Thread by @foxlorber

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.

https://twitter.com/1774266668740726784/status/1969336683469701161

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-…