Zapier’s Compounding Advantage
One of the big challenges that we face is that these tools, they massively benefit from context. Using Claude code, that feels like a bicycle for the pine. I feel like I got the wind at my back. I'm just sailing here. And even when we have problems, it's like, no biggie.
Speaker 1:Let's just try again. And it's just, like, kinda off to the races. It's incredible.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Founders Network podcast, where you get the real story, not the highlight reel. You'll hear the decisions, the doubts, and the messy middle of building something that matters. Today, you're gonna hear my conversation with Wade Foster, who started Zapier in his Missouri bedroom with two co founders, raised just $1,400,000 in venture capital, and grew it into a $5,000,000,000 company. He's been building Zapier for almost fifteen years now, and he's still at it. This is one of the best product market fit stories I've heard.
Speaker 2:You'll hear the early days including the wait someone will actually pay for this moment, the startup weekend sprint, and two years of building nights and weekends before going full time. This is a story about hard work, scrappiness, and sticking with it when nobody's paying attention. We got into finding the right co founders, why don't hire until it works as a survival tactic, and how product market fit often starts as a tiny signal. Then we fast forward into agents, context windows, vibe coding, and what the next wave of builders will win on. And if you're vibe coding, check out Zapier MCP.
Speaker 2:What I loved about this conversation is that Wade talked openly about the people who helped him along the way. That's what Founders Network's all about, lifelong success through peer mentorship. Wade sharing his story with our community is reciprocity in action. Wade's not Ironman. He figured it out one day at a time with help from people around him.
Speaker 2:If he can do it, so can you. So keep on building. Never give up. Thank you, Wade, for doing this, and enjoy the episode. Tell us about kind of your origins.
Speaker 1:I grew up in Central Missouri, Jefferson City, Missouri, kind of a, you know, slow, old school government city. It's the capital of Missouri. Not a lot of changes there. It's not exactly like a pinnacle of industry. Big employers are the state government, the school system, the hospital system, things like that.
Speaker 1:It's not like there's a lot of commerce or industry going on there. And so I kind of had what I felt like was a pretty just normal middle class, middle of the country childhood upbringing, and ended up going to school at University of Missouri, 30 miles north. And not really very certain of what I wanted to do. Entrepreneurship was not exactly on my radar, but I knew I liked math and science, and so I to school to get an engineering degree. And during school was the great financial crisis, and I was a junior when that happened.
Speaker 1:I was always a good student, but I remember that summer going to try and get an internship, a job, etcetera, and just nobody would hire anyone. Didn't matter how good of a student you were. It didn't matter if you had good grades or anything like that. They just didn't want anything to do unless you were, you know, exceptional in some degree. I never quite figured out exactly what it was, but it was not me.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. By the way, I finished my undergrad in o one Right? Bubble burst. So you got some MBA in in 2930.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you can relate then. Yes.
Speaker 2:Know this story.
Speaker 1:So, you know, I I but at the time, you know, I I was starting to Facebook had come out. I was starting to be more online, and I kinda came across this idea of, oh, you can build a website, and you can put AdWords on it, and maybe you can make money on the internet that way. That's kinda interesting. So there's like kinda some math y stuff around marketing that was like interesting. And lo and behold, I found this tiny little startup in Columbia, Missouri that was run by a professor at the university.
Speaker 1:They were looking for somebody to to do marketing. I don't think they knew what marketing meant, which was great for me, because, they didn't know how to evaluate if you were good at marketing or not. And for whatever reason, they thought, you know, hey, let's take a bet on this kid. And, you know, I got to work out of the professor's house. There was like seven of us.
Speaker 1:It was just like a weird, eclectic place, but I quickly fell in love. Building software was I still remember learning that we would just put software on the internet, and our biggest customer was in Australia, and they just found it randomly. And I was like, Oh my gosh, this is nuts. You can just put a thing on the internet, and someone halfway across the world can find it and pay you money for it? That's real?
Speaker 1:That's a real thing you can do? The act And of building websites, building software, marketing software, the whole thing was just very, very interesting to me. So I started to learn to code, learn to design, learn to do all this stuff. I'm not sure I ever got particularly good at any of it, but I just loved all of it, and I was wanting to get good at it. And from that, I ended up reaching out to an acquaintance of mine that I I'd known through the University of Missouri jazz program.
Speaker 1:So both him and I played music. We played jazz. I played sax. He played bass and guitar. And he was the only person on in town that I knew that was not only building software, but was also trying to build companies.
Speaker 1:Like, had built some sites, he built some stuff, he was making money, etcetera. And I was like, hey, like, I wanna learn from you. Like, show me what you're doing. I wanna like, teach me this stuff. And the trade was they needed a saxophone player for their band.
Speaker 1:And so he says, yeah, I'll I'll do that if you come play play play my quartet. And so I was like, sure. Sign me up. Let's go do it. And so that started, you know, what's now been a lifelong friendship, between Brian and I where, you know, we just we just spent all the time gigging around town, playing music, building side projects, building sites, you know, he brought me over to the there was a mortgage company in town that was one of the fastest growing companies in Colombia.
Speaker 1:We started working there together, and one day he messaged me the idea for what eventually became Zapier. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Speaker 2:That's so cool. Yeah. How do you find your co founder? That's always a perennial question for folks. And then how do you persuade them to join you?
Speaker 2:Right? And so there's this technical academic term of. Right? Kinda martial resources you don't control or direct, but, like, trading saxophone for the band is a great example of, like, okay. Cool.
Speaker 2:I'll do that, and then you help me with the startup, and then it builds and grows into something from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I think there's just a lot to be said around spending time with interesting people who are doing things that you think are interesting too. And, you know, a lot of for a lot of folks, I think that probably happens at You know, you're you're in and around people who are working on the same things as you, but, you know, what are you doing outside of work? Like, where are you spending your time? You know, if all you're doing is just, you know, sitting around watching football games, which don't get me wrong, I like watching football games too, you're probably not increasing the surface area of people that you're meeting, and doing interesting things, and working on interesting things with them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is one of the things I just mentioned to the new coworker we onboarded for founders' hour this morning. Was like, we've been doing this fifteen years. So so many these people are like, I'm looking for a technical cofounder. And I told them, like, look.
Speaker 2:What I see I've seen play out is in three to five years, seven years. Those people have shut down their startups. You've shut down your startup. And now they're teaming up with each other to start the new thing. And that's a dividend that comes from investing in in these relationships, or as you put it, the circ creating that circus area to interact with interesting people.
Speaker 2:I love that. Very cool. So so sort of Midwest origin story, very happenstance, and that magic moment of the Internet of, like, holy cow. Our biggest customers in Australia like, this is a know, these are more magic moments happening now around generative AI, and, like, we we keep living through these these moments. But as an entrepreneur, it's just like especially a tech entrepreneur, it's such a special thing to, like, to live through these times.
Speaker 2:But before we get to where we are today with generative AI, I wanna kinda work our way there with your story. So so you guys are working together at this mortgage company, and then you tell us kind of where you went from there to get to where you are today.
Speaker 1:So so we're the mortgage company, and Brian, you know, he's we're we're using a lot of the early software as a service platforms. You know, we're fans of, like, Mailchimp and Basecamp and things like that. So we're just kinda we're always just kinda poking around and seeing what they're doing. And Brian noticed this is trend, which if you would go to their community forums and look through common requests that would pop up, almost everywhere, you would see the same flavor of question, which was, When will you integrate with X? The threads always followed a very similar format.
Speaker 1:It would be a bunch of customers saying plus one, me too, I really want this. And then eventually, there'd be a product manager that would chime in and say, hey, folks. Thanks for the suggestion. We really appreciate the feedback. We're gonna take a look at this and see what we can do.
Speaker 1:Which if you worked inside these companies, you know is code for probably not gonna happen. So he messages me, and he's like, hey. I think we can make a really simple way for business users, nontechnical folks, to build integrations between the SaaS that they're using. And I jumped at this because my day job, I'm working with the Marketo API doing email marketing. And I'm not a particularly good engineer at this point, never was.
Speaker 1:But the Marketo API is this old school SOAP WSDL API. The documentation is in a PDF. Needless to say, I'm not having a very good time. And so if the thing that Brian was talking about existed, I'd be like, I'd just use that. That would be a better, path for us.
Speaker 1:And so it just so happened that there was a startup weekend that was coming up around the corner, and Brian took the idea to that event. We teamed up with Mike, our other co founder, and, you know, we built the first prototype of the product in fifty four hours that weekend. Had a ton of fun. They had some prizes and stuff. We ended up winning the competition.
Speaker 1:But after the weekend, we're like, well, do we wanna keep doing this? Like, what do you wanna do? And our perspective was like, this was a lot of fun. Let's just keep working on it. Now we're in Central Missouri, mind you.
Speaker 1:So this is not we're not a situation where you raise, you know, a million dollar seed round, you quit your jobs, you just go all in and make this thing happen. That's kinda not like the the environment we're in. And so we just looked at each other and said, okay. We'll we'll just do this nights and weekends. So Brian and I have jobs.
Speaker 1:Mike's still in school. We would you know, many nights, we just meet up at get takeout Chinese, meet out at 06:00, 06:30, whatever, and then we'd work till midnight, one, two a. M. On tapir. And then we'd kind of rinse, wash, and repeat for months, honestly, is kind of the approach until we had prototype ready that we felt we could launch.
Speaker 2:So cool. And was it a startup weekend, or was yeah. It just like a was.
Speaker 1:Was one of the, yeah, official ones. I think the like, Techstars owns it now, I wanna say. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It kind of it I haven't seen it in years, but it was I'm glad there's a success story from it. I'll say that. And and in this kind of, like, idea of, like, don't hire till it hurts or, you know, it's kind of baked into your story. Like, you guys kept your day jobs and built until you could actually leave and go full time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I think a lot of I think constraints breed a lot of creativity, and they act as a forcing function to really understand your stuff. I see a lot of founders that will hire really fast thinking I need more people to execute on my idea. And what happens is when you hire all those people, you actually don't learn as fast. When you are forced to do the whole business, build the product, sell the product, market the product, support the product, etcetera, you really understand what makes it special and what makes it click.
Speaker 1:And then once you understand it, it makes it more obvious where you could use people to help grow the business and help it be more successful. I think I see a lot of folks get that equation backwards where they think, I'm gonna bring in people to build the business. And I'm like, well, you build the business. You bring in people to scale what you know about the business. And, you know, it's a it's but it's real tempting.
Speaker 1:You know? Companies are hard. All this stuff is hard. And you're like, well, shoot. If I just had one magical person who could come in and handle this, that, or the other, then everything would be different.
Speaker 1:Generally, I don't find that to be true. I find the magical person is it's you, your co founder. Like, you are the people that have to bring this idea to life. You have to will it to existence.
Speaker 2:And so what was that moment when you had the day job and you're working the nights and weekends on Zapier? What was and this ties into the the hiring part too, but, like, even in your own narrative, what was the point where you said, okay. We're gonna go full time on my day job. Like, was there a in retrospect?
Speaker 1:Well, I ended up going full time three, four months in. And, you know, I had a my my boss at the day job noticed that, you know, perhaps I was a little sleepy during the day and not and not exactly, performing to the highest of my abilities. And so he had came in and was like, hey, Wade. Like, you know, he he was the owner of the company. Was like, look.
Speaker 1:You know? If your heart's set on this thing, like, you should go do that thing. So I got I kinda got a little nudge from him, which was which was helpful in hindsight. And then, you know, we ended up applying to YC, got accepted into YC for the summer twelve batch. And so Brian and Mike went full time just before that.
Speaker 1:So that was kind of the impetus for going full time, was we now had a little bit of money to be able
Speaker 2:What were on traction at that moment?
Speaker 1:So, we applied to YC twice. First time was right after startup weekend. We got straight rejected because we didn't have anything except for a very bare bones prototype. Six months later, applied again. This time, we had about 10,000 people on a launch list.
Speaker 1:We had 1,000 people who had paid us money to get access to the beta, and in that 1,000 people, we had a number of YC companies who, when we went to go apply again, we just said, Hey, if you like our stuff, could you recommend us? Could you give advice on the application? Yeah, just kind of guide us through and help us do a good job with this. And I think that probably helped our you know, odds. That plus, like, we've just shown a lot of progress.
Speaker 1:Like, you know, first time around, we're three three random people in the middle of the country. This time, it's six months of progress. It's like, oh, these people will do what they say they will do.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And you mentioned wanting to sort of, like, revenue fund and and be scrappy and the sort of ethos and and not take venture capital maybe was a bias in there as well of, like, hiring people to do the thing, but YC maybe was a different calculus. What was that decision like for you? Like, why did
Speaker 1:you Yeah. YC Yeah. YC always felt a little different. You know, we, big fans of Paul Graham, his essays, read Hacker News a lot. You know, it didn't feel like traditional venture capital to us.
Speaker 1:It felt like just a different beast. And we did feel like one way YC could help us was a little bit of a badge of approval because the product we were building required so many integrations with people that were based in the Bay Area. And now many of these folks had open APIs and, good documentation, and we could just go use those anywhere in the world. But there were some companies, some larger ones that had red tape and bureaucracy, and, you know, you kinda had to, like, prove yourself a little bit. And, you know, we were like, man, it it'd be nice if, you know, there was somebody who could vouch for us and say, hey, like, these folks are legit.
Speaker 1:And I that ended up actually playing out. You know, as soon as we got accepted in, I remember shooting PG an email and saying, hey, we're we're stuck on this random big tech company, everyone has heard of. And he fired off an email and, you know, twenty four
Speaker 2:hours gap and and closing more of these partners and partner and the business was really closing these partners. Right? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so and by the way, IFTTT was a early member of FN at that time and went pure consumer side. And and so it's interesting to see. And I've been a user of Zapier ever since then as well. So it's been interesting to see the the different approaches to go to market. And they had Adriza provide that sort of credential.
Speaker 2:Right? But that credibility gap is a big it's a big thing for early stage startups. Right? And how do you especially coming from Missouri, like, do you have any other thoughts on that, or really was it just kind of a check mark with YC that unlocked that credibility for you as a as a startup in the market?
Speaker 1:I think that that was what was where YC was probably what we were originally viewing as the value of YC was that. I think the second thing that we got, which we didn't necessarily totally understand coming in, was the focus. YC does a really good job, at least at the time, I assume they still do, of basically getting you to not do anything else but focus on your company. I think a lot of founders show up with sort of preconceived notions in their head of what a good founder looks like. And I remember the first kickoff, PG says you should do three things all summer.
Speaker 1:You should write code, you should talk to users, and you should exercise. And our joke was we always said we exercised on day one, and then we wrote code to talk to users the rest of the summer. But I think that's very it's exceptional advice because so many people get caught up with this event or this social media or fundraising or hiring or all these other things that you know, maybe are important in time. But at the early stages, you gotta build a product and you gotta get customers. There is nothing else.
Speaker 1:And so YC put us in an apartment. Well, they didn't put us in an apartment. They make you go get the apartment in South Bay where there's nothing going on. And so all summer, basically, you know, from the moment we woke up to the moment we went to bed, we were just sitting in a two bedroom apartment hacking away on this thing. That was all.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Yeah. Folk the power of focus, and hard work too. Spot on. And okay.
Speaker 2:So and then you're you're talking to customers, and you have a story about, like, customer, product market fit, where you kind of stumbled upon it. I think every early stage founder is looking for this. And when I look at for FN, you know, we have a fund, a small fund that we invest in. Member companies and a lot of the found the LPs are founders of exits. Jeremy Clark is one that from Formstack.
Speaker 2:You may know from Midwest also. And you hear his story. He launched on Zapier, one of the very first form softwares on Zapier, and it's just this lightning in a bottle distribution moment. Have other LPs in the fund who, like, were the very first game on Steam when gaming went to the cloud. Right?
Speaker 2:And so you see these, like, these stories of the startups that find that product market fit, but it's also a story of distribution as well. I was wondering if you could kinda share the story of Zapier and, like, how did you, you know, how did did you have a systematic process for finding it? Was it just what you talked about, talking to customers? And then yeah. Tell tell, like, found share with founders, like, how they might go about based on your experience.
Speaker 2:Well Uncovering that product market fit and then getting that sort of there's two questions. Getting that distinction.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think the thing to go back to was Brian's original insight, which is there's these forums where people are saying, when are you gonna integrate with X? And so what we started to do was drop comments in those forums. We'd say, hey. We're working on a project.
Speaker 1:Of course, you can use the APIs. If you know how to code, you can go build this stuff directly on your own. But if not, I got a project I'm working on. Try and solve this problem. It'll integrate this and that.
Speaker 1:Reach out. Let me know. And, you know, every time we drop a comment, we'd get three, four people that would reach out. And of the three, four, half of them would be like, Yes, I want this. I really need this.
Speaker 1:So it's not like you're getting a huge amount of volume out of this. But look, at this stage, you don't need volume. You just need anybody to care at all about what you're working on. And the fact that half of them are doing somersaults and backflips, that was pretty fascinating. And I remember our first customer, Andrew Warner, who runs his podcast, Mig Surgery.
Speaker 1:I remember reaching out to him, I would Andrew was the first person I did this with, but I did it a ton of people in that first year. I'd get on Skype, Skype at the time, and help them set up their first app. And I remember foolishly expecting Andrew to just be able to go build his first one without any help. And I remember watching him try to set this up, and he's just struggling. And it's not his fault.
Speaker 1:It's the the product is just not very good right now. It is a prototype of a prototype. But we get to the end, we set up the Zap, and we go to test it. He's taken a Wufoo form submission, and he's putting the subscribers into Aweber, which was his email marketing tool at the time. So we went and test it.
Speaker 1:We submitted to Wufoo. We went and refreshed in Aweber. You know, hey, is there a contact in there? And sure enough, it works. And he goes, Wade, this is incredible.
Speaker 1:Like, where do I send you money? I wanna be a customer. And we didn't have a bank account. We didn't have any of this stuff yet. And so, like, on the fly, I'm like, here's my personal PayPal account.
Speaker 1:You could send me $100. They're, like, making up something on the spot. But I remember that that experience was so different than the startup I'd mentioned before, you know, the one with the professor's house where there our products were like very slick, well engineered, design was amazing, usability was good. Man, nobody like, I thought I was just bad at sales, bad at marketing, bad at doing this, which maybe at the time that's that's true, but nothing seemed to work. And with Zapier, it felt like the exact opposite.
Speaker 1:The product was a prototype of a prototype, and the first reaction was, where do I pay you? Yeah. But anyhoo, like No. This is this
Speaker 2:is this is the this is what everybody needs to hear in the early startup stages.
Speaker 1:Totally. The the the process was then just rinse, wash, and repeat. It's like, do drop those comments in, take the the handful of inbound that comes, jump on Skype, watch them try and set up his apps. You know, if we don't support the app that they've got, great. Build the app that we've got, that that they're wanting.
Speaker 1:And, you know, every time we'd watch people on Skype, just take a lot of notes. This part of the product isn't good. This part of the product is confusing. This part of the products trip somebody up. Okay.
Speaker 1:How do we go smooth that over? How do we make that better? How do we make it easier to understand these things? And, you know, we just did that for months, honestly, until we got to a point where it was like, okay, people are sort of finding their way through this without my help anymore. I'm finding that I don't have to course correct or point certain things out to them.
Speaker 1:So then it was like, Well, let's just see if people can do this on their own. And we kind of let it be a little more self serve at that point in time. And then honestly, we benefited a lot from Gary Ton, who now runs YC, he was one of the first people we did office hours with, and he was like, When are you guys gonna launch? And we're like, Well, we're not ready yet. We think we still got And we just kind of explained where we were in this process to him, and he was like, Y'all need to launch.
Speaker 1:You're ready. And so, you know, even still, we kinda needed that that that kick in the pants to to go put ourselves out there and say, hey. Let's let's go see what the the public reaction is to this thing.
Speaker 2:Any And then that's a common failure meant too is, like,
Speaker 1:you know Polish, polish, polish. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Just if you're not embarrassed by the first, you know, version, then you wait until but but the how many getting back to this process, because I want founders to have this, like, takeaway from this this anecdote. How many conversations do you have, and you're doing these ride alongs on Skype? Like, when did like, in in retrospect, like, how many could you've gotten away with to get it done?
Speaker 2:And, of course, you've it all starts with it happened to be a forum. It all starts with uncovering some demand. Right? And then building MVP and then getting doing the ride along and figuring out usability and and these types of things. But what was like, what are what would be some if we're gonna give a guideline to founders that just based on your experience?
Speaker 1:I think you wanna hear from your customers that The anti pattern is people are being nice to you. Oh, this is cool. I like what you're doing here. Oh, that's interesting. That's a real danger zone because they're being polite, but that politeness doesn't really help you out.
Speaker 1:The kind thing, the thing you really wanna hear is like, Hey, Wade, I hate this. You're wasting your time. I would never buy this. And like, yeah, that burns for a moment, but at least I didn't waste like six months or twelve months or, you know, years of my life working on a thing that nobody matters. But humans aren't wired that way.
Speaker 1:Humans are wired to let you down gently, and that gentle letdown comes in the form of, oh, you know, cool cool thing you're working on there, Wade. That's that's cool. It's interesting, etcetera. And so you do really have to, you know, hold this, like, skepticism and optimism in your head at the same time. And the best way to do that is to just, like, look and see, okay.
Speaker 1:Someone set this up. Are they still using it? A week later, are they still using it? A month later? Or were they just being nice to you?
Speaker 1:And if they're still using it, alright. Kinda onto something. And look, you don't need everybody you talk to to be successful. In fact, in the early days, probably most people won't because the product probably is not very good yet. But as you start to get one, two, four, eight people who are, like, really in love with it, then you go back to those people and say, like, why do you love this so much?
Speaker 1:Like, what what is it that like, you're the only people that love this thing. Like, what was what are you like, why is this so value to you? And, like, really try and tease out of them, like, what what is it about them? What problem are they solving with your thing? And once you understand that, then you're like, okay, I'm gonna double down on that.
Speaker 1:Like, how do I get more people like them? How do I make this problem more obvious to folks in the market so I can pull in people that look like them, etcetera, over time? And you just kinda keep, you know, this product market fit is like the center of the bull's eye. You're continuing to just navigate your way into the very center of it. And look, it always sounds so nice when you know, I talk about this stuff looking backwards.
Speaker 1:But, you know, I'm fourteen, fifteen years in. I still feel like we're searching for the center of the bull's eye. Yeah. I still feel like I'm like, man, you know, there's still still something that's, like, not quite we don't quite have it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's get there because I think thing tech is always changing, and we're in the middle of a seismic shift. Right?
Speaker 2:And so I'm really curious to hear about your thoughts on that. But I wanna kinda carry the through line of our narrative. You're in this this discovery phase, and you're having dozens, 40, 50 conversations. I don't know how many, you know. And and and Gary says, get this thing to market.
Speaker 2:Call the bug a feature and ship it. And then what does it look? Tell us about the story of growth from there and the narrative there. Like, carry us through to, like, where we are today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, you know, I think the the simple observation we had pretty early on was that folks were already looking for integrations. They knew they needed to connect this and that. That's why they're asking stuff in the forums. And if you would go do a Google search for various integrations at the time, say you look for Zendesk Jira integration, or if you look for QuickBooks Salesforce integration, or things like that, the landing page results were like a desert.
Speaker 1:There's just like nothing in there. You'd get like a Pastebin URL that has like, you know, somebody's random script that they've abandoned I long
Speaker 2:remember making these searches, and then eventually they were all Zapier pages.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. We were just like, well, you know, people are looking for these searches. You know, what they're looking for is a like, they wanna, like, plug and play integration. They don't wanna have to, like, go, you know, sift through all this stuff. So we just wanna have a nice looking landing page that looks like a product that you can click a try now button and then drops you into product that helps you connect these tools up.
Speaker 1:Let's just give that to them. And so we quickly realized that the way to grow was to just make these landing pages, and then the way to get more landing pages is to have more integrations. So the bottleneck for us was great. Build integrations. Build the next one.
Speaker 1:Build the next one. Build the next one. So our approach, first 50 plus, we were just heads down building as many integrations as we could. You know, some combination of our own intuition around what was possible, some, like, public signals around traffic and, you know, things like that to help us guide what we thought could be interesting. And then, you know, we kinda got to a bit of an interesting inflection point where, you know, YC has demo day, and the advice is you want to do something impressive for Demo Day.
Speaker 1:Do something that puts a big number on the board. And we knew the thing for us is more integration is going to lead to growth, full stop. And we thought, well, for demo day, there's this kinda two approaches. One, let's just keep cranking on integrations. Like, that's the fastest, easiest way for us to get, you know, more users because we'll have more landing pages, and it'll just kinda get this flywheel humming.
Speaker 1:Or we could try something a little more risky. We could go build a developer platform that made it easy for other people to build integrations. But most developer platforms don't work. Even very popular products out there, if you go look at how many integrations they have, what their developer platform looks like, most of them is pretty small. And most the ones that they do have are first party.
Speaker 1:They had to build them themselves. It's pretty rare when you get Slack or Salesforce or Shopify or Mailchimp that have these breakout ecosystem where everyone builds an integration to them. And the reality is they're the exception to the rule. They're not the rule. They get all the users, and so everyone builds to them, and no one wants to build to number two or number three in the space.
Speaker 1:So even if you're a really good company, you're you're probably not gonna get people building integrations to you. So, you know, we're an integration company. We're, like, pretty keenly aware that most developer platforms don't work. Oh, and by the way, we don't have any users. So it's like, you know, doubly unlikely that our version of a, you know, integration platform's gonna work.
Speaker 1:But, you know, it might work for us. Right? So, you know, Brian builds the the first version of this thing in two weeks. And we actually we'd had a number of people reach out and ask for, you know, why why wasn't there an integration? I remember actually Aaron from Box, had had pinged us at, 2AM on a Saturday.
Speaker 1:Like, why isn't Box on Zapier? It's like, well, it's because there's three people at this company. And, like, of course, Box should be on Zapier, but, like, go as fast as we can. And, you know, we think, well, if Aaron cares enough to send an email at Saturday at 2AM, maybe he cares enough to have an engineer build an integration. So that was the thesis.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, we built it. We kept having more people with inbound requests to build integrations. And every time we did, we'd say, hey. We'll try and build it ourself, but, like, we got a long queue. If you want, we've got this developer platform.
Speaker 1:It's brand new. We'll actually walk you through it. Like, we'll spend time, like, showing you how to use it, you know, kind of that that, you know, Wade will help you build your first Zap via Skype. Well, you know, Wade or Mike in this case will help you build your first integration over Skype. And so we did that.
Speaker 1:We ended up launching with the the first developer platform with a batch of, I think it was 13 apps. And in that, first 13 was HubSpot, was ActiveCampaign, Gravity Forms, which is a hugely popular forms plugin for WordPress, and a bunch of other stuff. Those are the three that really worked. Massive companies that became massive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. Already were of some scale at that point too.
Speaker 1:Totally, and you know, it kinda just kept working. You know, once we sort of made a name for ourselves amongst, like, a small set of these these vendors, the flywheel just started just started to roll. First and first slowly, but then it really started to pick up where people in the industry, if you're in the know and you're like, hey, you know, we got an integration problem. The answer increasingly was like, well, I could do one integration to Zapier, and I get a whole bunch of stuff just out of the box. And so even if it's not a perfect answer to the problem, all these customers that are coming in, and I'm in those four ends saying, thanks for the feedback, but I'm probably not gonna do it, all those customers now in one fell swoop, you could say, Check out our Zapier integration.
Speaker 1:And so that flywheel was the thing that we worked on for years. I mean, but it started that summer, and then it just kept like, How do you just? Yeah. There's the Warren Warren Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett things. Like, take a simple idea and just take it very seriously.
Speaker 1:And that was kind of our approach to that.
Speaker 2:Very good Midwestern role model there. Yeah. So that was and that was the the real growth driver in distribution for Zach.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The developer platform plus the search Yeah. You know, tool created a little flywheel there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which seems to be a YC playbook as well, like the dev tools focus on a lot of the startups there Mhmm. Enabling developers. Okay. Cool.
Speaker 2:So that takes you through, of course, there's YC. Now you're into the fundraising game, and you're you guys have a pretty significant valuation at this point. Maybe let's touch on the fundraising journey as well as it it doesn't seem to center so so much in your in your journey as a core part of your story, but but maybe I'm wrong about that. Yeah. Tell us about that.
Speaker 2:What what have
Speaker 1:you learned about? Much of a journey, yeah, to to to talk about. So, you know, we took, after demo day, we raised about a million and change, and we treated it like the last money that we would ever get. Yeah, I think we had started to make some money, but it wasn't a lot. You know, I think at demo day we were, I wanna say between 5,000 and $10,000 of MRR.
Speaker 1:So you do the math on that, that's like a 60,000 to $120,000 a year. We're now living in California. We're not in Central Missouri anymore. Like, you know, our ability to pay rent is like, we're we're we're stretching it a bit. But we could start to we could see, like, things are working.
Speaker 1:Now the growth rate's feeling good. And so we're like, okay. We'll we'll take a little bit of money, and then we just need time for this thing to bake, and it's gonna work. So we trade it like the last money we were gonna raise. Don't hire till it hurt till it hurts.
Speaker 1:That'll keep burn rate at check. We're also, like, just kinda skeptical still, the whole Silicon Valley, raise a series A, series B, series C. You you just hear the horror stories of someone kicking out the founders and, VCs kind of messing up the company. Plus that mortgage company that Brian had I had been at, it was owned fiftyfifty by two brothers. They never raised a dime.
Speaker 1:When I joined, I was employee 500. When I left for Zapier ten months later, they had over 1,000 employees. So we'd just seen front and center that you could grow a fast, yeah, fast growing company bootstrapped effectively. And I think that experience just made us more, I guess, discerning around Silicon Valley tropes. There would be this advice that was given as gospel truth, and we had this front and center counter experience.
Speaker 1:And so that made us think, well, if that one is not true, what else of this canonical playbook also isn't true? So, yeah, I think we just we've we found a way to, like, marry, you know, the best of Silicon Valley and the best of, like, the Midwest, you know, blue collar mentality.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I love that. So one of those tropes is, you know, hiring here in Silicon Valley in San Francisco. You guys were remote first from the very beginning. What about, like, people culture and lessons learned there for especially early on?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wait till it hurts to hire. Was there anything else that you, you know, you wish you knew then that you know now?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, hire yeah. Hire till it hurts. That's a big one. You know, we were one of the first people hiring remotely.
Speaker 1:I think that was a big advantage for us because we weren't having to compete toe to toe with Google and Facebook and whoever else for engineers in the Bay Area. We were able to hire across the country in tier two, tier three cities that had really talented people who, you know, just had other reasons not to come to the Midwest or to the Bay or maybe they had families or, you know, just whatever. Right? There's a lot of people who like where they live, and they just don't want to move. So we're able to tap into that.
Speaker 1:I think probably the biggest thing we struggled with on the talent side was how to either hire or grow leaders. You know, that first executive team, that first set of management, it's pretty fraught. You know, I think we probably waited too long to bring some folks in, and then when we brought some folks in, you know, we had some mishires, and I don't think we're quick enough to realize it. These are all things that I think every founder makes this mistake as you grow. You know, every CEO I talk to goes through this challenge.
Speaker 1:And then as you start to scale up and you have more and more people coming in, you got to be real careful not to let the standard slip. And that's where the caliber of leaders you bring in matters a lot because you're not hiring them, you're hiring all the people that they are gonna bring with them. And so if you make a mistake there, you're gonna have not just that mistake, you're gonna have a compounding set of mistakes that go with it. And it's just really difficult to unroll some of those things. And so, you know, I think there's just been a lot of lessons learned around how do you how do you build in just like a top tier talent team, you know, sort of as you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's a no one solved it. Right? And I've heard you talk about in other places some of the lessons you've learned and and what and I learned about it. You have limited time.
Speaker 2:So I wanna I wanna kinda cap off the the kind of historical, and then I wanna look to the future with the balance of our time. And so, you know, looking back along the way and and Founders Network very much is about people. And it's just about, you know, founders helping founders, peer mentorship, not reinventing the wheel, not paying stupid tax, like helping others as you go learning from others and and trying to be a resource for founders. When you look at the history of Silicon Valley, say, Homebrook Computer Club, PayPal Mafia, YC as a a cohort forming function, this founder's network does it as well and and equips founders with that sort of so they don't have to go to all these, you know, sit in traffic on the l one to go to the meetup that's full of lawyers trying to, you know, get them to buy their service. But it's a pre vetted group of tech founders that can it's already assembled for you.
Speaker 2:You could stay heads down, tap into it, get help. I wanna talk about that thread of the of your journey so far of, like, when you reflect on the role that, like, others have had in your success, mentors, advisers? Who are the folks that you think of that were really important in your journey?
Speaker 1:Yeah. We were pretty lucky in that because we're an integration platform, we're integrating with all these really amazing companies, and that became a way for me to meet just a lot of interesting founders, CEOs, etcetera, over the years. And so almost all of the people inside of Zapier's ecosystem, I met the founding people, the teams of these, and some of them I've been lucky enough to to get to know over the years. And so, you know, like the Brian and Darmesh, the the HubSpot founders are super gracious with their time. I mean, Darmesh would write I'd send him these emails asking him about this culture thing or this marketing thing or what have you, and he would write these paragraphs back of, you know, here's how we thought about HubSpot.
Speaker 1:Here's what we did right. Here's what I think we got wrong, just for free. Like, you just do it. It was fantastic. You know, the the guys at Atlassian and, you know, Jay Simons, who was the president there for the longest time, is now on our board, in part because you just got to know them so well, they're just so generous with, you know, their time, their advice, when there was no no reason to be other than just, I guess they thought Zapier was interesting and part of their ecosystem, and it was pay it forward sort of thing.
Speaker 1:I think that's one of the just kind of magical things about Silicon Valley culture, is that, you know, sort of pay it forward mentalities. You know, every every founder, you know, remembers what it's like to kinda, like, figure these hard problems out and to sort of feel confused and dumbfounded by certain situations. And, you know, they probably had somebody that helped walk them through it. And, it feels nice to be able to pay that stuff forward. You know?
Speaker 1:And and sometimes it's like it's actually kinda nice for you. Like, now people will ask me questions, And I I'm sort of in that that that shoes, at least a little bit. And, it it is kinda nice to look back because I think about the problems I'm facing today, and I'm like, your problems feel I actually feel like I can solve some of your problems. I figured some of those things out. You know?
Speaker 1:And I think so for everybody. It's just kinda that pay it forward culture of just like it it's cathartic for everyone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I love that. I love that. It's one of our core values is reciprocity, paying it forward, and kinda globalizing that culture. Because as we've grown chapters all over the world, you see that, like, that's not that's not a cultural value around the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, a lot of people think you're gonna steal their ideas or you're gonna do and it's like, I'm busy enough with my own stuff. I I don't got time to steal your stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and there's almost a almost a transactional kind of dynamic that you you can encounter too. Yeah. The the stealing your idea one is is a great one that, you know, founders have to get over the nobody nobody cares about your your startup idea.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Cool. So looking ahead, like, it is such an interesting time. I've been a degenerate vibe coder for most of the holiday break. Because as a history major with an MBA, I've had to hire in for a company like Founder's Hour, which is an unintentional nonprofit. Like, I've had to hire tech talent that I can't you know, if they're any good in the area, they're at FAANG.
Speaker 2:And so I've had this pain point for fifteen years of our platform. I built my Zapier integration. Nice.
Speaker 1:You'll be
Speaker 2:glad to know. Yeah. And so I could pipe it over to HubSpot. And then, like, I I feel like I I feel like so empowered. Like, I feel with Cloud Code, like, I have it's like magic.
Speaker 2:And I feel like it's just so much power. And every night, I'm up till 12:30 doing things, like, that I could never do before. I and I'm just so curious about talking to you and the vantage point you have, especially thinking about your company and navigating and stewarding your company for the next decade. And, obviously, it's a little bit of a crystal ball. But what's your point of view on this, and where is it going?
Speaker 2:What's Zapier's role gonna be?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a really fun time. The benefits are really uneven right now. Yeah. Folks like you who are like, Hey, I'm a degenerate vibe coder.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean but there's like a there's you know, it it might seem like it's everywhere, but but it's really not. But it's really fun. Like, once you get hooked on it, it's it's pretty addictive. You know?
Speaker 1:And especially now with the latest batch of models, Opus four five, you know, GPT five two, Gemini three, like, these are all just incredible models. And, you know, you put them in something like Claude Code or, you know, Codex or heck, even Cursor. You know, it feels like you're there well, there's this old there's that old Steve Jobs quote that, you know, computers are a bicycle for the mind. And I don't know you about you, but I always kinda felt like that that quote was, like, aspirational, because it felt like, you know, computers felt to me like the bike where the chain falls off and the tires are a little fat and, like, the seat's uncomfortable. You don't really feel like It doesn't
Speaker 2:mean you're you're riding the bike. You're working on fixing the
Speaker 1:bike. Yeah. Exactly. But now, like, using Claude Code, that feels like a bicycle for the pine. It's like, I feel like I got the wind at my back.
Speaker 1:You know? It's just I'm just sailing here. And even when we have problems, it's like, no biggie. Let's just try again. And it's just, like, kinda off to the races.
Speaker 1:It's incredible. And so, you know, I think the one of the big challenges that we face, though, is that these tools, they massively benefit from context. If they don't have context, it's kinda like hiring a McKinsey consultant to come in for your business, where they'll drop a bunch of frameworks on you, but they don't understand your business. They don't understand anything. It's like smart smart sounding stuff.
Speaker 1:But is it actually useful? Hard hard to say. However, you give it context. You give it access to your CRM, your email inbox, your data warehouse, your customer support tool, you know, your calendar, you know, Slack, Glean, all these things. And now it really comes to life.
Speaker 1:And that's where I get excited about the role Zapier can play because, you know, we've got all these integrations. We've got 8,000 different tools. And you know, for for a lot of the Vibe coders out there, you know, first thing I always suggest is, man, you gotta hook Zapier MCP up to this stuff. You know, right now inside of Zapier, we've got we we do we do our performance reviews like the first week and get them done for, for the rest of the year. Everyone internally has agents set up that hook into, you know, Coda and Slack and Glean and their calendar.
Speaker 1:And they basically just say, hey. I'm writing my performance review for the end of the year. Can you go do a search into all these tools, pull out all my, like, best work, summarize what I did well, pull out the consistent feedback that I've gotten, help me write it in this format that zap your likes for performance reviews because they think it's a good format. And that takes what is usually just like a very stressful and tedious task and makes it, dare I say, kind of fun that you're just like, ta da. And so, you know, I think this is the world we're kind of moving to where the problems are not necessarily execution problems anymore.
Speaker 1:These tools can just go do the tasks that you need of them. The real problems of the future are, do you have good ideas? And then when the tools go and build those ideas, do you have good judgment on if the solution is good or not? And it turns out that I think might just be one of the most important skills going forward is the the the agency to point it at a problem and then the skill to evaluate, did it make a solution good? So humans are kind of at the start and the finish of all this work.
Speaker 1:But in the middle, you got AI that's orchestrating and doing all these things. And yeah, you're probably in there like having to troubleshoot and debug and like point stuff at it, but it feels, like I said, it feels more like being on a bicycle than, like, than than maybe using a computer does. It really does feel like you're just kinda out there, like, figuring the world out in a really fun way.
Speaker 2:You know, when I first moved to San Francisco from Silicon Valley, I was struggling to really adapt, and and getting around transit is was difficult. And as soon as I got a bike, it opened up the whole city. It was so much easier to get around, and I just it just, like, reminds me of that where I was like, what else is like that in my life that I just need the right tool? And then it'll make life I'll feel some sort of empowered and in control and and I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Disempowered is the word. And I think, you know, one takeaway is to go install Zapier MCP right after this call.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hook it up to Claude code. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously, it'll like, you'll you'll be off to
Speaker 2:the races. Yeah. I just really appreciate you, you know, as you said, you doing this today is a lot like those emails that Darmesh would sit down and write. And so I appreciate you doing that. And it's a way it's a leveraged way to do it.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Now you're gonna be our to members and yeah. And if we can have you come in, meet with our portfolio founders, meet with our whoever you wanna meet with, I'm happy to kind of create more surface area and facilitate
Speaker 1:more I would be happy to do this. We do workshops for, you know, startup founders, you know, VC portfolios, things like this all the time where we kinda show off, like, here's how to best practice for using these tools and here's some credits to help you get started and all that kind of thing. So we'd be happy to, you know, work and support you all on this stuff.
Speaker 2:So thanks for being the guinea pig on the podcast
Speaker 1:part of your side.
