Just two years after launching, Zapier achieved profitability. Today, they're at $140M ARR + $5B valuation. Here are 4 early-stage marketing lessons from Zapier: 1. Play bigger with strategic partnerships Zapier prioritized the top 6 SaaS apps when building their first integrations. Then they emailed each with instructions on how to promote the partnership. In return, they promised features in the newsletters and websites of the *other* SaaS partners. The result? 70% more signups. 2. Actionable SEO content Because Zapier integrates with 5K+ apps, they have an answer for almost any automation question (Ex: I just typed "how to connect LinkedIn to Slack." Zapier showed up first.) and a reason to capture searches like "best calendar apps" -- they integrate with all of them. 3. Smarter CTAs Most blogs don't convert well because most readers either 1. don't have intent to buy 2. don't make the connection between their problem and your solution. Zapier only suggests automations relevant to the search. If the blog was about the best Calendar apps they'd only include popular automations for Outlook, Gmail, etc. The biggest key to early success? 4. Do unscalable things. I keep seeing this theme when researching early-stage growth. Brendan Hufford shared a good one the other day about ConvertKit. Zapier's founders were in product forums looking for integration challenges and offering to help them set up Zapier. Also, every single Zapier employee did rotations in CS. "Let's get on Skype calls, let's do the things that might not scale right now, just so we that we can make people really happy and really want to work with us." Wade Foster, Co-founder and CEO @ Zapier That's how they won in the early days, but they're still growing. One way is through hyper-targeted, hyper-useful events like ZapConnect, next Thurs, Oct 20. I was kind of blown away at how detailed the event page was -- every question you might have about it is answered. The biggest name in productivity, James Clear, is speaking. If you ever dreamed of automating all the stuff you hate or finding more time in the day (literally everyone), they've got a session addressing that innermost desire. I'm going for this one: "Wait, you didn’t automate that? Level up your digital marketing journey with Zapier." ^^ That's some great FOMO-inducing copywriting right there. Register to ZapConnect (Oct 20) for free: https://lnkd.in/g2sz57Ms #productivity #event
Will Sackville point 1 here might be of interest...leading partners to water with clear instructions, as well as great cross-promotion.
Camille some folks are not happy with the recent price increase, I can understand it, but Twitter is very vocal at the moment...do you think it will blow over or no?
Damn, James Clear will be there!? Registering now!! :D
Interesting post. One thing I observed out of this is that they had 2-3 short term growth initiatives and 1-2 long term growth initiatives that they focussed on at the same time. SEO and speaking to customers would not instantly start to show results. it must have been consistent efforts across the period of 2 years or more. While product forums and strategic partnerships were something that would have instantly been a hit for them to get the initial customers and feedback to make product better. In relation to the smarter CTAs, do you mind sharing an article that you would have come across?
Zapier is a great example of a simple product, executed perfectly what somehow scaled beyond to what anyone was probably expecting. Great post Camille Trent. I think #3 was huge for their growth! They didn't get vague articles to rank, they got hundreds or thousands of their use cases to rank... Something people wanted to USE not read about.
Love this post! So well written and you provided some solid action items that any startup can (and should) take and run with.
Leveraging strategic partnerships is a massive opportunity that is often overlooked. It's free access to a trusted audience!
Love # 2! Many buyers choose software based on integrations with their current tech stack. Creating SEO content for integrations is still so underutilized by most companies.
Content & Community @ Teal + SaaS Advisor
1yFree registration to ZapConnect (Oct 20): https://bit.ly/zapconnect-event