How Zapier Went from Zero to 600k Users

Zapier really does have great support.

When you use them for something, and then a direct integration becomes available you actually feel bad about stopping using Zapier. I think this is largely because of the quality of their support.

If you are a startup and you don't have your founders and engineers doing support, I guarantee you - you are pissing off your customers. And are missing an opportunity to understand what these customers actually want.

I am looking at you FullContact, my current favorite offender here.

This is the number one best startup story I've ever heard. The keys I got out of it: (1) focus on the customer and the product not the culture itself, (2) charge and make money even if it takes bucking the norm, (3) have work-life balance as part of culture, (4) it's a blessing not to get funded too early, (5) remote workers are acceptable, (6) team building via getting together is very important, (7) use SEO and partner co-marketing.

If I could find anything wrong with this post, it would be that generating content is not always a good idea unless you know what you are doing. Many people can't do it well. It's like telling random people: "Go play some songs for us and then people will listen to your mp3s and you'll get more business." Well... yeah... if you are entertaining enough. Otherwise, it's just going to make you look bad.

I used Zapier to set up an automatic reminder on Hipchat for developers to shut down unused AWS machines. It was dead simple, took about 5 minutes, and has worked flawlessly ever since.

It should be noted that Zapier is (YC S12).

I have used and recommended zapier a number of time and actually wrote some custom code to integrate with another startup (Lob): http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1468

My favorite Zapier story, though, reflects how accessible they are. My company has a FAC, and we had just started using Zapier (this was probably 2 years ago). No one knew how to pronounce Zapier, so tweeted Wade and before the FAC was over, had an answer. Obviously a trivial question, but indicative of how they treat customers.

The article has some good actionable advice too.

I remember a client at a previous job claiming an app we were developing for them was definitely going to get "millions of users" in only three weeks after release, even with a small marketing budget. I laughed at how crazy unrealistic that was.

I bet they would look at these numbers and scoff, even though it's still an excellent number and I know they didn't even breach 50k users several months after release (I was no longer on the project after that point).

Zapier started at my hometown Startup Weekend! Stoked these dudes are getting the attention they deserve. They're great guys.

+1 on Zapier! I'm a big fan of the service and platform. With YC news a more tech-focused crowd their web interface for building integrations is really effective. Point-n-click for most stuff, and you can fallback to JS should you need to get more creative.

> So we come to our partners and we can now say “alright, here are the things that if we both do them, this is going to be successful.” 99% of the time, people are like “thank goodness, let’s do this.”

Would be great to see some examples of these successful marketing campaigns.

I found Zapier by searching for integrations available to the enterprise email marketing platform we use. Unfortunately, they don't support it and I never got to use them in production, but from just toying around with it, it looks extremely useful.

What's the difference between Zapier and IFTTT? They seem pretty similar.

It would be great to get a big list of growth stories, each in 255 characters or less. e.g. Went viral with free web widget, made zero money, realized growth without revenue sucks, pivoted.

I've used zapier recently and I've found it pretty convenient. My only complain is that their RSS integration lacks the concept of rate limiting. In my case I was using it to process user-events, so I needed a way to introduce some delay between an event an another, but I couldn't find a way of doing it using zapier.

Zapier is really a great product with a cool bunch of smart people behind it. I freelanced consulting for Zapier customers for a while and can tell you there's some companies solving real business problems elegantly besides notifications, like Salesforce to Salesforce and 3rd party APIs

This article was a great read, full of little nuggets. I highly recommend reading it.

It was also interesting seeing that he really applied Kevin's advice and philosophy (check Kevin's talk for the YC Start a Startup).