How Zapier Reached $35M ARR
ryanberg.co
ryanberg.co
I documented the issue, linked Hubspot's API docs confirming it, submitted a ticket through their normal support portal and had a confirmed bug from a Zapier engineer within an hour. The fix was live before I came back from lunch about an hour later.
This is why they're successful. If I submit a bug report in Blink (usually major text rendering/CSS issues), a Google employee will look at the issue a month later, maybe. If I submit a bug report in one of their APIs, if it isn't Adwords and isn't customer impacting, the response is basically a middle finger/"we will fix never".
Zapier made a lot of my contracting work way easier and often I get the client involved and they become self-sufficient. Zapier should pay me money! kidding
I wouldn’t even know how to file a ticket with GDocs.
I've sent a bunch of reports and "feedback" in about it but it all just seems to go into a black hole without even being acknowledged.
This is quite suprising to me because i think google this way gets their snooping JS on lot of websites. It generates data for them. Sure they also have to host it... but then again this is just matter of accepting pull request.
There is a reason Google keeps on making failed social networking products and a 100 messaging apps. They are far more interested in algorithms that can scale than messy little customer issues.
The problem is that you can’t deliver great customer service with algorithms just yet.
I think that explains it.
>Zapier made a lot of my contracting work way easier and often I get the client involved
Could you please elaborate more?
Also if you ever wish one missing feature in Zapier, what would it be?
For me it'd be a price point between free and 25/mo. I like the product and would have so many uses for it.. but I'm a person not a business and $25/mo is a bit too steep for what I need
Same. There are several things I want to do with Zapier but at the free tier I have to limit it to one if I want it to for sure work all month.
I'm not using it for business, I'm using it to make things a little easier for myself wholly unrelated to any income generating thing so it's just not worth paying 25$ a month to me so for right now I only use it to get text messages when I get email from a specific individual.
In general, it doesn’t make sense to price a business tool so that an individual can afford to under-use it.
SAAS isn't exclusively a business service and many, many, many services have multiple pricing tiers. In fact, Zapier has multiple tiers... for businesses 'starting at 20$' and for teams 'starting at 250$' a month. They scale price based on how much you use the service.
With the free tier you are limited to two 'zaps', they run less frequently, you don't have access to multi-step, you have a rather finite limit on how many times they can run each month etc.
It's just bizarre there isn't a lower tier. I mean, it's even more than my squarespace hosting and squarespace has a 12$ and 18$ tier. Or evernote. Or any number of other services.
I'd happily pay 5$ a month for considerably more functionality but I'm not trying to automate an entire business and 20-25$ or more is nowhere near justifiable. Sure, if you make 6 figures maybe you're like "hey 20$ to handle some weird email situations for me and make some docs automatically, sure!" but for the majority of people it's a "well, guess I won't be giving them anything".
And it might still be fine for Zapier to provide a cheap tier for people who don’t value what they do, but if they offered that, too many businesses that get a lot of value from Zapier from, say, running five zaps, would downgrade.
When you are in a situation where you don’t want something very much, and a seller would lose a lot of money by trying to make you happy, you find a substitute and Zapier has plenty, especially for a developer with more time than money.
1. They still submit support tickets. Sometimes more often than people on higher tiers.
2. They’re hard to convert to higher paid plans.
Also, the market for note taking and web hosting is bigger than Zapier. It’s not quite as horizontal.
In the end, sometimes it just isn’t worth it to offer a lower price.
Which they are already doing for the companies paying them several hundreds, or thousands, of dollars a month...
That's like saying "Sorry, we won't sell you 100 lowly private individual an Impala, we only want to sell hundreds of them at a time to fleet-buyers, it costs us a lot of money to design these things!"
I totally understand that you want to use Zapier and save money, but you have to keep in mind a) you are (likely) a more expensive customer than you think you are, b) Zapier can’t serve you without self-cannibalizing. And this is an issue because you undervalue software; if Zapier is worth anything to you, it’s likely worth $20/mo but you are conditioned to not pay for something like that. This isn’t peculiar to you, but it’s something to be aware of.
Extracting images from emails!
I'm on a team of fiveish serving a whole company of fiftyish. Sometimes we resolve issues quickly, but often it pains me how long resolutions take. I'd love to do better but it's not clear how, short of staffing an engineer towards those reactive things specifically.
Involving engineers into support is not cheap, but it pays off with extraordinary customer loyalty.
And for sure a lot of automation, extensive internal and external FAQs, and good documentation.
The first time I saw Zapier, I got the tinge of developer/engineer/builder envy that I get whenever I see products that just are obvious in retrospect, and seem to be very well and flexibly implemented. I heard of it from a forward-looking product manager I respected at a famous internet security firm that I worked at in the past and it absolutely blew my mind (also he gave me a short demo) because of how easy it made things for end users despite the complexity I know the must have had to deal with.
An entire area of contract work is basically irrelevant. I get to bill people to train them to do simple things for themselves, cheaper and focus on the more important work instead. And I don't lose any of those clients because everybody won and they have other work to give me.
They deserve it!
Then they can put "great interop" on their landing page, list some companies that Zapier interops with on their page, and be done.
- more small business/enterprise integrations (e.g Salesforce, Shopify, Magento)
- can run Python or Javascript as part of a workflow
- complex workflows with branching and conditionals
I can spend several hours building and deploying something with AWS Lambda and API Gateway or 15 minutes in Zapier and it just works.
IFTTT is a toy by comparison, but is also more straightforward to use - different audiences.
For me it starts with the name -- IFTTT means absolutely nothing to the average non-technical user, it sounds like alphabet soup or maybe a standards body or something. Zapier also doesn't mean anything, but it means nothing in a easy to distinguish way from other things. The audience for IFTTT (which is obvious once you know the acronym and makes sense) is for developers where Zapier is generally for smart forward-looking non-technical to fully technical people in the right domain. IFTTT might get a crazy article or two in tech-focused publications and some fanfare from nerds but Zapier is the kind of thing that silently chugs along to be everywhere in ~5 years once product managers/leads, managers, business analysis people get a hold of it -- and the tech isn't even bad.
I don't work for Zapier, I don't push use or pay for their products, I have no connection to them except realizing when I first saw it that it was a excellent idea in a parched solution space with an above average to great implementation & UX.
[EDIT] - Thinking about this some more, Zapier is a subset of IFTTT the concept as in I could Zapier's functionality in the sentence "if X then Y", but that statement actually doesn't mean anything because you can maneuver X to be just about anything and Y to be just about anything. Zapier supports non-trigger based workflows from what I understand and so does IFTTT... so maybe they're more equivalent than anything with Zapier focusing on enterprise-level polished integrations.
Zapier - B2B and web app apis, IFTTT - Home and IOT automation.
In retrospect it seems obvious, but they probably would't be where they are today if they hadn't built it as an open platform (for partners developing their own zaps) from the beginning.
Actually met two of the founders (Wade and Bryan) in mountain view when they were based in the YC offices (5+ years ago). Sometimes it's easy to think someone's just lucky, but in this case I think it's pure focus, talent, and a great understanding of the acquisition sources that got them here.
Looking forward to see where they'll be in another 5 years.
It’s garbage that this approach works for SEO. Who wakes up in the morning and decides that creating 25k versions of the same web page is a good use of time, automated or not. Apparently it pays off, but I don’t want to compete on who can generate the most fluff, and it’s bogus that this behavior is rewarded.
Zapier landing page: Sure, just use a webhook trigger to Google sheets.
"Connect Trello to Gmail" is a totally different thing from "Connect Stripe to Salesforce".
I don't know about others but I favour something like StackOverflow because it's consistent and predictable. I know it will load quickly, things will be in the spot I expect, and I won't have to jump through modals to get to the content. They'd have more than 25,000 informative and templated pages ranking and it's a positive thing.
It's not a lie; it's an exaggerated truth.
It only works if the company supports it obviously, but it's a nice win for them and completely legitimate in terms of both search engines and users finding what they need.
I found Zapier many years ago because I was searching for a way to connect two specific products together. They made a page to advertise their general purpose tool as a way to solve my specific need. It was effective, and at a time when there was no other way.
Not sure why you see this as such a negative thing.
We don’t use it for truly production-critical things, but at some point integrations like this for CRM, support systems, etc need to be working and can’t just turn off for 30 minutes as we hand-copy a new idea into it.
How to have a “test endpoint” for a given Zap, or to promote/copy a change from one Zap to another — has anyone worked out a best practice for this?
- duplicate your prod zap
- adjust the url to send a webhook to both your prod zap, and your (duplicate) dev zap (with just a single request): https://zapier.com/help/webhooks/#triggering-multiple-webhoo...
- once your changes are ready, "promote" it by turning the new zap on, and the old one off
There could be other workarounds for doing similar things, kinda depends on the overall structure of that particular Zap. Feel free to give us a shout anytime, and we could take a closer look at your specific setup! https://zapier.com/app/contact-us
When setting up a basic script to save attachments to a Dropbox, two basic thinks it could not do:
- Mark an e-mail as read
- Treat attachments individually (they all got dumped in a ZIP)
Zapier told me their gMail integration is better. But IMAP is the open standard.
Given they are entirely remote and have a pretty unique culture, I doubt they get acquired unless it's done like Amazon did with Zappos (basically bought them then said "keep doing whatever you're doing, we'll leave you alone").
Zapier achieved $35M ARR because they sell $35M worth of customers every year and have a product that can back that sales channel up.
1. Their SEO is on-point (search <Insert SaaS 1> integration with <Insert SaaS 2> and you'll undoubtedly get a 1st page SERP from them
2. Their customer service is great (from what I've read) and appears to be very international friendly.
3. They have good freemium hooks that get you to upgrade and clearly have A/B tested this for conversion purposes.
TL;DR - Product alone doesn't get you $35M ARR.
https://www.saasoptics.com/saaspedia/annual-recurring-revenu...
What happens if Google or Trello or Salesforce changes their APIs? How does Zapier keep up?
Plus Zapier support has been phenomenal, albeit slow as fuck using email, they are persistent and knowledgeable.
Zapier makes more sense for many smaller tasks. A common example I'm familiar with is to connect the output of a Google form with a crm search and create a ticket to follow-up based on some filters. This is something that you can set up on Zapier in 10 minutes, and you wouldn't want the hassle of actually maintaining your own backend for something like that.