Foster: A former roofer built an agency automating roofers' back offices
Wade Foster · #2289 Building companies using Zapier’s AI automations · Dec 19, 2025 · at 0:35
Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, discusses with Andrew Warner how vertical automation agencies are being built on Zapier for traditional service businesses like roofing.
0:00 / 1:20exact quote · 80.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We have one of our like solutions partners, experts, he started as a roofer. So he was running small time business, local roofing business, you know, Hale would come in, people would call him up and be like, I need a new roof, and he'd go out and, like, get him a new roof, and so that's what he did for a living and You know, as per roofers go, turns out he's, like, a little more techie, a little more nerdy than your average roofer, and he had set up a bunch of, like, technology to help him manage his business, so he had you know, he was running ads on Facebook and Google to, like, target local stuff. He, you know, had a CRM to collect his leads. He would send out you know, invoices so people could pay via credit card versus, like, writing a check you know, or handing cash over, like, you know, stuff like that that, you know, is, Is pretty modern for what you might expect a roofer to do. And, you know, one of these days he was like, you know what, I don't know that I want to be out on a roof all day, every day for the rest of my career, but maybe I could help my fellow roofers out with all this back office stuff. And so he set up a roofing automation agency where he works with roofers and basically gives them the playbook for like, here's how you can manage your back office, like way more efficiently. So you can take on more clients and you can spend more time Out on the roof, fixing the more roofs, getting more billable hours.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Wade Foster
Wade Foster: Vibe coding is for one-off utilities, not load-bearing SaaS
“I think vibe coding is fantastic for building tools that you can't buy, or these, like smaller utilities, where it's like, hey, this is sort of like a one-off piece of software that I need to use to solve a particular job. Fantastic. We're seeing so much more …”
Wade Foster: Zapier is rolling out AI coding tools to non-engineers
“This week now we are rolling out company-wide. We're getting everybody in every function, not just engineering. So like marketing, sales, accounting, HR, all set up on either cursor, cloud code, or codex. One of the three.”
Foster: Zapier will likely always rely on external LLMs
“I think, you know, we will probably always depend on you know, external LLMs for large parts of this.”
Wade Foster: Marketing to AI purchasing agents requires entirely new skills
“The agent is actually choosing what products to buy on behalf of a human. And so you're no longer advertising to the human. You are trying to get the agent to say, pick me. And that is often a very different skill set than marketing to a human.”
Wade Foster: Companies are building plain-text webpages exclusively for AI agents
“Agents care a ton about, like, clean documentation, like, fast webpages, so, you know, it's like, the thing I'm seeing a lot of folks do is serve up a separate version of their webpage that is meant just for the agent, and so that content is, like, plain text.”
Wade Foster: AI agent skills will become cheap commodities like WordPress themes
“I could see skills kind of having, like, a business model like that, where it's like, you could buy, you know, buy one for five bucks, 10 bucks, there would be a bunch of free skills out there. You know, it's, it feels kind of like a very commodity thing at a …”