The Exchanges

Q That's okay. That's great. And what you said, one of the big drivers, and I don't know if this was in the moment thing back in October, 2017, but you cited specifically the Airtable partnership as driving a lot of new folks into your platform. Does that continue to perform well? And what other partnerships are performing for you?

A You know, Airtable definitely has been like a standout new application. I think we release our fastest growing apps list every year. Um, this past year we were seeing companies like front, uh, like, uh, discord, um, which is kind of like a, a slack for, for like gaming, um, community primarily, um, really popular Squarespace, um, opened up their, uh, ecosystem quite a bit. And so, um, We have an integration with them now. Those have all been important new apps that have Been added to Zapier in, you know, recent history and have performed quite well. I think, you know, a lot of folks use those tools. And so naturally they need to connect those to other things that they're using.

AI assessment note: “Airtable definitely has been like a standout... this past year we were seeing companies like front”

Q you're a humble guy, but I mean, that's like doubling ARPU is a big deal over just 18 months. Um, okay, interesting. And walk me through any other kind of growth levers that kind of surprised you last year. You talked a lot about your landing page strategy and your partnership strategy in the last show, so we won't go deep into those, but any other growth tactics you're trying?

A You know, the thing that's most important for us is we want to have ubiquity in the apps that people use, and so we spend so much of our time focusing on how can we make sure that we have coverage across all these different apps that people are using at work. As new apps are launched, as new products from existing companies are launched, we really just focus on trying to have that ubiquity because when we support the things that people use, then Zapier becomes useful for them. If we don't support the tools that they use, then Zapier is not useful for them. Uh, and so I think that's a big, big piece of it. Um, you know, of course we've also invested a lot in an area that perhaps surprised me. We've invested a lot in our internal apps. So, um, this is kind of a thing that once users don't come to Zapier for these things, But they stick around for them, which are things like, uh, our filters, our formatter, our code steps, our delay steps, our scheduler, our email parser. They're these little utilities. You could almost think of them as like A modern Excel macro.

AI assessment note: “We've invested a lot in an area that perhaps surprised me... our internal apps.”

Q quick question I've got for you. So, this space, I recently had the, both the CEOs of Segment and the CEO of SnapLogicon, which, like, they've raised, like, whatever for better or for worse, loads of money, probably way more than what they need. That can be, obviously, an advantage for you, because now they have to deal with all this capital, but how do you compete with those guys?

A Yeah, I, I think, um, they're, Both tackling actually a little bit different spaces. So Zapier's real core user is the small business owner who is dealing with all these different apps. They don't have engineering resources. They don't have IT resources that they can lean on. Uh, Instead they're like, how do I do this thing with pale PayPal, Salesforce, MailChimp? Like I got all this stuff and it like I too much work to do. And I, I don't really like, I need to build some of these integrations to get them going. And so Zapier is the tool they turn to. They can set up in five minutes, these rules, these automations and get back to the core pieces of their business, which is a little bit different than something like segment, which is, you know, uh, more of an enterprise analytics tool. Um, that helps like bigger company companies take in huge, massive amounts of volumes of events that they're tracking on their websites and things like that. Um, so a little bit different, um, markets there.

AI assessment note: “they're, Both tackling actually a little bit different spaces. So Zapier's real core user is”

Q You just say yes to every, well, how do you do that? How do you not? What about, what if you overwhelm your list?

A We don't. So the way we do this is we have a Wednesday, every Wednesday we send out a what's new on Zapier piece. And this is something our users love getting because they love learning about new apps. It's to their advantage. They, they want this. And so if you have something new, that's cool. You built something interesting. We'll put it in that, that, uh, that Wednesday Uh, slot. And so, you know, there's like five to 10 new things that will go out every Wednesday. Uh, you know, a million plus people get that, and people love it. So I think the thing is, for us, we've built these, um, channels where people want this stuff. And so it makes it really easy for us to work with our partners, because We can say, Hey, if you've got something, we've got a place to talk about it and allows us to return the favor back to them. Like they built something nice. That's going to help us out. Like, how can we help them out by talking about them?

AI assessment note: “every Wednesday we send out a what's new on Zapier piece”

Q Uh, what do you look for in terms of signals for new up and coming apps that you see are doing well, but are not on your platform yet? I'm sure you have a very sophisticated approach to kind of trying to find these signals and acting on them as quick as possible.

A You know, I think, um, it's not too different than perhaps like a VC might approach things. Uh, You know, you're trying to pay attention to, uh, you know, are they hiring more people? Is, um, you know, is there traffic going up? You can look at like Alexa rankings. Stuff like that. Are there, did they raise some money? Obviously that's not always a signal, but you're just trying to piece together all these like little public bits of information to figure out like, Hey, is there someone that we should be talking to that we're not talking to? Um, so it is, it does look very similar to, I think like what VCs would do when they're on the hunt for, you know, trying to invest in a, in a company that's growing.

AI assessment note: “are they hiring more people? Is, um, you know, is there traffic going up?”

Q And you guys, I'm a customer, by the way, so I, I, I've been able to reverse engineer a little bit of the life cycle emails. You guys have gotten more aggressive on, I believe, on the life cycle emails. Like, hey, this app stopped working. You should log in and like check it out or something might be wrong here. Um, what are you doing to keep churn low?

A I think a lot of it is things like that. You know, one of the things that is so powerful about a tool like Zapier is that we can help you with so many different types of problems that you might be experiencing in your business, uh, across different types of spaces. So we can help you with marketing, we can help you with sales, we can help you with customer support, we can help you with engineering, we can help you with operations, we can help you in a lot of different ways. But because we can help you in a lot of different ways, it's sometimes hard when you come into Zapier to go like, well, what should I use this for? Um, and so those life cycle emails, if we do a good job, we get to know what you are using Zapier for, and we're able to propose better recommendations for you. We're better able to serve up content that might resonate with you. Um, now I don't think we're doing a job at this. I think there's a lot more we can do to improve on this over time, but that's definitely a thing that, um, we've invested in. And I think it helps with longer term retention is if we're introducing, you know, Well, if we're just helping you solve more problems over time, you're happy to keep using us.

AI assessment note: “those life cycle emails... helps with longer term retention”

Q Are you mostly U.S. or are you international, like international?

A We're international as well. So you have to get a lot better at that. Um, and you know, we have along the way, but it's not as straightforward as like, you know, outsource it to this agency. They'll handle it all. And like, no problems. Like, Even they are like, wait, what are you set up? And you're like, well, it works like this and this. Um, so like that kind of stuff is funny. Then like from an internal standpoint, you have to work hard on like your hiring process, your communication standards. You have to set up kind of workplace etiquette around communication to make sure. Folks understand, like, hey, this is how we pull off working remotely. If we don't do it this way, things are going to fall through the cracks.

AI assessment note: “We're international as well.”

Q only going to keep doing this if he sees opportunities to like learn new things fast and go after big new challenges. If they don't See what you're going after. They might go something fishy is going on here. Why is he still in this? So the question to you is like, what are you learning every day? What are you looking forward to learning over the next 12 months?

A You know, I think the thing that is constantly fun for me is The opportunity we have to serve our customers at scale. Like we've seen, uh, so many folks come into Zapier and say what kind of impact it's had on them from a work perspective, but also from a personal standpoint. You know, we've had people tweet pictures of them and their family at, you know, Disney World saying like, thanks for, thanks Zapier. I get more moments like this because of you. And That those kind of moments like are fuel. It's just like, wow, how can we create more of that? And the excitement part of me is I want more of that. But then the learning aspect is, okay, we're at 200 people. Okay, well, what do we got to do? 200 people, a 100,000 customers. Well, what do we got to do to get to 200,000 customers? What do we got to do to get to two million customers? Because all those customers represent, you know, someone with their family, their kid at Disney world, who's happy about Zapier existing. And along the way, there's all sorts of challenges that you're dealing with and the challenges change in scope and size. Also the people you get to work with change, um, over time as well. Uh, the different skillsets that you want to bring into your org change as well. And so that all that stuff just kind of keeps things fresh. And it keeps you energized to keep trying to create more moments like that for your cu…

AI assessment note: “the learning aspect is, okay, we're at 200 people... get to 200,000 customers?”