Or listen on:
It’s 10:20 am on the 8th of September in 2011, Bryan pings Wade over the following message:
They take this idea and team up with the third cofounder Mike to build out the Zapier MVP during the first annual Colombia Startup Weekend. They chose the name Zapier as the domain was available and it has "API" in the middle.
Wade quits his job as they sell lifetime access to the initial Beta in January of 2012 for $100 to ten or so customers.
9 years, 2,000 integrations and $50m in annual revenue later and anyone who is anyone in the SaaS... integrates with Zapier.
This post explains...
Now this first strategy could be intentional or non-intentional...
We don't know and maybe we'll never know.
Wade and the Zapier cofounders saw where the puck was going, and started skating there in 2011.
It's almost like they knew this was going to happen:
This image shows the number of new marketing technology businesses that launch each year...
And that's just marketing - similar growth is occurring across all sectors.
More SaaS applications = a greater need to ensure your data flows seamlessly between them.
When trends occur in the market, if you have the skill and the resources, you can drive faster than anyone else to get there first and seize the rewards...
But at the same time, if you start on your journey before the trend is widely accepted, you can be there as it starts to grow... increasing the likelihood that you will hit the #1 spot.
This is what Zapier have done, and it has paid off immensely.
I'm starting to see a pattern...
Wade Foster, the cofounder and CEO of Zapier has been quoted as saying he found Zapier's first users by stalking SaaS product forums such as Dropbox and Evernote to find people requesting integrations between their favourite tools.
He would then jump in and say:
“Hey, here’s how you can do it… here are the API docs to these two services, and if you know how to code, here’s how you can make it work. OR, I’m working on a project that will make an integration for this and if you want to find out more, go to this link and let me know.”
And though it may take him 10 minutes to write the message that may drive 10 or so visits to the site... he would get a customer.
You see, in the early days when you don't have a:
You have to go manual.
It's the only way you will be able to convince customers to take the risk... this echoes what I'm doing right now with
and customers.
Only those that believe in the people building the product.
By
.
So if you have less than 100 customers and aren't happy with your growth rate, stop:
And find the place on the internet where your customers are and PITCH.
Zapier have not always had a freemium model...
They initially charged $100 for access to their paid Beta, this would last as long as the Beta program existed. They then moved to a pricing plan based on the Fibonacci sequence:
This was a nod to the fact that they had no idea what they were doing with respect to pricing...
Their rationale for not launching with a freemium model was simple: once the product is good enough for free customers to gain value without support costs - they would do it.
And so after a couple of years, they switched from paid to freemium.
Picture this...
You just invested a shedload in your new
and are super excited. You spend a week configuring everything, it's looking great.
But there is this one automation step that you really need: an auto email sent to the CEO when you progress their deal to Closed Won. Pipedrive doesn't support this functionality so their support team points you in Zapier's direction.
You hit the landing page and set up the Zap in seven minutes flat. You feel this great sense of calm and accomplishment.
Then nothing happens for two months, the Zaps runs like a dream.
And you're telling all your business friends about your cool integration of course - the hidden benefit of freemium is the increase in volume of word of mouth. Zapier have approximately 100k paying customers and over 3 million users, that's thirty times the potential word of mouth exposure.
Until you get this email:
You know you can't loose that data... and you know that you aren't going to go back to manually sending those emails to the CEO after two months of these being automated to perfection.
Let's look at what just happened:
LEARNING: What is your slippery slope from discovery to value creation to value capture?
This is it...
This is the big one:
Zapier have built a product that heavily incentivises partners to integrate... and then more interestingly for the
At first, Zapier had to custom build integrations into core SaaS apps, and then Wade would reach out to their API person to embark on some co-marketing.
Some would accept, some wouldn't...
It took Zapier eight months to receive their first inbound SaaS partnership request - before that, it was pure outbound hustle to bring on new partners.
And a few months later, during Y Combinator... Wade gets a one line email from the Box CEO Aaron Levie saying: "Why isn't Box on Zapier?".
Aaron had seen somewhere that Dropbox integrated with Zapier... and he has FOMO.
The ball is now rolling...
Fast forward to today and Zapier now connects with 2,000 apps... the vast majority of these were built by the partner themselves (and not Zapier) and are actively promoted by these partners.
Here's a section of Zapier's Partner documentation that shares how they propose their partners promote the new integration:
Free:
...from each new partner that moves through their seamless, no touch partner integration process.
Here's an example of a partner page, from Mailchimp:
A domain with an 80/100 authority score according to
.
Number five is a beauty:
.
Imagine if you got advertising exposure in the onboarding flows of 5 other paid applications?
Insane.
But now we have to ask the question... why would a paid app insert advertising for Zapier in their onboarding flow?
Because the incentives work: the app will, in theory see increased customer retention as users integrate their product further into their business workflow.
Wade has been quoted saying that this SaaS partnership strategy has been instrumental to Zapier growth - I couldn't agree more.
That's it.
At Zapier... EVERYONE does support:
As surely there is a significant productivity drop experienced by regularly pulling each team member out of their day to day role.
When a customer speaks directly to the person that can solve the problem from them - it's an incredible experience.
Some roles within a business won't ever come in contact with the customer... this distances an employee from the value creation process (e.g. the reason the business exists).
As soon as the employ experiences the product helping people improve their lives, something clicks and can significantly improve employee engagement and retention.
If there is something wrong with any area of your product, when you have tens of thousands of customers... you will hear about it regardless of your personal expertise.
Having the whole Zapier team performing support is also a form of internal product training. The more employees know about the customer and product: the more effective they will be.
Selling to people that are already looking for your SaaS is 10x more effective than trying to persuade people that they need your SaaS.
This is the difference between capturing intent and generating demand.
One takes ages and costs a shedload of cash, the other is fast… and can be cost-effective.
Allow me to explain…
Zapier receives over 500k organic visits monthly:
Their SEO strategy focusses on creating large amounts of highly optimized landing pages for their different integrations… 25,000 of them to be precise:
Zapier has created a landing page for each SaaS tool they integrate with:
Every connection between two SaaS tools they integrate with:
And every “Zap” - a specific task that connects two SaaS tools:
Each page has:
And it gets better:
As we saw in Growth Lever 4, Zapier are no longer building these integrations.
They simply wait until a new partner integrates and the code performs well, I assume this then kicks off a notification to the content team to start building out this series of landing pages with content provided by the partner.
As we know from the previous Growth Lever 6, Zapier have done this:
They're currently sitting at just over 500k organic sessions per month...
Interestingly... it isn't the interactive SaaS partnership pages shared above.
Over 40% of this organic traffic comes from a specific type of "list post" that we can call the "Best Apps" series.
Zapier have simply collated lists of the best apps in specific niches:
How are they dominating what must be stiff competition on all of these terms?
Let's take a look at the best performing post: to do list apps (27.8k organic sessions per month) to try and understand how:
The perfect length
As is now widely known in the SEO word: longer content ranks higher.
The piece has been refreshed once per year since it was published in 2017:
Zapier have analysed top to do list apps, fit them into categories and then label those sections with longer tail keywords that will also drive more specific visitors.
For example: "best to do list app with google"
All that is great, but the real beauty in Zapier's content strategy lies in the fact their content is both deeply informative AND provides specific, relevant and interactive CTA's to the reader:
There are a total of four internal links in the final section of the Microsoft To Do app review:
This is great for two reasons:
And as you can imagine... the majority of apps featured in every "best of" blog posts integrate with Zapier:
This echoes the Ahrefs
- they only create content that features their product, they then drive people from blog posts directly into their $7 for 7 day trial.
In February 2016, Zapier launched the single biggest update in their 9 year history: Multi-Step Zaps. The ability for you to connect multiple apps within a single Zap.
And they wanted to make a splash.
The challenge was that... to date, the only growth strategies that they had mastered were:
Manual outreach was never going to make a big enough wave, SEO takes too long... so they focussed on partnerships.
You sell their attention to each-other.
Wade pitched the biggest application from each SaaS partner category on Zapier:
...on promoting the Multi-Step launch. His pitch was simply:
"If you email this to your users, we will include your logo on the landing page, which is also being promoted by X, Y and Z"
And it worked like a dream...
During the launch period, daily signups grew 70%... and they didn't slow down:
When we did it, I expected, “Okay, this is a great marketing launch. It’s going to cool down a little bit. We’re going to see a big spike and then it’s going to come down, but it will be a little bit better than it was before that.” It spiked and it stayed high. It never went back down.
LEARNING: Which big players in your niche can you convince to promote each-other? (and you of course!)
As mentioned in Growth Lever 1, Wade saw the future.
He accurately predicted the explosion of web applications and therefore the business need to connect them.
Zapier's team has been fully remote ever since cofounder Mike's wife went back to school in Missouri and their first support hire didn't want to leave Chicago.
Wade understands that in order for Zapier to continue to:
...he MUST bring in great people.
Silicon Valley startups also know this, and they attract talent through financial incentives: salaries, bonuses and stock options.
Zapier have raised approx, $1m and therefore cannot afford to compete in their realm.
So what can they offer that a software business headquartered in San Francisco cannot?
And so that's what they're selling.
Just as Papa John's can't beat Dominoes on speed, so they position themselves as the leader in ingredient quality:
It is clear to see that Zapier understands this advantage:
On every single page on their site, whether you are logged in or not... Zapier are shouting about that fact they work remotely.
Wade has been quoted as saying that the benefits of them being remote surpass just being able to recruit the best talent. Other benefits include:
It seems as though what started off as the default, became a competitive advantage.
What did we learn?
Which was your favourite Growth Lever, please leave a comment on the post below...