How Wade Foster (nearly) Bootstrapped Zapier to $5B
How Wade Foster (nearly) Bootstrapped Zapier to $5B
Ep 75 of The Logan Bartlett Show: Untold stories from tech's inner circle
Wade Foster is the co-founder and CEO of Zapier, an automation business most recently valued at $5 billion.
In this episode, Wade and I discuss why Zapier only raised around $1M and unpack their strategy for growing profitably. Wade shares lessons from building one of the first remote-only companies in tech, including key tips for hiring, onboarding, building a great management team, and much more.
Click here to view the episode transcript | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
✉️ Episode Memo
Some of my favorite takeaways from a true first-principles thinker:
5 Tips for Effective Remote Work…
Remote work requires companies to be more explicit than in-person work. Document rules of engagement, operating principles, accountability, naming conventions, and more.
Play with adding in non-work related conversations to virtual meetings. Zapier has an “unplugged” section of their Friday check-ins where employees share something they did outside of work with a photo.
People often dwell on whether in-person get-togethers should be more strategy oriented, versus more team/fun-oriented. It almost doesn’t matter what form they take, just getting people together makes a huge difference. If you really want to figure out what’s working, survey employees about their experience and ask them how to make it better next time.
When onboarding, share a deep sense of purpose, mission, and culture. Zapier has a dedicated slack channel for every onboarding cohort that joins (#crew-<datejoined>). This allows new employees to move through the organization together with a sense of tight-knit community.
Slack can make it difficult to interpret the level of severity of any given idea or issue. Use a naming convention to give people context and set expectations. These are Zapier’s (borrowed from Hubspot)
#fyi = I’m just putting this out there for your information, take it or leave it
#suggestion = I have an idea, but I haven’t looked into it deeply
#recommendation = I have evidence or expertise on this, please consider it
#plea - please for the love of God (a mandate)
“Don’t Hire Until it Hurts”
The main thing a company spends money on is people. Zapier adopted a “don’t hire ‘till it hurts” philosophy so that when any given person was brought on, they knew exactly what they would do. In their case, constraints helped keep things simpler at the early stage (pre-product-market fit). Every new person brought on adds additional overhead, taxes, and distractions from the top priorities: shipping code and talking to customers.
Finding Product-Market Fit
Zapier spent 2 months building before getting in front of their first users. Wade recalls one of his earliest interactions at Zapier with a customer that was struggling to use an early version of the product. It took 30 minutes to talk the customer through setting up a Zap and certainly wasn’t smooth, but when it worked, the user was blown away. It immediately addressed something that the customer hated doing manually. Despite the then janky customer experience, the customer insisted on paying Zapier.
“When you have to ask [if you’ve found PMF], you kind of know the answer.”
⭐ Highlight: How To Plan a Team Offsite
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