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.
How?
This post explains…
Growth Lever 1 – Skate To The Puck
Now this first strategy could be intentional or non-intentional…
We don’t know and maybe we’ll never know.
Regardless, it still has value.
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.
Why is this good for Zapier?
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.
LEARNING: Where is your market heading over the next 5-10 years and can you start skating there now?
Growth Lever 2 – Manual Recruiting (And Pure Grind)
I’m starting to see a pattern…
- Manny Medina went door to door in the Soma district of San Francisco in the early days of Outreach
- Nathan Barry famously got on a plane to New York to sell to a potential big customer in the early days of ConvertKit
- And now Wade…
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:
- Brand
- High converting website
- Testimonials
- Social activity
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 bCast. We don’t have the brand name to see a decent ROI from ads, content or social… so I’m going manual to recruit both affiliates and customers.
Who’s going to invest in an unknown product when there are players in the space that have been around since the dawn of podcasting?
Only those that believe in the people building the product.
And how do you find those people?
By speaking to them one on one.
So if you have less than 100 customers and aren’t happy with your growth rate, stop:
- Hiring sales people
- Blogging
- Working on the onboarding flow
- Posting on Linkedin
- Optimizing Google Ads
And find the place on the internet where your customers are and PITCH.
LEARNING: Go manual for the first 100 customers…
Growth Lever 3 – An Insanely Slippery Slope
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:
- $21
- $35
- $55
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.
What’s the experience like?
Picture this…
You just invested a shedload in your new Pipedrive CRM 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:
- Re-assuring the user that their data won’t be lost
- Providing just enough scarcity to boost conversion
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.
So you jump into your Zapier account and add those card details.
Let’s look at what just happened:
- Discovery – You’re introduced to a brand by a trusted source ( the Pipedrive support team in this case)
- Value creation – It takes you seven minutes to set up the automation that saves you an hour per week
- Value capture – You are gently prompted to move to a paid plan to save your time and data
LEARNING: What is your slippery slope from discovery to value creation to value capture?
Growth Lever 4 – The Ultimate SaaS Partnership Strategy
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 SaaS Marketer: promote them.
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:
- Backlinks
- Social exposure
- Email promotions
…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 SEMRush.
Number five is a beauty: “Feature your Zapier integration in your onboarding emails”.
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.
LEARNING: Who would your ideal partners be and how can you incentivise them to promote you?
Growth Lever 5 – Everyone Doing Customer Support
That’s it.
At Zapier… EVERYONE does support:
- Technical support is provided by the engineering team where they rotate through on a weekly basis
- Non technical support is provided by every other employee that spends half a day per week supporting customers
Why? What are the benefits?
As surely there is a significant productivity drop experienced by regularly pulling each team member out of their day to day role.
Better customer service
When a customer speaks directly to the person that can solve the problem from them – it’s an incredible experience.
Learning from customers
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.
Learning about the product
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.
LEARNING: Maybe consider scrapping your next CS hire and build out a rota for your team to action support.
Growth Lever 6 – SEO Without Blogging
Selling to people that are already looking for your SaaS is 10x more effective than trying to persuade people that they need your SaaS. Even our top 20 Saas marketing agency cannot disagree with it.
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:
- Extremely high search intent
- A simple data structure
- Breadcrumbs for easy navigation by both people and search engines
- Interactive page elements that increase time on the page whilst providing highly specific CTA’s:
And it gets better:
Wait for it…
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.
LEARNING: What content bridges the gap between someone searching and someone using your SaaS… and do you have to be the one to create it?
Growth Lever 7 – Blog Posts As Advertising?!?!
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…
Which posts are driving this volume?
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:
- Best To Do List Apps
- Best Screen Capture Tool
- Best URL Shorteners
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.
Continual content refresh
The piece has been refreshed once per year since it was published in 2017:
Long tail sub headings
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:
- Link to the Microsoft To Do app integrations page
- Links straight to the specific Microsoft To Do integration
- Another link (with UTM tracking clicks from the widget) to the Microsoft To Do app integrations page
- A link to the homepage
This is great for two reasons:
- We know that Google loves page interaction as it shows them that the user they just referred is probably getting value from the content.
- This is a seamless transition down through Zapier’s funnel for a user that is considering one of the To Do list applications featured in the post
And as you can imagine… the majority of apps featured in every “best of” blog posts integrate with Zapier:
This echoes the Ahrefs content strategy – they only create content that features their product, they then drive people from blog posts directly into their $7 for 7 day trial.
LEARNING: How can you insert native CTA’s into your blog posts?
Further Reading: Bootstrapping To $25k MRR – The VEED Story
Growth Lever 8 – The Multi-Step Zap Launch
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 – Growth Lever 2
- SaaS Partnerships – Growth Lever 5
- SEO – Growth Lever’s 7 and 8
Manual outreach was never going to make a big enough wave, SEO takes too long… so they focussed on partnerships.
How do you get 6 of the biggest SaaS apps to promote you at the same time?
You sell their attention to each-other.
Wade pitched the biggest application from each SaaS partner category on Zapier:
- Trello
- Mailchimp
- Eventbrite
- Slack
- Pipedrive
…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!)
Growth Lever 9 – Fully Remote Since Day One
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:
- Build an awesome, seamless product experience
- Provide insanely good customer support
- Execute on the Growth Levers mentioned in this post
…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?
Flexibility.
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:
- Better for the environment
- Cost savings (for both the business and employee)
- Better for personal productivity
- Increased retention
It seems as though what started off as the default, became a competitive advantage.
LEARNING: What can your SaaS offer talent that other competitors can not?
What did we learn?
- Where is your market heading over the next 5-10 years and can you start skating there now?
- Go manual for the first 100 customers…
- What is your slippery slope from discovery to value creation to value capture?
- Who would your ideal SaaS partners be and how can you incentivise them to promote you?
- Maybe consider scrapping your next CS hire and build out a rota for your team to action support.
- What content bridges the gap between someone searching and someone using your SaaS… and do you have to be the one to create it?
- How can you insert native CTA’s into your blog posts?
- Which big players in your niche can you convince to promote each-other? (and you of course!)
- What can your SaaS offer talent that other competitors can not?
Which was your favourite Growth Lever, please leave a comment on Twitter or on the post below…
We spent a week studying how @zapier grew to $50m ARR with just $1m in funding whilst being 100% remote.
Here’s what we found 👇👇👇
— SaaS Marketer (@SaaS_Marketer) May 12, 2020
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Tom Hunt is the founder of SaaS Marketer and bCast (podcast hosting for marketers, by marketers). He lives and works in Hackney, London with his delightful partner Rebecca and little dog called Bear.
