Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier on Harvesting Existing Demand for Your Product

Harvesting the existing demand for your product, why and when certain metrics simply don't matter, and how to approach your marketing and advertising campaigns from the bottom up. That and more on this episode of Advertising Influencers.

Advertising Influencers. Conversations with today's top-tier marketers from Silicon Valley and beyond. Powered by Instapage, the most powerful landing page solution.

Hello, hello. Hope you are doing very well. My name is Ander, marketing educator here at Instapage, and welcome to our flagship podcast, Advertising Influencers, where we speak weekly with the best in the business of marketing and of advertising. Lots of great stuff to come this episode, but first, let me quickly fill you in on the last conversation we had. It was with JD Pedersen, the CMO of Trello and one of the executives at Trello when they announced their acquisition, fairly recent acquisition by Atlassian. I haven't seen too many other conversations with JD out there. He was also a VP at a number of other companies, Marketo being one of them, and he's definitely someone you're gonna wanna hear from. So when we wrap up this episode, feel free to check out that Conversation with JD. Today we're talking to Wade Foster. He's the CEO and co-founder of Zapier, an app that has literally revolutionized thousands of workflows for professionals. As quote, the easiest place to sync data between web apps, it's found a place in so many different kinds of industries. It really is kind of unlimited to the degree that you can use Zapier to get things done. And on a personal level, I'm actually gonna say that as well. Matter of fact, we actually use it here at Instapage. Zapier has a fascinating growth story and Wade has some fascinating insights into what is making marketing work today. So let's go hear about how Zapier became such an essential part of so many marketers' toolkits and go say hello to Wade. I've mentioned this before when I've done these interviews for Advertising Influencers where we talk to a number of marketing thought leaders, CEOs, VCs, a number of other talented individuals from some really successful companies here in the Bay Area and beyond. But it's really cool talking to those architects who have built these platforms that I am a huge fan of personally and I use every day, and we also use at Instapage. And that is exactly who I'm speaking to right now, Wade Foster. It's a pleasure to meet you. Uh, pleasure to be on this call with you, and thank you so much for taking the time to join us.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

So maybe you can just start with what Zapier is, and for anybody who might not be aware of it, and listen closely because this is a tool you're probably gonna wanna use.

Yeah, so it's an automation platform, and it hooks into about 800 different common apps that you might use. So Instapage is one of those. You know, a thing that you might do with Zapier and Instapage is set up a zap that takes anyone that fills out your form and maybe you would send it into Salesforce or Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor or Airtable or a spreadsheet or anything like that. So it's easy to push data from one app to another. You can build not just like point-to-point, but you can do full-blown workflows as well. So you can do more complex things like someone fills out Instapage, run it through FullContact or Clearbit and like enhance the data and then send it to Salesforce if they match certain credentials. So you can also make 'em more sophisticated as well. So kind of spans from basic integration to full-blown workflows.

And it's almost like in some ways, let me know if you disagree with this, but I almost see it as a more powerful If This Then That for business.

Yeah, it's definitely similar philosophy. We definitely target the business use case, really trying to automate a lot of this just back office chores that, you know, happen in pretty much every business.

Yeah, absolutely. And you guys have been around for a few years now, 2012, 2013?

Yeah, 2011 was our start date. Late 2011, yep. Mm-hmm.

And you've grown to millions of users at this point. In fact, I can pretty confidently say that in my own marketing network, I can't think of any individuals who have not or do not use Zapier right now or at some point. So you guys have grown substantially.

Yeah, it's been a, it's been a fun couple years, you know, just trying to add new apps to Zapier and, you know, reach out to new audiences and get the tool in people's hands, make them more efficient and effective.

So this is going to be a very broad question, and I'm sure we'll get into more of the specifics, but how did you do that? How did you get this tool into so many people's hands? And maybe a way we can start with that is hearing what perhaps your growth or marketing philosophy was at the beginning. When you started?

Sure, so for us, we knew that people already wanted integrations, right? Integrations was a thing when Zapier started. I remember going to Basecamp.com and you could go to their extras page and see like cool little ways that you could, you know, find little add-ons for Basecamp that made Basecamp extra good, right? Mm-hmm. And so the fact that people were already searching for integrations and, and proactively seeking out solutions for us, you know, for us the marketing piece didn't have to be as novel. It was like, people are already looking for this stuff. It's just not provided very well. Like, there's— it's very difficult for SaaS vendors to build all the integrations that people want. And so it was like, if we can find a novel way to build it, we could probably get the distribution into folks' hands. So I really looked at the initial parts of Zapier as demand harvesting more than demand generation.

Demand harvesting.

Yeah.

That's a great phrase.

So, you know, this demand is already existing. It's already nascent in the market. We just have to tap into it, right? And so early, early, early, early, early days for Zapier, we were doing stuff that total— we totally don't do this anymore, but we would go to forums where I remember going to the Highrise forums and people were asking for like 4 years for a Google Contacts integration. And so I just posted a note in there and said, hey, you know, if you want this, you can use the APIs to build this. Also, we're working on a project over at Zapier that might be able to let you do this yourself. Drop a link in for how to contact me.

Awesome.

You know, we would do that across dozens of services, and each time we would do it, you know, we'd maybe get like 10 people to visit. Not much, but of the 10 people that would come through, about 5 of them would say like, yeah, I want this.

That's a, that's a 50% conversion rate.

Yeah, the conversion rates were huge, right? Which makes sense because these are people who have already taken the initiative to post a thing on a forum that says, "I want this," right? Most people don't have that activation energy to do that unless they're really interested in something.

Yeah, and what you really were able to do in that situation is you were able to provide a very personalized solution for a personalized need that somebody had.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's, it was almost like the equivalent of people walking up to a customer service desk and saying, hey, I'm here at Walmart, where do you have the butter? Right? And you're like, oh, that's on aisle 5, you can just go get it, right?

And so it's like, that's a great example.

Yeah, it was like we were just telling people, hey, we provide this thing to people that were already looking for this thing. And so the marketing behind Zapier was just getting us into the channels that people were already proactively searching for this stuff.

So let's talk a little bit about this demand harvesting because that's a very interesting idea. I've never really heard that before quite in this context. In fact, I don't know if I've heard those two words before specifically together ever, unless I read it in one of your previous interviews or something like that. But what kinds of markets or personas, what do you think is conducive to that demand harvesting? Or is it something that we can perhaps apply to anything we're marketing?

I think most products and services can actually take this approach, right? There's— it's very few products that exist that are completely novel where you have to entirely re-educate a market about a new solution or a new way to provide a new solution to something, right? Most products aren't like that. They're an iterative advancement on something that kind of already exists. You think about search marketing. Search marketing is entirely demand harvesting because you're taking keywords that people are already searching for, and you're trying to get your pages to rank well for certain keywords so that your solution to this problem, uh, is front and center for folks. So I think most marketing actually falls under this, and I think a lot of marketers, when they look at their solutions, they, they get a little too lofty with it, and instead they just need to think of the concrete ways that people are already searching for products and services that they can provide.

So do you think that marketers are, in general, in many ways, making things too complicated, looking for these very kind of niche hacky ways to get somebody into their funnel?

Certainly, I think a lot of startup marketers are for sure. When you're early days, you basically have two problems. Does my product actually do the thing that I say it can do? And two, can I get in front of enough people that we can make a business out of this, right? And so early on, a lot of stuff just doesn't matter in the early days, right? Like A/B testing just doesn't matter because you don't have enough traffic to even run sufficient A/B tests. You know, really sophisticated like email marketing flows in the early day, they just don't matter because there's not that many people going through your email list. So there's just so much of that stuff that just doesn't matter when really, you You know, it's like, hey, I need— in the early days, it's like, I just need to find 10 people, right?

Mm-hmm.

That's what you need. So you got to figure out, how do I do that? It could be as simple as running some Google Ads, or it could be as simple as just emailing a few people that actually doing Google searches for people who might need this stuff and just, you know, kind of cold emailing them and asking like, hey, do you need this stuff? If so, how do you go about searching for solutions to this sort of problem? And then just trying to tap into the existing channels where people are already searching for things.

So from that point of view, with what you're doing right now at Zapier, do you find that most of your acquisition is coming from people who— and if you're— if you don't want to answer this, that's fine by the way as well. But do you find that most of your acquisition is coming from someone who's looking to do something with a specific service or specific app, or are people looking for in some ways a one-stop shop sort of data hub. What do you find is more effective for you guys?

It's definitely more of the former, though that's becoming less and less common just as we grow, right? Like, we're starting to tap into a bigger market that is less aware of this problem, and that's kind of the crossing the chasm spiel, right? Right, right. It's like, all right, now you've got to go find and reach a bigger market. But definitely in the early days, and even still today, there's so many people that we could reach out to that have this problem that just —aren't searching for Zapier in places where Zapier exists. Like, our marketing isn't going in those channels where people are already looking for these solutions.

On that note, let's take actually a step back to even before Zapier even started. What was the inspiration for starting this company?

So Brian and I— Brian's one of my co-founders— we were working on some side projects, and we would occasionally get asked to build integrations like this. Get PayPal sales into QuickBooks for me, or get this list of leads into Salesforce, that sort of stuff. And Brian messaged me on iChat one day and he was like, you know, we should just build a tool where people don't have to hire us. Like, we're expensive. Like, we can build an out-of-the-box solution where non-engineers who don't have any clue what an API is can just sign up and get what they need. And I read that and was like, yeah, that's, that is a great idea. We should work on something like that. So that was basically it. That was the one thing led to another.

And here you are with millions of marketers and other technical professionals, or even people who aren't that technical using Zapier to do do all sorts of amazing things. Now, you guys obviously work with a lot of different SaaS products. Lots of different companies have what I imagine are nice relationships with you guys, as we have here at Instapage. And there was this article that I actually read about what is in your SaaS stack, what Zapier uses. And that's a great article, goes into that quite in depth. But I'm wondering, when you are a marketer, when you are navigating all the different tools that are available, there's— I mean, there's maybe 4,000 different are tech products out there right now. It's something like that. And it's incredible to me how some of them are still able to break through the noise. But when you're choosing your stack, how do you actually evaluate which product is right for your needs? Is there a process or a framework that you recommend?

Oh boy, that's a big tough question, right?

It certainly is. That's why I asked it.

You know, I like to approach this problem from the, from the bottoms up, which is what do I need to solve right now? You know, am I trying to run a campaign where I need to send an email to a person? And if so, like, do I just need to send a one-off triggered email? Like, so do I need like a transactional email provider or am I trying to send bulk emails to a list? Right? So it's trying to assess for me, what are the functions that you actually need? And then from there, that usually, you know, narrows into a handful of, you know, 2, 3, 4 people that you could potentially use. And from there, I still just like self-serve products, stuff that you can just sign up and try. And if you like it, if it does what you need, then I usually just start using that thing. Try and keep it pretty simple, right?

Yeah, that certainly makes a lot of sense. There's been a lot of talk recently. In fact, uh, our CEO Tyson wrote about this in a blog post. There's been a lot of talk recently about, uh, best-in-breed tools versus a one-size-fits-all or a kind of a full-stack solution. You know, maybe something like HubSpot might be that all-inclusive solution, They offer landing pages, they offer email, et cetera. At Instapage, we're focused on making landing pages as powerful and as great as they can possibly be. Now, Zapier is obviously a way to connect all of these best-in-breed solutions together. If that's something that you'd like to do with your approach, how do you think this is going to change moving forward across the marketing landscape as a whole?

Mm-hmm. I definitely think this is more and more common, right? It's, it's easier than ever for a solo dev to build a product, right? They can spin up a thing on Heroku and have a basic app running in a couple days. And so it's so cheap and so effective for them to do that, that you'll— that's why we see, you know, this proliferation of martech tools. And for the end user, the end user often doesn't need this full suite of tools, right? They often need one thing really, really good, right? They need a landing page software so they can get leads. And they just need it to be really simple and really easy and really fast for them to be able to use. And so I think you're going to just see more and more tools that are really good at one thing and just really knock it out of the park with that one thing, and then they connect into other apps that are really good at one thing. I still think there will be products that break out into suites and stuff like that, you know, the HubSpots of the worlds aren't going away. They're fantastic products because if you are needing something more robust invest in something that can span across an organization, those are still valid ways to solve those problems. But these best—

Especially if you're a solopreneur or small business owner as well.

Yeah, yeah, but these best-in-breed tools, like there's just nothing like signing up for a product and just being able like, this is the one thing I needed and now I've got it. Yep, yep.

Now, obviously there are lots of things you can use Zapier for. The list is pretty much endless at this point. You guys have, what is it, over 700 integrations?

Yeah, we're coming up on 800 apps now, yeah. Yeah, that's about what I figured it was.

What are some of the applications that you've seen and applications that you anticipate to see regarding Zapier and advertising? Zapier and top-of-funnel acquisition, maybe something that might be an edge case, something you haven't, uh, you haven't seen quite yet.

Well, I mean, I think one thing that's really exciting is things like Facebook lead ads, right? Like being able to put an ad form right inside your Facebook page. So instead of having to go through a middle step sending them to a separate page. You can convert people right on site. Um, it'd be interesting to see if other advertising platforms take a similar path to that, being able to put forms like right in the page and push folks there. So I think that's pretty interesting. And, you know, being able to pull in extra data that you get from platforms like Facebook and stuff like that is pretty interesting as well, because the targeting and stuff you can do there is pretty, pretty deep. Mm-hmm. And specific. So I think that'll just be— become more and more common no matter wherever you're running ads.

Or even if you take a step back from ads, marketing in general, where do you think that that's going in the future? What do you think that's gonna look like?

I think there's still a lot more we can do with underlying data. The tools are getting better, but they're still not amazing at tying into your existing data sources and making it easy to run campaigns based on stuff you already know about people. Like, how many of us are running campaigns that are less efficient than they could be? It's like, yeah, I have this data, it's in this other silo, I could probably use it to target better or segment better, but I can't really get great access to it. And so we run a campaign that's maybe a little more inefficient than it could be. So I still think there's a lot of kind of innovation that can happen there.

[Speaker:DAVE] And in this innovation that can happen, what's in store for the future of Zapier? What do you see happening with you guys in the future as the landscape changes as you guys continue to grow, what do we have to look forward to?

Well, I think one of the things that's pretty exciting for us as we've been able to grow is that we're able to get, one, more applications on Zapier, which is always a good thing, but we're also able to deepen our relationship with existing partners. So we're able to build out functionality alongside of them and get access to new and different APIs that allow for things that didn't exist before, right? In the early days of Zapier, we were totally baking onto preexisting APIs. Like, this is what's supported, so this is what we're providing. But as we've been able to grow, we've been able to say like, hey, there's actually gaps in the market, there's inefficiencies here where, you know, this service provider, hey, if you add this to your API, you're going to see, I think, a lot of value is going to be created here. So I think that's a pretty exciting thing, is that as we've been able to grow, we've been able to spot areas where we can kind of make things a little easier for folks, whether it's in marketing or even in other industries as well too. Mm-hmm.

What are some of the most surprising industries that you see engaging with Zapier?

Well, I mean, we have people from all walks of life. We've got marketers, e-commerce, lawyers, accountants, you name it. But probably the one that surprised me the most was we actually have an integration with this, this massive multiplayer online role-playing game called EVE Online. Really? Yeah. So this wasn't something we built. We have a developer platform where others can build on it. And, and the guy who built it was, you know, EVE Online, I guess, has this big, like, almost real-life economy as part of it. And the guy was, like, making money, like, real dollars that you can go to the grocery store and spend, right? Wow. Through EVE Online. And so for him, it was super valuable to be able to hook EVE Online up to these other tools to get notifications and alerts and things like that about stuff that was happening in the game. Because it made him a better game player and he was able to generate more real-life dollars based on this stuff. So he built this thing in Zapier and it actually has a decent amount of usage. Like, so I think stuff like that, that was probably the most surprising thing. Like, you know, we're, we're targeting kind of just the tools you would expect, right? Like your email marketing providers, your CRM providers, your project management providers. And here out of left field, we get this massive multiplayer online role-playing game.

I can only imagine some of the awesome and funny things that you see and incredibly powerful things that your customer success teams are seeing as people are using the product.

Yeah, we get crazy stuff all day, every day. I think another one of my favorites is we had a guy build— there's two services. They're called— one is called Kanye Text and the other is called Seinfeld Text. And okay. Based— you can basically pay him like, I don't know, like $1, $5, or $10, and depending on how much you pay him, that's how many texts he'll allow you to send to your friend that are either Kanye quotes or Seinfeld quotes.

Wow. You know, I feel like, I feel like I saw this on Reddit or something.

I mean, yeah, the guy is super smart. I think it was on Reddit and like trending for a while. Anyway, it's entirely powered by Zapier, so So, you know, you pay through Stripe and then you give them a phone number and then Zapier sends all these text messages to your friends. So if you have a buddy that is really into Seinfeld, you can use Seinfeld Text to text them a whole bunch of Seinfeld quotes every day.

In other words, you can use Zapier for pretty much anything that you need to do. Yeah. Regarding, you know, connecting different products together.

That's actually one of our big challenges in our support team, right, is we'll get people writing in, it's like, "Can I do this?" It's like, "Well, yeah, I think you probably can." It's like, "I'm not really sure, but I think with maybe this combo of services, you could probably get pretty close to setting this weird thing up." Awesome.

Well, Wade, we're just about out of time. I imagine you have a busy schedule. I know that we certainly do here at Instapage. I want to ask you, Wade, what is something that all of us listening, all of the marketers out there listening to this podcast, Advertising Influencers. Influencers, what's something that you would like them to check out? What's something that you think that they should pay attention to?

[Speaker:WADE_FOSTER] Well, I definitely think you should pay attention to the Zapier Instapage integration as well. So that for sure, but past that, definitely go to zapier.com/developer, and this shows you how you can add your apps to Zapier. So that's definitely something to check out. And then the other thing to check out is all the other apps that are integrated in Zapier too. So if you go to zapier.com/zapbook, you'll see a list of about 800 apps, and there's probably tools in there that you didn't know you needed. And so you can find stuff that, like, will just help you solve problems in your day-to-day business there.

And that's why Zapier makes you happier. It is. All right, Wade. Well, it has been a pleasure connecting on this call. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this, and we will talk to you soon.

All right. Thanks for having me.

Yeet! Here are some of the takeaways from our conversation with Wade. Harvest the demand for your product. Instead of using the term demand generation, Wade prefers to think of it as demand harvesting. Very frequently, there's already a tremendous amount of demand for a product, and all that's missing is the relevant messaging and value propositions, as well as the product itself. In many cases, the best and most popular products and brands in B2C and B2B industries are already engaged in harvesting this demand. I don't see why you shouldn't join them. Certain things don't matter. It sounds fairly simple to say and maybe a little bit trivial, but in the initial growth stages of a product, there are always going to be certain metrics that are not worth pursuing or paying attention to, possibly because the data doesn't even exist yet. Having one central KPI in the beginning phases of a product's growth can help maintain the focus required to generate the data that is going to allow you to explore other KPIs in the future. Approach campaigns from the bottom up. Although focusing on your long-term growth strategy is important, some marketers will lose sight of what is happening right now. Focusing on your next immediate action that's needed to address an immediate need of your users, and doing that with a long-term goal in mind can dramatically help clarify your marketing priorities. It is awesome that Wade Foster was able to join us for the past 30 minutes or so. Pleasure speaking to him, pleasure hearing from the guy who helped get Zapier off the ground and into the hands of so many marketers like myself and the rest of my team. And as always, and along with every other episode, you'll find a complete transcript in the show notes page at instapage.com/podcast. And while you've got your web browser open, if you are so inclined, you're more than welcome to drop me an email. It is ander@instapage.com. That's A-N-D-E-R @instapage.com. And seriously, I would absolutely love to hear from anyone who has anything to say about this episode or any of our other guests for that matter. Additionally, if there's anything I or the rest of my team at Instapage can do to help you and your organization or your agency's business goals, especially with your marketing, I'd be thrilled to see what we might be able to do for you. For our next episode, we're speaking with Émile Lomprecht at an e-commerce supplements company called Athletic Greens. And this is also the guy who is basically the architect of the entrepreneurship program at Google, in addition to a million other things. Very, very accomplished. He's got a fascinating story, incredible insight into how marketing and advertising is changing, and I truly hope to see you here for that next episode. All right, my fellow marketers, I am out for now. My name is Ander, and this is Advertising Influencers powered by Instapage. Cheers to your future success and cheers to better marketing. I will talk to you soon.

Advertising Influencers. Conversations with today's top-tier marketers from Silicon Valley and beyond. Powered by Instapage, the most powerful landing page solution.