it's like getting 400 additional features. It's like getting a whole slew of cool new things but with just this one interaction with Zapier, and that's a pretty cool value add. Yep, for sure. With that said, tell us how we can keep in touch with you, follow you around. The easiest way is I'm pretty active on Twitter @WadeFoster.

If you want to shoot me an email, wade@zapier.com. I'm not as active in my inbox, but I do my best. Those are probably the two best ways to get in touch with me.

I should tell folks to keep an eye on the Zapier blog because you guys actually I give out quite a few resources for free, like the most recent ebook. You guys give out a lot of ebooks.

Yeah, we do a lot to write about apps. So we've, we've written a guide to CRMs which goes over, I think, 20 or 25 of the best CRMs out there. We've done a guide to email marketing apps, which was the one that was released a couple days ago, which goes over the best 20 or 25 email marketing apps. Really what the guys over on the blog are trying to do is just write about the best apps out there. And help you find the best apps to run your business. So you'll see more and more of that from us.

Excellent. Wade, thanks again for coming on the show, and all the best to you, and enjoy that dinner.

I will. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks, Marcus. You guys have a good rest of the evening.

Thanks so much. Bye. Thank you. So that's gonna wrap it up for our interview, which means we should probably head straight into the news of the week. And the first thing I want to talk about is a Last week I published a post called "A Look Back at 16 Automatic Acquisitions Since 2007." So we'll quickly go down the list here. Hopefully this doesn't take too long. And I'll say the name and then I'll get a response from Marcus. You say either yay or meh. Okay. Or something like that. So the first one is Gravatar. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. The BuddyPress acquihire, which is when BuddyPress was— Automatic actually acquired Andy Peatling, who was the main developer on BuddyPress, and because of that acquihire, they were able to devote more resources into the BuddyPress project. They need to put more. So we'll see. So that's an in-between. How about intense debate? Never used it. Never used it, and I used it, and that's one of my— I wish they would have kept it around and done more with it. It's still around, it's just development's dead. Hopefully in some form or fashion it can come back, reestablish its glory in the commenting space. Yeah. How about Poldaddy?

Nope, I don't care what people think.

Okay. Just kidding. And then there's this B-L-O-G-S, or blog. Which was acquired by Yahoo and then transferred to Automattic. And I'm not— I'll give this one a big meh because it's nothing that works anymore. Sort of one of those services where you can ping your blog or have your blog ping various services to have it be discovered. But right now it's like, it's all broken. The only thing cool about it is the domain.

Yeah, it's already built into WordPress, it's pings, you know.

Ping-o-matic. Yeah. After the Deadline. Never heard of it. After the Deadline is a contextual spell checking service created in 2009. It is a module within Jetpack. I use it. I think it's pretty darn cool because it's one of the only— well, I don't know if it's true these days, but it uses context. It can do spell checking and grammar on context, which is something not a lot of other spell checkers can do, which I think is pretty neat. And it actually uses artificial intelligence to do that. So that's pretty— I give that a big yay. Okay, I'll have to check it out.

I, you know, I'm not a Jetpack user, so I'll have to look.

So there's another service called Plinky, which was created by Thing Labs, and what it did was it inspired users to write content. Um, was cool back in the day, but in 2014, user registration was disabled and the service was put in archive mode, so we'll just skip that one. CodeGarage. CodeGarage is one of those services that were providing backups and security scanning, crisis control for WordPress sites. Of course, we know a service that does something similar today called VaultPress. Actually, CodeGarage was acquired by Automattic and rolled right into VaultPress, so there you go. Yep. If you look at VaultPress, We use it on the tavern. I give it a big yay because it's really, it's really good. I like the automatic backups, and anytime something goes wrong, boom, it gives you a track log of what's going on. So I think I really like it. Yes, very much so. Next up, some Purium and SimpleNote. Do you use SimpleNote? No, I do not. It is a note-taking app that is synchronized across multiple platforms, so you can create a note on your desktop, on your phone, whatever. They're all synchronized and the company was founded in 2010, acquired in 2013. SimpleNote is still available as a separate app outside of the whole WordPress.com sphere. So I'll give this one a no comment because I don't use it.

Okay, me neither.

Then there's Poster. Now Poster was a slick, easy-to-use WordPress mobile app for iOS back in— that was created by Tom Whitkin in around 2003, but it was no, not 2003, boy, that's way back— 2013, and that's when it was acquired. Now, after the acquisition, the app was removed from the App Store and Wickham joined the mobile team at Automattic. So it was— I don't know if you want to call it an acquihire or not, but at the time, his app, Poster, was described as one of the most elegant and smarter WordPress mobile clients that was out there. So I'm gonna give this one a big meh because Poster was removed from the App Store. I never had an opportunity to use it. Now I probably will never have an opportunity to use it. And I've learned, I've since learned that Wick Kent is no longer employed at Automattic. He's off doing something else. I know, I think building cool stuff for Apple. So now, you know, as a, as a consumer, that really sucks because A, now I'm out a competitor to the WordPress mobile app, and B This guy had some really cool talent for design, and I probably won't experience that in the WordPress mobile app. So I give this one a big meh.

Yeah, I hate the WordPress mobile app. I, you know, I want so badly to be able to use it, but it's just so clunky. And I was a Poster user, actually. It's something— it was one of the first things that I put on my iPad 1 when I first bought it, and it was nice. I really liked it. I like the interface. It, it was cool. And I, I'm sorry to say, but I think the WordPress mobile app was kind of a step backwards in some sense, just from a UI perspective. So, um, yeah, I'll give this a meh too. I wish this kind of technology would make a comeback.

Next up is Lean Domain Search, which is, which is a service that allows users to find and register domain names. It's It was created by Matt Mezer in 2012 and acquired in 2013. And the thing I like about it is, well, A, it's pretty much a simple web design, but if you type in a word, it will give you a bunch of different suggestions on domains that have that word in it. So if you type in WordPress, you'll see a whole slew of domain names like moneywordpress.com or wordpresscapital.com. It just puts that word into a domain name and it kind of does a lot of different suggestions for you. And I'll give this—

don't buy a domain that has WordPress in it, by the way, everybody.

Oh yeah, Wade Foster, yeah, don't do that. That was just an example. But I give this one a yay because I like it, and it's cool just to type in a word and see what it comes up with in terms of domains with that word in it. And who knows, there might be someone, there might be a couple out there that look really good I never thought of that, that are available. Just a neat service to look into.

It's awesome. It's a lot better than any other kind of domain suggestion tool out there.

Then there's Cloudup, and Cloudup is a free file sharing service that was created in 2010, acquired in 2013 by Automattic. And to me, Cloudup is a big yay. I love it. I use it. I have a little app on my Windows desktop, and it's, it's incredibly easy to just take a screenshot of something upload it to the little app and it gives me the URL automatically and I can paste this to somebody else. The file management is very easy to use. I really, really like CloudHub.

Hmm, that's pretty cool. I've not used it but I'm going to try it out since you give it such a high recommendation.

Yeah, and I guess a lot of people have said it's like a Dropbox but I've never used Dropbox or any of those other type of file sharing services or repositories. So CloudApp is the first one I've used, obviously because it was acquired by Automattic. I wanted to know how it works, and it's very cool. I, I like it. It's pretty darn, pretty darn convenient. Hmm, cool. Then there's Longreads, and Longreads is sort of like a, I guess, kind of like a service, or it's right now it's sort of like an addition to WordPress.com where group of people share the best long-form stories on the web. It was founded by Mark Armstrong in 2009 and acquired in 2014. Now this one actually has a paid subscription model, so you can pay $3 to $5 a month and you can have curated content, long reads, sent to your inbox. And I don't, I don't really use this one, but I have seen a couple of recommendations that it that it sends out, and I've read them, and they're pretty good stories. So I'll give this one above meh, but just, just below yeah, or wherever that is.

Alright, I'll take your word for it. I haven't used that one myself.

Then there's Scrollkit. Scrollkit allowed users to create web pages without writing a line of code. Apparently had a very cool visual editor. In fact, the co-founder Cody Brown recreated the famous snowfall piece from the New York Times in like an hour, which was unheard of. Because the New York Times got really PO'd because they spent lots of money and time and hours creating that effect on the web, and here's this thing that comes along and does it in less than an hour. So it was acquired in 2014. I never had a chance to use it. Now I have no idea if parts or pieces of the Scrollkit editor will end up on WordPress.com, you know, for editing themes or maybe in the self-hosted version of WordPress.org. I have no idea. So since I've never used it, I'm just going to have to pass on it. And hopefully, if it was that cool and it had that cool visual editor, I hope at some point we see some of that technology integrated into WordPress.com. That would be pretty cool. Yes. Then the next one is Brute Protect, and the parent company of Brute Protect was Parka at the time. It was established in 2013 by Sam Hotchkiss, someone who we've had on the show before. Acquired in 2014, and I give this one a big yay because it's, it's a really neat service. It's one of those things that does brute force protection on your site without you even having to worry about it because it's a service. So I give this one a big yay, and apparently from what I've heard, if it's not the next version or the version after it, it's going to be integrated into Jetpack as a module. So it's going to open up millions of websites out there to have brute force login protection, which is, which is nice, and it'll help make the web a safe, a little bit safer place.

Yeah, we featured this whole story on the show, and it's nice to see that Sam and his team joined Automattic. So I'm really looking forward to the integrations that they're going to deliver within, you know, the next year and years to come.

And the last one is an agency called Code for the People, and Automattic acquired them. They're based in the United Kingdom. They're also a longtime partner of the WordPress.com VIP program. So basically this is a strategic acquisition for Automattic to pick up these people, the the employees of Code for the People, and they're probably gonna help the VIP team during European hours. And, uh, just, uh, well, there's also another little addition to that, and that is they obtained Babbel, which is an open-source multilingual tool from Code for the People. Now, it'll be interesting to see what happens with that, because right now I think the sort of the household name for WordPress multilingual stuff is the WPML plugin, and there's a lot of people that would like to see an alternative to that, a lightweight alternative. And we'll have to see if Babel turns into that preferred alternative or what they do with it. So, and in fact, in the acquisition announcement, Matt Mullenweg did say that Babel was a key part of the deal. And with all the talk of WordPress downloads exceeding— outside the US exceeding those in the US and the internationalization. I think that all sort of start to see the pieces fall into place there with the multilingual stuff in WordPress. Definitely.

But, you know, as the list, you know, went on here as we started talking about it, the WordPress community should kind of look back in reflection and notate that not every acquisition is the game changer for WordPress. No, in fact, hardly any of these were, but as long as they turn the wheel just a little bit, I think that helps.

Mm-hmm, exactly. So let's see, um, hey, tickets are on sale for WordCamp North Canton, Ohio. Boy, that's in my backyard. I could use my house as a hotel room, so that's awesome.

Hey, I'm coming.

Let's do it. So tickets are on sale. The event is on May 8th through the 9th. There's going to be like a business sort of, I think, Friday. Friday is going to be a split between entrepreneur and WordPress sessions, sort of like that business day before the WordCamp. And Saturday will feature a full day of WordPress presentations. Now it's pretty affordable. You can, you know, $30 for Friday and Saturday, or you could spend $20 for Friday ticket or $20 for Saturday ticket. It's going to be held on the Stark State College campus, so those of you listening who aren't in Ohio probably have no idea where that is, but it's a really neat college campus that has awesome Wi-Fi, an awesome internet connection, so Wi-Fi is not a problem. And I will actually be participating on a panel at this WordCamp on a discussion on imposter syndrome. Hmm. What we're going to do is we're going to share our experiences battling the syndrome on a daily basis and give advice on how Avoid Its Influence. And I think a lot of people out there, our listeners, can relate to what imposter syndrome is. And even for someone like me, I've, I've been battling through it without even realizing it. And so we're going to talk about that and see if we can't, can't right the ship for a couple of people and have them stop beating themselves up, which is a routine symptom of the syndrome.

Definitely. That's going to be cool. I look forward to that. I'm going to check my schedule. Maybe I can head that way because I know in June you're coming out to WordCamp Orange County to hang out with me.

Yes, I am. I'll be— I was checking the dates today. I'll probably head out there on a Friday and hang out there during the weekend, come back Monday. Just in time for a concert the day after. Alright. So our last story before we wrap it up with the plugin picks of the week is that WordPress 4.2 is on track to expand core support for emoji.

Ooh, I was waiting for that.

Yeah, so emoji characters originated back in Japan in the late '90s, but they've really— they've sort of taken a decade to really break into global usage. So emojis are like— they're way beyond smileys. Icons of things like ice cream cones or a chicken head or poop. You know, there's an emoji image out there for poop which a lot of people seem to use and enjoy. So apparently— now a lot of people are arguing with this, saying, you know, this should be plugin territory. There's no reason why this should be added into the core of WordPress. On the flip side of that argument If you consider that emoji support is pretty much built on all mobile devices and there are more mobile devices in the entire world than there are people, it sort of doesn't make sense that WordPress doesn't support it if it's something that's globally supported everywhere else. It's heavily used, especially over in Japan and some other parts of the world. You know, maybe not so much here in the US, but it's catching on. So eventually we're going to see emoji in WordPress so people can put poopin' icons and all this other stuff within comments or their posts. I, I'm only gonna guess that content in WordPress sites is going to become a lot more colorful or, or something. I don't know, but emoji definitely looks like it's going to be coming in WordPress, whether it's 4.2 or 4.3. It's, it's on its way. So emoji, man!

Nice. I will not use it anyway, but you know, hopefully there's a way to disable it.

There always is.

Yes, that's a plugin coming to you soon.

So that wraps it up for this week's WordPress News of the Week. Marcus, let's wrap this thing up. Give us your picks of the week.

Alright, well, Jeff, with the cold weather up where you're at, we were talking about some shrinkage. Earlier on before the show started, and I'm going to continue with that theme with a plugin called WordPress Image Shrinker. Now, I don't know about you, but I am a big fan of this site called TinyPNG. You can upload your PNG files. I use Fireworks, Adobe Fireworks, and it makes these awesome PNG files, but man, they're so huge in size you can hardly ever use them. Well, before I had to go and upload them to TinyPNG, then pull them back down again, then upload them into the media library. Well, now you don't have to do any of that because you can use WordPress Image Shrinker and it will work automatically. So anything you upload into your media library, it will shrink them down in size, not by dimensions, but rather by, you know, disk space size, bytes, and, you know, all that. How many K it is. It's really efficient. I don't really notice any loss in the quality of the image when it does that, and it certainly helps to speed up load time while still maintaining, you know, pretty good resolution on your image. So I really, really recommend this plugin. It's just, it's like a Zapier right in your own WordPress installation. It goes right into TinyPNG and back. So I really like it. And there is a new plugin out called There Can Be Only One, and it ensures that there is only one sticky post published to your site at one time. So when a new sticky post is published, it just pulls the other sticky posts back into normal rotation so it no longer appears at the top of your page.

Okay, that's, that's pretty convenient. So instead of having a Well, actually, you wouldn't have to go back and find and undo it because it should be right there stuck to your front page. But it sort of automates the process of having to go in and uncheck it. It just does that for you automatically. Yes, absolutely. Alright.

And finally, something that's related to my very favorite movie has just come out in the repository. It's called The Dude, and when activated, you will randomly see a quote from The Big Lebowski. In the upper right of your admin screen, just like Hello Dolly! was. But this one rolls on Shabbos, as the author likes to say. It's one of my favorite movies, and I love the adaptation of this particular plugin, and I'm gonna use it on my personal site.

So hooray for motivation from Hello Dolly!

Yes, it's good for something, which is rewriting it.

And then I gotta say, we featured this plugin on WP Tavern And there's quite a few people that have said they've enjoyed it and have also forked the plugin on GitHub, and now they've pretty much created some more plugins that are based on, you know, movie quotes here, song quotes there. So every time we sort of come up with this, we write about a cool plugin that's built similar or on top of Hello Dolly. It sort of extends Hello Dolly's life. Sort of crazy to look at it that way. But actually, I have I can't remember if I've watched the movie or not, but I think I'm way overdue to go check out The Big Lebowski again so I can see what everybody likes about it, because there are a ton of people I know that really, really like, enjoy that movie. So with that said, uh, did we lose you, Marcus? Oh, I don't know what happened. I think we may have lost Marcus. Boy, he gave his plug-in picks of the week and decided he wanted to get out of here. So in terms of— see if he comes back— but in terms of announcements, nothing going on, no really upcoming events. I think next Wednesday evening, if we can confirm it, we'll have the gentleman out from the School of Podcasting next Wednesday. So we'll talk about everything podcasting. So that's going to do it for this week of WordPress Weekly. You can find show notes for this episode and all previous episodes on wptamron.com. You can follow me on Twitter @jeffro, J-E-F-F-R-O. And I guess since Marcus ain't here, I'm gonna have to read— tell you where you can find him. You can find him at marcuscoach.com, and you can also follow him on Twitter @marcuscoach. So until next week, everybody have a safe and enjoyable rest of the week. I'll talk to you guys next Wednesday evening. Good evening. Bye-bye.