I was Zapier’s first customer. How they sold me (and launched their business) should be taught in every business school.

I recently interviewed the founder, Wade Foster, so I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

Finding the First Customer

2011, I had the first paid subscription podcast, and I wanted to send handwritten thank-you notes to buyers. But getting their addresses out of PayPal was a pain in the butt.

So I went to the StackExchange message board and posted this:

Months went by with no solution. Nobody knew how to do it.

Then I get this email from a guy named Wade:

He said, “Would you be interested in a service that lets you do this without writing a single line of code?”

My reaction: HELL YEAH.

Customer Discovery

We jump on a call.

He and his friends were building something (called Snapier at the time) that could connect apps.

We screenshare. And I see the most confusing MVP ever.

One example: I had to know my CRM’s internal id numbers. WTF is that?

But I still LOVED it.

As confusing as it was to use, it solved a painful problem.

The Need

I was so desperate to keep his software that I decided to do whatever I could to ensure Wade and his team kept building it.

So I insisted on paying.

I demanded a way to send him money.

Turns out Snapier (later named Zapier) didn’t have a way to collect payments. It didn’t even have a bank account. I sent money to Wade’s personal PayPal.

Today

Today Zapier is a multi-billion-dollar AI automation company.

It all started with finding a BIG pain and addressing it.

I’ve done over 2,000 founder interviews. That’s the thing I noticed that the most successful founders do: they find the pain and help.

What’s Next?

Wade and I both evolved over the years. Lately, we’re both interested in how AI is solving problems.

I interviewed him about how Zapier and its users are finding and solving customer problems today.

You can get it (and all our AI interviews) on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and pretty much anywhere.

~Andrew