600 thousand users in 3 years: Zapier history

Wade Foster talks about the unusual beta version of the Zapier application, attracting new users and successful remote work with employees.

The ability to integrate various software products with each other is not a discovery, but the ability to effectively combine two products is available only for those who have programming skills at one level or another.
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A few years ago, Zapier changed this situation.

The company has made the integration of [services] available to almost everyone. For example, for a marketer who wants to combine his email-marketing software with an analytical application. Or for the director, who needs to track his tasks in [application] Trello from three other applications at once. All this can be done in the Zapier application, without any programming.

This application is liked by many, and to be more precise, more than 600 thousand people. However, like any other successful business, Zapier started from scratch. The creators of Zapier were not technically savvy, and according to them, their resumes were not at all impressive, and their first application for entering Y Combinator was immediately rejected.

It all started with Startup Weekend

Despite the pet's status [at the moment] in the startup community, Zapier does not go back to Silicon Valley. Not at all. Wade and his two co-founders, Bryan Helmig and Mike Knoop, created the very first application prototype in just two days at the Startup Weekend event in Columbia, Missouri.

Encouraged by the feedback they received, they decided to further their idea. They submitted an application to Y Combinator, but did not accept them (see below for details). They were different from the typical teams from TechCrunch: for the sake of the project they did not quit their jobs, did not take risks, did not set the task to gain fame.

We wanted to succeed and create a full-fledged business, but we were in Colombia. There are few sources of funding. Projects working here finance themselves from current profits, so this project could not [immediately] replace the main job. We had to preserve our core work and organize an approach with this in mind - this is where we started.

A week after Startup Weekend, on the night from Monday to Tuesday, we began to think about how to implement it, and got down to business. The next few months, at night and on weekends, we worked to create the first prototype and find the first users [to test the beta version of the application].

Unlike his co-founders, who were talented developers, Wade specialized in marketing, so his main task was to attract users. It was not easy, because they only had a barely working prototype of the application.

First users

Zapier was not at all ready for publication, but this did not prevent Wade from “knocking on people at the door” (or rather, in mailboxes).

We had a working prototype of the application - not too good, and certainly not so cool that the client immediately became interested in him and formed his own integration of services. And although the clients could not yet use the application themselves, I could install and configure it for them - which I did.

I called people on Skype, asked what services they wanted to link, and did it for them. As a result, the client received a working bundle, just what was needed.

Wade was looking for possible ways to grow the business, and in the application support forums he found users who wanted to combine some services.

I searched the forums where users wrote about the integration of services and asked to make them for themselves. Evernote, Salesforce, Dropbox - all these services have forums.

People wrote something like: “I like Evernote, it would be great if it worked in conjunction with Dropbox” or “I like MailChimp, it would be great if you made a decision linking it to Wufoo”.

And I just left my comments on these forums: “Hello, see how you can do it: here is the API documentation for these two services, and if you can program, this is how it will work. OR there is another option: I am currently working on a project with which I can integrate these services, so if you are interested in it, follow the link and let me know. ”

These links, left on the forums, did not bring serious traffic - no more than 10-20 visitors from each link - about half of which made the conversion and reported: "Yes, I want it."

In the early stages of business deployment, this is incredibly important, and we were able to move from scratch with the help of such targeted advertising. And not only forum participants paid attention to us. Wade was interested in the companies themselves that own these forums.

Very soon we had the opportunity to meet with many employees of these companies, because they contacted us and said: “Hello, your application looks cool, maybe we will cooperate?” - and this was the beginning of a partnership for Zapier.

These Skype calls in the early stages of our business are also becoming part of the future Zapier customer service culture.

The first versions of the prototype are constantly falling. It is very important to attract people who understand what a beta version is and forgive all mistakes in work and other inconveniences.

When something didn’t work, I certainly felt terrible, but it was a rewarding experience, so I called up with the clients, explaining that the problem [that they had indicated] was already being solved.

If we found a mistake, then we corrected it as quickly as possible, and immediately informed the client: “Hello, do you remember the problem we discussed on Skype? We solved it. ”

This level of service to the first customers surprised many.

Kevin Hale, the founder of Wufoo, told me that there are only three types of business.

You can create a business selling high-quality products. Companies like Apple create the best-of-its-kind products and ask for the right price.

You can create a business that will offer the cheapest products and services, such as Walmart or Amazon.

The problem is that a young company is too difficult to compete in the market of the most expensive or the cheapest services. Your product may not be the best (and expensive) because your product is brand new. And offering the cheapest is also difficult, because then you will not be able to take advantage of economies of scale.

And the third type of business you can build is providing the very best customer service.

These words have sunk into my soul, so from the very first day we decided: "Let's call on Skype, let's move forward in small steps to just be able to make people happier, and they will want to work with us."

Any startup can do this - offer great customer service. You do not need to be a genius to be able to behave friendly and help others.

The unusual way to attract users was not the only non-standard thing in the beta version of the Zapier application. They didn’t attract people to pay for using the first versions of the product. People paid for the privilege of using it.

To test your beta application, most companies simply offer: “Register, get the application for free, all you need to do is leave feedback with suggestions for improvement. We will respond to every offer. ”

They just beg the customers. And we asked people to make a one-time payment to get our beta version. From the first few people for unlimited access to this version we took $ 100. Then this figure varied - we asked for about $ 1, and in the end the price was set at about $ 5 to $ 10 for unlimited access to this version of the application.

This is not to say that we wanted to make money on the beta version. We wanted people to think that the application was worth the money and time spent on it (which they spent communicating with us), even if they were testing it for fun and were not going to use it on an ongoing basis. So this small obstacle helped us earn some money and get some of the first interested users who explored the application far and wide and wrote a review about really important things.

How Zapier was not accepted (but then accepted) in Y Combinator

After developing the idea for Startup Weekend, Zapier co-founders decided to submit an application to the Y Combinator accelerator. Application rejected.

None of us had an impressive resume. We are not engineering students at Stanford University working on cool startups in the Valley. We have never been financed before. In our resumes, such things as “education of an industrial engineer” and “work in a mortgage company” were indicated.

We did not suit them at all. We thought, “Well, very bad. In any case, let's continue doing what we were going to do. ” We were still working on our prototype, wrote letters to people, and developed our Zapier promotion strategies.

A year later, the team applied again, and this time the result was different.

The second time we already had a correctly working version of the application, which was paid for by a thousand people, and ten thousand more were waiting for the application to be released. We have integrated 25 different services into the [developed by ourselves] platform, we can say that we have gone from unknown newbies with an impracticable idea to developers, still without an impressive resume, but with a certain achieved result. This is the biggest change that has happened to us, and perhaps thanks to him we have applied to YC again.

So, what did the team achieve in YC? Surprisingly, their biggest achievement was not funding, connections, or education — what is usually expected of an accelerator graduate.

At YC, our main achievement, which is rarely talked about, was the understanding of the importance of customer orientation. For three months we lived and worked in a tiny apartment and practically did not communicate with anyone. We only did what we wrote the code, created the application, worked with our users. It’s not possible to lead such a lifestyle for a long time - it’s impossible to work in this mode for years, but it’s quite possible for three months, for many people it can definitely work. And our progress during this time was simply enormous.

We even began to learn in the technological sphere, since we tried to integrate all the most popular SaaS platforms (this helped us a lot). When we were young, no one knew us, but thanks to the “YC” label we seemed to people to be a promising company, and they were ready to support us and work with us.

SEO to attract new users

Creating a platform made up of products from other companies in itself helped the Zapier team use the “power” of the search results to increase their traffic.

We created landing pages for each application interaction that could be combined. So, if you are looking for Groove and JIRA, Zapier will also be looking for queries.

Marketing with partners

There were more and more partners, and this became one of the biggest sources of traffic for Zapier, and Zapier also began to be of tremendous value to its customers. Partners often helped by recommending integration with Zapier, but the Zapier team was capable of more.

With hundreds of partner applications integrated behind them, the Zapier team knew how to help their partners co-run a more successful marketing campaign.

At first, we simply asked [partners]: “Hello, recommend our app!” We asked [all] our partners to write tweets, share information about us on Facebook, advertise us by any means. But then we realized that this was simply ineffective: neither we nor the partners had achieved excellent results, and therefore we began to try different strategies with different partners.

We paid attention to the most successful advertising strategies and started working in this direction - when we created a new integration, we ourselves carried out a marketing campaign to promote it. People turned to us because at this point we had the experience of creating integrations, and now they thought that we were the ones who needed them.

Thanks to this, we could come to the partner and tell him: “This is what we need to do together, and then Zapier and your service will succeed.” And in 99% of cases, people answered us: “Great! Let's do it. ”

Creating your own content

At first, search engine optimization and collaboration in marketing was enough to turn a startup into a real business. But about two years ago, the company began to invest much more effort in its content marketing. And it paid off instantly - almost 250,000 people read the Zapier blog now every month.

We felt that we needed to raise the bar. Our partnerships and search engine optimization strategy worked well, but Zapier seemed to us to still be somehow unrecognizable. If you did not need our application, then there was no reason to know about its existence.

It seemed to me that we did not fully understand the mission of our own company, did not understand that because of what we had already done, it was worth the effort and what was not, so we decided to use the potential of content marketing to tell people about ourselves: in this case, as soon as the blog reader needs application integration, he will first think about us.

We watched what celebrities did on the Internet and thought about how to become like them, while maintaining our own style and highlighting issues that we thought would attract potential users. This is how our blog was formed, where we started writing about applications, tools, performance, and the like. It took a lot of effort and time, and it was difficult.

In the first six months it was hard. In the next six months - a little better. And in the last six months it was great. This is very similar to personal savings. You must continue to invest a little. If you make only one contribution, you will not get a big profit, but if you constantly make investments for a long time, you will get a large percentage from them, and ultimately much more benefits.

How Zapier switched to remote work

In the Zapier team from the very beginning, people from different places worked.

The time spent in Y Combinator is the only period when we worked together in the same place at the same time. After [the release of Zapier from] YC, when Mike's girlfriend (now wife) was studying in Missouri, Mike said: "I'm going to move there."

Then we thought that it was very important for our company, and we were not going to lose it because of the move, so we just agreed to work remotely, after that he returned to Missouri. Micah, our first tech support employee, lived in Chicago, so we decided we could work remotely. Other companies manage to work remotely, so we also decided to try.

Over time, remote work has truly become an important part of our [corporate] culture and identity, and everything worked out perfectly for us. Of course, it was difficult, but I think we benefited a lot from this.

To create a [corporate] culture in which people want to work, we made Zapier a priority for regular employee meetings. Many companies consider remote work a “cheap option”, although in reality they don’t even consider this option, however if you work in the same office, you really have to pay for the rent of the premises.

However, instead of including renting an office as an expense item, it’s better to include travel expenses there, because, working always remotely, you will definitely want to meet in person: it seems to me that some personal connection is formed at such personal meetings that cannot be established during remote work .

Summarizing the above, there are things that can be done remotely to create a good corporate culture in some way. We have always hired people who care the same thing as us. We wanted to hire people who would really try to do their job really well, and who would think less about ping-pong tables and massagers, and more like to create high-quality products.

It was easier for us to unite as a team, having in the company of employees for whom the same thing as us is important. I also think that you need to hire slowly and for a specific purpose. If you hire a lot of employees too quickly (you double your staff every six months), then working remotely will most likely be impossible.

And one more absolutely necessary thing in work is communication, regardless of whether it is remote or not.

Another important part of creating a strong culture is to make the team understand that even for the director, the balance between work and personal life is important.

I do not work 12 hours a day.

I have a fairly standard work schedule, and when my wife goes home, I also go home, we have dinner together and go to rest. I go to bed early and, waking up the next morning, I repeat my working day.

I never work on Saturdays and Sundays, I may just “play a little” with Zapier, but this is more like an application functionality check. The worst thing I can do for my company is to pretend to be a superhero and work 16 hours a day, and after 18 months in this mode, realize that I can no longer.

All Zapier employees have worked in technical support at least once.

There is one thing that every Zapier employee, from developers to marketers, must do is work in customer support.

There is no such thing that you get a job [with us] and never speak with clients. If you do not want to serve customers - look for another job.

Our principle of work - everyone should work in support.

Our engineers do all the technical work, and they change from time to time: today we have about 10 engineers working for us, so they work one week out of ten serving customers.

This helps in many ways, because this is how engineers see what problems arise with the application, and how customers are disappointed.
The support team and other employees involved in creating the product always speak “the same language” about what is most important for users, because everyone already knows it.

Other employees, for example, from the marketing department or other departments, spend four hours in support each week, and this helps them to better understand the desires of users, so that they care more about customers.

This is what we have been doing since day one, and this is a long way towards creating a customer service oriented company.

Therefore, interviews about hiring new employees are associated with unusual tasks for candidates: each of them must have a good understanding not only of his profession, but also of user support.

During the interview, we are looking for people to whom we are; if the engineer is really professional in his work, but a bit irritable, we probably won't hire him because such people are not suitable for working in support.

We also pay attention to how their letters are written to us: are they friendly or short and callous? We just want our employees to write friendly letters to customers, so along the way we pay attention to such things.

We also ask questions, for example: “Have you ever been given excellent user support?” We also ask one weird question to find out how the candidate will give the customer bad news: “Let's say you and I are meeting now and you want to part with by phone How do you tell me about this? ”

Sometimes in support you have to give bad news, but you still have to do it with sympathy, and in such a way that the customer is satisfied [with the service].

We ask all of our candidates what kind of startup literature they would recommend reading. Before you suggest an essay by Paul Graham and a Lean Startup, listen to Wade's valuable advice — warning:

I think that the most important thing is to start acting, try to do something, see what came out of it and analyze it. You don't just need to read for the sake of reading a book on business, use the reading as a motivation to do what you are going to do.

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