Zapier

“Product market fit is not just about the product. It's about the market too. You need these things to like coexist. And in many ways, that's what made Zapier hum is that the product and the go to market motion are inextricably linked. They work as one fluid mo…”

“And that's like for most of Zapier's history, you know, it's a relatively small ish team. And so a lot of it is, you know, a maniacal focus focus on like the singular thing. ... Generally we were always trying to think through, like, what is the one thing that…”

“As a first time founder, like if I tried to go 10 to a hundred, I think we would have ruined a lot of stuff inside the business.”

“It's way more fun and way more valuable to work with folks who have a much more dynamic problem solving skill set, where they can borrow from a bunch of different areas, and then they can start to put those puzzle pieces together in novel ways.”

“I think it took us till we probably had 30 or 40 people before we hired someone who had been a manager before into the company, which in hindsight was just like far too long.”

“We had this rule, don't hire till it hurts... One, it meant we did every single job. So we understood every piece of our business. So when we hired somebody in that meant we knew exactly how they were going to be effective, what was going to help them win. And…”

“So much of company building is literally just like showing up day after day and doing that for a really long period of time and just putting in the work, like building companies, building startups. It's not a particularly glamorous thing in spite of what, like…”

“And the fact that there was maybe, you know, half a dozen tech companies of like name That were doing that at the time, you know, that were more than, say, 10 or 50 employees doing that. That really gave us an incredible advantage trying to attract top enginee…”

“And of course, like a through line for all of this is just the explosion of number apps that are supported on the platform from two to now 6000 today.”

“If you tried to build a company like ours before, I don't think you have like all these APIs that you can go connect and do this stuff. Like most companies aren't building and doing stuff in this way. If you try and build it, you know, a year later, there's al…”

“You know, we figured out how to, A really good distribution engine that meant our customer acquisition costs like rounded to zero.”

“One of the first customers was doing that, but the app directory existed before we had a customer. It was just like, hey, we'll build this like little app directory, see if we can get people coming in through search. And if they are like, yeah, we can build a …”

“We raised the 1.3 million seed round. That's all we raised.”

“But if you can find somebody who has all the executive skill sets, who is willing to join your company and able to roll their sleeves up and do the job, that is a game changing hiring.”

“A good business makes a lot of this stuff a lot easier. Like, if you're making good money, if you're growing, if there's plenty of opportunity to go around, there's plenty of money to go around, salaries and bonuses and things like that, everything gets way ea…”

“We're still not an enterprise company. We still like SMB is our bread and butter. That's who we solve for.”

“The more you're even aware of these phenomenon, like the more you, and the smarter you are, like the more it actually dangerous you are to these things because you actually get better at rationalizing your way through it.”

“I think you get into this really tricky thing where you're just literally like paying attention to somebody else's roadmap and just being like, Hey, we just got to keep up. You know, we just got to match it one to one because oftentimes you don't actually know…”

“And if you tried to replicate it today, like, you couldn't do it because everyone has copied what Zapier has done now and It's just too competitive.”