The Start:

Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, hails from Missouri, USA.

An entrepreneur with a background in industrial engineering from the University of Missouri, Wade's journey began with a strong interest in technology and automation.

Before Zapier, he worked in various marketing and freelance roles, gaining valuable insights into the challenges businesses face in integrating different software tools.

The problem:

Alongside his co-founders, Bryan Helmig and Mike Knoop, Wade started Zapier in 2011 during a Startup Weekend event in Columbia, Missouri.

The trio aimed to create a platform that could automate repetitive tasks by connecting various web applications, thereby improving productivity for businesses and individuals.

Getting the first $$$:

The story of Zapier's inception is one of bootstrapped success.

Many companies like Dropbox, Salesforce, and Evernote had product forums where customers could make product requests and discuss new features.

Wade leveraged these forums effectively by visiting them and finding posts such as “I love Evernote, it would be great if it worked nicely with Dropbox,” or “I love MailChimp, it would be awesome if you had a Wufoo integration.”

He then commented on these posts with messages like:

“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 integration for this and if you want to find out more, go to this link and let me know.”

Each of these links garnered 10-15 visits—not a lot of traffic, but the right kind of customers.

About 50% of visitors would sign up for the Beta. Wade and his cofounder would call prospective clients from the product forums, asking them what integrations they wanted.

The team would then handle these integrations on the backend and email the customers when they were ready.

How they scaled:

After the Beta program, one of their key growth tactics was creating a landing page for every possible combination of zaps.

This approach boosted their SEO over time, allowing them to capitalize on specific keywords (e.g., [Company Name] and [Company Name]) that were underutilized at the time.

Another key channel was partner co-marketing, where Zapier collaborated with its integration partners to promote their combined solutions via co-marketing campaigns.

Zapier also utilized Google AdWords to target specific keywords related to their service offerings.

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