Startup Chat #54 Zapier makes you happier with Wade Foster

I probably won't be talking much, but I am here.

All right, we'll pop you on mute.

Yeah, that's great. Don't look at your screen. That doesn't sound very safe. I don't want to be responsible for someone crashing.

Oh dear. All right, so we're live.

Oh, okay, sorry. I'll stop talking.

You've pressed live, so welcome everyone to Startup Chat. This is episode 54. Today we're very excited to bring you Wade Foster, the founder of the man behind Zapier, the man of Zapier fame, and today we're going to talk to him a little bit about his business, some of the work that he's doing in content marketing, and hopefully he's going to explain to me how I can use Zapier because I'm the least technical guy you've ever met. So welcome, Wade. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Alex. I'm stoked to be here.

It's good to have you on. So I've got a list of questions that I want to burn through, and so does Dan, but I'm I might start with the introductory type of stuff, which is a bit of a background about who you are, what your business does, where people can find you if they're not familiar with your work.

Yeah, so I'm one of the founders of Zapier. Zapier makes you happier. That's the trick for saying it. That's the first question anyone has. So that's the weird little cliché that we've come up with to help figure out people how to say it. Company's been around for, I guess, 2.5 years now. When we started— so my background is in email marketing, and I'm kind of a half-baked developer too. So I'm not entirely clueless, but I'm like, compared to my co-founders, I am definitely clueless behind what's going behind the scenes behind Zapier. And so before we started, I was like trying to hack on like Mandrill. SendGrid, some of these email APIs, because I was working in email marketing at a mortgage company and trying to send emails based on when certain events were happening in our database. And being the half-baked developer that I am, that was really hard for me. And, you know, Brian, on the flip side, was my co-founder. He's running a couple SaaS apps, just kind of like micro-preneur type style stuff, and was already getting lots of questions about integration and hooking his apps up to all these different tools. And he's like, "I just— I'm a solo guy. There's just no way I can build, like, all these integrations my customers are looking for." So, you know, we always, like, bantered back and forth on ideas and companies and things like that that we wanted to start someday. And he pitched me on this idea of, like, it would be really awesome if just anyone, non-technical people, could go to this place where they could just hook up all sorts of different apps and wouldn't have to rely on third parties to build that integrations. Wouldn't have to rely on developers from oDesk who are expensive and a lot of times get things wrong, wouldn't have to beg at the mercy of their SaaS provider in their forum saying, "Just God, please, can you add this one integration? My life will be set." Gotcha. I was like, that actually really like drive with me at the time because here I am just like trying to send a freaking email based on this change. It's something that seemed like it should be super easy, but I'm having to learn cURL and OAuth and all this nasty messy stuff. Before, I'm looking these words up on Wikipedia and stuff, trying to figure out what they mean.

Did you see me get cross-eyed when you said curl?

I know. That's exactly how I was, right? That was where the idea for Zapier came. Anyone could just come in and quickly create what we call zaps, which are automation between two different services. You could say, hey, when I get a sale in PayPal, you should add that customer to my Mailchimp list. or someone fills out my Unbounce form, they should get registered for my GoToWebinar event. They don't have to know anything about what's happening with the APIs behind that. That was the original idea behind Zapier 2.5 years ago. I mean, it's changed a little bit since then, but fundamentally it's still the same thing. Almost 300 apps now integrated. We got people from all sorts of industries just connecting tools in various ways to make their work just a little bit easier for them.

So what you guys have done is— I was just going to say, you're making automation accessible to really sum it up, right?

Yeah, exactly. It's something that anyone can do, not just developers.

Go Dan.

Yeah, apologies for no— I might just keep the camera on you, Wade, because my camera's not working. But yeah, so just with the launch of the idea, were there competitors at the time? Like, did you look around to see if anyone else was doing this, or was it like we the first people to have a crack at it?

I mean, this idea has been done many, many times before us, but mostly in the enterprise software. So, you know, pushing— like, there's these— there's a company that sold to Dell, there's one that sold to IBM, and it was like for big nasty, like, on-premise, like, Microsoft Dynamics, SharePoint integration, like, tools that did, like, workflow style stuff. But all of it was like super expensive. The deploy times were like months at a time. Nothing that was like accessible for a small business or solopreneur or, I mean, even like a company that has like 500 employees, it was really expensive for them. And so we're just like, what can we do to build like that except for companies that like don't have as much money, one, but also are using completely different tool sets. They're using things like Mailchimp and Salesforce and Woofoo and these just lightweight SaaS apps that cost $50 a month or whatever. So there were people doing this type of idea, but not in the SMB space really.

That seems to be a theme that I've noticed in other startups that are happening. I was listening to an interview with the guy from HipChat and he was saying the same thing where like they were aware of all these enterprise-type technologies but no one was really doing it for this emerging market of small business owners who are using the apps you mentioned. So that, yeah, there seems to be— maybe that's a good way for people to think about new business ideas as well is to look at what's happening elsewhere that hasn't yet happened for kind of the rest of us.

Yeah, totally.

You want to go back?

I have some more, but I know you've got some more questions.

I've got a few to get through, and I think this will help me understand exactly. With Zapier, let's say I'm a complete technology noob, which I profess to be. I constantly tell people that. If I'm a small business owner and I want to use Zapier, what would the top 3 most popular zaps that you guys have be?

One that I use all the time that is super simple is to save certain emails that I get in Gmail to Evernote. For instance, I have a swipe file of email— like I subscribe to a lot of email newsletters. For the ones that I really like, I just mark— I label them as 'to Evernote.' Zap sends them to Evernote behind the scenes. I've got this huge swipe file now of just like great emails that I get from tons of different companies. When I'm looking at Zapier emails to revamp, I just open up that Evernote file and they're all there for me.

Cool.

And what would two other ones be that if you're not just—

yeah. So another great one is for lead gen. So if you have a form on your website, which most people have forms on their website, is to, you know, it could be a Wufoo form, Unbounce form, it could just be like a regular old form, is to push those— the leads that you get there into whatever email marketing tool you're using, whatever CRM you're using. Or like if you're using a webinar software, like GoToWebinar or something like that, that's like very popular. And lastly is alerts are super popular as well. So if you hang out like in a chat room like Campfire or HipChat or maybe just like Google Chat, you can set up alerts for all sorts of stuff. So like I have one that when Zapier is mentioned on Twitter, it dumps into Campfire. When we get a payment in Stripe, it dumps into Campfire and we can all celebrate. When we get a new ticket on our help desk. That one actually I've turned off recently because it's gotten so noisy. I used to have that and it would go into Campfire as well.

Excellent, good examples. Over to you, Dan.

Yeah, right, well, I've got a lot of questions. I guess a lot of my questions are to do with like how do you guys manage to create so much of this technology? Like I would have thought something like this, and especially Alex showed me the 28 Zaps in 28 Days thing.

Yeah.

Can you tell us a little bit about that, and like, what do you do developer-wise? You mentioned you've got co-founders who are technical. Do you have like a huge team of devs, or—?

No, we actually only have 4 full-time engineers, and our team is 10 full-time people, so it's a pretty small team still. My co-founders are very smart, though, which is— that helps. It used to be really challenging to build integrations for us, like when we were just getting started, but what we kind of figured out was just that there's this abstraction layer where if we define an API a certain way, all we have to do is like plug in the endpoints from the different APIs, and then the logic behind the scenes can kind of handle itself. Once we understood that, we were able to build our developer platform where anyone can now add integrations to Zapier, and it's done via like basically a web form. You just say like, hey, I use, you know, my API uses OAuth, or my API uses API keys, and it's like, okay, cool, here's what you need to do to set up, and you just like click a few buttons, and then you're like, okay, well, a trigger, I need to go to this API URL or whatever, and it ends up taking, you know, like an hour or so to create an integration versus, you know, 2 years ago it would have taken us many, many days, if not weeks, to build an integration.

So how does that process work? The owners of the different apps are making their own integrations and you just approve them?

Yeah, for the most part that's how it happens these days is, you know, we've got enough built-up demand where people see all these different services on Zapier, they want to be a part of it, you know, they can hook into this ecosystem where they get hundreds of integrations out of the box, it gets managed by another part— company, they don't have to worry about API updates. So they're just like, "How do we get in?" And they just find this developer platform and define their triggers and actions. We do an approval process, kind of like Apple would if you're submitting an app to their app store or something. And once it's good to go, we say, "All right," and we turn it on live for them.

Awesome. Hey, I don't know if you can hear us, but if you want to point your camera down or something. It's a little bit distracting, and I'm also worried you're going to crash and we're all going to see it. All right. I'm a little bit interested in— Alex, do you have any more questions, or does anyone else have any questions about the technical side? Because I want to talk about some startup stuff as well. I'm good.

I'm good on the tech side.

All over it? All over it.

Good.

We've basically hit my understanding too, so— Cool.

So how did you go from— I was reading you guys started out at Startup Weekend and went through Y Combinator and then got a big round of funding. How did all that happen and what kind of indicators did you have at the time or what kind of traction did you have at those 3 stages?

Yeah, so in October 2011, that was when we went through Startup Weekend. We did this in Columbia, Missouri, which Columbia, Missouri, for those who aren't familiar with, it's a nice college town. But not traditionally known as like a startup hub. You're not going to see a lot of funding or anything like that around there. So when we came out, we were very much like, we've got to bootstrap this company. We've got to make it revenue generating. We've got to make it a profitable company. And so we all kept our day jobs and worked nights and weekends to try and basically bootstrap the company up. And after about 2 months in was when we got our first customer. Who was actually Andrew Warner at Mixergy, just by a fluke happenstance, he was asking for some integration on Stack Exchange and I happened to notice it and reached out of the blue and said we could do it. By the end of the year, we had had 10 people who paid for beta access to Zapier. We did our beta program completely differently than most people. Most people, it's just like free and give us some feedback because that's all we want right now. Instead, we were like, no, you have to pay $100. To get into Zapier, and it'll get you access for the length of the beta. We didn't know how long the beta would be, but you'll have access for it for then. And that way, what that did was it got us feedback from customers who were really invested in the problem and people who were incentivized to pay for a solution. So we knew that we were solving an actual problem, and not just problems that generic, like, early adopter tech founders, tire kicker type people have. which, you know— That's pretty awesome. Yeah, it was— like, in hindsight, it was a pretty smart way to do things because, like, I'm the type of person that I would try any app under the sun, but I'm— there's only certain ones that I would end up paying for, and I know that I wouldn't want my advice on certain products to build because that's just not the problems that I have. Yeah. And so this way we were able to get feedback from people who actually had our problems. We actually left it that way for the length of our beta. You had to pay to get in. Now, it wasn't always $100. We shifted that around just for giggles to see what we could get people to pay and what different amounts affected them. By the time we launched, we actually had over 1,000 people who had paid some amount of money to get into the beta of Zapier. Wow. Nice. Yeah. And so there are— let's see, we actually ended up launching in June of 2012, but we got into Y Combinator before that. So in kind of the whole life cycle of this, from October 2011 until about March 2012, we were just kind of like heads down, nights, weekends, trying to make this stuff happen. And we'd gotten up to about 700 or so customers. We realized like We can actually— like, this actually has some serious legs. You know, we were hearing from our SaaS partners that we'd integrated at the time, like, they were just loving what we were doing because it solved such a huge problem for them too, which was their customers are asking for integrations and they couldn't build them. And so we knew that we were kind of on to something a little bit bigger than we initially anticipated. And so, you know, we kind of thought, How can we grow this a little bit bigger? One of the things we realized is it would be really helpful if we were in Silicon Valley, because that's where a lot of our partners are located. Having access to that ecosystem would be really helpful for the company, but we didn't know anything about San Francisco, Silicon Valley, or how any of that stuff is played. We applied to Y Combinator because we figured they could teach us. We'd actually applied for the Batch before, but we had no traction, we had nothing at that point in time.

The Batch before, was that before you even launched?

Yeah, it was right after Startup Weekend, so all we had was like a demo. We had no users, no, like barely any web traffic, like I'm talking tens of visitors a week sort of web traffic. So it was like the very beginnings. So they like rejected us outright. None of us have fancy resumes, you know, none of us went to Stanford and worked at like hot startup number 7 or anything like that. You did now. That's the only one. So yeah, so, but when we applied the second time around though, we actually had, you know, we had significant traction. We had— we worked our network pretty heavily, so we had like a dozen or so Y Combinator companies who had applied or who had started using Zapier. So we started just asking them like, you know, how does YC work? Like, is this something we should do? What's the process like for getting in? Can you review our application? All that stuff. And we applied and ended up getting in. And so we moved— the 3 of us moved to Mountain View, California that summer of 2012, and basically went full-time, kind of all heads in on the company. And that was actually— you're alright, keep going. Yeah, I was going to say, that was actually an interesting time because that was the only time in the history of our company where everyone was in the same location. We're a distributed company now. And so we just, like, for that summer, we just worked on getting— we launched, we got as many integrations as possible, and we launched that dev platform which allowed us to get other integration partners to integrate with Zapier. And those are really the big things that we worked on that summer.

And how was the actual process of Y Combinator? Would you recommend that to other people in a similar situation?

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely— it's a fantastic experience. Like, you're not going to get hooked up with as many, like, smart startup people as you would by going through Y Combinator. Like, I've just never been in an environment quite like that. So I would definitely recommend anyone do it if they had given the opportunity.

How did you rate the competition within Y Combinator? From talking to an Aussie named Nikki Durkin, who put 99 Addresses through the incubator there, she said that it was hypercompetitive and part of it was, you know, pushing forward and beating the next guy. Did you Did you feel that? Did you see much of that?

Yeah, so I didn't actually feel that as much. I mean, there definitely is a sense of competition where it's like you want to be seen as doing better than your batchmates, but the trouble with it is they're all working on different companies and serving different markets, so it's hard to really judge, you know, what's this SaaS startup compared to this healthcare startup compared to this hardware startup. It's apples to orange comparison. The biggest thing we tried to do was just hunker down and if we were better than we were the week before, we were happy.

Was there anything that happened that you can pinpoint in Y Combinator that you think wouldn't have happened if you didn't go? Any major things that really impacted the direction of the business?

The biggest thing was access to partners. And the single best way that I can define that is, you know, for months before we'd gotten into YC, I was trying to get in touch with someone in Salesforce ecosystem to help us get our app approved on Salesforce, get in the app exchange, and it just wasn't happening. But as soon as we got into Y Combinator, we got an intro to one of the Roku founders, and like 2 days later, like, we had the contact we needed to basically push through the Salesforce ecosystem and get things live. And that was just kind of like the magic of knowing the right people that we just would have been a lot harder to do in Missouri. I think we could have done it in Missouri, it just would have taken longer. And YC just gives us kind of like— at first it gave us like that instant access, and now we don't even rely as much on the YC name as we just rely on Zapier having tons of integration partners. And kind of being respected in the space to get our introductions. But at first, that was really hard to get those. The YC name definitely helped a ton.

What about the investment round?

That actually helped some too. The interesting thing about that was all of the people that ended up investing in Zapier had known about us prior to YC. But the one nice thing about YC is it gives us like— it gives you like demo day. It teaches you how to fundraise. We didn't know anything about fundraising. I didn't know what a convertible note was. I didn't know what equity— like, I kind of knew what equity was, but I didn't know, like, understand the mechanics of how it all worked. And YC teaches you all that. And it also gets you a meeting. So one of the misconceptions is that, like, because you're YC, you'll be able to raise a bunch of money. That's not actually true, but because you're YC, you will be able to get a first meeting, which is helpful. So we were able to, like, right after Demo Day, we lined up, you know, 40 meetings with investors, and, you know, we wanted to close our round within 2 weeks, and we were able to do so because YC kind of gives you that momentum to open doors and get the meetings set up. And, like, there's a bit of a snowball effect because you can take so many meetings in such a short time. Wow, that's pretty impressive.

So was your decision to get funding, did that happen before YC, or was that always the path you wanted to go down?

It actually happened kind of during YC. So I mean, originally we were thinking this was going to be an entirely bootstrap company, you know, from Missouri, we didn't know anything about funding, so it wasn't a thing where we were like, you know, if we don't raise money then this company isn't going to exist. That was not, like, ever on the plate. It was more like, "Should we get funding to accelerate what we're doing already?" And eventually that's kind of where we settled, was, "Yeah, it would be helpful to have a little bit of money in the bank to help us go a little bit faster." Especially since the three of us all had significant others, and it was helpful to not have to worry as much about money. I mean, we still worry about money, but Just having a little bit of cushion helps us sleep a little easier at night and focus on, you know, a little bit longer-term thinking rather than just like what's in the bank account tomorrow.

And did you use that money for anything that you wouldn't have been able to do otherwise? Like did you use it to hire more staff?

Yeah, the biggest thing is we hire a little bit faster than we traditionally would. So as soon as like when we raised the round, I was doing support from 8 AM in the morning until about 3 PM in the afternoon. Like I'd wake up and there was just that much support to do. And my time could be better served doing, like I enjoy doing support, but there was things that I could do that would be more beneficial to the company. So we hired a support guy right away. He took over 80% of the support and allowed me to focus more on marketing, biz dev, and things that would grow the business. We've always kind of thought about, how can we hire just a little bit ahead of maybe where our profitability is? We never spend too much, but we're always thinking about growing just a little bit faster than maybe what we could have had we not raised that money.

Okay, cool. Do you have any more questions, Alex?

I'm going to rip off one of the questions that's in your queue, but physical Zaps like If This Then That— I've tried If This Then That, I think that's what it's called, IFTTT.

Do you guys play in that space at all? We don't have very many hardware Zaps. Our big focus is on SaaS, B2B. You know, and that's where we spend most of our time. I think that we do have Loxitron and what else? I think there might be another integration that's hardware-based that somebody else added. I can't think of it right now. It's not something that's top of mind for me. Sure.

Okay, what about pricing? Have you played around much with your pricing and how did you arrive at where you are at the moment.

So a funny thing is our very first pricing page was— because we're all nerds and we didn't know what to price it with, it's kind of— there wasn't like any services like we could point to and say like, "Hey, we should just price like that. They've probably got it figured out." So we kind of had to like figure it out on our own. And being nerds that we were, we priced our plans based on the Fibonacci sequence. So it was $11, $23, and $58. I love that. Totally scientific. But because it was so silly, it kind of got over our fear of charging money for something. You know, we had people sign up for plans, we had people pay us, you know, jump on monthly subscriptions. It totally wasn't optimized at all, but it was like, "All right, people will pay some stuff for that." We tweaked our pricing plans 3 or 4 times since then, and we'll do it again. We know we're not perfect, but it's definitely something we're always trying to figure out, like how we can best align our plans to what the value our customers are getting from the product.

So what about the free Zap versus the premium Zap? Is that kind of the model that you think is the best way to go?

Yeah, that's actually worked out quite well. We've had like zero pushback on that. It's basically based on the fact that if that service is an entirely paid-for service, then you should pay for it on Zapier. You can't go to Salesforce and get it for free, so why should you get Salesforce integrations for free? Also, it provides more value. It ends up— customers just don't have a problem with that at all. The value that Zapier provides by being able to do a Salesforce integration far exceeds the $15 a month or whatever that we charge for it. And is—

are the free ones creating much of a burden, like technical-wise or staff-wise, for support and things like that?

Yeah, I mean, we definitely see a lot of support from free users. That's probably the biggest place where you might traditionally view it as an expense. However, we think it's kind of worth it just for the word-of-mouth marketing that we get from having a free plan and also being able to give like really, really good support even for free users.

Can we talk about your support for a sec there, Wade Foster? Because I know that you're quite hands-on still in some aspects of your support. Is that right? You still get in and help out? Yeah.

I don't know, I'd say 10% of my week I spend doing support still.

Okay, and in terms of like retaining your customers and keeping them happy, what have you found that works to, you know, keep people coming back? Is it just that they rely on the product, or do you regularly touch base with them, tell them what's coming? Is it a combination of these things?

Yeah, it's a combination for sure, and it's actually quite challenging for us because Zapier is the type of product where you don't actually go to it every day, right? You set up a Zap and then ideally you forget about it. It just works, right? Which is kind of hard when you're trying to build a brand that people are thinking about and coming back to. We try to send out like— everyone that signs up gets opted into a weekly summary email that just kind of shows like what their Zaps have done this week. We also try and get them to subscribe to our blog. We try and get them to subscribe to our product updates blog, which is another weekly email that says like, "Hey, here's a bunch of new triggers, services, actions that are on Zapier." Just things to make them realize like we're still around, they should be thinking of us. Yeah.

And do you have any—

So just regular touch points just to let you know.

Exactly. Yeah. Just make sure they know that we're still alive and kicking and doing something for them. Because even if we aren't like— One of the interesting things we see is even if there isn't something that we can solve for them today, it's highly likely that in 2 months or 6 months or 12 months, they will be in a situation where Zapier can solve a problem for them. Whether because they've entered a new position or doing something different in their line of work or because Zapier has got new integrations or new triggers or new actions that fit the things that they're already doing. So we just want to make sure that we're like staying in touch with our customers and letting them know that this is actively being developed and worked on. Things are getting better all the time, and hopefully they'll just keep checking back in and see what's going on. Cool.

I think I cut you off, Dan.

Yeah, so is there a channel of new customer acquisitions that, other than word of mouth, that's a really big channel for you?

Yeah, we rely heavily on our partners, which is pretty fantastic. So, you know, every SaaS service or most SaaS services have like an integrations page or a marketplace or a partners page. And all those— any of those partners, we make sure that Zapier gets listed. If possible, we try and get us listed multiple times for the different integrations that we enable. And so those will link back to specific pages on Zapier. That are for that service or for that pair of services. So like we'll have a Salesforce integration page, and then we'll also have like a Salesforce MailChimp integration page, Salesforce Eventbrite integration page. So there's pages for all these different types of integrations that you might possibly be looking for. And we get those links then from all these services, which they're highly trafficked sites and they send really targeted, uh, traffic to us. Even if the volume isn't high, the quality is so, so high that the conversion rates are are just insane from a partner page.

Nice. All right, we've got a couple of final questions. I think that was one question from you, Alex, but I'll ask this one. Was there anything you made, a mistake you made early on that you slapped yourself in the face for making? I'm pretty sure Alex wrote that.

I wouldn't write that. Yeah, totally. One of the things we did early on was try to build our launch list, our launch email list, and we did a great job at it. By the time we launched, we had over 10,000 people on the email list waiting for Zapier. The problem was we never emailed them except for when we launched. We had these stale email addresses from 6 months ago. That just, they'd totally forgotten what we were. Looking back on that was just a huge miss because if we would have interacted with them, even if it was just once a month, sent them something, I think we would have had a much higher chance of converting them into actual Zapier users. But man, we really screwed the pooch on that one.

I like that. I really like that.

It's something that's so hard for people to do. I was like, "We don't really have anything to report. The product's not ready. What can I send them an email about?" And I just kind of like psyched myself out of sending them an email.

A question about like validating— I don't even know if I want to use the word validating. I know it's a dirty word in front of Dan, but if you had a— if you had to launch— If you had to launch a SaaS product today and based on what you know now, like how would you go about it? How would you quickly get to, okay, within a week I know that this is going to be a business. Do you think that's achievable? Is there a way to do it, do you think?

Yeah, totally. The first thing I would do is go to the forums of any of these SaaS service providers and look at what their customers are complaining about. Nice. Because one, these people are already paying for software. They're already using SaaS, they're already using cloud software, and they're complaining that something doesn't exist. So it's like the trifecta. It's like, well, if I build something that does that, I'm at least going to have some customers. I mean, it doesn't answer the question of like how big can this be, but it does answer the question like is this valuable for somebody, which often that's like the first hurdle to get over. Love that. That's great.

That's— people can just go out and jump on the forums and built himself a business in a week with that sort of advice, right Dan?

Yeah, well, I guess we're sort of trying to take that advice ourselves in that we're looking for, like with our WordPress support stuff, we're looking for people who are already connected to some kind of ongoing monthly service like something like Infusionsoft for example where we already know they're paying a reasonable amount of money each month so it's not going to be a hurdle to get them to pay that. But yeah, I For us it's a little bit different because we can't go and solve direct problems unless we're building plugins and stuff, but at least getting in front of those people I think is something we're trying to do and probably a good idea for people to start with rather than kind of getting advice from their mates.

Yeah, totally. And it's also great if you can like— if you can somehow build a service that's complementary to the SaaS services. That's one of those things we did on accident was that it was like valuable to SaaS services, so they like happily recommend us to their user bases. While we were spending time building the product, we got a lot of help from the marketing teams at these other services promoting our service.

Since Alex is stealing my question, I'm going to steal one of his on this topic. In your work since starting Zapier, have you thought of any ideas that you haven't executed, and is there anything that you've seen that should be done that hasn't been done?

There's one thing that I think would be really awesome that I don't know that it— people have gotten pretty close to it. We actually ended up building it in-house, which that's a key sign that there should be a SaaS service for it. It would basically be an email, like a lifecycle email marketing tool that is hooked directly into your database. So there are services like Vero and Customer.io and Intercom and stuff, and those do all do lifecycle marketing. They do it great, but you, you have to push like all the events that are happening in your database to them. And so it makes it really hard to trigger off of like custom fields that are specific to your SaaS service. Like, if we wanted to use them, we'd have to push all the different services that our customers are using and just tons of data, and it just gets out of hand really quick. But if it hooked directly into our MySQL database and was really— and had all the same other features that those services do, we would sign up for that in a heartbeat.

I guess that means you've got your customer database not in a SaaS app, right? Yeah. We've got our customer database in Infusionsoft.

Yeah, ours exists in Django. Yeah, so we use Django as our backend, and so, like, using the Django admin to, like, key off of different stuff would be phenomenal if that was keyed up to, like, a better-built SaaS product than our janky email sending tool.

Nice. All right. Well, you never know. We put a few ideas up on our blog a few months ago, and at least two of them have been developed since, so you never know. This time next couple of months.

My habit. Yeah, that's awesome.

Are we to the million-dollar question here, Dan, or have we got more to go?

I think we're pretty good. I think you can ask it. I'll see if there's anything we haven't covered. If anyone else has got anything, just chuck it into the chat on the right-hand side.

Cool. The question that I've got is something that I noticed doing a bit of research on your 28-day Zap effort, and one of the things that popped up time and time again was people asking for Zaps for Ontraport. I've met the guys, the support team and a bunch of the guys over there at Ontraport, and we know that they love the idea of having Zaps for their product. Now, can you reveal whether that's on the radar?

Well, I will say the demand on that post was quite high. So we would seem quite foolish if we didn't do that, I'll say that much.

Okay, so Ontraport users can read between the lines on that one. Stay tuned.

Fantastic. Alright, so this is a question that kind of goes back a little bit to what we were talking about before, but we had written down to ask if you have advisors and if you do, is this something that came out of Y Combinator, or have you sought people out after that?

Yeah, so we actually don't— our investors are our advisors, so people that have invested in Zapier end up being advisors. And we selected our investors based on, like, specific criteria. You know, some we selected because of, you know, they were good with integration, or like they were in the space. Some because of SaaS, some because of whatever reason, right? Like, we tried to find people that had specific domain expertise, and then those are the people that we end up using as advisors as well.

Okay, cool. Again, I'm just jumping all over the place, but I've got a couple more questions. Sure. We haven't really talked much about content marketing, but you guys have got a pretty active blog, and could you talk to us a little bit about that and maybe like what how you approach putting content out there and whether or not it's useful at driving leads for you?

Content marketing is hard. It's really hard. When we started, it was not very effective at all for us, and I think it was because the level of— the level, the quality that we were putting out was just not good, and it didn't necessarily match with the users that we were trying to attract, and our design on the blog wasn't such that it would convert people to actually being users of our app. So there was lots of things that was wrong with our content marketing efforts initially. And so I kind of, about midway through 2012, I, or 2013, I kind of sat down and was like, alright, you know, here's, there's clearly tons of companies being successful with content marketing. I was looking at companies like Buffer and Moz and HubSpot and Unbounce who get almost all their leads from their content marketing efforts and trying to figure out how we could do something similar for ourselves. Just decided we're just going to up the level of quality on our blog and consistency as well because we hadn't been consistent at all. We were like, "All right. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we're going to have a post." on our blog come hell or high water. It's going to be a beefy post. It's going to be— we're going to do 1,000 words plus. It's going to cite a lot of our partners because that way we can get our partners involved in promoting our content and we can promote them as well through it. Hopefully we can play on the fact that we've got— they have audiences and try and pull some of them into reading our content. And we're going to try and focus around a certain theme. So we're like, "Okay, well, let's focus around productivity and tools and a little bit more on company building stuff," which seems to be what our users were interested in reading. And it's definitely not our best channel yet, but it's gotten so much better in just 9 months. Handful of maybe 100 or 200 visitors to our blog a week, and now we easily get, you know, 10,000, 20,000 every week to visit our blog. So I think just that consistency and quality and also finding people who can help you promote your content were like the 3 biggest things we did to try like help beef up the blog. Nice.

So did you also get staff to help with that, or was it just you? Internal staff, or do you have like a content manager or something?

Yeah, so we ended up hiring a guy, Danny Schreiber, who used to run— he was the managing editor at Silicon Prairie News, which was a regional tech site in the Midwest. And he like heads up our blog now almost entirely, manages like the editorial schedule and what content's coming next and things like that. Nice.

Very cool. That's a really good message to finish on, I think. Alex, you got anything else?

I just want to reiterate how important that message is for people who are thinking about doing content marketing for their business. The fact that quality and frequency is what's going to set you apart from every other blogger out there who's just putting a post up here and there, maybe every couple of weeks or months. If you've got a target and a specific plan, then you're setting yourself up for the to success, I think. So that's great. Thank you so much for that, Wade Foster.

Yeah, it definitely— I mean, it seems obvious in hindsight, but it's definitely hard to execute on.

I think even just the design, like you go to some of the really top blogs like you mentioned, Help Scout or Kissmetrics or whatever, just the design is so good that like immediately when you get there, you can just tell that it's it's a legitimate kind of location and it's the same with yours. Obviously you've got people who know how to make things look pretty and it all looks nice and professional and I think that actually is like a pretty underrated feature of a good blog because you're not just scaring people off because you've just got it filled with all kinds of crap.

Yeah, I think it's helped us out. Our blog used to look like crap and it doesn't anymore so. We weren't super awesome at keeping metrics back in the day, so I can't like— anecdotally I think it's better. I can't tell you quantitatively that it is, but it definitely feels like it. Yeah.

Awesome. All right. Well, I think that's enough. That's been a pretty awesome call. We've covered just about every aspect of running a company that you could imagine, so that's been super cool. I really appreciate you coming on. Yeah, I just encourage everyone to check out Zapier. We've started using it with automating calendar appointments to Trello, but every time we think of if we can do something, it's like we get on Zapier and see if there's a job for it.

Yeah, you guys should check out some Infusionsoft stuff. I'm sure there's some awesome Infusionsoft stuff you guys could do.

Yeah, I'll have another look at that. There's definitely a few things you can FusionSoft. We're trying to work out what we do with our support, with the help desk and everything. We've got a little bit of automation going on with that, but yeah, there's definitely some more we can do with that.

Well, Dan, I think I've got the confidence now to jump in there and just start zapping things. It sounds pretty easy to me, so just let me jump on that.

We can pronounce it at least.

There you go. You're good. You're good to go. Perfect. Perfect. All right. Thanks again, Wade. Cool. Thanks for having me, y'all. It was fun. All right.

See you later, guys. Cheers. Bye.