Wade Foster of Zapier on InspiredInsider with Dr. Jeremy Weisz

What I got, you can't buy. It resides between my eyes. Walked through the fire, came out better on the other side. See life's like a beach if you find the sand. Right now, I'm feeling like 100 grand.

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Wise.

Dr. Jeremy Wise here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders like the founders of P90X, a top Kari, many more, how they overcome big challenges in life and business. Today our sponsor is Rise25.com where entrepreneurs of 6, 7, 8-figure businesses come together live and in person every few months to solve their biggest business challenges and leave with lifelong friendships. Check out Rise25.com. It's run by myself and co-founder John Corcoran. It's application only. Today we have Wade— I'm really excited. It's been a long time since we've chatted. We have Wade Foster, co-founder of Zapier. And Zapier gives you internet automation superpowers. And it does this by making it easy to get your web apps to talk to each other. And I'll give you an example. So I use Zapier in two ways. One, someone fills out our Typeform application in Rise 25 and it automatically imports that into Infusionsoft so we can make sure to stay in touch with people. Also, for Inspired Insider, for this, I use it, when blog post gets published, it automatically posts the link on Twitter and Facebook. So my tagline, Wade, for Zapier is, it's like having a virtual staff member focused on automation for a fraction of the price. So that's my personal tagline. And Zapier went from zero to over 1.4 million users and grew to 50 staff in 5 years. Wade, thank you for joining me.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here, Jeremy. Thanks for a wonderful intro.

Yeah, that's my favorite tagline. Feel free to steal it.

Yeah, that's great. I love it.

You know, you've been interviewed a lot. You've talked a lot. Your blog is awesome. You know, I suggest anyone go on and check out the blog on Zapier. But I want to start off with the mindset growing up in Missouri and how the saxophone influenced that ultimately.

Yeah. Yeah, uh, take me back to Missouri. Yeah, so I grew up in a, in a conservative, you know, town in Missouri, Jeff City. It's the capital of Missouri. It's, you know, um, everyone there, like, the, the, the majority employer there is, um, state government, right? Um, so I didn't know that.

Okay.

Yeah, so that, you know, that's the capital of the, the state. And so there's not, you know, people who work for the state government tend to think about, you know, employment as you know, what's gonna get you a good salary with good benefits and gonna be able to take care of the family. You know, that's the mindset of most of the folks there, which is a good path for a lot of people. But there's not a lot of entrepreneurship. That's not really a thing that happens much in that city. That's a different mindset that's not very well represented there.

Yeah.

And so growing up, I didn't really have much of that exposure. I kind of just did Went to school, got good grades, did what I was told. It was like, here, this is the path that's going to get you a good job and benefits and the things that you need, right?

What did your parents do when you were growing up?

So my mom is a pharmacist and my dad worked for the state for a long time. And then he actually did try his own thing. He did try to have his own business, but that was later on. And so growing up though, he worked for the state was what I remembered.

Yeah.

And my first real exposure to anything that was kind of different than that was with the saxophone. So I started playing in 5th grade. I really took to it. I liked doing it a lot. It was a lot of fun. I started playing jazz music, which I really enjoyed that because it's more creative. You get to solo and improvise and things like that, which is a lot of fun. And my instructor at the time, um, realized that, you know, I, I was enjoying this and I was doing well at this, and I was— I think I was putting more effort into a lot of this than a lot of his students. And so they had a, um, a saxophone quartet where they had a membership slot opened up, and he started inviting me to sub for that group in like you know, occasionally do a gig or two, I think kind of trying it out to see if I could like handle playing with them, right? Um, and so I did a couple rehearsals and I was like, for me, I was in, I think it was 9th grade at this time, so for me this was super cool because I was playing with like what I thought were basically professional musicians. That's what I—

if you're getting paid, you're professional, right?

Yeah, yeah, but like, okay, that was, that's around the corner here. Um, and so I, I guess I passed the whatever test they had, right? It was like, they were willing to let me play with them. And that's when I got invited to my first gig officially. And they had this regular gig where they played at the governor's mansion a couple times a month generally. And we would go play for a few hours. I'd get $50 and I'd get a meal out of the thing. And the food there was— Awesome. It was fantastic food. And that was kind of eye-opening because here was like me doing a thing that I really, really loved. I was only basically working for about 2 hours is what I saw it. So 9th grade, that to me, I'm like, you're doing the math in my head. It's like, oh, that's $25 an hour. Like, that's a good rate, right?

Right, right.

For, for a 9th grader. And I'm getting a great meal out of this. This food is amazing. I hadn't quite put it two and two together though until the next summer when I worked as a lifeguard, because that was like the— that was the summer job that most kids got. Which there I got paid like $6.50 an hour, so I'd work all day. It's crazy hot. You end up having to clean the bathrooms, which is— they're disgusting by the end of the day. And I would make like $48 or something like that for the whole day. And I'm like, this is crazy hard. This is not fun at all. Yeah, it's way cooler to play the saxophone for a couple hours and way more fun, get the same amount of money, and you have all this other time to do all this other stuff. And so that's kind of when it dawned on me, like, you can get paid for the value that you create. It doesn't have to be about like the hours that you sit in a chair. It's like if you create enough value and someone's willing to pay you for that value, yeah, it doesn't matter if you work 1 hour or 8 hours or 40 hours or 80 hours or whatever it is. Yeah, it's the value is in the eye of the beholder. So if you can do something that's worth that, you should charge a premium for it.

I love that you get paid for the value you create.

Yeah, exactly. And so saxophone was the thing that like I ended up Like, that was what— through high school and college, that's, you know, gas money, food money, rent money. Like, I used that to, like, you know, I ended up working a lot less than other folks but still making, you know, similar amounts of money that other folks were making in their side jobs. But I was working half the time because the kids were willing to pay just a little bit more in general.

Yeah, well, that's amazing. Yeah, and we'll get into Zapier, but What are the things that you try from a startup or entrepreneurship before Zapier that maybe didn't work or maybe had a moderate success?

Yeah, so I, it still took me a while before I like, you know, even between that experience playing the saxophone and it dawned on me that entrepreneurship was really a better route to it. I'd had a couple jobs where a lot of times I was just optimizing for my rate. It's like, where can I get like a high, you know, hourly rate rate and like low effort spent. So like I remember in college having a TA job where I ended up with a professor who I ended— you're supposed to work 10 hours a week because that's how much they pay you for, but he told me it's like, don't worry, just— I only need you to do this one task, so just do that task. The other thing, you can just go sit in the TA's office, and if people show up, you can help them, but if they don't, just do whatever. And no one ever showed up to the TA office hours until the, like, before finals.

Right, right.

So I got paid to sit there and work on what I just worked on my homework basically. It's like studied and got stuff I needed to get done. So that's kind of the jobs I was like, I was like, where can I double it up a little bit? It's like get paid for two things at once.

Right, right.

That's kind of a clever thing that, you know.

You always had that efficient mindset.

Yeah, right.

Which is sort of like what Zapier does. Right?

Exactly.

Because you at the time, were you trying to automate tasks in your engineering job? Is that how it came about?

Yeah, more or less. I was an industrial engineering major, which is all about efficiency. The more common application of that degree is in a manufacturing facility where it's trying to increase throughput, decrease costs, and that sort of thing. At the end of the day, maximize profits from that. But it's mostly about cost savings generally. And so that, that's like been a mindset that I've always had. Like I'm always just like, how can I do this the quickest, easiest way possible? And then get the most amount of money from it. Or at least a good amount, right? Anyway, so entrepreneurship didn't really hit me until later when 2008 market tanks. I'm at the end, near the end of college then, and I start looking for like actual jobs. Not good time to come for— yeah, tough to come by. But then I found— so I started getting a little more creative in my search for like where I should go look for a job. And I found this small software company that was like doing kind of something a little different. And I was like, that's kind of cool. That's like not what I was thinking. But Maybe I can go work for them. And so I talked my way into a marketing role there thinking like, you know, online marketing has like a lot of this mathematical bent to it. Like you're doing conversion rate optimization and click-through ads and things like that where it's like, alright, this seems like I can get my brain around this type of work. I'd never done it before, but like I knew enough and I knew how to learn that I was like, I figured I could talk my way through it. So I go take that job and it ends up being like It's like there's 5 people, 6 people working there. This is a startup effectively. I didn't know it at the time, but that's what it was.

Was it based in Missouri or where were you?

It was in Columbia, Missouri. Yeah. And they're trying to sell this, bring this— they're doing product development, trying to sell this product, bring it to the market, all that sort of things. And, you know, I started learning all that stuff and I was like, why? Like we were having a tough time selling it.

And I was like, what kind of product was it?

Um, it was this like, uh, like natural language processing type app that could detect like sentiment and, you know, sentiment analysis in like text.

This sounds cutting edge for like 2008.

This is like, it was pretty cool stuff. Um, they were using it to try it, they were using it to sell into the university on campus to sell like an essay grading style software where you can take templated essays like, you know, prompts and try and like automatically detect themes and facts and stuff like that.

Sounds complicated, yeah.

Yeah, it was pretty complicated. And I— that was one of the things I learned towards the end is like this product is too complicated. It's like too inefficient. Efficient to deliver this at a price point that anyone's willing to pay. And it was too hard to set up was what my initial, my eventual conclusion came to. But that was after reading things like Steve Blank's Four Steps to the Epiphany. Eric Ries' Lean Startup came out around that time. And learning a lot more about like what it takes to grow a business. And that's when I was like, alright, I'm hooked. I want to do this stuff. So that's when I started teaming up with Brian, who is one of my co-founders at Zapier, we started playing. Again, I played in his— we had a jazz quartet where I played saxophone.

It all goes back to the saxophone.

Yeah, it really does, right? So I played saxophone.

So he was a musician too.

He was a bass and guitar player. I reached out to him because he was doing a lot of freelancing and I wanted to learn how to code. So he was playing— he was doing a lot of Python Django development at the time. So I reached out to him because I was like, can you help me with some apps? And of course the thing he's interested in with me is come play saxophone in my quartet. So like that was the trade, right? The sax is what kind of got me in with them a little bit.

Nice.

Um, so yeah, so that's— it really does come back to the saxophone. Um, um, I want to talk about some of the sacrifices.

You know, like when I make the intro, it seems like a breakout success, right? And you and I both know it took a lot of grinding Oh yeah. To get there.

Yeah.

Talk about some of the sacrifices early on and even up to today. Like when you first started, what are some of the sacrifices?

Well, the biggest sacrifice out the gate was just like every ounce of free time and hobby that I had.

What did it look like at that time? What was your schedule looking like with Zapier?

When we started Zapier, it's in Missouri. You don't raise outside funding. There's no such thing, so you have to build a business that can just run itself. So I kept my day job at the time. Yeah. So did Ryan, so did Mike. And we worked nights and weekends to get this done. So we, you know, I'd wake up, go to work at 9 AM, I'd work till like 5 or 6 or whatever, go grab some Chinese food, then go start working on Zapier. So we would work till, you know, 1 AM was like a, like an early stop for us. Sometimes it would be like 3 AM, 4 AM.

Wow.

Go to sleep.

And then you're waking up when?

Yeah, you're waking up at like— I'd wake up at, you know, 8:45 and then like go to work basically. It like, try to be at work at 9 o'clock.

Yeah, 8:45, that's cutting it close.

It was.

You sound like me.

I hate commutes, so I was like super close to the office. I could get there in like 3 minutes. Um, so I would just like quick shower, throw on some clothes, and they had food at the office so I could grab breakfast and stuff at the office. Yeah, so—

How long did it take for you guys to be working nights and weekends to kind of get the first version?

Yeah, so I got— the first version launched publicly in May of 2012. We started in October 2011, so that's about 7 months. Almost a year.

Yeah, 7, yeah.

I had been working nights and weekends like that for about 3 months before I went full-time on Zapier. I still work nights and weekends, but I was putting my days into it as well, which that, that released a little bit of pressure because after 3 months you went— I went 3 months full.

I didn't realize that.

Yeah, um, I talked it over with my wife. She was a teacher and we were living in a cheap, cheap apartment in Columbia, Missouri. I think rent was like $525 a month.

I lived in Missouri. I lived in Ballwin. My rent was like $120 a month. Yeah, I had 3 roommates.

Yeah, so way cheaper. Like, I'd actually in college lived in a place where I was $205 a month. So you, you know, you know what the rents are like. Yeah, so she had a teacher's salary, so it's like we can we can make ends meet on just her salary. And Zapier had made enough progress that I was willing to take a bet on it and go full-time.

What were you seeing with the progress that you were willing to take that bet?

So we were able to get like a couple customers. So in fact, how we met was through Andrew Warner at Mixergy. Well, Andrew was our first customer.

Oh, he was the first customer.

Was the very first customer at Zapier. So that happened in, early December of that year, and we had Olark on the site. And so I kept that on sometimes at work and I would get quite a few chats, like I would sometimes get 3 or 4 or 5 chats during the day about people asking about using Zapier. And I would be, you know, kind of taking care of it in between tasks at work.

Yeah.

And realize like, all right, this is— there's some serious interest in this. Like we can move faster if we wanted to. And so that was kind of in my mind what like pushed me to see if we could make it work.

Where did the name come from? Like, now it seems almost counterintuitive, like, oh, Zapier, Zap, but like, I mean, what was the origin of that?

So, good question. So Zapier, the very first prototype was built at a startup weekend. And so Brian, Mike, and I sat down, and I actually had come up with the name Snapier, S-N-A-P-I-E-R. In about 5 minutes. And the way I did it was I was like, well, we're doing things based on APIs, so let's see if we can fit API into the name somehow. And I was like, well, -ier is a common ending, right? -ier. So now we got API-er. Is there a prefix that I can put on that that is kind of cool and clever? And I was like, well, snap, Snapier, right? You know, you got one piece. There's a downside.

You do everything in a snap. Yeah, that could work. Yeah.

So went and looked up the domain, see if it was available. It was. $8 later or whatever it was, $9 later, we were in business. We had the name Snapier. Then after the weekend, we did some more research and found a similar company who had snap in their name. So we're like, ah, we gotta change it. We didn't wanna deal with all that sort of stuff down the road. And so we did another search on APIER and found Zapier. And so that's what we settled on. I love it.

It works.

Yeah, it's great.

So, you know, Wade, at the time you guys are working nights and weekends, grinding, right? But you have a wife at the time.

I do.

So tell me about that because it's really hard to balance. I mean, I know if I'm working late, like, I get yelled at in a nice way. What's the dynamic there and how do you make her happy along with just having these other two wives, co-founders? That you're basically spending all your time with.

Yeah, I used to joke with Chelsea that it was her fault that I started Zapier and that I ended up working as much as I did because as a teacher she was working just as insane of hours as I was. She kind of has that workaholic mentality too where she would, she'd go to work at like 6 in the morning and then she would be at the office till 10 PM or whatever and get home and just, you know, go to sleep effectively.

Yeah.

Um, and so before we started Zapier, she was, you know, that was her first year teaching, and I would come home and I would just like watch Netflix a bunch. And I was like, well, this is not a productive way to spend my time. Um, and so that's when I was like, I gotta find better hobby to do. And really that's where I started spending way more time like coding, working on side projects, things like that, which is what led to Zapier.

And so it actually wasn't, you know, there was, there was no real friction there.

Like it wasn't right because she was working.

Yeah.

And we were both doing what we wanted to do. And every now and then we would take a Friday night or a Saturday off and we would spend it together. And that worked pretty well for us in that first year. The friction, the tricky part was when later we ended up moving to California and she didn't have a job then and I was still working the crazy amount of hours. And now, like, that's the harder part to deal with is when there's like lopsided schedules.

Yeah, you weren't around and she had some free time.

Exactly.

And that was for Y Combinator, right? Yeah. And the first time around you got rejected.

We did. So we actually applied right out the gate after we started Zapier and got kind of their standard rejection email.

How far into Zapier were you when you applied?

2 weeks.

Oh, 2 weeks. Okay. So it was really early on. I got you.

Yeah, it was like right out the gate. You know, I guess we were a little bummed, but we weren't— it wasn't an unexpected outcome, I guess. It was kind of like a moonshot for us anyway. We're like, well, let's just try it just to see. Yeah. The second time we applied, there was a lot more intention to it. We had made a lot more progress. We had like YC companies using Zapier. So we were like, we can—

That's a big testimonial, yeah.

It's like, exactly. And we knew like that this product was gonna work. Like this company was gonna be successful. We just didn't know like how successful or how quickly we were gonna be able to make it work. And we felt like YC could, yeah, true to its name, it could accelerate us. And so we were a lot more serious with the application the second time around. We also had way more progress too. So like all the stuff in that first application was like, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that, we're gonna do this, you know. The second time around, the application was, we did this, we did that, we did this, here are the results.

Much better, yeah.

Right? Way more convincing when you're trying to vet a person to say like they're worth taking a bet on when you're like, "I achieved this, I achieved that, I achieved this." You know, everyone's gonna bet on the person that already has a couple wins under their belt. And so we had proven like, not a ton, but enough that it was, you know, I think that's why YC was willing to take a bet on us that second time around.

[Speaker] So how long into it did you get accepted and what were the most popular zaps at the time?

We had got accepted, I guess it was about 6 months in. I honestly—

So pretty early on also.

Yeah, I honestly don't remember what the most popular zaps were at the time. Like, I don't even know.

I'm just wondering what were the most popular early integrations that you guys did? Like Andrew, I know you had HiRise, I think, and PayPal, or I don't remember.

PayPal and HiRise. I think he was doing like Woofoo and AWeber as well.

Woofoo, yeah.

Yeah. He was doing. I was getting like text messages for Stripe payments. Like I loved getting those. Hmm. We were also loading our customers into MailChimp. So through Stripe to MailChimp. I think there was quite a few folks doing stuff with, let's see, Gmail was popular. Zendesk was one of those early ones. MailChimp was one of those early ones. And SMS, there was a ton of stuff with SMS. Just getting like text alerts and stuff. Stuff for things was pretty common at the time.

So the sacrifices, grinding, and then picking up and basically moving you and your wife to California was a big one. What did you learn in that, the Y Combinator experience? Talk about some of the mentors you had and what advice you got during that time.

Yeah, you know, YC is interesting. The mentorship is good. It's great. But honestly, like, if you go watch, you know, YC has their startup school. Now. And if you go watch, like, those videos, you're getting, like, 99% of the advice that they give you. Like, being physically there, it's all there. You just gotta— you just gotta do it, right? So they publicly put all this stuff out there. At the time, it was PG's essays, right? Like, he has those essays. It's all there. Like, you know, they're not hiding this stuff. Um, so The thing that YC really gave us, and I think I didn't realize this maybe until hindsight, was we were grinding nights and weekends, day jobs still happening, right? They took us away from that environment where Zapier was this secondary goal. They turned it into the primary goal.

It wasn't the priority completely.

Yeah, we got 3 months They put a deadline where you got like this artificial deadline, Demo Day, where you've got to do something impressive by Demo Day. So you got to race against the clock, right?

Yeah.

We moved all the way from Missouri to California, so away from friends, family, no other distractions now for us. And it's 3 of us holed up in an apartment. The only thing we have to do is Zapier now. So it became like all-encompassing. And that sort of— that is what makes the acceleration part happen. That's all there is to work on. And they really instill that into you. PG, the very first day, he gets up and says, this summer you should do 3 things. You should write code, you should talk to users, and you should exercise. Those are the 3 things you need to do. We exercised the first day, and then the rest of the summer we wrote code and talked to users.

For 10 minutes we exercised.

That was basically it.

You know, because I figure obviously people can go online and watch the stuff, but you're probably having one-to-one conversations with some of the mentors.

You do have a little bit of that, and you know, it's a lot of it's just repeating what's in that Startup School. It is. And what's that, the essays, you know, I remember one of the first one was demo, like office hours, was, are you guys launched? Like, do you have a product? And like, we're like, well, we have one, we're not quite launched yet. Like, we're not sure if we're ready. And they were like, what, well, what, you know, why aren't you launched? And it's like, well, we're just not sure. Like, we, you know, like we were doing the classic—

It was a circular conversation.

Yeah, it's like we were doing the classic thing. Like, it's not perfect yet. Like, there's a few things we kind of want better. And they were just like, stop it, you're gonna launch next week. Right, so they're like, they got out like a Google Doc and they were like writing up a TechCrunch press release for us basically on the spot. So we're like, oh, I guess we should just do this right now. You know, they took a little of the fear out of us when it came to just doing things before you're ready.

Yeah, they held your feet to the fire and held you accountable to make sure you did it.

Exactly. And, and that's where the accelerator part comes from. It's like they knew we were ready for this stuff. Like we were just kind of I don't know if it was fear or what it was, perfectionism, whatever you want to call it. There's a few things that we just kind of went a little slower than we needed to. They just had known based on historical insight that we just needed to go. So they kind of just pushed us to move a little faster than we were probably accustomed to.

What was the progress from the beginning of starting to the end?

Sure, we— so when we started, Zapier wasn't launched. It was— there was a private beta, and we went from that to being launched to having about 20 integrations, 20 apps on Zapier, to having about 70 on Zapier.

Wow, that's crazy.

We had no— the developer platform didn't exist at all. So the developer platform is now how apps get added to Zapier. Our partners add apps to Zapier based on the developer platform. We don't typically add them. That didn't exist at the beginning of the summer. By the end of the summer it existed. We had 13 people build on the developer platform.

So you were, before that, you were doing all of them. Yeah, we were. Now you were giving people the opportunity to do it so it takes a huge weight off of you.

Exactly, yeah.

That's huge.

Yeah, I mean we built something valuable enough too that people were willing to invest in our platform too and build their apps on it as well.

Was that a hard thing to do, to convince that, like, early on to get those first few people? Or do you remember who those first few companies were that built on it?

I remember a handful of them. HubSpot did, ActiveCampaign did, Podio did. Those were three that I can remember. There's another, you know, 10 or so that did it as well. The way we got them to do it was they had come to us and said, we want to be on Zapier. Yeah, like, it's like a product manager, you know, someone who was in some position of authority was like, we want to be on Zapier, can you build on Zapier? And we said, yes, we'd love to have you, but do you think you could help us out with it? We're working on this developer platform, we're building it out, and we'll, we'll sit side by side with you and help you build the integration if you invest in our developer platform. So we kind of were like, you're going to get this special treatment because you're going to be one of the first people using this tool. And so we kind of did it side by side with those first 13. And that momentum was enough that I guess, you know, like since then basically everyone is, you know, has built on the developer platform.

So right now, Wade Foster, what percentage of do you build versus the developer platform on a monthly basis?

Like we build like one or less, you know, really in the process. 25 every month.

So it's, it's almost 100%.

Yeah, uh, the only time that, you know, we build one is like when we hire someone new. Uh, oftentimes we'll ask them to build one as an experience to understand the process and understand what it's like. Yeah, exactly.

So how was Demo Day?

Uh, a blur. Um, yeah. It was crazy. I like, you know, there's hundreds of—

Are 3 of you up there on stage?

Just me.

Just you?

Just me on the stage. You get 2 minutes to pitch. You know, we pitch this thing. Everyone kind of sounds a little bit the same because the advice is all, you know, they polish up everybody's pitches so they all sound great. It's like, you know, TAM is huge, growth is great, you know, we're changing the world, you know. They all sound similar, but they all sound great, right? Yeah. And I was, you know, firmly in the middle of the pack when it comes to like pitchers at— from, you know, other YC companies. There's people in our batch way better presenters, way more personable and entertaining up on stage. They could captivate an audience way better than I could. So we were— I felt like we were fairly middle of the pack presentation. Even though now we're probably one of, you know, there's a handful of companies from our batch that are maybe better than us. Instacart maybe being the only one that's like a clear runaway.

Who are the other companies in your group that you guys spend time with? 'Cause that's valuable too, who the peers are around you at the time.

Yeah, so like Instacart was in our batch, Coinbase was in our batch, Danielle Morrow was in the batch with Referly, which is now Mattermark. 9GAG, Clever, Boosted Board, like there's a handful of other stuff that you may or may not have heard of, but are doing interesting stuff in their kind of specific industry or niche. But yeah, you get to spend time with some pretty smart folks for sure.

So what was good about your pitch that you liked? Do you remember? You have 2 minutes and you're raising money. I mean, this is a big moment, right? You're raising money for your company.

The best thing we had was this graphic that showed, that really viscerally showed the problem. So we put up a bunch of logos of apps that we integrate with.

Yeah.

And it started with, you know, like 2 apps, and it showed like, here's what it's like to build an integration between just 2. Then we added like 5, and then it showed like all the lines and connectors between 5. Then we put like 10 up there, and it showed all the lines and connectors between all of those. And so like the The graph is like, wow, to build all the integrations point to point like this between all these different apps is insane. Like, once we got to like, I think we had maybe fit 20 on the slide. Like, it's basically just all dark. You can't see any white space between any of the lines. So visually, like, when you see that, you're like, wow, that is a hairy mess. And then the next slide was like, here's Zapier as the solution, and it's our logo right in the middle. With all the lines just drawing through us. And it's like, wow, that is a way smarter way to do things. Right. Is to have kind of a middle thing like that. So that was probably the most compelling piece of our pitch was just like visually showing people. Visually seeing like how much Zapier simplified the space in this problem just by existing.

So what was the response you got from demoing this?

So funny enough, We raised money after Demo Day. We spent about 2.5 weeks doing it. Only one person that we met at Demo Day invested in our seed round. The rest of the people that invested in our seed round were people who had already emailed us prior to Demo Day and expressed interest in us. And we told them, you know, we're not raising money now, but we'll be in touch later. And so we just circled back to them after Demo Day and said, "Hey, we're looking into it now. Are you interested?" And enough of those were that we were able to put together a million and change in about 2 and a half weeks.

That's amazing. What were you looking for at the time?

In terms of money?

Yeah. Was there an amount or—?

We were like, $500,000 would be fine, $750,000 would be fine. We were used to not like operating without bootstrapping. Yeah, yeah, used to it. So in our minds it was like a little bit of money would have been nice because then we could have paid ourselves like a small salary, um, maybe hire 1 or 2 people.

Um, that would have been good. So yeah, what would you, um, initially when you're like, okay, we want to get this funding, was it for hiring people? What did you want to use it for?

It literally was put a little money in the bank so we could pay ourselves some salaries, so we could exist, not worry about working 20 hours a day, paying yourself $5 an hour is still—

yeah, right?

Like, we wanted to, to, to be able to support ourselves. So, you know, in that regard, you know, if we would have raised, um, you know, living in the Bay Area, if we'd have raised like $250,000, $250,000, that could have paid for the 3 of us to like live in the Bay Area for a year and a half and make no money. Yeah. So like, that was like the baseline of like, okay, that's probably a good start. $500,000 lets us hire probably 1 or 2 people.

Um, so what did you do after aiming for—

and then we had the opportunity to raise more, like, and we kind of considered not doing it, but then when we talked to YC, they were like, go run the dilution numbers, just look at the valuation and look at the dilution and see how much you would you know, get diluted. And we did, and it wasn't very much. And so we were like, well, I guess having the safety net isn't the worst thing in the world, right? Yeah. So that's why we took a little bit more. So who do you hire first? Um, we— so we started— the thing that I was doing at the time was spending about— I'd wake up in the morning, and from about 8 or 9 o'clock until about 3 PM, I was answering customer emails. So we're like, we need some help on customer support.

It's a lot of customer emails, yeah. Yeah, we need some help on customer support. You guys pay off, I have to say. You guys have amazing support. Thank you. I mean, right now. And I want to get to pricing because we pay, we have the work account and I also have the free account. I feel so bad emailing from the free account because I'm like, I'm taking up the resource courses. But even on that, there's amazing support. I'm like, I feel guilty even emailing you guys. But anyways, go on.

Yeah, so we got advice from— in fact, the reason, big reason why we have this great support is from this advice we had from Kevin Hale, who was Wufu founder. He is now partner at YC. At the time he wasn't. But we got to chatting with him about customer support and how to think about it. And, you know, the very first person he recommended was like to find someone who, you know, is— loves just helping people and isn't super like, like, they're cool with that being their thing, right? Like, just there's people out there that just love helping people. And if they're not, if they don't— don't worry if they don't have ambitions to be an engineer or a marketing wizard or anything like that. Like, support is its own entity. Like, it doesn't have to be treated like a call center or something like that. There are people who genuinely just love helping other people, right? Find someone who's like that, and that's who you want to be your support. Yeah. Um, and so, and so that's why I, I thought of my buddy a guy I, I'd lived with in college for a year, um, as someone to bring on to help us with support because he was running this forum, the Chicago Cubs forum. Oh really? Is he from Chicago? Yeah, I think he lived in Chicago for a small period of time. He's from Ohio originally, but, um, he loved the Cubs and so he moderated this forum that had like thousands of Cubs fans, and I was like, well, if you can handle dealing with Cubs fans on an internet forum, you can certainly do support for a software app, right? And so I talked to him about joining and convinced him to join up with us. And so that was our first investment. But I do want to go back to something else, which is the great support that we have at Zapier. Which was another piece of advice we got from Kevin Hale at the time. And the way he talks about this is really interesting. You can have— what he told us, you can have— there's 3 types of companies. There's ones you can have the best product. This is like Apple or Tesla or something like that. It's going to be super high price, but you know you're going to get what you pay for. It's really high quality. This is really tough for startups to do because it takes a while to have the best product. Like, you usually don't have the best product out the gate, right? Um, the second thing was you can have the cheapest product, right? This is like Walmart, Amazon. This is also really tough for startups to do out the gate because you don't have the economies of scale at play, right? So you're not going to compete on those type two dimensions. But the third type he mentioned was you can have just like the best customer service and create like the best emotional connection with your customers and your brand. This is like what Zappos Wade Foster, right? Right. They didn't do anything novel or unique. They just sold shoes, but they did it in a way that was like, the customer service was really great. They had great refund policies, guarantees, that they built a great brand off it. This is something that any startup can do, right? Right. All it requires is just effort. You just need to take the time and just care enough about your customers to do it. And so we really took that to heart when it came to customer service because we were like, well, Let's do that. We may not be the best out the gate. We may not be the cheapest out the gate, but we certainly can make sure that our customers care a lot. Now we baked it into the model now at this point in time, the business model that we know we can give great customer support to free users. We're willing to do it because we know it pays off for us. That investment in our customers gets returned to us in space.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] It's amazing. Yeah, I can firsthand see that. Um, I want to just put a plug, you know, you guys are always constantly hiring. So I want to make sure that we link that up. So if anyone's looking for a job or know someone, um, because you guys, I think when I read, you have people in 19 different countries on your staff or something like that.

I don't know if it's 19. Okay.

That's, I thought I read that. It's more than 10 for sure. Yeah. Um, no, 9. I'm sorry. 9. Yeah. 9. Sorry.

I think it's more than 10 now.

So you could do this from anywhere.

So what link should we link up? Yeah, go to zapier.com/jobs. We've got roles in customer, so if you wanted to help us out with support, if you love customers, we got roles there. We got engineering roles.

How do you decide what to hire and when to hire next? So give me an example of what you're looking for now and how do you know you're ready for that next person?

Yeah, so we do a little bit more forecasting now than we used to, but it still comes down to like, when do we viscerally feel the pain, right? Like, and like, we, we tend to be a little slower in hiring. Some companies are just like, we're gonna hire way ahead of time so that we know we have the staff. We tend to try and hire a little bit, feel the pain a little bit to the back end of that a bit. Yeah. And so like with support, we know like, okay, like it's feeling a little tough, we should probably bring in somebody.

Is there an indicator like for the— because I mean back then you used to do support, right? You'd wake up, 3 PM, so you knew that firsthand. Right now there needs to be some kind of feedback mechanism. Do you tell them, okay, this is— what's the feedback mechanism there for you?

Well, now we have like a lot of— we have got, you know, 3 or 4 years of historical growth that we can look at. So we know like support trails are as closely aligned with our signup rate. So if our signup rate keeps moving like it does, that indicates we're going to need customer service reps to help out with the amount of signups. Yeah.

So it's based on signups. I didn't know if it was like support ticket, like you're seeing X number of support tickets a month. You're like, okay, when we reach this, we need another person to take that on. I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. So it's really tightly coupled with the signup rate. So we have that. And then from like the product and engineering side, it's more like, are there opportunities that we're missing out on? Like, are there things not getting to build because we're only able to build, you know, a certain amount of stuff? It's a tough one though.

So how do you decide what to build? Or, you know, because you— I'm sure you get a million requests.

You do get a million requests. And I think for us What I think I put one in the other day. Yeah. Yep. Yep. You know, I think a lot of it comes down to you have to be a little patient and impatient at the same time. So you got to be patient and know that you can't build everything at once. But you also can't accept that that's good enough. You have to be willing to say like, that has come up enough, that issue has come up enough. Why haven't we solved that yet? And if the answer is like, we have other more pressing things to solve, yeah, well, how can you get more staff on board to make that happen? And so that's kind of how we've always approached like the product engineering side of things. It's like when we can, we try and invest in it to help it grow.

So talk about— because we'll give a specific example, right? Because you're launching a new Chrome—

yeah, we launched a Chrome extension a couple weeks ago now.

So Before you talk about that, what did you pass over to build this? Because obviously you couldn't build everything, so this will kind of elicit the point.

The Chrome extension is actually interesting in that we built this at a retreat. So we do these retreats because we're 100% distributed. So twice a year we do these, and during the retreats we end up working on about a half dozen or so projects. Oftentimes these are more speculative things. The retreats kind of kick off—

What's the retreat? Yeah, tell me about the retreat.

They are these two times— we're 100% distributed, so two times a year we fly everyone in the company out to the same location. We find somewhere in the world that we like to go to and we go there. We spend usually about three days of it as part of— is a hackathon where it's just kind of like— build something.

And there's like, what, how many, like 50+ people there?

Yeah, our last one was in Whistler and we had 43 people. Um, it was in August. And so part of that, one of the projects was this Chrome extension. It was— this was an idea that has been on our backlog for forever. It's like, cool idea, no one's like, you know, knocking down the gates to get this, but we've seen like enough signs that we thought it could be more powerful than like—

Sometimes people don't know what they want. But they don't know, yeah, exactly.

But we— there was enough people that did mention this that we were like, there is value here. We had seen ourselves using this sort of stuff. Like, I don't know about you, but I'm a Chrome extension power user. I have tons. So I was thinking like, well, if we can make a Chrome extension that kind of works with all the apps on Zapier, it's almost like building a universal Chrome extension. For every single app that exists. And so now you've got this kind of like all-in-one Chrome extension. It brings Chrome extensions to things that don't necessarily have Chrome extensions yet. Pretty compelling story, pretty compelling use case.

So yeah, talk about the retreat and what did you do with this Chrome—

So one of the teams went like over the 3 days, built out a version of it. And it started with the simplest thing you can do, which was just Click the Chrome extension and you press a button and it fires a Zap. So maybe it like sends a text message to, you know, your spouse saying like, "I'm leaving work today." So when you're ready to leave work, you just press the button and it fires off that text message, right? It could be as simple as that. It could be more complex, like maybe you push this button and it runs a script that generates a report and then emails that report to a handful of folks. So like on-demand, you know, report generation. It's the easy button.

You're creating the easy buttons. It really is.

It really is the easy button. Button. You know, you just say, you know, generate sales report and it sends the sales report to— that's awesome— on a monthly basis or whatever, right? So that's what it started out as. Then we added— they, they got that released and they had a little extra time and they added a form block too now. So you can actually, you know, put a little information in it and then push the button and send that bit of information along as well.

So it's customized, sort of. Exactly. Customizes things.

Exactly. So now it could be something like make a note to yourself. So you make a little note to yourself and you press the button and it logs it into Evernote. Mm-hmm. Or you write a little bit of information, or you put a— you put an email address in there, it spits it through Clearbit, finds out all the social profiles, then logs it all into a CRM or something like that. So it's like it's got a text field now that you can use with the Chrome extension.

They built this all in how much time?

It was 3 days for the prototype, then post-retreat they spent about a week kind of polishing it up and getting it ship-ready. Okay.

So what's it called? Where can people find it? So you can—

if you go to the Google Chrome Store and you search for Push by Zapier, you'll find it. Push. Yeah. Push by Zapier.

Find it. Is there a place on your site that you profile it or anything, or is it just on the site?

There's a blog post about it, uh, that we launched it, um, maybe a week or two ago. We don't actually have a landing page for it yet. Um, I think if you go to zapier.com/zapbook/push, maybe, right, that exists.

Um, the easiest is to go obviously on the Chrome extension. Yeah, the Chrome extension Push by Zapier. So what will it do, like What's a common use for it that you find?

So, you know, a lot of it is to like do those types of like on-demand reporting is pretty common. You know, click a button, Jenner pulls in the report from last week, emails the report, or dumps a Slack notification for the report. You know, it could be on-demand like text messaging. So like text message, common text message that I need to send a person on a weekly or daily basis. It can be like a quick add to generate tasks is a common way. So like quick add a task to Trello, Asana, Todoist, Wunderlist, that sort of thing. Like quick add them, that sort of stuff. Because it's just right there, like anything that you do but you want to do it quickly, it's often like just a slightly faster way to do it.

Yeah, the possibilities are endless. That's why I love reading through your— the information on Zapier is because I'll get ideas for things I should be automating or doing that, I had no idea that could even integrate, you know. Yeah, yeah. Like, the people are productivity masters, they should, you know, if they haven't read through your site in its entirety, they need to go on there.

Yeah, it's great. It's one of the fun parts about running it too, because I don't know everything that's being done with Zapier. So oftentimes I'll hear from folks doing pretty cool stuff.

I'm like, oh yeah, what's the craziest thing you've heard someone automate through Zapier?

Well, one of my favorite things, so silly. This guy made like several hundred bucks off this thing too, maybe even more. But after we launched multi-step Zaps, he made this kind of joke site. And he made two of them. One was called Seinfeld Text and one is called Kanye Text. And he loaded up a Zap with it, well, it starts with Stripe. So if you pay a certain subscription, it fires, it turns on this Zap. And you put in someone's phone number and it basically becomes like a message of the day sort of service. Mm-hmm. But for— in his case, it's like you do this to your friends and it starts randomly sending you Seinfeld quotes or Kanye quotes. Okay. Like on every day or every week or whatever. And the more you pay, the more you can spam them effectively. So he set up this entire site on a Zap like in a day. Wow. That just over the course of, you know, I think one of them is like you can do it for a month or for 3 months or for 6 months. So for 6 months you can basically like send a spam Kanye quote to a friend and you can pay, you know, I forget what he asked, like $100 to do that or something. And so he made like a little bit of money doing this thing. But that's the kind of cool things where it's like, wow, I would never have thought to build a little app or something like that.

Yeah, I would definitely do like Tommy Boy quotes or something. But, um, yeah, what about business purpose? What's the, the most sophisticated, like smartest integration you've seen? Something like, wow, that I can't believe what we created.

One of the coolest ones is from Eileen, who's our user researcher here at Zapier. She does a really cool, she has a really cool setup for scheduling user researchers or user interviews. Like, cause she, as part of her job, she does a lot of Skype interviews like this where she watches people use the software to try and learn. Yeah, trying to learn like where is it working well, where is it failing, that sort of thing. But she's got a Zap that automates like all the scheduling tasks for this. So she uses this service called Calendly. And so when she sends out an email, she says, hey, if you want to book some time and help us out with this, please use Calendly. And you know, you can say I want to do it at, you know, 10 AM.

Right, yeah, I use Acuity Scheduling, same type of thing. Yeah, same, same.

Right? There's several services like this. So for her, when that Calendly link goes through, when someone schedules it, what it does is it sends them— it triggers the Zap, it sends them a follow-up email saying like, hey, confirmation, you just got scheduled for this, you know, here's a link to add it to your calendar. It sends a, you know, email out that puts it in Google Calendar or Outlook or whatever. It then delays until a day before the scheduled event. So then a day before the event happens, it sends an email saying like, hey, reminder, tomorrow we're scheduled to do this, are you still on for it? And then it delays it one more day. And then an hour before the event happens, it says, hey, you're, you know, ready to do this. And it sends along a GoToWebinar, GoToMeeting link that says you can join the meeting link here, which I forgot, there's an earlier step that actually inputs that into GoToMeeting and sets up that stuff and generates the invite link. And then it sets up the interview. And then post-interview, the afterwards, it sends another follow-up email thanking them and sends like a link to get a t-shirt from us. That's awesome. And it also along the way is dumping notifications into Slack so that the rest of the team has visibility into this saying like, hey, this interview is getting scheduled or it's getting ready to start. If you want to join in and watch along with it, you can come watch along with it. I think it also logs some data into Airtable so that we have kind of an archive of like—

this is amazing. Wow. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's like, it's a pretty sophisticated setup. Um, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, she's like really thought through like all the pieces. And so now all she has to do is show up, get the person to just schedule, and that's it. Yeah, conducts the interview, logs her notes. Um, but then the automation kind of handles all the logistics around it. Um, yeah.

And people typically probably either have to do that manually or they're not doing it manually and things fall through the cracks. And that's, that's the problem. Yep. Yep. So talk about pricing. Yeah. I need to, before we, we end though, I need at some point to hear about what the Chrome extensions you use as a power user. I'm really curious. Um, But pricing. Yeah, I'm really curious. You have a free plan and, uh, the $20— as we're talking now, may change, who knows— the $20 a month plan and on. But I'm curious from the sort of the free plan, the thought process on that. And I'm curious why you, you allow people 5 zaps and not 3 zaps or 2 zaps. I think if, if I were you, I'd be like Nope, sorry, like 3 zaps, I guess, like 3 is enough. Yeah. How did you come to that or even have a free plan?

We didn't have a free plan originally when we launched. We were just paid. Then we realized, you know, a lot of the services we do integrate with have free plans. And so free made it easy. And also the partners that we were integrating with, it made it easier for them to talk about Zapier if we had a free plan. So it was a marketing advantage. Yeah, yeah. Having that free plan made it easier for people to talk about Zapier, share Zapier with other folks, that sort of thing. So that's why we added the free plan.

So on the free plan, how do you decide what to include in the free plan?

Gut feel. Like, we could probably— I know we could do, you know, you mentioned go from 5 to 3 or 2. We could do that, we'd make more money, like almost guaranteed.

I mean, I think I say that because I think there's huge value in, in that alone also, you know.

So yeah, I think we'd make more money guaranteed. I just—

I didn't know if there was a reason for that number, like you saw users, or it just was a gut feel type of thing.

It's a lot of gut feel. We've done some testing on it. It's like a good amount that allows people to try that product and get kind of hooked on it and to do some stuff for— they might have one Zap that's for serious work. They might have one that's for maybe more play types things. They can kind of get a feel for it.

I mean, I say that, Wade, because I like paying for those services because I know you're going to improve the product. I knew when I use a free, I'm like, eventually I'm going to be paying a monthly fee because I want to make sure you're sustainable and you have the support and everything. It comes from a place of, okay, if you had like 3 Zapier, so I can like, once I become more of a power user, like I'm fine paying whatever that is. So that's why I was curious about that too. Yeah.

And I think most people, maybe not all, but a lot of people who are running serious businesses that are making like, you know, once they've reached a threshold where they have like one person on staff, they realize like the amount of money they pay for software is like trivial for what they pay that person in salary. Yeah. I think for the most part, you know, once you get to that serious business sort of stage, like paying for stuff is like pretty common. Yeah. We have a lot of users though that are like freelancers, contractors, and that free plan really helps kind of— it really is marketing is the way I think about it. It's like having a little bit of a generous free plan just gets that word of mouth kind of kickstarted. I don't have a lot more science to go behind that to say like, you know, we should make it 10 zaps, or maybe we should make it 1 zap, or whatever. You know, we've done a little, like I said, we've done a little testing, but it just feels right. Like, it feels like a good spot right now.

Um, so what about— okay, so now you go to the next, next plan, which is the paid. Yep. So how do you decide on that pricing and what's in?

So that one was a little bit more scientific, um, because we have messed around with it. You know, it used to be $15, now it's $20. Um, We just found that, you know, when we moved it to $20, the conversion rates didn't change at all. Yeah. The— so we were dealing with the same number of customers, making a little bit more money, allowed us to invest more in the product.

Makes a big difference, yeah.

We were able to grow a little bit faster to do more things and build better stuff. So if the price didn't care, our users clearly didn't care that it was $20 versus $15. So it was better for us as a business to charge $20. Yeah. Make a little bit more money and then pour that into making Zapier better. Yeah. And so that's really why we moved it up to $20.

Yeah. Is there a plan beyond that?

There's a $50 plan too. There's a $100 plan. You know, we do have some power users. We don't have like a real enterprise sort of thing yet. Yeah. Been talking with some other companies. So we're, I think, finding ways that— What's the $100 plan?

Like, what do people use the $100 plan for?

You can just get like a lot of stuff, basically.

Like, what type of companies— What type of companies use it?

It tends to be folks who are using Zapier for like more infrastructure type stuff. So they're like, you know, auto-generating tons of mass emails to users as they sign up. Or they're like logging things into MySQL databases and things like that. They're doing like or maybe like a marketing org that's got like a pretty heavy lead gen setup where they've got, you know, tons of leads coming through the site. They're funneling those into CRMs and email marketing tools and notifications to drive like a pretty sophisticated sales funnel, um, that sort of thing.

Yeah. You know, Wade Foster, this has been amazing. I have, I have one last set of questions I always ask, um, and then I want you to point people towards wherever we're going to point people towards, if it's zapier.com or go to zapier.com/jobs. But since it's Inspired Insight, I always ask what's been the lowest point and then how you push through, and then what's been the proudest moment. Yeah.

Well, I think the toughest part, and you and I have talked about this before, is in 2012, my father unexpectedly passed away. And that's tough. I've got hindsight now, 3 years, and I've been able to come to terms on what that's like living with not having him around anymore. But at the time, he was the guy that I went to for everything. When I have a tough spot, you pick up the phone and call dad, right? Right. Zapier wasn't clear that it was going to be amazing success. We were still struggling to get things done. Make progress and all that sort of thing. So I— it was like, it was really tough, like, losing him kind of right there at the beginning. Yeah. Um, but, you know, we were able to push through, and, and now I can think back fondly, and I remember a lot of his lessons that he shared and stuff. Like, what, what were some of the things that, you know, I remember most from him is just the way that he treated people. Um, you know, he always would go out of his way to like help somebody out or do something nice for them or try and help support them in whatever they were doing, right? And so he made a lot more friends that way, and he had a lot of people. I remember at like the, you know, the kind of the week after he passed away, like people would just come out of the woodworks telling stories of all the stuff he'd done for folks. I had no idea. Like, I just— amazing— totally clueless to these things that he'd done. Yeah. Um, and so it was like, wow, Like, that's really how you build up, you know, I think he just did it because that's the kind of person he was. But like, you can build up, you know, people that are gonna be there for you when you need it most by just treating them really well. Yeah. So I think that was a big lesson I learned from him for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it's tough to go through at any point in life, especially with all the chaos and everything else. that you are going through?

Yeah, it's not easy for anyone. That's for sure. Whether you're starting a company or not starting a company, it doesn't matter who you are, like losing people close to you sucks.

Do you take time off at that time or how do you deal with it? Because things are such a weight on your shoulders because if you stop working, it doesn't get built, right? It's not like you have a government job where you can leave and maybe, you know, take a few days off and still be getting paid at the time. Things only happen when you are there to make them happen.

I was pretty lucky. I had two good co-founders and we had Micah at the time, so it was a team of four of us. They were able to cover a lot of things. Pick up slack. We weren't operating quite at the scale we are today either, so me being unavailable for like a few weeks was not the end of the world. A lot of it ended up being The nice thing about it was I could work part-time a little bit. So like, that was— You had flexibility. Right? Like I was back in Missouri when that happened and I was able to like do 2 hours this day or 4 hours that day or whatever. So I could keep the ball moving even if it was less than what I was accustomed to.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. It's, that's such a tough thing to go through and I'm sure people people have gone through that, we're listening. What about proudest? Wow.

Proudest moment. There's so many things that are like— that make you proud. I think the thing that's really exciting for us is those— I talked about the retreats that we do. We do those twice a year. Every retreat is really cool because we work remotely. Always visually get to see like all the people that are contributing to this. Like, you don't— you know that it's happening, but you don't see it, right? Yeah. But those retreats, we get to see all, you know, in this last one, 43 people come together all in the same room, you know, from various different walks of life, from all over the world, uh, and you're like, these 43 people, like, we've been able to build something pretty special at Zapier. And you're also just I'm just incredibly thankful that they spend their days helping me out on the thing that I, you know, I love. So it's just like you feel proud and thankful and humble and all those things. What's some—

I'm sure you do obviously the hackathon, but you do probably team break exercises. What's a breakthrough, like a team breakthrough, a company breakthrough that came from just being together? I don't know if you do any special exercises or activities with the team and what's come out of it?

You know, we talk a lot about— we do a lot of roundtables, like share experiences and tackle that sorts of stuff. A lot of the hackathon projects are like the best stuff because it's the first inspiration for something that eventually is going to become— might become a key part of Zapier. Yeah, so I mentioned the Chrome push extension, but we also have a hand—

like a whole— yeah, what are some of the other breakthroughs that came?

Like, if you go look at a lot of our built-in apps, they were started at retreats. So we've got the Formatter, we've got Digest, we've got Delays, we've got Storage, um, we've got a weather app. Like, all these kind of built-in utilities as part of Zapier are— I think most of them started at a retreat. Which is pretty cool. Yeah, and it's also just a good time. You know, we treat it as just a good time to reflect and just hang out with each other and just enjoy kind of the last, you know, 6 months' accomplishments. So that's kind of what we use it for.

Wade, this has been super valuable. I really appreciate your time. People should obviously check out Zapier, zapier.com, wherever else should they go to check out on your site that would be valuable?

Yeah, so if you're, you know, we've talked to, you know, zapier.com is the place to check out for Zapier. zapier.com/zapbook shows all the integrations we have. Definitely check out the blog too if you're interested in productivity, how to use apps. Jeremy mentioned that earlier. And if you're interested in work, if you think this has been cool enough, like, and you want to join Zapier, check out jobs.zapier.com/jobs. Com/jobs. Like, we're hiring, bring on more folks to the team.

Is there a job that's typically common that you're always looking for people?

Yeah, you know, we're pretty much always looking for help on our customer support, and we're pretty much always looking for engineering help. So if that kind of matches your background, you know, we pretty much always have a spot for you. Yeah. So Chrome extension—

last question— Chrome extensions, I need to know, what do you you use as a power user?

Let's see. LastPass, I'm a big LastPass user. Huge, yeah. uBlock, so ad blocking. I just can't stand most sites these days with the amount of ads they have.

Obviously Push by Zapier goes without saying, but we'll say it again.

Push Zapier, yep, it is. I've got Pushbullet, which is a pretty cool extension that allows me to push files and URLs and stuff between my phone and my machine. So I like that. I use Buffer for tweeting. I have Printfections Chrome extension installed, which lets me quick generate a t-shirt link. So if I want to send someone a link where they can get a Zapier t-shirt. [Speaker:SCOTT] That's cool. [Speaker:CHRIS] I have that installed. What else do I have? Man, I have a couple other ones up here that I— oh, ha! I've got one that's— It's like a— what's it called? Oh, display anchors. It's called like anchors away or something, which shows all the anchors on a site where you can link directly to that spot on a page, which is nice for really long pages. Sometimes you want to link to a specific spot, so that display anchors one lets me get a link to the exact spot on that page. I have a like full browser screenshot Flipshot that takes a screenshot of like the whole page. You don't have to scroll, take screenshots, scroll, take another screenshot.

Very efficient. You're very efficient.

I got a whole bunch of stuff. I got a— I have one tab, so it collapses all my tabs into one tab because oftentimes I get too many tabs open. Guilty. Yeah. So there's a handful. There's more that I use, but those are some of the most common ones.

Thank you, Wade Foster Foster Foster. I really appreciate it. It's always fantastic catching up.

Yeah, thanks, Jeremy. I appreciate you having me on the show.