true

1. Recording begins
Ari: Today we’re talking with Wade Foster of Zapier. Hi, Wade.
Wade: Hi, Ari. How are you?
Ari: Good. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. First of all, tell everybody what Zapier is.
Wade: Yeah. So, Zapier is a really easy to way to automate a lot of your busy work. Think
things like [0:22] form submissions, sales force, or create a to-do list in your project
management tool via email; just a lot of things. You can automate these common
problems that you might have in the day to day of running a business.
Ari: Right. So, we obviously love automations at Less Doing and anybody who follows my
blog or the podcast is going to know how big a fan I have been of ISTCC but I see
Zapier as kind of like ISTCC on steroids. Do you think that’s accurate?
Wade: Yeah, there's certainly a lot that you can do with Zapier to kind of push the limits of
automation.
Ari: Well, it’s just funny because I find that there's often times there's something that I want
to do and ISTCC sort of gets halfway there but then there's not that detail that you go
into and what's amazing with Zapier. I can see how it might be a little overwhelming for
some people but it gives you so much ability to automate things. I'm using it to automate
things having to do with Gmail and a bunch of stuff that has to do with Evernote. The
level of granularity you’ve achieved is really amazing. One of the things that I wanted to
ask you about is what are some of the most popular things that people are using it to
automate, for instance, that you're seeing?
Wade: Yeah. You actually hit on some of the popular things; saving specific Gmail emails to
Evernote or creating text files in Dropbox but there's an interesting dynamic where the
most popular things tend to be around tools that are more consumer oriented – they're
free. but there's a lot of valuable things that people miss out on that may not be quite as
popular, but still popular, around things like lead generation, saving email marketing,
building an email marketing list; things like that that drive a lot of value if you run a
business.
Ari: One of the things that I really love about a service like Zapier, and I'm actually working
on a blog post about this right now so everybody watch out for that. It allows you, in
some situations, to almost instantly create effectively a really viable product that you can
test things out. If you want to create a service or something, a web service that has
these certain functionalities and potentially test it using Zapier, have you seen that
because I've used it for that?
Wade: Yeah, we actually have. In fact, one of the very earliest things we did was we created
kind of a gag startup around that exact concept. We created a woohoo form that was

2. basically mad-lib style. You filled out this quick woohoo form and it automatically sends
an email to post to a Posterous blog – back when Posterous was still working – and we
called the PR reps. So, it automatically created like these automated press releases sort
of deal. They were kind of joking and funny but it took us 5 minutes to build something
like that which before would have taken a couple of hours, maybe a day or so.
Ari: Right. For instance, one of the things that I have used it for in that regard is there's all
sorts of services that will help you unsubscribe from lots of mailing lists whether it’s
Swizzle or Unroll me. They're good, some of them, but it is another service and I like to
streamline things. I actually have a zap set up where if I put a Gmail message into an
unsubscribe folder which not only can I do that quickly for one but I can sort of go down
the list and select several and just stick them in an unsubscribe label in Gmail. Then,
that sends an email to my 50 assistants and asks them to unsubscribe me from the
service manually. So, it’s really cool and as far as I know that could be a service in itself
– testing its functionality. It’s really cool.
Wade: Yeah, that’s a great use case; I haven’t heard of that. That’s a perfect example.
Ari: Yeah, that’s what I specialize in. I kind of dream about how I can use things like Zapier
to do my biddings. The other thing that is interesting about it is you are really
empowering, and I mean this. You are really empowering like one-person companies to
act as if they're hundred-person companies because they can automate invoicing and
social media and accounting and all sorts of community building stuff that one person
simply wouldn’t have the bandwidth to manage. It’s really an amazing offering in that
regard.
Wade: Yeah, for sure. We have people who have upwards of several 100, even pushing 1000,
zaps running that are basically powering their entire businesses and they're 1, 2, 3
person shops who have better things to do than import and export lists and copy and
paste things from here to there, stuff like that. We kind of believe that computers should
certain things and humans should do others so we want to automate the ones that
computers should do.
Ari: Yeah, well, I certainly appreciate you personally getting on this call and doing this
interview instead of doing text to voice or something.
Wade: Um-hmm.
Ari: Is there a zap that you use like a 1000 times or a set of zaps that you are using in your
life or Zapier business?
Wade: Yeah, I actually have… My day to day is a lot of email and I'm sending out reports and
things like that are kind of routine on a weekly or monthly basis trying to update the team
on things we’re doing or updating faster things we are going on; stuff like that. One of
the things I use to send these routine emails is every month, for instance, let’s use our
investor update emails as an example. I use an email that’s kind of template to all of our
investors. So, I have a zap setup that creates a draft in my Gmail inbox and fills it with

3. that whole template, bcc and all the appropriate people, every like that. What used to be
a several hour task to compile this email, I just have to come in and plug a few numbers
in and then click send. So, it automates email, a really big task down to just a few
minutes. I do that with a lot of emails where there are kind of these routine things that I
need to send out but they're more simplified or kind of routine to just eat up hours that I
would have been spending composing it from scratch. So, that’s one great thing that I
love to use it for. I also use it for simpler stuff like, for instance, all our teams hang out in
campfire. So I take all of our team’s blogs and when everyone writes something I just
send it to campfire and say, Hey, Brian wrote this post. If you like it you should share it.
It’s just like a nice way to encourage everyone on the team to kind of get involved with
what other people are doing online. So, from really fun – that’s kind of more fun in these
cases – all the way to serious stuff. You can kind of use your imagination to build
whatever automation you want.
Ari: Yeah, it really is sort of limited by your own imagination because you certainly have, I
think you have over 200 services, right, that you can plug in with?
Wade: Yeah.
Ari: Yeah, so it really is kind of limited to your own imagination and you're adding, I see on
the blog that you're adding, new services all the time. Is most of that coming from user
requests or you're just thinking…?
Wade: So, a lot of it actually comes, one of the cool things about Zapier is you can build your
own triggers and actions yourself, as a person. A lot of times vendors will come in or
even customers and they’ll want to have triggers and actions for a certain service and
they’ll just do it themselves. It even enables them even further. If it’s something that we
don’t support, you can actually get hat functionality yourself anyway by making it
happen.
Ari: Does that require some real technical knowledge or how easy is that?
Wade: Umm, usually there is like a bit of… like you have to have an understanding of API’s and
things like that but we have freelancers, if you have a little bit of money, they can help
out with it. Or if it’s popular enough like if it’s a big name service and it’s something we
were going to do it anyway, we’ll just let you know like Hey, this is coming down the
pipeline so just hold on for a few minutes.
Ari: Okay. Now, can you think of one of the more bizarre zaps that you have come across?
Wade: Say that again.
Ari: Have you seen any kind of bizarre zaps?
Wade: Yeah.
Ari: Okay, go ahead.

4. Wade: I have, we actually have a case study coming soon. I don’t know if anybody is familiar
with Rube Goldberg machines; things that kind of chain off each other and trigger a
whole bunch of sets of different stuff. We actually had a gentlemen build such a thing for
kind of like the web automation projects. He runs a like a web design consultancy; all
the consultancy is they start the same way and they finish the same way. You set up
this incredible Rube Goldberg machine and involve maybe a half a dozen zaps; it started
with gravity forms. Someone would send out a form and that would send them to
PayPal. When they made their PayPal purchase to get the review that would add them
to a mail temp list. When someone got added to a mail temp list it would send an email
to the team to let them know they had a new customer coming in. the mail temp list or
the email and Gmail created a new folder in Gmail and it created a new folder in drive
and it created a client inside a free agent, which was their accounting software, and a
board inside [10:01], which is their project management tool. So, it basically setup a
canvas for this entire project. Then, the last thing it did was buffered a tweet to say like
Hey, thanks for being a customer. Set off this whole scheme of stuff that, when doing
manually, takes about 30 minutes each time to do something like that. So, for every new
lead they’ve got, they’ve basically automated this 30 minute task with a half of dozen
zaps. This is a pretty good example of how you can chain and build these Rube
Goldberg style machines via multiple zaps.
Ari: That’s really awesome. In fact, I think I saw a YouTube video of that exact process that
you just described; it was amazing. Anyways, 14 different things happened and they
broke off in different chains, which was really cool. The last question that I always want
to ask people on this podcast because I talk with so many people on a productivity basis,
what are the top three personal productivity tips that you live by? That make you better
every day?
Wade: Yeah. One common thing, I'm not sure where I picked this up but, usually the night
before, sometimes, at first thing in the morning, I’ll just build a short list of two or three
things that I want to get done that day. That way if I finish those things I can feel happy
about the day even if other things don’t go right. So, it’s kind of just a little mind hack to
make sure that I am satisfied with overall progress. Another thing that I do, I'm actually
married so you kind of have kind of a work/life balance to manage, I have setup
Saturdays as my ‘no working day’. I make sure I have dinner with my wife all the time.
So, it’s like this nice way to make sure that I chomp off times of my day for specific
things. Probably the last thing that I do, since my job is so diverse, I setup days in
themes. So, Monday is my day for outreach to reach out to bloggers and the greater
community. Tuesday I’ll work on products. Wednesday, I’ll be writing. That way, if for
whatever reason, if I don’t have something going on that day I can just default to doing
those types of tasks. Of course, may need to work on things that I might not be as
excited about because I have a day chomped off for it.
Ari: Well, I think those are really wonderful distinct tips, especially coming from somebody
who helps people automate 1000s of things in their lives every day. Thank you for
sharing those. For everybody who not wants to but absolutely has to try out Zapier,

5. please check out Zapier.com. Wade, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us
today.
Wade: Yeah, thanks for having me, Ari.
Recording ends