In this Inbound Marketing France interview, Zapier co‑founder and CEO Wade Foster explains how Zapier was born from freelance integration requests and a startup‑weekend prototype, and why connecting disparate SaaS tools has become essential for productivity, error reduction, and new capabilities. He outlines practical starter recommendations for marketers—automating lead capture into CRMs or email platforms—and shares his view that the number of niche SaaS products will continue to explode, making Zapier’s integration layer increasingly vital. Product manager Martin Briantet of Digitalio illustrates two concrete Zapier use cases: (1) linking Outlook appointments to Digitalio to automatically send reminder texts for service visits, and (2) automating a knowledge‑base workflow where Google Sheet‑logged questions trigger email alerts to a customer‑success manager, enabling rapid responses and a shared knowledge repository. Both speakers highlight the gains of connectivity, flexibility, and improved customer experience, and they advise newcomers to start with simple, low‑value‑add tasks, map them on paper, and use Zapier’s ease of use to boost efficiency and even language skills.
Chapters
Hi everyone! Today I'm very happy to have Wade Foster and Martin Briantet with me at Inbound Marketing France. CEO and co-founder of Zapier, thank you Wade for coming to Rennes to talk to us about Zapier and the connectivity of the tools we use every day. We also get the chance to speak with Martin who is a Zapier user and who's gonna give us a few examples of how he uses it. So hello to the two of you.
Hi, thanks for having us.
Founded in 2011, Zapier is a connectivity tool that connects over 1,300 apps we use every day. Um, it helps us automate tedious, repetitive parts of our job so we can be more productive at work. So Wade, how did you come about creating this company?
Yeah, so in 2011, my— one of my co-founders and I, Brian, we were doing a fair amount of freelancing, and our freelance clients were asking us to build these one-off integrations. So I remember we built a WordPress forms plugin that you could put on a WordPress site and collect, uh, lead data and send it into Salesforce. Uh, we built another app that, uh, allowed you to save your, um, PayPal sales into QuickBooks. And Brian sort of put two and two together and messaged me on iChat, uh, at work, and he was like, you know what, I think we could build a thing that allowed regular people to set this up where they didn't have to go hire us as clients. Instead, they could just use the software. And also, at the time, I was trying to— I was doing a lot of marketing automation in my day job, so I was a big Marketo user, and I was struggling to use the Marketo API because I'm not a very good engineer. And so when he pitched that idea to me, I said, oh my goodness, if I had this, I would use this like right away, like right now I would be using this thing. And so we teamed up with Mike to build the original prototype over a startup weekend, which is kind of a hackathon-style thing. And so that's, that's kind of where the idea came from.
That's good. And why do you think today it's important for companies to connect their tools together?
Well, I think, you know, the thing we noticed even in 2011 was that more and more companies, regardless of their industry, are using many different tools to get their jobs done. They're using G Suite, they're using a project management software, they're using a CRM software, they're using payment processing, they've got an email marketing provider. They have a software provider for almost every job that they do inside of the company. But none of those tools share data. They never talk to each other. And so in order to get the most out of the tools, you have to find ways for them to rely on each other. And because none of them integrated really well, they needed something like Zapier to exist. And so, you know, that's why we started the company in 2011. You fast forward, you know, 8 years now, 9 years now, and, uh, it turns out there's way more software than even we thought was possible to exist. We're at, you know, over 1,300 different apps. Uh, which— and, and it's not stopping and slowing down. And so I think the explosion of the number of tools people use at work has just gotten even bigger since 2011.
So there's a lot to gain when we connect all our tools together.
Yeah, yeah, it can make you more efficient, reduce errors in the business. You can do things that you never thought you could have done before.
And do you have any best practices on how to start using Zapier, maybe?
Yeah, I think the best places to start are with some of the common things that you have to do on a day-to-day basis. So if you're a marketer, for example, you might be collecting leads from your website somehow. Maybe you're using, uh, like lead forms for like Facebook, or maybe you have Google Ads that you have lead forms, or maybe you've got forms set up through Wufoo or Typeform or whatever. You're collecting leads somehow and you need to get those leads into the tools you use, which is likely your CRM or likely your email marketing provider. So a simple Zap to set up to say, hey, let's just take these leads I've got and forward them into the CRM or the email marketing provider. That's probably the most basic place that marketers should start with. And then a lot of times they'll evolve into do more sophisticated things. Maybe they'll insert something like Clearbit to do some lead scoring. Maybe they'll integrate it into, uh, like their project management software to say, hey, we're gonna create new projects for all of our new clients so that we can, you know, better service those clients. Um, so it can start to expand from there, but oftentimes I think, you know, thinking of your lead funnel is often the best way for a marketer to get started.
I can see that. So to you, uh, what does the future look like? Like how it's gonna look like maybe in 5 years for us to connect our tools?
Yeah, I think the— what we're noticing is that the number of software tools that are being created is growing exponentially. So I think you'll start to see even more and more tools exist.
The—
now, not all of these tools are going to come and be like named household brands. They're not going to be made super huge, but they will be very successful standalone software businesses. They might make between $1 million to $10 million in revenue every year. Um, they'll have, you know, a couple thousand clients that are very happy and satisfied, and there's going to be a ton of those. And for the businesses that they serve, they won't be able to live without that vendor. However, those tools need to hook into everything else somehow. And so I think that's where Zapier is going to continue to play an even more important role, is connecting all these different tools as the ecosystem continues to expand and expand and expand over the next, you know, 5-10 years.
That's great. Thank you so much for answering my questions. Yeah. So Martin, you're a product manager at Digitalio. Yeah. And you've been using Zapier for a while now. Can you tell us more about your job?
Yeah, so I've been product manager at Digitalio for 2 years and a half now, in charge of the product strategy definition. And our product is a distributed marketing solution that helps brands and retail chains activate their local communication. So basically, we help headquarters to plan and share campaigns to their local stores. And by campaigns, I mean email campaigns, text message campaigns, voicemail campaigns as well. And behind this product, we have a strong conviction, which is that an effective marketing campaign should be cohesive with the brand image. So that means fitted to the name of the local store as well as customized to the final customer.
So in your job, why did you start using Zapier?
We started using Zapier for two main reasons. The first one, because we wanted to improve the connectivity of our platform for our customer to automate their marketing more easily with Digitaio. And the second reason came a bit later, but we also found out that we could use Zapier to help us to collaborate better with our customers.
So can you give us examples for the two uses you have for the tool?
Yeah, for sure. The first example, we use Zapier to connect Outlook and Digitalio. The client is a gardener, so he needs to remind people before he comes to the house. And thanks to Dapio, we are able, the gardener is able, for each appointment that he schedules in his Outlook, a text message is then automatically scheduled to be sent in Digitalio so that the final customer is reminded before, 1 hour before the intervention. So for the gardener, he does not have to do it manually anymore, and it's also a way better experience for the final customer.
And what is the use you have to better your customer experience?
Yeah, you mean to improve the collaboration that we have with our customer? Yes. Yeah, the second use case is a retail chain that has the request to create a knowledge base on the usage of our platform among a specific group of users because their users are marketing managers that use our platform across, across the country, not all at the same location. And their need is both to create a knowledge base on how to, to use our platform as well as to contact us more easily without sending an email or asking a question. And thanks to Zapier, We are able to send an email notification each time a question is asked in the Google Sheets, and this notification is received by one customer success manager in Digidalio, and the customer success replies within 1 hour. And benefit is that it creates a knowledge base accessible to all marketing managers. So yeah, it's very efficient. And it enabled us to create a knowledge base that we can share to a specific group of users.
And so all in all, what have you gained since you started using Zapier?
I would say a lot of connectivity. Our customers are now able to integrate Digidalio with their daily application without having to develop or having developing skills. So that's very useful. And the second point is that it also shows our clients that we have the flexibility to tailor simple solutions to their specific requests. And showing this flexibility is very important to us and contributes for sure to raise their satisfaction at the end.
I asked the same question to Wade Foster, but do you have any best practices you'd like to share with us?
I would say to start simple, to look for tasks that have no value added to be done by a person, and then to write the scenario of your task on a paper before getting started in Zapier. But then it's very easy to do it in Zapier. It's a very easy-to-use tool, and for French people, it's also a good way to improve your English.
Is there any feedback you've received from either coworkers or clients since you started using it?
Sure, we've got a lot of good feedback because it works well. And as I told you, it helps them to save time and deliver a way better experience to the final customer.
Alright, thank you. Is there anything you'd like to add, Wade Foster?
Thanks for using Zapier, Morgan. This is awesome. I love hearing all these use cases.
That's great.
Yeah.
Okay, well then, thank you to the two of you for answering our questions, and I hope you enjoy your day here at Inbound Marketing France.
