It's 10:20 am on the 8th of September in 2011, Bryan pings Wade over the following message:

8 years, 1,000 integrations and $50m in annual revenue later and Zapier is a driving force in the app integration space.

How?

This posts explains...



Selling to people that are already looking for your SaaS is 10x more effective than trying to persuade people 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.

Especially when other people are doing the work for you.

Allow me to explain...


receives over 500k organic visits monthly:

Their
strategy focusses on creating large amounts of highly optimized landing pages for their different integrations... 25,000 of them to be precise:


has created a landing page for each SaaS tool they integrate with:

Every connection between two SaaS tools:

And every "Zap" (specific task) connecting two SaaS tools:

A simple data structure...

Breadcrumbs for easy navigation...

And interactive page elements that increase time on the page whilst providing highly specific CTA's.

The brilliant part is still to come.

Wait for it...

The majority of this content is not created by Zapier.

In fact, the integrations... are not even created by Zapier.

Their partners do all this work, with Zapier having editorial and code review rights to ensure quality.

Furthermore, in order for a partner to launch a new integration, Zapier recommends that they link from their site and an announcement on their blog, with a backlink to the integration page.

Providing relevant backlinks from high authority sites (imagine the SEO impact of getting a backlink from Gmail) and a fresh stream of users for Zapier.

We salute you Bryan, Wade & Mike.

What did we learn?

1. Understand who you are or could partner with
2. Consider making high-quality SEO landing pages with rich content for each partner
3. Ask them to input on content and backlink when live.