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…everything about the product that they like disliked add feature requests all this sort of stuff and and uh you would go to these and inevitably like there was always a very popular category category of posts which was Integrations you know someone would say hey when are you going to build an integration with I don't know whatever PayPal Salesforce whatever right and uh you know then You' pop in and you go look and see what were customers saying in that thread and inevitably it just be like classic internet plus one plus one me too me too I can't believe you haven't done this yet like you know give it to me give it to me you know get the thread would get 1015 comments deep and uh lots of upvotes and uh then a product manager would come in and the product manager you know uh very politely as product managers tend to be uh would say something like hey everybody thank you so much for the feedback we really value it we're going to take a look at this and uh we'll let you know uh sort of what we decide and if you've ever worked in a software company you know that this is code for yeah probably not going to happen and so we looked at that and we're like all of these forums have this same pattern this same category so for whatever reason either these companies don't want to build these things they can't build these things it's not profitability these things Integrations are just not getting built and so Brian my co-founder messaged me on IAT and was like hey I think we could build something like this and um to me I got kind of excited because I'm not a very good developer myself and in my day job I was working with the maretto API which at the time was this old school like wisle soap API and I was just like beating my head against the wall like just this is no fun I don't like doing this I'm having a tough time figuring it out and so when Brian pitched it I was like oh I would use this like right away to sort of take leads out of our CRM and send them into to maretto so you know we we uh that that's where we started we built like an initial prototype that was a single trigger a single action and so you could say hey when this event occurs over here I want to make sure that uh the data from here goes into this other thing and it was just like a simple like point click drag and drop thing that allows you to you know any sort of Regular Joe to set these things up but it it wasn't that simple when you first started it right like you're still kind of janky well yeah so the uh the first version was bad for sure I remember the very first customer we got um we had sent them sent him an invite over email uh and he was uh you know was trying to set zap up and he couldn't do it and um you know he shot an email back and was like wait really you know thanks for thanks for inviting me I I I love what you all have done you know being very polite you know he's like I I I could use a little bit of help and so we jumped on Skype it was Skype at the time and uh I sat down and just said like okay well like let me help you set it up and so we went through setting up this app step by step and as I'm like watching him use the product I'm just at the time and uh I sat down and just said like okay well like let me help you set it up and so we went through setting up this app step by step and as I'm like watching him use the product I'm just sort of like trying to hide the horror in my face um because he's struggling and he's struggling not because this is a a dumb person he's struggling because like the stuff we made was just bad he was setting up a wofu wofu was this uh for form Sofer it's still Reas popular he wanted to take folks from his contact form so in the UI you had to select which contact like which form do you want to use and when you click that drop down instead of showing a list of here are all the forms that are in your woo account it didn't show the name it showed the ID numbers of these these forms and so he's looking at it and he's like I don't know which form goes with which so I'm like oh here let me help let's go to woo and in the URL you can actually find the ID and then so you can match it up to this so like that's the level like the first version of zapier was just like pretty janky honestly and uh anyway we get so we go through this whole process he turns his zap on and then we go to test it and we you know fill out his wooo form and uh we click submit he wants the the contact folks to move over to his email marketing newsletter so we go over to the email marketing newsletter he's using aweber we re refresh the page to see hey is the contact letter in or contact uh email inside that newsletter and there it was and his response was oh my God Wade like this is awes awesome like if this I do this every day I Port this stuff over it saves me this will save me you know 30 minutes every single day gone for my to-do list for forever and I remember just like logging away from that thinking holy cow like we made something this guy cares about if we just actually make experience of setting up a zap like not bad I think this will work it's kind of ironic that it was a product around Automation and seeing people time but it was so difficult to to get that first one set up there's like this forever debate around like what is the what is an MVP you know and I think in our case like yeah we probably pushed the minimum side pretty pretty heavily um but the reality is like it was still viable like it was still working and functional in the way that this person cared about um I think it it works for us because zapier said it and forget it and so it's not like you know if he had to interact with a zap like every single day and set these things up he'd probably would have been like yeah this is this is no good like I'm not going to go through this really janky experience but he only had to go through it once and once it was done it worked for forever and so for us like that janky start actually was a perfectly viable starting spot for us um and then you know for us it was all about Polish Polish Polish from there on out the problem was just so urgent that it didn't really matter what the form factor of it was if you could solve the problem 100% And for a lot of these folks the Alternatives they don't have they didn't have Alternatives you know ent that it didn't really matter what the form factor of it was if you could solve the problem 100% And for a lot of these folks the Alternatives they don't have they didn't have Alternatives you know the you know if you're not an engineer there's nothing you could do like if you're an engineer you could go the API you could write a script yourself you could set this up and you know be Off to the Races but even if you're an engineer a lot of the times you're not really wanting to go spend time doing this stuff and so the best that these folks could hope for was to go beg you know the engineering team if their company was lucky enough to have an engineering team and likely the engineering team was like ah get lost we have other things to work on or you just try and figure it out yourself and like that's kind of a non-starter for a big chunk of the population you know Circa 2011 yeah it's almost like it wasn't urgent of a problem for some people but it was super urgent for other people like the people actually to build it were like ah doesn't matter but the people needed to use it it was like pants on fire you know a lot of companies you're hired in to do like a specific function and the engineering org is often hired in to to own a certain thing but it turns out the engineering skill set is quite valuable every other function but every other function usually is starved for the that that skill set and the engineering function doesn't actually want to go help with those things because they actually have a thing that is more pressing to go attend to and so all these other functions could benefit from the skills but they didn't actually get hired in with those skills those functions don't exist and so all the jobs that require that skill set that that team is sort of left wanting um and this is sort of I think a big part of why you know no code has been such a big Trend over the last like five years is people realize like hey there's a lot of folks that if you just gave them the tooling to do this stuff they would happily go make it happen themselves but you got to you know get out of python or JavaScript or what have you like you got to provide it in a you know mechanism that's going to be relatable for them and you've mentioned before this concept of you know product Market fit how did you know that you had it like was there a way that you think about product Market fit specifically what zappier Michael cyel who's the uh runs the batch over YC always has this way of saying like you know if if you have to ask if you have product Market fit you probably don't have it and in some our experience mirrors that because you know I'd worked at a startup before zap year and I was hired in as like the marketing person the marketing intern or whatever and you know they built this it was very like well-engineered well-designed product and I was there to sort of like go figure out how to get customers for this thing and um candidly like I really struggled uh in fact I thought at some point in time like they were going to fire me because like I just wasn't being successful it's like and but I was learning a lot and trying a lot along the way you know I was…

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