Zapier Beta was full of bugs. The initial prototype was built within 54 hours at Startup Weekend in Columbia.
Wade Foster, Bryan Helmig, and Mike Knoop needed people to test their software and give them feedback. Foster went to online tech forums and looked for people interested in apps integration. He posted links and got 10-20 new visitors from each one. About half of that decided to give it a try.
The founders also asked people to pay a one-time fee to test their beta product. They didn't want to make money on beta. They wanted to make Zapier look more "exclusive." It was $100 from the first few users and then $5-$10 for the rest.
The forums that worked weren't generic startup boards. Foster targeted the support communities built around specific SaaS products, places like Evernote's and Wufoo's own forums, where everyone posting already wanted two apps to talk to each other and had nowhere else to ask. Posts there converted at over 50%, far higher than anything a broader channel could produce at that stage.
Not every early call worked. Over Zapier's nine-month beta, the team collected 10,000 email addresses from people who wanted in, then never emailed a single one before launch, a gap Foster later called a real mistake. What compounded instead was the integration count: Zapier opened its platform so other SaaS companies could build their own connections, and supported apps grew from about 30 to more than 350, roughly 250 of them built by outside partners.
Winning Startup Weekend Columbia in October 2011 got Zapier its first attention, but Y Combinator moved it out of Missouri. Weeks after Foster, Bryan Helmig and Mike Knoop were accepted, the three relocated to Mountain View and launched publicly on June 20, 2012, straight out of the program, and made staying remote a deliberate choice from day one. It held: Zapier has since been valued at $5 billion while keeping total outside funding to about $1.3 million.