The Origin Story of Zapier with Wade Foster

Would you consider yourself a high-level entrepreneur? Now, most likely if you're listening to this, you definitely are. And what I've heard over and over and over again is it's hard to find like-minded people that are like that too. Again, I'm from Maine, so I totally understand how difficult it can be. Thank goodness I have an amazing online community, so I know tons of them. And that is exactly why we are starting this brand new mastermind group with high-level, like-minded entrepreneurs, the ones that you know you can go alongside with that will help move you to the next level, let alone with kick-butt coaching from me, because I like to slap you around both on focus and on strategy. So if you're looking to double or triple this year, which I know most of you are, I want you to go ahead and apply and see if it's a good fit for you. I will totally tell you if it's not and if I wouldn't do it if I were you. Uh, but go to eventualmillionaire.com/apply. We are looking for amazing like-minded entrepreneurs. My previous mastermind members have told me it is life-changing.

Changing.

So take the time today, fill out the very quick application, and we'll see if it's a fit. Take care.

Potent advice and inspiration from real self-made millionaires. Welcome to The Eventual Millionaire with your host, Jamie Masters.

Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I am Jamie Masters, and I am ridiculously excited to have Wade Foster of Zapier on. And it's Zapier— makes you happier— and I use it and I recommend it to everyone. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jaime.

Thanks for giving me that little thing, Zapier makes you happier. It is funny how often I talk about this. So is it— was it a pain in the butt when you named the company to hear somebody name it, say Zapier afterwards, and then go, ah, no.

You know, I like after a while you sort of just get used to it. It's just kind of like, all right, I get it. There's not two Ps.

We wanted to—

We're a bunch of technology nerds and we built the company on top of APIs. So we wanted to have API in the name.

I didn't even realize that.

Oh my gosh, you are genius. But now we have to deal with this. You're too clever.

Man, you guys are too clever. Everybody spells my name wrong. You get over it after a while, but it does make me have conversations. I just posted on Instagram, what is it called? I've heard it over and over. This is what everyone's reply is, just so you know. Well, they're called Zaps, so it has to be Zapier. And I'm like, ooh, okay, thank you very much. So let's dive into it, 'cause you guys even got rejected from Y Combinator. Sort of give me your origin story a little bit.

Yeah, so we started Zapier in October 2011. So before that, Bryan and I, one of my two co-founders, he and I had been just like freelancing, doing anything to make a buck basically, any internet work in Columbia, Missouri. And we got asked to build these one-off integrations from time to time. I remember building, a WordPress forms plugin that could push info into Salesforce. We built like a QuickBooks PayPal connector. And Brian, it sort of dawned on him one day, he's like, people keep hiring us for this stuff, and we can probably make a site that makes it really easy for them to do it themselves, set it up themselves without needing engineering help. And so he messaged me on iChat one day, and I was like, oh my God, that would be awesome. I was using the Marketo API at work and struggling with it. I'm not a great engineer myself. I'm just barely competent, if even that. And so—

Phew, makes us feel better about all this because we all suck at it too. Awesome, thanks.

Yeah, and so it was like, oh wow, if we had something like this, if I had something like this, my life would be a lot easier. And so we teamed up with Mike and at a startup weekend built out the initial prototype. And then we're in Columbia, Missouri. You don't go out and raise like, you know, bookooz of bucks like you do in Silicon Valley. And so we just set off nights and weekends plugging away at this thing, trying to get it off the ground. And, you know, one by one, get some beta testers, get a launch list going, and, you know, trying to get the product ready for launch. So that's kind of where it started.

See, everybody loves the story, by the way, because everyone's like, oh, kids in their basement that don't really know business that create this thing, right? That's what all the geeks— because I hang out with all the geeks— are like, yes, we could do it too, right? How did you know that the market would love it so much and that it was ready for it at the time?

Yeah, so we— a big reason, one, you know, people were already hiring us to build this stuff, so it's like, well, we're already getting hired to do it anyway. Two, you would go to the message boards for these products, so if you went to like the Salesforce message boards, the Evernote message boards, the Mailchimp message boards, the Woofu message boards— these message boards don't exist anymore, all these companies got rid of them, by the way. At the time, you could go find them and people would have feature requests. There would often be people saying, "When are you going to have an integration with X?" Then the threads would be like, "Oh, I want this too. Me too. When's it going to be? Hey, you haven't replied to this in 6 months. Is it coming?" Some product manager would get in there and fall on their sword and say, "Hey, we're thinking about it. Maybe someday we'll get to it. We hope we'll have it." which is like code for, hey, basically it's not on the roadmap, it's not going to happen. We saw all those happening and it was just like, customers want this stuff, the products themselves are struggling to prioritize it, trying to get this stuff built out. If we could make it really easy to facilitate all these connections, then there might be something to that. To us, that was enough insight that this could be useful.

So how do you go from that, hey, I think I got an idea that's useful, to building it? Because don't get me wrong, the people that have programming skills, it's really cool for them to be able to start building it. You already knew how to do it, so you've got that piece. But then there's the whole other piece of you were freelancers and now you grew from 0 to 600,000 users in 3 years or something, I read. That's insanity. Tell me about that trajectory because you must have had to evolve as a human big time on that.

Well, yeah, so I mean, between Brian, Mike, and I, like, we actually all worked in like marketing before this, so we're like marketers who code, so we kind of know, we kind of had a couple different skill sets that between the three of us, you know, made us like one, we basically became a mini competent company. That's awesome. Pretty quickly. Not to say that we were great at everything, there was like enough skills where it was like, we weren't totally out of, you know, or dApps. So for us, day one, it's like, how do you get a product that you know is good enough? And so that started with our own intuition around what this could look like. And then you just start getting it in front of potential customers. In our case, we would go into these message boards I was talking about and post comments and say, hey, we're working on a project that could help get this connection happening. And if you wanna try it out, send me an email. And so people would send me emails, I'd get a couple emails a day around this stuff, and I'd say, hey, what are you looking to set up? And then I, if we had it, I would be like, let's jump on Skype, I'll give you access to it, and see if you can build it, build a Zap. And at the time, I remember the very first time I did this, we had a customer who was like, when, you know, I didn't volunteer to get on Skype the first time, Instead, he emailed me and said, "Hey, can we get on Skype? I'm struggling with this." I get on Skype and I have to coach him through setting up his first app. It's going very poorly. He, like every click, he has no clue what to do next. I'm like, "Well, click this button, click this dropdown, fill in this text, click next," walking him through all the way to the very end. He gets to the end and I'm like, holy cow, that could not have gone more poorly. And he goes, oh my gosh, Wade, thank you so much for this. This is going to change my business. And that's when I knew I was like, if we just make this easy enough, people are going to eat this stuff up. Like, it's clearly not good enough yet because he had needed help every step of the way, but I knew that if we could get there, we would, we would have something. And so I just, we just sort of rinse, wash, and repeated that for, you know, it took us about 9 months till we felt good enough, like opening the door and saying, you can sign up and not talk to Wade Foster, basically, because before that you had to talk to me, otherwise you wouldn't be able to set up a Zap. But I would just keep getting on these Skype calls, taking good notes, recording the sessions, going back to Brian and Mike saying, here's what's working, here's what's not working. This screen is still confusing, this button is confusing, this text is confusing. We don't support this app, this trigger is not good enough. Like just all sorts of reasons why it's just not ready yet. And we just one by one, just sort of methodically work through it. And eventually you get about, if in our case it was 9 months in, you know, some people still needed some help, but more and more I would get on those Skype calls and people would just sort of, Set it up and I'd be like, okay, you know, and that's when I sort of felt like, okay, we're ready. We can put this out there and people are going to be successful.

So it was tweak after tweak after tweak for the beginning. It wasn't like, because what people do now, especially that they're like, I'm in a startup, I'm going to go hire a UX/UI guy and then I'm going to do this right. And they're going to tell me all the things right. But you spent hours and hours and hours on the phone with customers. And I know we highlight that on this show all the time. But I have to highlight it again because a lot of people, especially if they've ever had a business before, they feel too good for that stuff. Like, how many hours do you think you did on the phone with customers trying to walk people through it?

I mean, I certainly put my, you know, 10,000 hours in front of customers, and I still spend time with customers. It's like one of the best ways to just understand what's working and not working. I don't feel like you can, you know, a certain, you know, a certain point, a year in, we did hire a customer support person to help. Who did probably at that point in time, he started doing maybe two-thirds of the support, but Brian, Mike, and I were still doing the other third. It's just like you never want to— I don't think you ever want to get too far away from that. Otherwise you start to like, I don't know, you just start to lose touch with what's the reality of what's going on.

I really appreciate you saying that because a lot of people are like, I don't want to talk to customers right now. I'm too important or I'm too— right? As we go up the chain and the fact that you guys still do that and care about that is kind of huge. Tell me about— Well, I get it.

Like, I mean, I get that. Too, because, you know, company at Zapier now, we have 250 people. And so like, you're mad. Like, for me, the management burden is heavy. Like, you have to spend a lot of time with your team making sure that goals are aligned and all that sort of stuff. So finding time to talk to customers when you have this whole org that you've hired, at a certain point, you're kind of like, they've got it covered. They're good at this. They're better at working with customers than I am. So you— but even still, you're like, I gotta find time to do it a little.

Yeah, because the losing touch completely is not necessarily good either. Okay. But tell me about the growth trajectory because from hiring that customer service person to 250 is a huge growth curve and probably outside of your wheelhouse, I'm assuming. So, tell me about you guys and the, and the growth of the company and how you decided to do what you did.

Yeah. So, we've more or less, so more or less the headcount is a little less than doubled almost every year. So, the first 3 years is just the 3 founders and then it's 7, and then it was 14, and then it was like 25, and then it was like 60. And, you know, just kind of kept going like that. The early days, though, we were— we felt like we were going— it felt really slow, like especially compared to other like Silicon Valley companies that are like, raise a bunch of money, go hire the team, like go take the market, all that sort of stuff. And we had never hired people before. And so we were like, going, we were really meticulous about it because I didn't know, like I never managed anyone. We'd never like paid anyone a salary really. We didn't have health benefits. We didn't have like any of the things that you sort of need to have to have employees didn't exist. We had to do that for the first time ever. And so that was just like all figuring that stuff out. And I didn't want to rush it. I wanted, we wanted to like sort of make sure that when we added somebody, it like, okay, the team gelled. So when we hired that first person, it was like, okay, there's 4 of us now. How are we feeling about that? And it took us maybe 4 months and it was like, okay, this is working. Like we didn't totally screw this up. Like we feel like we're ready for one more. We added one more in and it's like, okay, this is working. You know, 4 months later we add a 6th person. So it's like, you're just sort of getting used to that. And we were very intentional in the early days about saying, we are not gonna hire another person until it absolutely hurts. It hurts. And that's what helped keep our spending down because you can hire really fast and get your spending way out of control and go broke very quickly. And we were like, we will not hire until it literally is like, like we cannot do this anymore. And so that really, that discipline helped us, I think, make sure we understood our business really well. We understood the types of people who, when they came into the company, what made them successful, what didn't make them successful. It really gave us a certain amount of confidence and a certain amount of identity in who we are, which being totally new at this, we lacked confidence. We lacked an identity. Like those were things that we just were, we're just oblivious to. But that sort of meticulousness and that methodical pace, it wasn't necessarily slow, but it was definitely methodical. I think helped us so that eventually we got to a point where it was like, We can hire 2 people at a time now instead of 1 person at a time. And you know, now we've had weeks where 10 people will join in a given week. And, but now you have all the systems and processes to accommodate that, where 10 people can come in and feel like this is normal, this is how it's supposed to work. Uh, and things don't just sort of fall apart on you.

I really appreciate you going back to that because a lot of people, as they start making money, they have a skillset, right? So you guys had your skillset. You're really good, especially with customers. Then you go, oh, I have no skill set for hiring or managing. And that is a skill set that takes people a long period of time to learn typically, and a lot of mistakes. So do you have any hiring tips or managing tips for people, especially people that are more either engineer-like or more salespeople-like, and that's not their innate talent?

There's a great podcast, Manager Tools, that covers the basics. It's like, you know, 30-minute podcasts on you know, how to hire a person, how to give feedback, what to do when you think you have to fire somebody, like all these sort of, and they're like very specific, which is what I liked because a lot of the management advice is so fluffy. And so like, it's hard to like grasp. It's like someone just walked into my office and said, I want a raise now or I'm going to quit. And it's like, okay, I need the advice on how to deal with that right now. I don't need this sort of like, people love having autonomy. And it's like, well, great. I know that. I understand that people want autonomy, but I have a very tactical situation that I am not equipped to handle. And so I just would, you know, it took me a couple of years to realize that like, wow, I'm not good at management. And the Manager Tools podcast just was like a crash course in how to handle these situations that come up. You know, when you're a manager, like, you, you know, you can sort of— any, any manager who's done this for enough times will tell you that they constantly get surprised by situations that come up where they're like, whoa, I've never dealt with that before. And you need to have these toolkits, these conversational tools to be able to navigate those things without screwing it up. Cause you didn't, you know, it's, it's easy to screw that stuff up. Sometimes it's not intuitive.

It's so easy to screw that stuff up. And I love, I love the action piece of it too. Like, just tell me what to say, people. Just tell— I just want to know. I just want to know actual things instead of fluffiness on the corporate side. So I love that tip too. How did you guys start figuring out what your strengths are? Because it sounds like you're sort of all doing pieces. We all hired together, we all did this, but I'm sure each one of you had different strengths and, and different roles in the company. How did you make sure that you went down the role that was really best for for you?

Yeah, it was pretty natural for us. We knew that we had different leanings going in. I was always on the business go-to-market side of things. Mike was always really focused on the product and user experience and how do customers interact with this. Then Brian was really focused on the technology, like how does the infrastructure work? How do we scale this out? While at the same time, each of us was still somewhat competent in the other things that people were working on. It made us good thought partners. You know, I like Brian and Mike could challenge me on go-to-market stuff and they could say, hey Wade, you might try this or might consider these types of things. And I would step back and go, you know, that's actually a good idea. I should probably think about it this way and vice versa. So having that, you know, a bit of expertise in an area, but also, you know, the ability to sort of help other people in their sort of specialty went a long way. And then after that, it was like we all just had to learn. So like general management skills was a thing none of us was good at, but all three of us had to become good at. It. Because at a certain point in time, you kind of need management skills, just general management skills. So a lot of that's just, just-in-time learning. It's like grabbing the book on the thing, figuring out, you know, reading it, and, you know, trying to stay just ahead of where the company is at in terms of your learning and your knowledge.

Yeah, because there's always something, right? And that's the funny thing, it's like the phases and the trajectories you go, you're like, oh, I learned this, I finally started feeling good about this, Oh shoot, I know nothing about this now and I'm in a totally new area that I'm trying to learn. So, what are some of the pivotal books or resources like Manager's Tools that you really felt like were really lifesavers for you? Because everybody that's listening is like, "I'm dealing with stuff right now. Give me the actionable stuff." Yeah.

I mean, Manager Tools was critical. High Output Management was another good book that I really liked. That was from a longtime CEO at Intel, Andy Grove. That one was really practical, useful. There's, oh man, it's been years since I read it. Oh, Don't Make Me Think and Rocket Surgery Made Easy were like really great sort of like, you know, practical, like UX user testing sort of things that were really useful for me. In school, I don't talk about this much, but I do have an MBA and most of the classes I took were not useful, but funny enough, the one that really was, was Accounting 101. Such as like how to read a P&L, how to deal with a balance sheet, how to deal with a cash flow statement and understand how money is moving into and out of your business. So like, I would definitely take a crash course on just accounting best practices that came in handy quite a bit. Then, you know, get a good like accountant, a third-party accountant, good third-party lawyer who you can sort of dial up and ask questions when you're just sort of confused on things where you're like, "Hey, I was reading up on this," and then get really good at Googling.

Thank goodness we have Google nowadays, right? Imagine running a company right now without that. So it's interesting, especially on the accounting side, because this is sort of the thing that especially small business owners that are just about gross revenue, top line, like just keep running the sales sort of mentality is that they sort of avoid the actual numbers and they don't even want to look at it. Even for like clients of mine, I'm like, "So you still need to send me your P&L because I have no picture of what you're working on. So did you guys avoid that stuff because you were more programming side or marketing side, or did you actually lean into that and not have an issue with, with going after the numbers?

I mean, I always, you know, every month I would review our P&L and just take a look at it. And, you know, I think in my mind we were always very cost-conscious, so we tried to keep our spend intentionally low. And so I was paying attention to like, where's the top line going? We wanted to grow revenue, but we all wanted to keep our our costs in check. For us, we were so like spend-worthy that we actually probably overdid it on that side of things. We probably could have spent more. In fact, one of the best things was when we finally hired a CFO, this was about 4 years in, 5 years in, she came in and actually gave us the confidence to deploy capital in a much more effective way. It was like, you actually can, spend more money and probably generate higher returns. But, you know, for us, we would just— we were just like, we don't want to— like, we've got a good thing going on, we don't want to overspend. You hear the horror stories of like these companies that overspend and they have to do layoffs, and it just is brutal. And so we were like pretty, you know, I, you know, counting every penny, um, literally in a lot of situations.

Well, that's, that's That's an amazing thing, especially when you were saying that you didn't hire someone until it hurt. How did you know when that hurt was enough hurt, right? Because it started to be like the team is busting at the seams, but where and who do we hire? And did you like predict who you were hiring and when?

Well, so our CFO was like the one that I had held on to, like running basically— I was doing the books, I was doing a lot of the HR, like a lot of even like office management type stuff, like buying plane tickets and like stuff like that for our team retreats and whatnot. That was probably around 30 or so people. And it like had gotten to where it was eating up like huge chunks of my day. Like, you know, probably half my time is being spent on that. And I'm like, that's not a good use of my time. Like I can be helping our customers and there's a lot of people that can buy plane tickets. And so then I was like, well, what type of person do you want for that role? And it was, I went out and I asked a lot of different types of people who are like further along in their businesses than we were at the time. Not maybe like a year ahead of us, not too far along, because if they were too far away, like they wouldn't really remember it. But like a year ahead, maybe 18 months, 2 years ahead, just saying like, hey, this is what I'm dealing with. How did you approach this? What worked for you? What didn't work for you? What skill sets are you looking for? What titles do these people tend to have? And one of the people I actually happened to email to ask advice is our now CFO. I said, hey, you know, you've gone through this, you've dealt with this, like, how would you think about this problem? And she was like, well, it turns out I actually just left my, the role I was in, like, I'm happy to sort of like advise or help coach or see where this goes in the meantime. And so, you know, we did that for about 2 months and it was like going really well. And I was like, why don't you come on full-time? And so she did and it worked great. And so we actually ended up overhiring Like, I don't know that I was looking for a CFO at that point in time. I was like, hey, I want someone to help with the books and the HR and just like some of the, the kind of more basics of this stuff. But it was really helpful because she was willing to roll up her sleeves and like I handed her off and I was kind of embarrassed. I was like, look, I need you to help book plane tickets. And she was like, so good, we'll do it.

Wow. Yes, that's amazing. Wow.

So like having someone that was like, that understood that building a company is partly just rolling up your sleeves and yeah, we're going to hire a team and we're going to eventually get to where we can grow. But like, that's a— it's a journey. It's not a thing where you just can walk in on day one and expect to have, you know, you know, 10 people or 20 people that can sort of do your bidding. It's— you got to come in and do some of this stuff. And over time, we'll get to where we have a, you know, that kind of team. But it's not going to happen.

Everybody's got to clean the toilets for a little while until we can, you know what I mean?

Yeah, exactly. And so that That just mentality that she had made her so well suited for Zapier at the time.

Okay. So now let's talk about the actual technology that you're using, because I know a lot of people, especially people that are not tech savvy, try and back away from anything having to do with this. So when I say automation, they're like, yeah, who do I have? Like, would you give me a referral? Right. And it's like drag and drop interface, you know? So can you, can you tell a little bit more about the types of avatar that would be good to like really go in and look at Zapier, like could get a lot of use out of it?

Yeah, I think almost any small business owner could benefit from something like Zapier. It really helps non-technical folks like build things that they wouldn't have been able to do before. So like a basic use case, one that I use all the time, is our team is in Slack all day, every day, and Slack doesn't have the concept of a queue, and so it's easy to look at the different, you know, it's easy to lose messages inside of Slack. Like if I'm on mobile, I'll see one and then I'll forget about it and I can't find it again. So I set up a Zap that says, hey, I'm gonna star these and have them send me an email, and then I can know which messages to follow up with. I don't get lost, and that took me 5 minutes to set up, less than 5 minutes. It's just like you say, hey, when Slack, when I start an email or when I start a message, I want to send me an email and I want the email to have who sent me the message, what was the message, and a link back to the message so that I can respond. 4 or 5 clicks, you got it set up and you're good to go. Any of these sort of—

I'm laughing hysterically just to stop you for a second is because I need to set, like, I have made my assistant, which, dumb. I don't know why I've been doing this in Slack for our Mastermind members, make an Asana task for me when there's big, like, things that I have to respond to. Ah, man. And I use Zapier. Yeah.

So, well, this is what the fun part for me is about talking to our customers, because I, I used to be the best user of Zapier. But when I go talk to our customers now, they have so many different use cases. That I never would have thought of. I was just talking to one, the other, a fellow CEO the other day who for his team, his sales team often likes to have him send emails to their prospects to help close them because it helps them feel the love. And so what he did was he set up a little form on Google Forms where they can come in and say, you know, here's the email of who you want to send it to. And here's the subject line, here's the message that you should send. And they submit the form and that auto-creates a draft in his Gmail inbox. So he can come in real quick, review it, and press send. And doesn't have to give them access to his Gmail, but now people can send emails on behalf of the CEO. And so now their prospects can feel the love because the CEO sent them an email and that feels amazing. So like, that was something that I had to deal with all the time, sending customers or partners or potential candidates' emails where people would be like, hey Wade, can you, can you send a quick email for me? And I was like, oh man, why didn't I think of that? I could have just sent them a little form and said, here, fill this form out and you know, I'll press send for you.

And you have common Zaps too, right? Like that's the other thing. Cause I remember looking through a list going like, I need to do that. I need to do that. I need to go back and do that again too.

Like, yes, you can go to our app directory and, you know, point out the apps that you use. It's like, oh, I use Slack or I use Asana or use, you know, G Suite or whatever. And then it has a list of like recommended Zaps or common things that other people do.

Yeah. Well, and that's, and that's the key thing that I just want to highlight. Cause when I talk about this stuff, I used to use like If This Then That for my Amazon Echo to go to my thing, but then it would get so complicated and I try and explain it to a client like, oh, I have them remind me of my goals for blah, blah, blah. And they're like, no way. And no way in heck I'm ever going to do that, Jamie. Right. And so when you say that, I'm like, I could actually have my assistant go in right now. And do the Slack thing and she should be able to, she's, she should not technical, but she should be able to do it without a problem without necessarily needing a whole tech team. So how can you start, especially because we have a lot of Zaps, we have so many, it's crazy. So once it gets to be a lot, my tech uses it, but what do you suggest for people that aren't tech savvy? But once we start getting too much, it starts to get a little complicated. Do you have any tips for us on that?

Like managing, uh, like a lot of Zaps at once?

Yeah, I'd have like 3 of your Zaps had issues today. I'm like, "Oh no," right? And then I just forward it to my tech guy because I can't, like I don't remember, right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, we've got a couple of different things that help you with this. So you can use folders to help organize the Zaps. Our Teams product, you know, often for, you know, it sounds like groups like y'all's, helps you have multiple people can have access to it. So it's like, "Hey, this folder is for our marketing team. This folder is for our sales team." folders for our support team, and then if there's issues, it'll alert those people instead of, you know, you, because it's like, hey, I'm not the one who— like, I actually don't know. Our support people set this one up and they need to follow up and deal with it. Good point.

Why am I getting the emails? Good point. You're giving me tons of stuff to do now.

Yeah. So that's where our, like, the Teams product comes in and helps out with just some of that management inside of an organization that happens when you sort of grow and you have some scale and it's there's a lot more going on and you just need, you know, some, some features to help, to help navigate that.

Yeah. It's like an ever-evolving process though. Right. And that's the thing that I think is so difficult. Like these are super small things that shouldn't be that big of a deal that will optimize a lot of small things that I'm doing. And those micro moments really do add up, but not only on the time space, but on the, the brain space kind of thing. And I feel like small business owners are just stuck in the minute task Switching over and over and over again. So setting it up once and then having it done for a really long period of time is hugely important. But what I see mostly, and I wonder if you have some things to say about this, is that they're like, "Ah, I'll get to that later. It's a low priority now." Right? Because it's a small thing and yes, it adds up, but I've got urgent matters right now. So do you have any tips for people for that stuff?

Well, you know, the funny thing is even I fell suspect to that myself and one of the things I remember I went on a Zap-making tear when we hired, when I hired an executive assistant for the first time, because he joined and was like, Wade, I can do this for you and I can do this for you. And he had a list of things where he's like, I can help you with this stuff. Probably like, you know, half the things on the list, I was like, that seems dumb. Like, why would I have you do that? You have better things to do. We can make a Zap for that. And so these were things that I was already doing, but he just sort of prompted me and I was like, I'm like, that's dumb. Like, why would you do that? And then the funny thing was like, I'm doing that. Like, and so just, I think, you know, for me, the act of sitting down with somebody and having them say, here's all the things that I could potentially do for you, forced me to go, wow, there's a lot that goes on in a given day that I can sort of delegate to Zapier, or in this case, an executive assistant, or it didn't matter which one. One of them needed to do it, but there was a set that could go to Zapier and not necessarily have to go to another person.

See, you make me feel so much better about this though, that the CEO of Zapier says the exact same thing. So it is really going, hey, I need to be prompted to make it an urgency thing because especially like the beginning of the year, you start to feel like, oh man, I want to have a new fresh start. So taking like a day, I've had clients of mine take like a day and reorganize their Asana and everybody on the team is like, yeah, we're reorganizing Asana, right? We should have a Zap day. Where we're like, everybody just does all their snaps and everybody gets their questions because it— because long term it saves so much time. But short term, it's so hard to just go, I have to go in and do the thing. I know it'll save me a minute, 3 minutes over a month and a half. But when you add them all up, it really— I mean, we're paying other people to do this or you're spending your time, which, how valuable is your time? Oh man. Okay. So I get on rants on some of this stuff too. So where do you think the industry is going? Because I feel like we talk about AI and we talk about automation and we talk about implants in our body and crazy stuff like that, right? Where do you see that stuff and do you really pay attention to trends?

Yeah, I mean, I pay attention to those things, but I think for our customers, a lot of them are folks like you, right? We're busy people, we're using all these different tools. And for us, like, you know, implants in our brains, like that's like sci-fi still. It's like, you know, that would be lovely. But right now I've got, you know, 100 emails in my inbox. My text is blowing up, and I've got this project that's behind, and I've got, you know, however many clients that are screaming at me. And then there's one person in my— there's a couple of people on my team that are like begging me for help on these things. And it's just like, how do I get through all of that? And so having things like Zapier and like these different tools where you can create automations between them, that sort of helps you, you know, route things to the right person that automatically does some of these tasks for them. Or gives your team the ability to tackle some of this stuff on their own, like that email on behalf of the CEO form, things like that. It creates this, I always like to think of it as, you get to this point where you can lean back and it's like arms sprout out of your sides and start doing some of these tasks for you, and you can lean back and drink your coffee a little bit. That's the visual image I always have.

Robotic arms.

No. And so I think just, you know, most small business owners are just working so hard that we need tools like Zapier to help just get control of like the little things that are eating up our time, that are eating— and more than our time, it's eating up our attention. It's this stuff that we get caught in the minutia. And if we don't take the time to step back and think, what are the things that are going to push my business forward? What are the things that are really going to help my customer that I need to be planning on for the next for the next 2 years. And if I constantly, and if I get caught in this circle of, you know, approving expense reports, replying to the latest email, putting out the latest fire, your business will, you know, won't plateau today, but you look a year down the line, 2 years down the line, you'll start to realize like you probably haven't made those investments that you really wish you would have. And so I think having, You know, tools like Zapier, tools like Asana and Slack and G Suite and whatever that help keep you organized and just on task go a long way to helping you out.

I completely agree, and it is really interesting, especially because it's stuff we have to do. That's the— we do time audits for all of our clients that come through, and it's like they're like, but I have to do it, which I totally get. You have to do it. But when we look this way, right, then it takes our focus off of the actual things that we're supposed to do, even when we try and prioritize and carve out time and do all that stuff because it still has to be done. We just need robots to do it like Zapier instead of, right, instead of you actually taking up your brain space. So I have another question before we start to wrap up. What comes up all the time is which software to use. And my stance on software is whatever you use, just commit 100% because no software is perfect ever, right? Is it Asana? Is it is it Teamwork PM, is it Trello, is it this, right? There's a million different things. But have you seen any correlations for size of business, especially in the, you know, couple hundred thousand dollar or less than $100,000 size of business that are some core software that really, really works or most common? I don't know if you're allowed to pick between which APIs you like better, right? But do you have any tips on any of that stuff? Because I feel like I get bombarded with questions about this.

Yeah, I mean, I have a similar response to you. I think it's like, find what works for you, what works for your mental model. Some people are Trello, some people are Asana, some people are Basecamp, like it's whatever works for your mental model and go all in on it, like find the way to work it, build your, you know, have your sort of systems and structures and then find software that sort of matches how your brain thinks about the world. And then tools like Zapier can help, you know, fill in the blank and like automate things between them. But typically, you know, folks are generally looking for like, you know, group chat tool like Slack, they're looking for video conferencing like Zoom, they're looking for email, so it's probably like, G Suite. They probably need something for project management, so it's Asana or Trello, or maybe like Airtable these days is pretty trendy. You know, so those are the types of things that I think folks are paying attention to. Email, Mailchimp comes up a lot. CRM, you're starting to look at things like Pipedrive or BaseCRM or whatnot. So these different tools, you know, are useful. For helping and getting you started. There's a lot of great software now that has free plans or pretty inexpensive stuff, you know, $20 a month, $50 a month, that works great for, you know, small businesses. And you shouldn't feel like software is the thing that's holding you back because it's so inexpensive, so easy to get started these days that you really can just pluck something off the shelf and be a little bit more organized pretty quickly.

I know, I'm so grateful that we live in the world that we— I used to code my own blog. Back in the day.

Oh yeah. You know what I mean?

Like WordPress was like that.

Yeah, now you can have it and it doesn't cost that much.

Like. When you're not, when you're more of a visionary or not a tech or not a detailed person though too, I feel like it can overwhelm even just you naming those apps, which are very common, what most of my clients use anyway. But it can be overwhelming, especially to go and then I don't even know what I'm supposed to do. And I know Zapier helps with the integration of those. But even just having that many different things to log into is a lot. Do you have any tips for people that are more visionary that aren't the detail-oriented people?

Well, at a certain point in time, like you kind of have to buck up and deal with the details. Like running a company is filled with like details. Uh, if you sort of stay up here all the time, like nothing will ever get done. So either you need to find it in yourself how to be organized and get some details, or you need to get a partner or an assistant or somebody that can sort of enforce some structure on you. I'm not one of those detail people, but I can force myself to do it when I need to. I like, okay, we're going to buckle down and we're going to get this done and we're going to power through it. Then as we've grown the team and scaled it out, I brought in more people who are really those workhorses, those really who think through these things that help me scale it out. That's been my approach. When I like to stay up here, I get people in who like getting into the details.

How do you do that? How do you just hunker down and do it? Do you have a bazillion cups of coffee next to you and you just time yourself? Give me some actionable.

Tips on the biggest thing is for me, like the mental model I have is I write down the night before what's the, what's the 3 most important things I need to get done. And if those 3 things get done, I can feel like it's a good day. And so I just focus on that stuff. And if, you know, then, then the next day I wake up, I'm like, all right, first things first, I'm going to do those 3 things before I before I go to Slack, before I go to email, before I take a meeting, like these things are gonna happen. So you just sort of do like, you know, you do the thing you hate first and the rest of the day is your oyster, right? Yeah, you do the job.

Do you actually do it all the time though? 'Cause this is the other thing, people are like, oh, you do this?

No, I don't do it all the time. Okay, good. I've gotten pretty consistent about it. The thing you, you know, there's Jerry Seinfeld has a thing like don't break the streak, right? And so I think that's the mentality you wanna get into where it's like, hey, I'm gonna create a streak out of this Then you can feel a sense of motivation, at least around the streak, where it's like, "Hey, I may not want to do the thing, but even worse than that would be breaking the streak." That's actually a really good way to put it, because I'm not a details person, so I have to make myself do it, but I'm like this, you know?

But I feel— but I love checking things off lists, so if I can at least check it off my list, I feel at least a little bit better about that, which is sad.

Is that dopamine hit?

Exactly. It's all I got, people. But there are things we have to do as business owners, unfortunately, as you said, that literally is like, and now you have to learn this whole new skill set. Oh good. Even if you suck at it, good job. Keep working on it.

Well, I think that's the thing that all, you know, sort of founders, CEOs, like at a certain point, if your business grows and scales, like you're going to have to do almost every job at least a little bit, and you're not going to love all of them, but you have to find a way to like at least be interested in it a little bit and learn a little bit about it because you're going to have to do it. And then you're going to have to hire people whose full-time job it is to do that. And you're going to have to get excited about working with them on solving their problems and dealing with the things that they deal with. So I feel like my, one of my superpowers is just that endless curiosity where I'm like, even if I don't like doing the thing, I can sort of appreciate the craft of the thing itself.

That's actually a really good way to look at it. That's exactly what I was going to say. Like, at least entrepreneurs in general like learning typically. And are cool with change because it's like, okay, well I know this is going to be short term until I hire someone, so I better get good at it enough so that I can grow the company enough so that I can actually get this to go away. Because we know we can make change ourselves, which is amazing. I know we have to start wrapping up and I told you I could probably talk forever, but we won't. We won't. I will be cognizant of your time. What is one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

Well, I think it would be my trick of like, before you go to bed tonight, write your 3 things down, the things you've been dreading. The things you've been avoiding that you need to know and then tomorrow morning, you know, do the thing. Before you do anything else, do that thing.

Do the thing. My friend has a tattoo that says "Do the thing" on it, right?

I like it.

Always remember that. Go do that thing. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Everyone check out Zapier, please. I can say it, you don't have to say it. Go check it out right now because it's super easy and it will save you so much time long-term. Where do we find out more? Spell it for everybody just in case they don't know.

Zapier, 1P-Z-A-P-I-E-R.com. You can sign up for free, get started, play around with it. The blog has lots of great advice and tips and things like that as well too. So yeah, check it out and hopefully you can find something that helps you be a little more organized, saves you a little time and gives you a little bit of that thinking time back in your day.

Thank you so much for doing what you do and creating this company because I love it and thanks for coming on the show today, Wade. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jaime.

If you enjoy this show, I would really appreciate your wonderful words of feedback. Go leave me a review. I would love a rating, whatever you can do in the time that you've got. I would so appreciate it.