The average startup burns 50 THOUSAND DOLLARS monthly.
These 3 founders prioritized margins from day one, turning a personal productivity tool into a marketable product.
The Zapier blueprint that turns mundane pain into massive profits: 🧵
2011. Columbia, Missouri.
Wade Foster was manually copying leads between apps for hours daily.
His developer friends Bryan and Mike faced the same nightmare.
"There has to be a better way..."
They built a simple connector.
One app talks to another app - no coding required.
Just point, click, automate.
VCs called it "a feature, not a company."
Numerous rejections later, they proved everyone wrong...
Summer 2012: Y Combinator acceptance marked a growing industry momentum.
They had a frugal budget and 3 months to prove their idea worked.
Paul Graham's advice: "Make something people want."
Their remote work policy was visionary:
While Silicon Valley demanded office presence, Zapier went 100% remote from day one:
- Lower costs
- Global talent pool
- No commute = more building time
It was a 2012 decision that became post-COVID gospel. The network effect was their moat:
- Each new app integration = exponential value
- 1,000 apps = 500,000 possible connections
- 5,000 apps = 12.5 million combinations
More apps → more users → more apps requesting integrations.
Their customer acquisition strategy was written into the SaaS textbook:
Give away the drug, charge for the addiction.
- Free plan: 100 tasks/month
- Paid plans: Unlimited + premium features
- Result: Free users recruited paying customers
They cracked the search engine optimization (SEO) code early:
- "How to connect X to Y" guides for every integration
- Process documentation as marketing content
- Long-tail keywords nobody else wanted
1 million+ organic visitors monthly by 2019.
Every part of the automation product was addictive to share:
Zapier built sharing directly into workflows.
They even offered a template marketplace where users could share their automations.
The community was incentivized to showcase creative use cases, taking effort off the internal team.
By 2021, the numbers were nuts:
- BILLIONS of tasks automated yearly
- $140M+ annual recurring revenue
- 4,000+ app integrations
All built on just $1.4M in primary funding. Ever.
As AI gained popularity in 2023, they didn't fight it...
They embraced it.
- Natural language to workflow conversion
- Smart trigger recommendations
- Predictive task optimization
"Just tell us what you want, we'll build the automation."
Zapier created an entire category:
The no-code automation market grew to $30B+ in 2025.
Hundreds of competitors now exist.
"Zapier integration" is now a standard feature request.
Boring problems are billion-dollar opportunities.
What repetitive task are you still doing manually?
Founders: We'll own your go-to-market motion, from content to pipeline.
Active clients include funded startups, exited founders and GTM leaders at billion-dollar companies.
If you're ready to break through the noise, let's chat: mortonstreet.typeform.com/workwithus
Thanks for reading!
I'm Fox, founder of @morton_street, a growth studio for startups, founders and GTM leaders who want to build authority online + generate pipeline.
If you want more breakdowns like this, follow me @foxlorber.
Media Credits:
assets.ctfassets.net/f1df9zr7wr1a/6…
sacra.com/research/zapie…
adamduvander.com/me/rhymes-with…
zapier.com/apps
techcrunch.com/2012/08/01/yc-…
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