Hello, everybody. This is Cortland from EndiHackers.com. And today I've got Wade Foster,

the CEO of Zapier, on the podcast. How's it going, Wade?

Pretty good. Thanks for having me, Cortland.

Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. I'm going to do my best to explain what Zapier is. and then I would love for you to go ahead and explain what Zapier is in case they do an awful job. But Zapier allows you to connect practically any apps and products to each other so that you can automate your work. For example, if you get a new tweet, you can automatically have Zapier and create a draft in your Gmail inbox or add a road to a Google spreadsheet.

So personally, I think Zapier is an invaluable tool for people who don't know how to code and also for

developers. I use it at Indie Hackers because it's way faster than learning 100 different APIs and coding it all up myself.

That's my interpretation of what Zapier is. Wade, how would you explain it?

That's pretty good.

I generally talk about Zappir as like a workflow automation platform hooks into about,

I think we've got 800 different apps now.

So, you know, tools like Salesforce, Slack, Google apps, Mailchimp, Stripe, you name it.

Like if there's a SaaS app out there, it's probably on SAP here at this point in time.

And then like you said,

you can set up these little rules

that automate pushing data between various apps

and really does help you speed up time,

automate kind of the mundane work you've got going on

and you can end up building some pretty cool stuff with it.

Yeah, I think it's one of those tools that now that I'm like super familiar with it and I use it all the time, I wonder how I got anything done without it. I guess I just did everything by hand and spent a lot of time hooking things up. And yet it's pretty new, you know, like for most of the internet's history, there was no tool like Zapier. And so I really want to, at some point in this interview, asking questions about how you end up marketing a tool that doesn't really exist and trying to explain it to people who've never heard of it, because I'm sure in the earlier days, like trying to figure out what messages resonated with people is very difficult. But we'll get to that later. Let's start off in the very beginning. Can you talk about like the earliest days of Zapier

when you guys are maybe working on the prototype

or just coming up with the idea?

Yeah, so Zapier started as a side project

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