In this interview, Zapier CEO Wade Foster explains the origin and mechanics of Zapier’s distribution engine. Early on, the team noticed that searches for integrations returned low‑quality results, prompting them to create a dedicated app directory with SEO‑optimized landing pages for each possible integration pair. The idea was inspired by Patrick McKenzie’s Bingo Card Creator, which generated cheap, high‑ranking pages that each earned a profit. Zapier replicated this model: for a small cost per page they could rank well for niche integration queries, driving organic traffic without traditional sales or marketing spend. They built the directory before having any customers, treating product development and distribution as a single, inseparable effort. As they added more integrations, each new app spawned additional landing pages, creating a self‑reinforcing flywheel. Later they opened the platform to third‑party developers, further accelerating page creation and traffic. Foster emphasizes that this distribution‑first mindset is crucial for founders, noting that the competitive landscape has since changed, making the approach harder to replicate today.
On this topic of the distribution engine that you've built, what's sort of the founding story of that part of the business?
Yeah, there's really like two pieces of it. And if you tried to replicate it today, like you couldn't do it because everyone has copied what Zapier has done now and it's just too competitive. But at the time, you know, when you would go search for integrations, the results, the keyword results that would show up were a bunch of like just kind of like junk pages. Like you'd get like a Pastebin result that like had API docs and stuff like that, which is not what people were looking for. Most people were like looking for a product that says, hey, I can just integrate, you know, Salesforce and Zendesk, I can just integrate PayPal and QuickBooks, one click. Like they wanted a SaaS product. They didn't want, you know, an API at the end of the day. And so we had read there's like a Patio11. He's like famous on Hacker News and Patrick McKenzie worked for Stripe for a long time. But way before those days, he had this thing called Bingo Card Creator and he'd written a lot about how he did content creation for Bingo Card Creator and he would spin up these landing pages for every type of bingo card he could think of. You know, he'd have like a physics bingo card, a US history bingo card, a world history bingo card, anything you could think of. And he'd done the math on it and it, you know, he had had a person that he paid like, I don't know, $10 to generate every one of these to come up with a list of, you know, bingo card things and put them into this little CMS and it would automatically generate a page. And I think it cost him like $10 to do that. And he had figured out like for every page he spins up, he makes $20. And so he just created this little engine where it was like, you know, $10 to make a page and I'll make $20 of sales every single time. You know, $20 sales is not a lot, but it's like the number of ways that you can create a bingo card are conceivably infinite. And so if there's enough people searching for that specific type of bingo card, you're gonna really rank quite well in Google for this. And so we saw that and we're like, oh, that's interesting. Integrations is kind of like that. If you are looking for integrations, there's all these different keyword results that you conceivably rank for, But no one is trying to rank for this stuff. If we had a landing page that said you could connect Salesforce and Zendesk, or you could connect QuickBooks and PayPal, that would stand out. So, you know, we made an app directory that, you know, has a nice page. It describes how you could connect these things. You could sign up for free. And pretty quickly, you know, Google indexes that and says, hey, that's the best page or like the best 2 or 3 pages on the internet for that specific type of query. And we start generating traffic from that. And so as a result, like if we really wanted to grow, all we had to do was we just need more apps that we support on Zapier. We need connect more things. So that's what we did. We started just building integrations ourselves, and every new app like spins up n+1, you know, sort of new landing pages. And the question just becomes like, how, how fast can we go to get high-quality integrations on the platform? And then you combine this with, you know, about a year in, we launch our integration platform, and other people start building integrations for us. And now the engine just starts to hum where we've got people building integrations, and that's automatically spinning landing pages, and that's getting more traffic in, and that's attracting more folks to build landing pages. And you get this just really good flywheel going. And, uh, as a result, like, we're growing quite quickly and not having to spend a bunch of money on sales and marketing to go do it, which is quite exceptional for, you know, a B2B SaaS software company. Like I said, like, you could go try and do that today, but in our category it wouldn't work because, like, you go do those searches and you see, uh, a list of search results that's a lot more competitive than it used to be. So it just wouldn't work as easily as it did for us. you know, I think for another type of company you might have similarly underappreciated growth advantages that are just sort of like sitting there untapped that a person just hasn't connected, you know, two and two yet and figured out how to do it.
At what point in the company's life did you figure that out?
We had that idea on day one. The app directory existed before we had a customer. It was just like, hey, we'll build this like little app directory, see if we can get people coming in through search. And if they are, like, you know, we can build a product. You have to think like this is 2011 too. This is like when Lean Startup methodology, customer development, development is like kind of all the rage. MVP was like in vogue, you know, build like a landing page, get some emails, go talk to them, see if you can build the thing for it. Like that, that was kind of the style of product development we were doing at the time.
And so were you thinking about, hey, I think there's this problem to solve. For this to work, we have to figure out distribution. How can we figure out distribution?
I mean, you need distribution. And for us, we felt like, well, if we're going to build software, like we want people to use it. So yeah, we should be thinking about distribution from day one. I think this is one of the biggest things that like founders especially product-minded founders overlook is they say, oh, you know, I have an idea for product XYZ in this category. The incumbent stinks for these reasons, and I think I can make a better version of it, right? I can make a better Salesforce or I can make a better whatever. And they go make a better whatever. But then they realize the thing that actually helps Salesforce win is not necessarily that the product is amazing. It's that they have this incredible distribution engine that is really difficult to compete against. And so You know, I think the best founders are thinking about that. I mean, product market fit is not just about the product, it's about the market too. You need these things to like coexist. And in many ways that's what made Zapier hum is that the product and the go-to-market motion are inextricably linked. Um, they work as one fluid motion. It's not, we built a product and then we figured out how to like, you know, latch on a go-to-market to it. They were built as one and the same thing.
And out of the gate you saw the world in that way.
100%. It just sort of made intuitive sense where it was like this bingo card creator thing like is winning this. Way, like why couldn't other people work this way? And we were fans of things like, you know, Basecamp and Mailchimp and stuff like that. And they were doing a good job of just drive traffic to a landing page. You know, you could sign up for free, get started. And so for us it was like, it just sort of intuitively makes sense where it's like, we know from Veterans United how to like drive traffic through search. You see what these other products are doing and you're like, if we can just get traffic, drive them to a page on the internet, and then the product underneath supports the problem that they're trying to do. All of that just intuitively made sense to us. It didn't feel like rocket science, I guess.
