A Dive Into Zapier’s History of Sustained Growth

My answer to the question, “what’s your favorite brand or company?” has been the same for the last 5 years. Zapier. I believe Zapier is the best modern example of how to build a sustainable B2B software business while growing rapidly. In 3 years they went from 0 -> 600,000 customers with a churn rate of less than 5%. Crazy, right?

There’s typically two major roadblocks to a startup’s success. Lack of traction and failure to execute. The former simply refers to failing to connect with and identifying your ICPs. The latter, is more about the decision-making once a business starts to experience some growth. While most startups fail at the lack of traction stage, those that make it past there aren’t in the clear (just look at the series A-E success rates). But I digress.

The reason I’m a huge fan of the people at Zapier and what they’ve built, is because of what they did to successfully execute and take advantage of the momentum they were experiencing. I am fascinated by the choices they made to leverage their traction to ensure sustainable growth. There were many low-code automation and integration startups in 2019, but none were even close to Zapier in terms of overall growth and margins. Begging the question - how did they make this happen?

The folks at Zapier were ahead of some big trends in SaaS like PLG, customer-led marketing, programmatic SEO, partner co-marketing, and decentralized customer support. And while these principles and strategies are now commonplace, there are many valuable lessons in Zapier’s journey to 600K users that can help startups understand their own path to growth (and 600K users!).

Being Ahead of the PLG Trend

I won’t say too much here because this is a well researched, and spoken for field. But Zapier is known as one of the first examples of building a successful self-serve business motion. This is confirmed by the fact that in their initial years, they did not have a sales team and to this day support is a distributed function (more on that later). However, these two realities highlighted a simple fact: Zapier was easy to use and had a clear value proposition.

And when I say easy to use, I don’t mean for a developer or IT professional. I mean it was easy for a marketer or sales person or HR professional, etc. And yes, developers/IT liked it too. Low-code was really hot in 2019, but few actually delivered on the promise and some of the most successful PLG plays didn’t do anything fancy except deliver a valuable low-code tool.

Zapier’s success with PLG can be mapped like this:

Identifying a Gap in the Market by looking at popular user groups, forums, and communities -> Identifying a Core Set of ICPs who would benefit from a product that fills the gap -> building a product that truly delivers on the promise to eliminate that problem from the ICPs life -> building a cross-channel and sustainable marketing strategy/spend that connected them with their ICP -> a seamless low-code product experience -> an effective support process when the platform does fail + usage based pricing

Fostering A Culture of Customer-led Marketing

This is a pretty simple one. Find inspiration for marketing from customer usage. However Zapier, didn’t just build blogs and copy based on how their customers were actually leveraging the platform. They also built guides, recommended automations, and other tools to further engage customers/prospects. Their product, as a result amplified its propensity for usage with each new “Zap” customers built.

Scaling with Programmatic SEO

Zapier deployed a highly successful programmatic but organic SEO strategy. Because they were an integration platform, it made sense for them to create dedicate pages for things like “Salesforce Integrations” or “Salesforce-Marketo Integrations” or “Salesforce Automations”. All of these high intent keywords naturally increased the visibility of the platform, and the customer base. Why are these high intent terms? 99% of people searching Salesforce-Marketo Integrations are probably looking for that functionality. A good portion of them have probably already looked at native options and are now looking for 3rd party solutions, like Zapier. Thus, these keywords were high intent searches for Zapier. In other words, the searcher was definitely looking for something like Zapier.

In the initial years, before Zapier was a household name, SEO was their biggest growth factor by a huge margin. And as of 2023, “Zapier generates 7.3M visits a month, including 53% from organic search.”

Building Trusted Relationships and Partnerships with Other SaaS Vendors

In the world of software, everyone seeks partnerships that benefit their business. But they hardly ever think about the folks they’re reaching out to. That’s where Zapier did things differently. When building new low-code integrations, Zapier focused not just on what users needed, but also what would give other software vendors an incentive to partner with them. For example, if a CRM company’s engineering team communicated that they do not plan to develop integrations with a particular type of solution or haven’t for years, that’s when Zapier would step in and decide to build the functionality. While other iPaaS vendors seemed to aimlessly chase short-term revenue and build an unsustainable load of integrations, Zapier was highly intentional.

Teaching Employees About the Customer Experience Through Support Shifts

This is another one that is well documented but everyone at Zapier – from engineers to marketers has to do support shifts. For less technical folks that might mean ticket resolution, and for the more technical fixing bugs.

Why? Well in the CEO’s own words (in 2015 when they were 30 people):

“The most beneficial part of everyone doing support is the opportunity to see the everyday problems that customers face. Rather than being shielded from frustrated customers, everyone on the team gets an unfiltered view of what customers think about your product”.

And as they grew, he made that unofficial rule an official policy.

Concluding Thoughts

There’s a lot that went into Zapier’s success and I think the high level strategies mentioned above show both their values as a company and processes that led to success. I think we have yet to see another company as successful as Zapier, in recent history, in martech. But that’s just my opinion.