Episode #25 - Wade Foster – Zapier

Today we have Wade from Zapier. I think most of our listeners probably know Zapier already, but Wade, why don't you introduce yourself and what Zapier does?

Yeah, so I'm Wade Foster. I'm co-founder and CEO here at Zapier, and Zapier makes you happier. It helps you connect all the different tools you might be using at work Airtable, Webflow, Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Stripe, Salesforce, you name it, all the way down to like tiny startup that you may never have heard of. 2,000 different apps, create all sorts of automations, connect it in all sorts of creative ways. You know, in the MakerPad world, it lets you build apps without code is sort of the crux of it. So I think that's really what Zapier is all about.

Awesome. Well, I think I'm really glad that you started off by saying Zapier makes you happier because so many people say, how do you pronounce it? Is it Zapier? And I'm like, on the footer of the site it says Zapier makes you happier. I spoke to Wade Foster and he says it like that.

But yeah, yeah, it's our GIF controversy, right? We're just trying to, we're just trying to pour some fuel on the internet fire.

Well, speaking of that, I suppose no-code at the moment is doing that as well, where it's like people debating the no-code thing of Is it no-code? Have you seen it? What's the— like, does anyone give a fuck? Like, what's the thing? What is your take on how this no-code movement has seemingly come out, I think, over the last year or two, 18 months probably, where it's really blown up of people taking notice of, holy shit, I can do stuff. Have you seen similar things?

I mean, I think this is, you know, I give credit a large part to you and to the MakerPad community. I think No-code has been a thing that predates, you know, a couple of years ago. It's been around for a long time, but it sort of happened in the corners of the internet. People would just be doing this stuff and there wasn't really a lot of evangelism around this concept. And, you know, folks like you in the MakerPad community and others have done a really good job of teaching and educating. And I think the power of it is it's not about replacing developers. It's not about getting rid of code. It's about empowerment. It's about helping a person who's got an idea, who's passionate about trying to do something. It's about giving them a place to start where they can get going, where it doesn't require them to, like, do all this other work first and then spend, you know, 4 years in a university or, like, slog their way through a bunch of tutorials and then realize, like, hey, there actually still is, like, a whole bunch of other stuff you got to learn to actually get to where you want to be. And you can go, oh, in a few hours or a weekend or whatever, you can be like, oh, I actually have a thing and it works and it does what I want it to do. And that feels so awesome when you're able to have that ability.

Yeah, I think it was when I was at Product Hunt when I discovered Zapier, I think for the first time. I think I must have seen one of the launches and then there was like, Typeform and Bubble and Webflow and things that came along. I was like, oh wait, I can sort of make this feel like a real thing by connecting these pieces and like a fake signup flow but real. But yeah, it was just that empowerment that I felt. And I was trying to build a bunch of things, so I thought one of these ideas will be my thing, but then I didn't realize it was actually not that. It was the process of the making piece of like, how did you make that happen? Zapier and Typeform and Webflow, do you not know that? But it does take a few people to really sort of drive that home that this stuff doesn't need to be like really a specialized skill and that anyone can learn this like really quickly. It's a lot quicker than people think.

Yeah, I think that's totally right. You know, I sort of, you know, it's like, it's like learning to type for the first time. It's like learning to do some of these things where it's like, yeah, it takes a little bit of work, but once you get the hang of it, really anyone can do this stuff, just like anyone can use Gmail. It's like, oh, how does email work? You send it, you find— OK, I think I got the hang of it. But you have to— it takes a second just to really get what you're doing. But once it's under your belt, you're off to the races.

Are you technical in any way, or are you the non-technical?

I'm like a little technical. So when we started Zapier, I was teaching myself to code at the time. I built some very, very basic stuff. Like I'd gone through the Learn Python the Hard Way tutorial and some and some other things like that. But I was more from a marketing background. And so I was doing like a lot of marketing automation. And that was where I was kind of dipping my toes into the technical world was I wanted to send trigger emails based on different events and like run better campaigns. I wasn't approaching engineering from a standpoint of how can I be the world's best engineer? I was trying to be a better marketer. Yeah. And so Brian, one of my co-founders, he and I had been like just spitballing back on a whole bunch of ideas. And at some point in time, he pitched me an idea on Zapier and was like, I think we can help connect all these tools where folks don't have to hire engineers to do this. Instead, they can do it myself. And I was using Marketo and the Marketo API, and I was struggling because I'm not a very good engineer. And to me, it was just like, yes, like if I had this, I would definitely do that instead of what I'm doing right now because it would be better. It would be easier.

Yeah. And then, so that's going down like the person at a business route straight away. Right. And is like, did you, or when I suppose, did you see this opening up like this thought, full businesses can be run on Zapier? There's definitely businesses that are built on Zapier. I mean, there's agencies that specialize in just doing Zapier for people as well. Like, did you expect this or did you see the intentionally or did it take a little while?

You know, it took a little bit to really understand that, holy cow, this could be a really big idea. At the beginning, you know, we're 3 guys from Columbia, Missouri, which is like right in the middle of the U.S. It's not like a tech hub or anything like that. It's a college town, so, you know, it's not, it's not like the back country or anything like that, but it's, it's not Silicon Valley either. And so our ambitions were pretty modest, honestly. Like, we were like, if we could turn this thing— it was a side project— if we could turn this thing into a business where it could pay for our paycheck. And in my mind, I was like, if I could get $100,000 a year, like, that to me would have been like, I'm like, I'm gold. Like, I'm set for life at that point in time. That to me was— if I could do that and work on Zapier, I would have been set. And so getting to that point was sort of what I was focused on. I wasn't thinking about like, wow, there's this world world of makers out there that are sort of dormant and need just a little bit of a helping nudge. And then all of a sudden, their potential can sort of be unlocked. That came later on. That came after starting to see some of our customers, some of the things that they were building, and realizing like, wow, there's a lot more potential to this. It took them to sort of open my own eyes to what could be.

Yeah, I think that's quite an interesting, like, Similarity that I've spoken to other founders of these no-code quote-unquote tools is it's only when their customers like start like hacking it a bit or like pushing it to its limits and showing, oh, these are— this is why I want this to work for me. So then it's like, oh wait, there is this like complete other thing that I've created. It's like not necessarily on purpose, but it's really— yeah, so like that weird curious maker. And that was definitely like me at that point. I was like, No, I'm going to make this feel a lot bigger than automated.

Yeah.

Or something.

Yeah. I think I saw you on Twitter talking about this this weekend, like how the MakerPad community is better than you, right, at some things now. And I definitely had that experience with Zapier where for a little bit early on, I felt like, yeah, I'm probably the best Zapier user just by nature of like I used it a bunch. I built a lot of the stuff like I know what all the features are. But like, not that soon into it, I stumbled across some users and they were like, we're doing this with this and this and this. And I'm like, you're doing what? How? Like, I don't think it can do that. And they're like, no, it definitely can do that. And I'm just— I'm like, OK, I'm not the best at this. And like, since that time, I stumble across users every day, every week that are doing things that are just beyond me. And I'm like, this is pretty awesome to see it sort of take a life of its own.

Yeah, I mean, I, yeah, I think I was similar to you when thinking earlier in the Make:Code, I was like, yeah, I'm probably like at the very forefront of building with no-code, putting— there's like a lot less tools then as well, so you could specialize in the area. And then now it's just like when I need help, I'm pingin' the Make:Code community because I know someone will have an answer that I definitely don't have right now. So when, like, when did it start getting bigger and just really taken off with all these things that you're seeing other people making?

Yeah, you know, I think it was, it was like a very slow but steady and consistent growth pace for us. Like, if you look at the, the bend in the curve of growth, it looks very sort of normal, or like just sort of like steadily grows every year. But to me, it really felt like it took a like lurch forward in 2016, that was when we introduced multi-step Zaps. Before that, it was just one-to-one. You know, when this happens, do this. Like, that's all you could do was Zapier. 2016, we added the ability to say, and this and this and this and all these other things. You can add filters and you can format things and just give a lot more ways to manipulate the data and change the destinations that, like, opened up a whole set of things that where really just like people's creativity took hold.

Yeah. So you think about some of the things you were blown away with, what people were making. What were some of the things that impressed you then and now? And like, fast forward to now, what are some of the things you see people running with Zapier?

I still remember like fairly early on, there was this guy in Australia, who made— I think it might have been the first time I saw something that was like kind of app-like, and it was called— he had two of them. One was called Kanye Text and one was called Seinfeld Quote, and he had a landing page for it. You'd go, you put like your friend's phone number in, and you could pay like $1 for a few text messages, $5 for more text messages, and $10 for even more text messages. And it would set up like every day a text message that would either be like a quote from Kanye or a quote from Seinfeld. And that was built off of like Stripe, Zapier, Twilio, and I think like a spreadsheet. And he, he like messaged me and started telling me about it. He's like, yeah, I'm making money off this thing. Like not a lot, but like, I, you know, I launched it this weekend and I made a couple hundred bucks and it pays for my Zapier bill. And that was where I was like, oh my gosh, people can build It's not just about integration and connecting tools. It's about building stuff and making things. That really is where I think the future belongs. It's about putting real solutions in people's hands.

Yeah, I remember seeing that on product time. It spurred a bunch of other people to see, oh, I can build this sort of thing as well. There's a ton of products then that were just these prompt text services on the computer. Yeah. Than anything else I've ever seen, for sure.

Yeah, and it's great. I mean, you look at Product Hunt these days and like, I mean, how many of them now are literally like no-code apps? They're Webflow and Zapier and Airtable and Memberstack and like these other tools. And you go look at them and you're like, this looks pretty good. Like, this looks pretty legit.

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that one of the second-order effects of the no-code space is that These tools give you design out of the box so that user experience is already sort of baked in a bit and you don't have to think so much about this perfect flow. It just sort of almost leads you down a path of like— people expect a certain level of what an MVP would be, right? I think it used to be very different to what it is today. And I think I did mention someone in a talk recently was just like, what the fuck is an MVP anymore? Because Like the MVPs used to be, the Buffer one was landing page, you click a plan and say, oops, sorry, that was MVP. And then you can fast forward to like today where you could build a functional Airbnb with hosts, with ratings, with like payments and everything, and that could be seen as MVP too. So I mean, it annoys me to some extent when people are saying the no-code space is just for people to ship MVPs, where MVP is very familiar.

Well, I think that's for sure true, but I think that misses out on this world where we see most of the no-code stuff happening actually happens inside of companies. It's the back office tools where they don't need— they need a custom app that runs a very specific thing for their business, and they're not going to deploy engineers on it because one, their engineers engineers aren't interested in doing it or they can't afford to hire engineers for that stuff. And so it's like a marketing ops person or a sales ops person or an IT person who says, like, oh, I can create like an order invoicing purchasing form for you real quick and like, you know, make it happen. And so in a day they've actually built like a mini app and then that runs this back office process for years and it just sort of works like they don't need some like really slick custom mobile app or whatever. They just need a thing that like gets the job done. And to me, that's where this like iceberg of no-code apps is happening.

Yeah, I totally agree. And that's what we're trying to do more of. Make these not so much here, so do an Airbnb clone, because that's great for like a certain subset of users who are probably in their tech circle of Twitter that I lived in for so long. But it's more like How do I recreate the sales process of Morning Brew? Or how do I like do data enrichment and follow up emails in an automated way rather than like manually copy and paste this in here, over here, and then do a lot of stuff. So yeah, it's definitely something we're trying to do more of. And it's one of those things again where, where the initial piece of no-code was you have to educate people and show them, look, you can build an Airbnb-style app. It's like Hey, sales team, you can build all of these types of processes that you're copy and pasting and doing the same thing over and over again every day. You can automate that. Like, you need to have that solution and show it. This is it. You can do that.

Yeah. And the Airbnb clone part is an important piece. It's the part that's like, it grabs your attention because you're like, whoa, Wade Foster. Like, I think of Airbnb as kind of like, that's a big business. It's kind of complicated. Like, how do you do that? And so it pulls you in. And you start to realize, well, I'm probably not going to try and compete with Airbnb. That's just not a thing that I really want to do. But there is some of these— the fact that I can make a clone means that I can make other types of things. And there's probably something in my world that I can make for myself or for my team or for whatever that's going to be really powerful.

Yeah, I think it also helps pull you down the rabbit hole. I think the no-code rabbit hole is so quick to go down, whereas with Learning to code for me especially was, I tried it multiple times, get to a point like, I don't know what I'm doing now, and no one can help me. I'm not getting help from this really experienced person on Stack Overflow. I just don't get it. I can't, I can't tell there's anyone who can figure it out. But then when you start doing stuff in NoCode, it's just like there's a quicker feedback loop. You understand, oh, this thing was wrong. Okay, I'll just fix it one tiny piece. Cool. You can see that working rather than I spent 9 months on this and I don't quite realize where I've gone wrong in the thousand lines of whatever I've been doing. What I'm looking at— I asked Twitter yesterday what were— what some questions I should ask you. So I'm just looking at them now. There's plenty there that I will not be asking you, so don't worry about them. But one of them is from David Head. He I remember he built something called Sixty or U60, and it was like the no-code, the OG no-code marketplace for experts. And I think they built it with Google Sheets and Zapier, and then they moved it to Bubble, and then they went to like YC and stuff. Um, and he's, he went, he's been recently at Lambda School and been doing a lot of the data side of things. He's really interested in, uh, no-code, like, the limits. Like, how far can it really go? I was talking to him about the internals of MakeItPublic and things get messy because, you know, I built it in January 2019 and I just built on top of it, on top of it, on top of it. So, like, we have technical debt in a no-code stack. It is a real thing. So he's asking where Where do you think these limits are and where would you advise, like, taking that next step to the code piece rather than trying to see if Zapier will do that thing for you? Where do you think there's a black and white line?

Yeah, I don't have a lot of hard and fast rules for this. I think there's a few things that sort of like tick you over. You know, is it you maintaining this or is it a team of people maintaining this? You know, if it's you maintaining this, this probably lasts fairly long. If you start to have to have a team maintaining it, then that's a lot of people that have to get up to speed on what this thing is and how it works, that sort of stuff. You know, how, how critical is it that you migrate? Like, I think a lot of times there's this sort of fear in no-code where they're like, I don't know what could happen. And so, you know, folks, especially engineers, are like, want to move to tools that they're familiar with. Because they just worry that it might not without a lot of founding. So it's like, is it really a thing that you need to move or because of some limitation that you've actually run into? Or is it just like, I'm just nervous, which, you know, it's fine to be nervous, but, you know, understand what that— like, do a proper risk assessment there, I guess. And then, you know, if you literally have, you know, particular opportunities to chase, like, there, I think, is a place to consider, you know, maybe moving to code, like if there's a place, a part in your stack that you feel like we add specific— by writing code, I add specific value to it that I can't do through no-code mechanisms. By doing that, that I can monetize that in a certain way or generate a customer experience that I couldn't do a certain way. It's the value-add piece of it. Like, that's where I'm saying, OK, maybe we should go to code for that piece because it allows us to do this a little more flexibility in what we have to offer. But for things that are like commoditized and routine, Like, why? Like, what's the point? You know, this no-code stuff works pretty darn good.

Yeah, I think a lot of people do ask about, like, the limits and things before getting to, like, the smallest hurdle of, like, getting 10 customers or 100 customers or whatever it is. It's like, well, will this scale for 10,000 customers? Or when you've got 10,000 actions on Zapier going through every day, you said, well, Do you? Are you there yet? Because I'm sure there's definitely another period within that that's like, that's when you can start thinking about what is the next piece and is there a function of Zapier that helps you fix up a piece so you can carry on for another year, another 2 years or whatever it is, or is it, yeah, you've got to hire developers?

Yeah, I mean, we have a guy internally that is sort of our Zapier wizard and I, you know, I remember early on He asked some of those similar questions like, well, should I build it this way? Like, will this scale? Like asking all those sort of classic questions. And I'm like, I don't know. But like, I don't know that we need a thing that scales right now. So can just make a thing that works. And so we made it. And not too long ago, this is probably 5 years ago at this point in time, not too long ago, I was going back and asking some of our early employees, I was like, hey, you know what? What tips would you give to folks who are just starting out? What advice do you have? His comment was like, just build the thing that works now and you'd be surprised how long it lasts. Because he's like, I've got things that have been running for, for years and I haven't had to touch them. Like, it just works. And so, yeah, I was like, now sometimes I do have to update them and sometimes I have to, you know, add something special to it. But more times than not, like, the original thing was good enough. And so, like, it's sort of that don't fall into the prey of the premature optimization thing path. Just like really just solve the problem you have in front of you.

Yeah, I think it should probably look at a natural instinct, thinking of, or even what's— what about when it's bigger? What about it's better when it's even bigger? What are some of the big— I don't know if you can say— what are some of the largest companies that are using Zapier and what, like, what are the core things that they're using Zapier for?

I mean, we have about 70% of the Fortune 500 using Zapier in some form or fashion. Mostly it's what I was talking about. It's like, hey, we're running an internal process, an internal tool, behind-the-scenes sort of things. Then there are other companies that are doing actually like public-facing things. You know, we've got a fairly large consumer tech company. I don't think— I don't know if I can say their name, but they, they're running a— they run their— they have like a lost and found service and they have like a kiosk for it. And so like the customer kiosk that enters all the data and stuff like that is a form that and then Zapper handles all the logic to put it in databases and alert various folks and things like that. And that's being used very heavily. Like, that's deployed across— globally across tons of these different kiosks that they have. So things like that. So, you know, it spans— you know, I think it starts usually on a small, small little thing over here, and then it starts to grow as people get a little more confidence and understand how to use it a little bit more, and they just get more ambitious with the things they can build.

Yeah. Is there, is there like a natural pull from like tech-enabled companies or startup? I know you're based in San Francisco and people would assume, I guess, that it's like startup stuff mostly. Is that— do you see like local businesses using it for certain things like managing their offers and stuff too?

We see a lot more like global usage than I would have expected. Like at least half our business is outside the US and mostly coming from folks that I would say are like, they're, they're forward in their tech usage, but they're not traditional technology companies. They're like, like what you said, I think tech-enabled or like, you know, service or tech-adjacent type businesses. And they're using technology to run better operations, to run better companies. And that type of business really benefits from no-code movement because they can use these tools to go faster, to deliver what it is that is the most important thing, which usually isn't technology for them. Usually it's like a service or maybe a commerce, like, or like a physical good or something like that.

Yeah, I think the line gets blurrier and blurrier every day, right? What is a tech company, like if you've got a website.

Yeah, technology is everywhere. It's in every business.

Yeah, exactly. With what's currently going on in the world, if for those who are listening, if you don't remember, it's the COVID-19 lockdown period that we're talking. There's, I mean, we're seeing a huge increase in companies looking at operational efficiency and like that's going to be a sweet spot for Zapier, right? Are you just seeing a ton more people doing a lot more things, people at home learning that, wait, I could be— I've also got rid of my commute, I can also get rid of this chunk of time too. What have you seen there?

Yeah, I think we've definitely seen that. You know, it's a tough time for a lot of folks right now. And, you know, part of it's a lot of folks have been laid off and they're trying to learn a new skill. So there's a part of that. Part of it's these companies have laid people off and now they've got to get more efficient. And so they're, you know, looking to tools like Zapier to get more things done. You know, some of it is that all these companies are moving to work from home. And so they're adopting a whole host of digital tools way faster than they ever would have done it. You know, I think What's the quote? It's like, you know, first it happens really slowly, then it happens all at once. Like COVID has done that for a lot of things where it's like happening all at once now, where folks are adopting Slack and Zoom and online teaching portals and all that stuff means that Zapier is sort of like called into service to help these tools perform at a higher level. And so we're getting— we're like benefiting from that wave right now and seeing a whole bunch of different types of use cases. Emerge from this. I think the ones that are getting me really excited are a lot of those businesses who are on the front lines who have been disrupted so heavily, like the physical economy, your, you know, your restaurant chains, your gym memberships, like these folks who basically just lost their business overnight. And then watching some of them just like pivot on a dime to create like curbside pickup apps and like all these little things that they're like, we can still operate, we can make money. Yeah, it looks a lot different, but we're not totally underwater because we've been able to use tools like these no-code tools allow.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

I mean, we've, we've seen like all sorts of things like that with smaller apps, like you said, for restaurants and things like that. Even sort of the NHS over here has been looking at no-code solutions with us for certain things too, which is really interesting. I've got a question from Brianne Kimmel who asked a question that sort of wouldn't have been on my mind, but quite an interesting one. And then you can sort of start talking about the funding landscape of no-code stuff. She said, when you raised In 2012, did you have a clear use of funds? Was the goal always like a single round of funding? If not, how did you operationalize the business across everything to make it possible?

Yeah, so we raised the $1.2 million in September of 2012. At that time, Zapier had been publicly available to sign up and pay for, for about 3 months, and I think we were making something like $10,000 in, uh, I want to say a month, something like that. So like very little revenue, but some, like, and it was growing, but it was not like, not, not enough that like the 3 of us who just moved to California for YC could afford to live in California. Um, And so for us, we were looking at that money and saying, hey, this lets us continue to, like, really work hard on Zapier for the foreseeable future until that revenue mark, like, can sustain us. And so we treated that money as, like, just a bit of a buffer against sort of a worst-case scenario. But we were really trying to figure out how do we not have to raise ever again? And we felt like we did. I think one of the things the three of us have done well over time is we're good at marketing. Like, we know how to generate users and we know how to attract folks to the platform. And so from day one, we were already thinking about how do we get people into this product? And so we felt like we saw a future where Zapier— we felt like we had a scalable acquisition strategy. We just needed a little cash to get that thing humming. And once it was humming, It was like, well, maybe we raise, maybe we don't. Like, we're not particularly inclined to because, you know, it's a bunch of dilution. And if you don't need it, it's better to get revenue from your customers. And so that was our mode of thinking circa 2012. And with a lot more— I say that right now with a lot of confidence, but in 2012, it was like, here's what we think is right, but we're just sort of a bunch of dummies from central Missouri. So who knows?

How does that go then? When— because I assume, speaking with VCs and in the funding landscape, the traditional funding landscape of tech investments is you like go in and you pitch a company to say, yeah, this is how we're going to get your like money back, 10x over the next 12 months. Do you still go in with that same type of pitch, but in the back of your head you're thinking Hopefully, we just—

I mean, seed— yeah, seed funding is a little different, right? Because they're sort of just like placing a bet and they're sort of just, you know, 10 years down the line, maybe this is something. It's probably nothing, but maybe it's something and maybe it's big, right? So it's a lot different than like, you know, growth stage investing where they're like, ah, I can 5x my money here. In seed stage, it's more of a binary. It's like, it's probably zero, But maybe it's 10,000x, maybe it's 100,000x. And so that's kind of what it looks like. So the pitch is not really about like, hey, you know, give me some money and I can turn it into 5x. It's more just like, do you think that this thing could be really important? And if you think it is, like, maybe you should be along for the ride. Yeah. And, you know, I think enough folks thought it was that they gave us some money. Yeah, I was a bad— I was bad at fundraising in 2012. I can't tell you that I was like super polished founder pitching VCs or anything like that. I was just sort of like, look, it's working, we have something that's cool, do you like it or not?

Yeah, well, I think that seems like a solid pitch to me. Um, why am I not investing right now? Um, so Do you think that now, like, the whole no-code space is— how I describe it is like it enables people to build software without having to write the code. And it is coined this no-code movement right now. And we see more and more people make businesses, make them really efficient from like day one with automations here. Like this thing happens and maybe there's like a VA that does something manual, or maybe there's just like a bunch of things that work together. Do you think we're going to see different types of funding coming? I know there's, there's obviously funds that, like, Ernest, for example, have invested in us, and there's different types of funding mechanics that's happening. Do you think there's going to be like an awakening of there's a different type of business out there? I think Zapier is probably one of the big ones that people look to, to say, well, here's this company that, like, yeah, they raised money all the way in 2020, but they pride themselves on making money. Like, that's what a business traditionally looks like or feels like it should be to a lot of people. And do you think that we'll see a lot more of like these combination types of funding and people with no-code businesses happening? Well, I think it may be that it feels like this whole push-in economy of people having their own newsletters and everything else is like something that maybe with this current situation, actually, it accelerates something. It's the same thing that you just said, which is, yeah, you're thinking about this idea for ages, and all of a sudden, what are they going to lose? Let's just go for it.

Yeah, I, I— so I'm not a, I'm not a VC, I'm not an investor, I'm a— you know, I run a company. Um, but I have thought about this a little, and I do think that we will see people being more experimental in the way they try and fund companies. Companies. VC is, you know, a very, like, a very small— it's one asset class and it's a very small portion of total investment dollars goes into VCs. And VCs typically look for a very specific type of company to fund. They're pattern matchers. So they say, like, oh, you look kind of like Facebook, you look kind of like Google, or you look like Amazon. And so, you know, that company was successful, so maybe you will be too. But I think one of the things that, you know, VCs learn time and time again is that pattern matching is actually not— like, it can be a good way to win, but it's not always. Like, the best businesses are by definition outliers. They look different. They come along and you can't match it to a pattern because it's something totally new and different in the way that it operates. You have to be willing to— the best companies buck the mold sometimes. They do it in a different way, and that's actually what makes them successful. I think the types of investors that are capable and able to buck the mold are the ones that will be— are the ones that some of these new types of companies that are being built in different ways will get money from and they'll attract because they're willing to just try something new and different.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's interesting to see that. Yeah, I think I saw a tweet yesterday about the VC asset class being like $33 billion or something. I'm probably mixing up the numbers there. It's a piece of— yeah, a whole investment piece. Um, but people just like to hate BlueSeed, whatever it is. They just— I mean, I'm obviously in the wrong circles on Twitter that that's what I see a lot of. Um, So what, um, so what's next for Zapier? Like, this is big. I mean, how many, how many employees is it now? Is it 300, 400 people?

Yeah, we're at about 300, uh, 300 employees. Yeah, full-time. 350 actually, I think.

Well, I mean, I suppose we've got to talk about that as the world looks to remote work of like how There isn't a playbook for how to scale a company to 350 employees. How do you just figure that out? By default, I'm just like, we have to.

Yeah, I think so. In some ways it's easier than you would think, and certain, but don't mistake easier than you think is easy. So, you know, I think the thing that I've I've uncovered or I've learned as we've gotten bigger and bigger is that the problems we face as a remote company are not so different than the problems that, like, just any fast-scaling company would face. You know, early days, I would go talk to other remote founders who are, like, running a small team or maybe scaled to 50 people or 100 people and try and learn from them. And then we got bigger than all those companies. It was like, okay, well, now who do we learn from? There's not that many other remote companies. There's like GitLab and Envision and, you know, Automatic. And so certainly learn from those folks, but there's things that they do that we don't do and vice versa that I'm like, well, that doesn't really match. And so I started just going to talk to companies that were going fast altogether, and I'd ask them, what are the things that you struggle with? It's like, well, you know, aligning the team is really hard, hiring executives is really hard, setting a vision is really hard, getting incentives right is really hard. Building a culture is really hard. And I started going like, yeah, those are really hard. Like, those are the same problems that we face. And so it was, in some sense, that was reassuring to say like, look, it doesn't matter how you build a company, you're going to run into certain problems, whether you're remote, whether you're in an office, whether you're hybrid. These are just things that you have to work on. And so we just recognized that early on and tried to identify those things and said, hey, we need to figure out how are we going to build alignment across the How are we going to build culture and camaraderie so that people feel like they're a part of a community, that they feel like they're a part of something? You know, how are we going to incentivize folks? How are we going to motivate folks? How are we going to manage teams? Like all those things you need to have like a bit of a playbook for. And sometimes the office playbook works just fine. So like how to do good management, I found, is generally just be a good manager. Like the in-office playbook tends to work well for remote. Just that most in-office managers kind of suck. And so it's like, well, if you actually were doing it well, you would probably be doing it well remotely too. So some of those playbooks you can just port over and then some of them you have to create sort of from scratch, like the community side and the camaraderie side. You kind of have to think about a little differently. You don't have a cafeteria table. You don't have a break room. You don't have some of these things. And so for us, we look to other types of online communities. We paid attention to things like, well, what, like, what makes a Reddit community really hum? What makes, like, a Facebook group really hum? What makes Twitter work? Like, what are these things that, where you see, like, where you see it working, where it's like, oh, this is actually a really positive and fun community to hang out, versus, like, some communities that are really easy to find online where you're like, oh, this is actually not the type of community I want to be a part of. So, like, how do you How do you try and get more of the first kind and less of the latter kind as part of the culture and company building? So those are the things that we just sort of looked at to help us scale. And then we just ask the team regularly. Every 6 months we run an employee survey and we say, what's working? What's not working? We track some scores, we track some metrics, and we try and fix some stuff up as we go. And then stuff will break and then we fix it again. And so it's just sort of this like continual It's like gardening a little bit. It's like you just sort of keep tending to it over and over again. And, you know, you yield your crop sometimes, and then sometimes, you know, you get a weed in there and you got to prune that out. And like, it just really is like this, this constant effort, I think, to make it work.

Yeah. How did you— you said looking at those communities, I think actually a lot of people try and build— well, a lot of people like came to me after Product Hunt especially and said, like, how do I build a community? And lots of times, it's like for a product that doesn't exist yet and it's like, well, just maybe like hold fire on trying to build a community straight away. It doesn't always happen like that. But so how did you— how do you build an internal community when you say you're looking at Twitter, Reddit, and all these things? Is there— do you have your own forum? Is there like subgroups? Is there like these as people do, like loads of Zoom Hangouts or things like that. What do you do?

There's a few, like, tactical things we do and a few things that I think are a little more strategic. So the big thing we focus on is getting people into the company that share principles, that share values. So for us, it's like default to action, default to transparency, empathy, no ego, have a growth mindset. Like, these are things that we believe are important to be a part of our company. And to be successful here, you need to demonstrate, to share those same values. If you think otherwise, like, we're just constantly going to be at friction and it's just not going to work. And it's not inherent thing that says that you're wrong and we're right, or that you're right and we're wrong. It's just, we're just different. Like, we think it's better to just roll your sleeves up and get started on a thing. Some companies don't think that way. Like, Apple is very, like, perfection-oriented. And they're one of the biggest companies in the world. It works great for them. Like, we're not that M.O. Like, we approach working a little differently. We're a little more, I guess, Amazon-esque in that way. We just sort of roll our sleeves up and get started on problems. So sharing those values is really important. And we have that as part of the hiring process. We ask questions around that and then we have it part of our performance reviews. So we're just saying, like, how well are you doing against these things? That really helps it flow inside the company, like that shared DNA just becomes this thing that like, it like, I don't even have to, I don't have to preach it that much anymore. Like everyone else preaches it now. And sometimes they preach it back to me. They're like, Wade, I don't think that this is, I think you could be more transparent about this. Or I think that you're not, you know? And so I'm like, ah, okay. Yeah, I gotta, I can try better there, you know? So that's when you know it's working, when the community's starting to hold you accountable. Where they feel some ownership over it, too. That's a really important part of it. Then there's the more tactical stuff, like inside of Slack, we have a bunch of channels that are off-topic. They're all prefixed with fun. And so these are non-work channels, and it recreates the water cooler a little bit. It's where people can talk about sports or movies or music or books or gardening or ham radio or like whatever, like, niche hobby that they're into. And they're fairly low volume, but like people gather around there, they chat, they get to know each other, and it just makes people feel like they're a little bit part of the community. So little stuff like that helps too. So I think it's a mix of like getting the big picture thing right and then just providing little spaces and little niches and little communities inside of the company where folks can gather around shared interests and feel like they belong.

Yeah. That makes sense. How, how are you seeing those lessons translate to building the Zapier external community?

I think, yeah, I think, you know, the challenge we have with the external community is similar. So you have, for example, there's the broader Zapier community, there's all the users that we have. But just saying that you're part of the Zapier community doesn't mean that these folks share interests naturally. There can be people from totally different backgrounds, totally different walks of life, totally different tools that they use. And it's like just sort of dumping them in one ground is not going to be effective. And so we're starting to look at things like, you know, just traditional things like what are you interested in? What types of tools do you build? Are you an accountant? Are you a lawyer? Are you a marketer? Are you operations? Like, and just trying to, like, make it smaller where you can feel like you connect with your people and not necessarily like this big, massive group of folks. And so I think that's like been one of our things out the get-go is just trying to get it where folks like you— I would rather have like a small group of people very deeply engaged than a lot of folks like very passively interested in it. And so we're really trying to get those small things off the ground. And granted, it's very new. Like our community at Zapier is less than a year old, like the public-facing stuff. So we're still, we're still learning and working this out as we try and scale it up.

Yeah. And you mentioned like the different people you have using Zapier. I struggle from being the person who built Megapanda, which I'm now learning is probably the wrong thing for me to be doing right now. It's like, I'm going to be in a deal with the founder CEO person and do these things. Like, this, the no-code world and the things you could do with Zapier, you could do anything, almost anything in any field. So there's like this huge broad spectrum of stuff available. How do you like cater to everything whilst also like, people always talk about being really specific. When we, when I talked about no-code education, I was like, Well, you could do the sales process thing, 'cause I could do that thing, but you can also build like this movement that did this, but also you can do it like, it's been a struggle for me specifically to like convey that sort of sense. So yeah, you've like, and see—

Yeah, you can't serve everybody. Like if you, you just can't, like it's not possible. It'll pull you in weird directions. And so, you know, I think you look at, to me, a strategy is when you're picking, who do you wanna win with? Who do you want to— who do you really want to solve for? And so, you know, a classical— classic example might be, you know, Google search engine, right? They've got this great search engine, but they have two constituencies with the search engine. They have the person who's doing the search, and then they have the advertiser who's paying their bills and keeping Google alive. So, like, who's most important in that situation? If you have to build a feature for the search result, do you care if the advertiser's needs are met, or do you care about the searcher's needs? Are met. Now, in a perfect world, you can do both, right? So you, you do as many of the things that you can sort of meet both of their needs. But there's this section in the middle where you're like, they're in direct conflict with each other. How do you resolve that? And you have to choose. You can't say, well, we'll do both. It's like, no, you can't choose both. These things are in direct conflict. And so you have to make a choice. And, you know, in Google's case, they said the searcher is more important. So we're going to serve the searcher over the long haul because we feel like if we take care of the searcher, then the advertiser will be there. Like, they're— if people stop searching, the advertiser loses, period. So we pick the searcher versus if we pick the advertiser, the searchers might go away and then the searchers would— the advertisers would go away. So that's how they've made their, their call. And so for us, it's something similar where we look at the user and we say, how do we solve for them? How do we make life easier for them. And if we keep driving more adoption of Zapier, we keep making it easier and more accessible. All these other stakeholders in the Zapier ecosystem who have needs that we should meet, like they will be— they will be happier if we do these things, even if that means in the short term, sometimes their need is not prioritized at the level that they would hope for. Because at the end of the day, it's better for no-code as a whole to grow. It's better for automation to grow as a bigger trend than to solve this very niche thing. And so I think that's how I've always thought about it, is like really understanding who it is that you're trying to solve for and making sure that when you do get in conflict, you keep that in mind. Now, when you're not in conflict, great. You do both, like try and do both. Like that's what you should do. But there's those moments where you're not. You can't confuse who you serve most.

Yeah, I think that's probably the same scenario of like, who is a beginner, first time seeing Zapier, of like, how do I interact with the product versus someone like me and beyond, which is like, I know exactly what, like, how to do this stuff. I want to do this really quickly. Must be a difficult thing to juggle of how the individual uses the UI or how They discover what is possible and think it back that way.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's— and like, you need— like, the reality is, like, folks like you are the early adopters. You're the ones that are teaching folks. And so we need to meet the needs of folks like you because you're going to be advocates for what we do. But sometimes there's things that you all want that's, like, never going to be relevant to a mainstream audience. It's like, well, what happens when that happens? How do you make that choice, right? This is sort of like You know, there's a whole bunch of analysis about how MacBook Pros have like declined in their favorability amongst developers over time because they've sort of let the ecosystem swing. Now, people still buy MacBook Pros a ton, but maybe it's starting to hit a plateau. I don't know. Is that because they haven't paid enough attention to developer community, or is that because phones are more popular and iPads are more popular? It's a really tough problem to answer. Yeah, you know, people get paid tons of money to run studies and lots of consultants get brought in to try and answer this question. Like, should we build more features for developers? Should we build more features for, uh, you know, a, a, a college kid or whatever, right? Um, eventually you sort of have to make your choice and it's like, we don't have all the time in the day and all the resources, and so you have to pick who you serve.

Yeah, definitely. I know we're sort of running out of time a bit here, but I'd love to know what is on the horizon for Zapier? What can we— what is there anything specific like no-code focused or anything around that that you're looking at?

Yeah, I think, you know, we are, uh, our, our mission is to democratize automation. We're going to make this easy for everyone in the world to have happen. And so, you know, you will always see us pushing on how to make this stuff simpler. I think one of the things we're realizing and spending more time on is how do we How can various other people help us with that? So we're spending more time on our teams and companies product to, like, help folks in bigger groups. Like, how do they use apps in better ways? We're looking at our agency world and saying, like, hey, these folks are already selling and advocating for Zapier. How can we better support and enable them to do what they do best, to bring Zapier to the people that they have? How can we maybe even bring people to them and say, like, actually, I think you can help this person because we have a lot of folks that are asking for help. And then just like, how can we continue to just plug in all the— make sure we support all the apps and support all the triggers and actions and keep it really high quality and the uptime is great? Like, there's a lot of work that just goes unspoken for a lot of the times that is just making Zapier hum quietly. And so there's a whole bunch of work that goes into that.

Yeah. And what do you think about the no-code space as a whole? As a whole, what do you think? Yeah, we expect to see that.

I think for— I mean, I think the thing I like to pay attention to is what, where are the gaps? Like, you know, no-code I think does a really good job of thinking through like, what are the— it's almost like the, the primitives, the like components. What do you need to do? And it's like, I need to send an email, or I need to store a piece of data, or I need to have a front end. And so like, we're paying a lot of attention to like, what are those components that people have and where are the gaps, where, where things— where's friction and how can we help reduce friction? You know, people are using lots of different tools. Can we make it easier for them to use those tools in combination together? You know, I think that's a place where Zapier can play, play a hand. But it's going to be a— it's going to be a long time to solve some of these things.

Awesome. Well, yes, Zapier has been like a key piece of software that Bacon wouldn't be around if it wasn't for Zapier software. Give you and all 350 of the employees kudos for that. It's been awesome. And yeah, we always continue to use it and like our business wouldn't have gone without it either. So, you know, we're always grateful for that. Really appreciate you coming on. Just tell the folks where they can find you and Zapier.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me, Ben. You know, you can find me on Twitter, Wade Foster. I'm active there. You can shoot me an email. I read all the email and Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for all you do with MakerPad too. I think you've done such an amazing job. The community is awesome. It really has been fun watching it grow from you tweeting out these little threads of like, "Oh, I did build an Airbnb clone," to like lots of people doing all sorts of random stuff. It's been so awesome to watch.

I really appreciate that.