A Love Letter to Zapier

Zapier — The Next Generation of Lambda School

8 min readJan 15, 2020

Three Zaps Made Me $33,000 in the First Month

The idea was simple —

Go to the airport
Get delayed passengers to share a few pieces of information
PROFIT

You see, there is an obscure European Union law which states that passengers on delayed flights originating from Europe can earn up to €600 if their flight is delayed over 3 hours.

Living in New York City, allowed us to take advantage of two of the largest US based International Airport, JFK and Newark.

We used public websites like FlightView, to track incoming flights. If we saw they qualified for the law, we would go to the airport and meet the delayed passengers. We used Zapier for the rest.

We leveraged Zapier to send a push notifications if the flights departed more than 3 hours later than their scheduled departure time. Automating this step allowed us to unglue ourselves from constantly monitoring European airports, and focus more on serving justice on behalf of our clients. Operationally, this also allowed us to get our employees ready to go the appropriate airport Terminal to greet the delayed passengers.

Push Notification OKRs-Increase efficiency in delayed flight awareness
-- Reduce visits to Flightview.com by 60% in 2 weeks
-- Reduce false positive flight delays by 75% in 2 weeks

Once at the Terminals, we used a Zap that would take passenger details from a Typeform, and create a Trello card. We would use Trello as the repository of passenger data (i.e. passport photo, name, contact email, booking reference code) as well as case management software. In a glance, you could see the status of any case.

Claim Creation OKRs-Increase speed in claim creation
--  Reduce time from information capture to submitting claim by 50% in 3 weeks.
-- Reduce time spent in Typeform by 50% in 3 weeks.-Decrease time looking for relevant client information
-- Reduce time spent in Trello by 25% in 3 weeks.
-- Reduce visits to Trello by 15% in 2 weeks.

Lastly, when we would progress a specific passenger’s claim through the Trello board, a unique email would be generated, via Zap, to inform the passenger of where they are in the process and how soon they will be paid out by the airlines.

Client Transparency ORKsMake sure customers when the exact status of their claim
--  Increase number of emails sent to clients, based on status by 50% in 2 weeks
-- Decrease time of initial communication by 40% in 1 week.

We even jumped into the conversations between Zapier and Trello to expedite a feature that we believed would have been helpful. Zapier ultimately delivered this feature, with a notification from their star employees — Hannah Rochau and Regan Starr.

By using Zapier, we were able to worry less about making sure all the systems talk to one another, and more time to deal with the Airlines to ensure that our clients got their claims paid on time. Overall, we were able to recoup $33,000 for our clients in our first month of operation. All this by using off the shelf tools — and customizing them with Zapier.

The future Growth of Zapier will fall into three pillars: (I) expanding user base, (II) going deeper with the current user base, and (III) make itself a discovery platform for SaaS companies.

Growth Pillar I: Everyone is a Product Manager and Zapier is their Coding Language.

As you read above, we were able to leverage all the work Zapier had to done to 1) prove out an idea, 2) get it up and running in no time, and 3) make a decent profit.

Lambda School, a coding bootcamp with a unique business model, is making waves. By putting skin in the game, Lambda is allowing students to learn valuable coding skills, and only once those students graduate and get a job, does Lambda see their tuition getting paid.

There is certainty that technical acumen will be necessary for the 21st century. However, just as how you don’t need to know to build a computer to operate one, you will not need to know how to develop software to customize it.

The future will consist of companies building out APIs, as that will be the most scalable way of doing business development. The more open a platform is, the quicker it grows — see Slack. The end consumer of these APIs will be non-technical hybrids of digital marketers and product managers which will have the tools to test any idea, on a minimal budget, and super quickly.

Zapier allows anyone to become the product manager of their product without needing the technical and design support, of existing teams. If you look at what is needed to have a successful product, it’s really just the product (with market fit) itself, and a list of potential customers. Even five years ago, you would need to staff teams of people (call centers — with actual phones, developers, marketers, and designers). Now it’s just SaaS companies like Aircall, Mailchimp, Intercom, Shopify. These people will leverage their creativity and acumen, and not have to worry about the technical knowhow of coding.

A great example of this are sales funnels. These are highly valuable, tried and true recipes which lead to high conversion rates of product offerings. Marketers claim that their special sequences will unlock a windfall of clients.

Mind you, this had nothing to do with which language they are coding in, or which software stack they are using. It was about knowing which APIs to string together in the right sequence, to listen for the signals that the potential customer wants to buy, and engaging them at that moment.

Think of this as premade Zaps which have generated results for clients.

Zapier as an Income Source OKRs
- Grow freelancer user base
-- Offer promotion for freelancers and have a 10% clickthrough in the first month.
-- 15% of freelancers sign up for the partner program within their first 8 weeks.- Increase Zapier acumen of new users
-- 95% competence score of new users using Zapier.
-- 75% of new users create more than 1 Zap in the first week.

Growth Pillar II: Going Deeper with the Existing User Base

This is an example of how to reframe a simple Zap into a valuable recipe. Companies like Stackshare.io are valuable because they unveil the secret sauce behind some of your most beloved companies. The types of business tools they use and which platforms they leverage to support their massive user base. The missing piece, which Zapier possesses, is that creators of the Zaps have the tools AND the application conditions which make it valuable. Think of this as the timing to a piano concerto. If it’s off, it just doesn’t sound right. But when it’s pitch perfect, it brings tears to the eyes.

Makers of valuable Zaps are experts in their respective areas. They can provide solutions to tough integrations, like they do on r/Zapier or https://zapier.com/experts/. Adding a buy button to the customized Zap, like CodeCanyon, can give creators a reason to evangelize Zapier all over the internet — as the onus of educating and refining the product, falls on them.

Zap Commerce OKRs
-Increase visibility of Zapier
-- Double number of backlinks to Zapier from forums, Reddit, and other places where people share knowledge over the next 6 months.
-- Increase number of success stories by Zap creators by 30%  over  the next 6 months.-Provide additional income for valuable Zap creators
-- 5% of Zap creators activate the "buy" button on their Zap in the  first month of rollout.
-- 15% of potential buyers of the Zap actually transact in the first  month of rollout.

Ultimately a Stack Overflow for Zapier will emerge as more people will Google solutions for integrating apps and a repository for those solutions will be built.

Zap discovery will become the voice of Zapier. It will be no longer a faceless person creating a powerful Zap, but someone with an identity, trust and a track record of updating and supporting their work.

Growth Pillar III: A Discovery Platform

Companies which are the most robust, and thoughtful will have the most usage. Just like how people sell items on Amazon, instead of building out their own Shopify store, because Amazon will handle their discoverability — so will new companies launch on Zapier. Potentially co-listing on Product Hunt and Zapier at the same time. The unfortunate truth is that Zapier needs to become Product Hunt, before Product Hunt becomes Zapier. When new SaaS companies launch, they will kickoff with a dozen or so prebuilt Zaps, so they can start piggybacking off of larger platforms.

Additionally, the number of new APIs will flatten out, as we’ll get a “winner takes all” effect. Dependance on more companies emerging at the rate they currently are will become unnecessary as growth will come from discovery, deeper relationships with existing users, and new personas of users Zapier has not yet seen.

Zapier Discovery OKRs
-5 companies launch new features on Zapier within the first month of announcement.
-The average company includes 5 integrations at launch.

In conclusion, the growth flywheel is currently spinning. As each pillar gets investment, it only gets faster and faster. The immediate future is hungry for ways to leverage the technology that is already built — it’s just up to Zapier to bring it to the masses.

P.S. I haven’t really dug into the data that Zapier collects and how that can improve user experience. Zapier will make more Zapier-built apps. Zapier also has an unfair advantage in seeing 1) which zaps get leveraged the most, 2) which folks value, 3) and which are being underserved. Zapier doesn’t publicly show these metrics around usages of zaps, however they are sitting on a repository of stats around these zaps which will allow for Zapier to develop killers apps with a built in market. Demand can also be gauged by tweets at Zapier, inbound emails requests, or surveys from Zapier Experts.