
How Zapier Went from Zero to 600k Users - gk1
https://www.groovehq.com/blog/zapier-interview-with-wade-foster
======
gleb
Zapier really does have great support.

When you use them for something, and then a direct integration becomes
available you actually feel bad about stopping using Zapier. I think this is
largely because of the quality of their support.

If you are a startup and you don't have your founders and engineers doing
support, I guarantee you - you are pissing off your customers. And are missing
an opportunity to understand what these customers actually want.

I am looking at you FullContact, my current favorite offender here.

~~~
lloyddobbler
Hey, gleb - Kipp from FullContact here. Sorry if our support team wasn't able
to address your needs - that's something we never want to hear. Mind dropping
me a line at kipp@fullcontact.com and letting me know what the issue is? I'd
like to look into it and see what we can do to make things right.

(And agreed, Zapier support is awesome. Wade and the rest of the team do great
work.)

~~~
Xorlev
Echoing this, early engineer at FullContact here -- I'd love to know what
kinds of problems you ran into with our support team. More often than not, if
the issue isn't trivially answerable the support team asks us directly.

We'd both be happy to address your concerns.

~~~
gleb
Thanks for reaching out to both of you guys. I emailed Kipp. I'll forward the
email to you.

The issue is not with your support folks. They are responsive. But much like
me they can't figure out your product ;-)

To bring it back to the article - the main benefit of engineers doing support
is not better support. That is just a welcome side effect. The main benefit is
a better product that does not require much support.

Unlike dedicated support folk engineers do not enjoy doing support and have
the ability to change the product to reduce the need for it. It's a magical
combination.

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littlewing
This is the number one best startup story I've ever heard. The keys I got out
of it: (1) focus on the customer and the product not the culture itself, (2)
charge and make money even if it takes bucking the norm, (3) have work-life
balance as part of culture, (4) it's a blessing not to get funded too early,
(5) remote workers are acceptable, (6) team building via getting together is
very important, (7) use SEO and partner co-marketing.

If I could find anything wrong with this post, it would be that generating
content is not always a good idea unless you know what you are doing. Many
people can't do it well. It's like telling random people: "Go play some songs
for us and then people will listen to your mp3s and you'll get more business."
Well... yeah... if you are entertaining enough. Otherwise, it's just going to
make you look bad.

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vosper
I used Zapier to set up an automatic reminder on Hipchat for developers to
shut down unused AWS machines. It was dead simple, took about 5 minutes, and
has worked flawlessly ever since.

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minimaxir
It should be noted that Zapier is (YC S12).

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mooreds
I have used and recommended zapier a number of time and actually wrote some
custom code to integrate with another startup (Lob):
[http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1468](http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1468)

My favorite Zapier story, though, reflects how accessible they are. My company
has a FAC, and we had just started using Zapier (this was probably 2 years
ago). No one knew how to pronounce Zapier, so tweeted Wade and before the FAC
was over, had an answer. Obviously a trivial question, but indicative of how
they treat customers.

The article has some good actionable advice too.

~~~
morgante
FAC?

~~~
georgiecasey
[http://www.acronymfinder.com/FAC.html](http://www.acronymfinder.com/FAC.html)

i can't guess from that. friday afternoon club? if i was pushed to guess from
the context. i'm bemused how anyone can use an acronym like that twice and
expect everyone to know what it means. or maybe it's just me and you!

~~~
Nilef
Friday Afternoon Catch-up is my guess

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cableshaft
I remember a client at a previous job claiming an app we were developing for
them was definitely going to get "millions of users" in only three weeks after
release, even with a small marketing budget. I laughed at how crazy
unrealistic that was.

I bet they would look at these numbers and scoff, even though it's still an
excellent number and I know they didn't even breach 50k users several months
after release (I was no longer on the project after that point).

~~~
mikeknoop
The success metrics are quite different for consumer vs business software even
though Zapier does ride that line a bit.

Consumer apps tend to care about raw user counts (as a sign of engagement) and
B2B software companies focus on paying users.

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bobbyadamson
Zapier started at my hometown Startup Weekend! Stoked these dudes are getting
the attention they deserve. They're great guys.

~~~
zschuessler
Columbia's Startup Weekend is gaining much attention lately from out-of-
towners. I was surprised to see my friends in other states RSVPing to attend,
recently.

Cool to see CoMo get attention!

(Also.. hey Bobby! Hope you're doing well in the big city!)

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russtrotter
+1 on Zapier! I'm a big fan of the service and platform. With YC news a more
tech-focused crowd their web interface for building integrations is really
effective. Point-n-click for most stuff, and you can fallback to JS should you
need to get more creative.

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welder
> So we come to our partners and we can now say “alright, here are the things
> that if we both do them, this is going to be successful.” 99% of the time,
> people are like “thank goodness, let’s do this.”

Would be great to see some examples of these successful marketing campaigns.

~~~
hu_me
they have a pretty detailed guide here with some partner examples
[https://zapier.com/help/partner-co-marketing-
guide/](https://zapier.com/help/partner-co-marketing-guide/)

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ssharp
I found Zapier by searching for integrations available to the enterprise email
marketing platform we use. Unfortunately, they don't support it and I never
got to use them in production, but from just toying around with it, it looks
extremely useful.

~~~
eric_bullington
Out of curiosity, which platform is that? If they have a standard REST API,
hooking it up to Zapier is pretty simple.

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benbristow
What's the difference between Zapier and IFTTT? They seem pretty similar.

~~~
ryanSrich
More enterprise focused. They have better support (because you pay them) and
more integrations. You also get more control over your integrations as well.

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mmaunder
It would be great to get a big list of growth stories, each in 255 characters
or less. e.g. Went viral with free web widget, made zero money, realized
growth without revenue sucks, pivoted.

~~~
dmix
...why? At least a paragraph would be needed to have some substance and
accuracy.

~~~
mmaunder
Nah. The essence of most growth stories can be described in less than 255
chars. I just described one of mine above.

~~~
kzhahou
Maybe 255 characters is too long also. Let's just have a 10 character max:

"Got big" or "Succeeded"

In fact, we could represent it as a bit-field, and then get the story in one
byte:

0x01: Made a key product/market connection

0x02: spent on advertising/marketing

0x04: connected to customers by investors

0x08: Fortuitous current event or market shift drove traffic

0x10: big media mention (TV, celebrity endorsement, ...)

0x20: focus on customer support

0x40: Long grind before today's success

0x80: Pivoted one or more times

Then... the story of Zapier: 0x62 :-)

~~~
ultimape
I propose you write up an RFC for the protocol.

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arthens
I've used zapier recently and I've found it pretty convenient. My only
complain is that their RSS integration lacks the concept of rate limiting. In
my case I was using it to process user-events, so I needed a way to introduce
some delay between an event an another, but I couldn't find a way of doing it
using zapier.

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zemanel
Zapier is really a great product with a cool bunch of smart people behind it.
I freelanced consulting for Zapier customers for a while and can tell you
there's some companies solving real business problems elegantly besides
notifications, like Salesforce to Salesforce and 3rd party APIs

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ilurk
This article was a great read, full of little nuggets. I highly recommend
reading it.

It was also interesting seeing that he really applied Kevin's advice and
philosophy (check Kevin's talk for the YC Start a Startup).

