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…think about like product Market fit they think of it as like an ordering thing where it's like oh first we need to make the product and we're going to make this product that works this really well and then oh the product's great we've got a great product now we got to go figure out like how to go market this thing and then they're now they're trying to like bolted on and it turns out like I actually think product Market fit is actually one thing it's not a sequence of things you want your product and your goto Market to be sort of one fluid motion um and the best plg companies like this is how it works it's like sort of intertwined in the same way and that's why I'm always like you know I have Founders come up to where they're struggling it's like I've got a great product like the product's not the problem like I got to go figure out how to get distribution for this thing and I'm kind of like well are you sure like are you sure you've got a great product like because I'm hearing is like I actually kind of don't think you have a great like a product maybe maybe it's a Well engineered product or a well-designed product that that absolutely could be true but is it a product that anyone cares about because if no one cares about it and you don't have distribution engine that shows that people care about it I think you might want to go back to the drawing board yeah yeah I was going to say do you just start over like you got to rebuild the product completely different yeah I mean sometimes you can sort of like take bits of it novel pieces of it and you know you can sort of quote unquote pivot into something that you know maybe it is a bit of a nugget that somebody cares about um a lot of this is like there's a lot of Art in it though like you're sort of going through the idea maze you're trying to like put things in front of customer figure out what they're reacting to what they like what they don't like I think the more working experience you have probably the easier this gets because you just have a better sense for like what problems exist and like what those potential Solutions can be and so it does help to like have some exposure to that particular thing you know for me with zappier it was like a problem I felt like I was working with the maretto API I knew what was painful about it and so I sort of felt like well I kind of could be like customer number one for this thing and and that helped like that's short circuits what you're building when you sort of know like your problem and if your problem is representative of a problem that others have that it's pretty helpful you said something that I thought was really interesting too you said you don't think the exact same growth Playbook that you use on zapier could work today can you kind of explain that because that's I mean I hear a lot of people they say oh you know this SEO strategy that zier used we're going to use it too to be clear I think you could use this like longtail thing like this a lot of folks do this right this is how Yelp works this is how Thumbtack works like most marketplaces work this way you know Airbnb and the like sort of have the same Dynamic where they're targeting a lot of folks do this right this is how Yelp works this is how Thumbtack works like most marketplaces work this way you know Airbnb and the like sort of have the same Dynamic where they're targeting these longtail keywords I think if you were to try and do it in any of those spaces I named like if you were trying to compete with zappier or compete with Yelp or compete with air Airbnb or compete with any of these folks you're going to have a tough time because those keyword categories are so crowded at this point in time whereas you know 10 years ago when we were doing this the keyword categories were not crowded at all there was nothing there like you you go search for the stuff you would find like these P Pace bin links and you know uh like really bad API documentation and all that sort of stuff versus if you do these searches today you see zapier and zapier lookalikes um all over the place that are sort of running this Playbook and so it's just really tough to do it in this particular space but if you have an idea IDE that is and you go do searches and you see that like hey there's nothing sort of in here like I actually do think it could work quite well um in in other categorie s you need to find new and underco competitive distribution channels and kind of relating back to what you said earlier about yeah combining the product and the distribution it's I mean I think it's nearly impossible it does not happen very often but it's almost like you go you go to the the fringes the edge of the internet new platforms or channels that are kind of emerging um I don't know what that is today maybe it's chat GPT chat GPT is probably a good one Tik Tok you know Discord like there's always something to these like emerging channels emerging platforms where there is usually like a you you can sort of get outsized returns because they probably you know like the the big players probably aren't playing enough there because they they can't make the math work they sort of look at it and they're like we don't know how to measure it we don't know how to do XYZ so like we're probably not going to invest whereas a small company can come in and be like I mean we can't measure it either but like kind of doesn't matter to us because we have no business so like if it works at all it's great for us so many companies are built off the back of this like you think of how many companies got built off the back of say like Facebook early on like Zinga like you know exists because you know the Facebook platform totally uh was there now after over a while um those opportunities start to disappear because the platform matures and every you know Facebook like has an advertising platform Google has an advertising platform they know exactly how much to charge you to like extract all the marginal utility out of that and so the you know Roi you get from working on those platforms like starts to stabilize and you don't get these like outsized returns uh on the more mature platforms but um yeah you can at times like you just sort of like you said you have to find the niche you have to find the nooks and crannies that you know just are underexplored underappreciated um e platforms but um yeah you can at times like you just sort of like you said you have to find the niche you have to find the nooks and crannies that you know just are underexplored underappreciated um but if you can find them they're they're worth their weight in gold for sure yeah I'm trying to think of an interesting example right now would maybe be uh this thing called Tik Tock shop are you familiar with Tik Tok shop I'm not it's basically shoppable Tik Tok videos so you know I make a video about this sweater and you like it and you can buy it directly from the video I have some friends that have small Brands and they love it they they swear about like this is working so well and then some people I talk to were like that'll never work it's so dumb it's like no one would no one would never use this yeah it's that information asymmetry where it's like you sort of discover something before anyone else does and yeah for a while times are good yeah I know at one point you went through YC how did that come about uh why combinator because you kind of talked about this whole VC versus bootstrap yeah so we uh you know we started zappier at like a startup weekend and YC had its applications I think like the next week and um we didn't know anything about like Venture Community or anything like that but uh the one thing we did know was Paul Grahams essays and Hecker news and so we were like huh like you know if we could do the YC thing I think we would do that you know especially because we're trying to build this like integration platform automation platform and you know big part of that strategy is like hooking in to all these different folks and we're you know sort of three random like more or less kids in the middle of Missouri at this point in time and it sort of felt like you know it'd be nice to have a little bit of credibility and YC felt like a way to get some of that credibility sort of get a little on the inside so anyway we apply for it uh and we sort of get straight rejected the first time around because it sort of makes sense it's like you know we had nothing to show like we had barely a prototype and if you looked at any of our resumés our track records we didn't really have much to show there uh you know and so we were like okay well that sort of makes sense and you know didn't deter us we're like we'll just keep working on this thing and so we just worked on it nights and weekends for the you know next like six months or so you know we felt like hey maybe we'll try the Y thing again you know when the next batch comes around or maybe not like it wasn't it was just sort of like a little bit of a flyer like if it works great but if not we're going to keep doing this thing anyway so anyway like the next batch does come around we've made a lot of traction at that point in time I think we had about a thousand people on a beta we had about 10,000 on a waiting list uh but we also had a fair number of YC companies that were using zap here and so when we went to go apply again we started to ask for hey like can you give us some tips and tricks on like how to apply like is recommendations a thing can you like you know tell tell them…

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