The Ledger
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Wade Foster says startups should charge beta users to filter noisy feedback
“Everyone's like, oh, we should make it free. So we get more usage, et cetera. And I just think that that's a really tough place to be. Cause you're going to get a lot of just like noisy feedback from people who actually really don't have this problem. Whereas …”
Early customers tolerate poor software if founders care deeply about their problem
“Like most, most people don't have an entrepreneur who deeply cares about solving their problem. And so even if the software is not good, they'll be okay with it because like you just have a passion and excitement for it.”
A company's decline starts when it stops doing small customer-focused things
“I think it's so easy to lose that stuff as you get bigger. It's like, ah, we're a big company now. Like we only do big company things. But that's kind of when I think the decline starts and the decline might be long. Like you might have like so much like insti…”
Wade Foster says early growth at Zapier was an engineering problem
“We knew the thing that would create, cause us to grow is more integrations. Cause every new integration meant new landing pages. It meant new partnerships. And that was, More customers coming our way. And so basically growth became really about an engineering …”
Zapier raised little capital and was fully remote early on
“We didn't raise much money, we did remote work before it was a thing”
Zapier made its first revenue via a $100 personal PayPal transfer
“Send it to my personal PayPal account. And so that was literally how we made our first money was just a hundred bucks via PayPal.”
Zapier founders built Wufoo and AWeber integrations overnight for Andrew Warner
“So we did have PayPal and HiRise, but Wufu and AWeber, we didn't. And so when he emailed back and was interested, I went to Brian and Mike and I was like, can you all build Wufu and AWeber tonight? And they're like, yep, on it. So that night we got Wufu and AW…”
Zapier charged early users a flat $5 one-time fee for beta access
“We actually put a price on the page and we said, Hey, it's five bucks to get access to the beta. Which is comically cheap but, and it wasn't even a recurring thing, it was just like five dollars, you have access, and it's gonna be the life of the beta.”
Zapier had 1,000 paying beta users when Y Combinator finally accepted them
“This time around, I think the time we applied, we'd had a thousand people that had paid for access to the beta, 10,000 people on a launch list.”
Zapier's initial pricing plans were based on the Fibonacci sequence
“Yeah, the first plan was 11 dollars, the second one was 23 dollars, the third one was 58 dollars a month, and because we're Zaps, we were like we should give them fun plan names, and so the plan names were amps, volts, and ohms and so that's what we shipped.”
Wade Foster says early Zapier forum comments yielded two signups each
“Every one of these comments I'd make, you tended to get, you know, Four or five people would reach out and two of them would sign up and be like, I want to use this.”
Zapier's first external hire was in customer support
“Our first hire ended up actually being someone to help with customer support.”
Y Combinator rejected Zapier's first application in 2011
“So we go ahead and apply. Straight rejected.”
Wade Foster personally conducted manual onboarding for over 50 early Zapier users
“I was doing this bespoke onboarding for, I don't know how many people I did it for. I lost count. It probably was hundreds. You know, if it wasn't hundreds, it was definitely, you know, more than 50 people that I was just going through this process over and ov…”
Mixergy podcast host Andrew Warner was Zapier's very first customer
“Our very first customer was a podcaster, Andrew Warner, who runs this podcast Mixergy”