No-code workflows that grew a $10M company

hi everyone and welcome to our webinar no code workflows that grew a 10 million dollar company we know you guys have a lot of things you could be doing with your friday so really appreciate that you are spending it here with us also love to see all the people joining us from all over the world that's so great my name is katie and i'm going to be moderating today's event and before we get started i just want to go over a few housekeeping items so first of all this webinar will be recorded and you'll get an email with the recording on monday uh next all attendees are muted but if you have questions please put them in the q a box at the bottom of your screen if you put the questions in the chat box it'll probably get lost due just due to the sure number of people on the call so be sure to type it in the q a box and we'll have lori on the line from our support team try her best to get those two during the webinar and if not we'll have time at the end of the webinar for michael to answer some of your questions live there will also be a survey at the end of the webinar and we'd love it if you could fill it out and give us any feedback that you might have so we can improve all of our future events all right let's get started i would love to introduce our speaker today michael murtochi he is the founder and chief swag officer at swagga swag up kicking off his entrepreneurial journey at the age of five michael has been running businesses for as long as he can remember never afraid to make a bold move michael dropped out of william and mary after two and a half years to become business partners in an online fitness business with nfl veterans steve weatherford before starting swag up the api first platform that helps growing companies easily create automate and distribute swag globally in just three years swag app has grown to over 1200 customers 65 employees and eight figures in sales with zero venture funding which i think is pretty awesome um so first i'm going to introduce you to the three companies we'll be talking about today and then we'll turn it over to michael to walk you through how he actually built out swag ups workflows all right so the first one what is swag up so swag up is a platform that allows high growth companies to create automate and distribute high quality branded swag items globally through one streamlined integrated vendor michael actually founded swag up after realizing there was a major need in the market for high quality swag items to be delivered in an efficient and cost effective way and he's going to be talking a little bit more more about the company later um next we have zapier so zapier actually rhymes with happier which is a fun fact that a lot of people don't know zapier is a tool that allows you to connect your favorite web apps to each other to move information between them automatically it act it actually allows you to get rid of the busy work in your day-to-day and focus on the work that really matters so for example you can connect popular apps like mailchimp gmail slack salesforce and actually over 2000 more apps to each other while using zapier again michael will talk about using zapier to streamline his workflow in a bit and lastly we have typeform which is absolutely one of my favorite tools and you'll all get a chance to see it at the end when you take our survey after the webinar but with typeform every interaction counts they help companies of any size turn online forms surveys and quizzes into conversational experiences that are fun interactive and more personalized they're essentially humanizing the internet and you'll see a bit more about how swag up uses typeform in a second all right so remember you can ask all the questions that you want in the q a box at the bottom of your screen the q a not the chat and we'll either answer them at the end of the webinar and we'll try our best to have lori answer those in real time all right and with that i'll let michael take it away perfect first off thanks katie and and thank you everyone at zapier in type form it's funny because all of our customers would always say zapier i had no idea how to say it for the longest time i was so confused um but no it's been awesome working with you guys you know especially working with typeform for probably about two years now um and integrating you guys into the different workflows so really excited to just have some time to walk through you know what we did to to get off the ground basically you know i i say this to a lot of people but you know we couldn't have done what we've done without tools like typeform and trello and zapier and wix and because i don't have that you know technological background and development background um and it's hard to you'll find those types of people early on when you don't have the money to do it and you don't have you know really a business plan in place yet so you know again i just want to thank both of those tools and and everyone that's part of those teams for um you know for everything that they've done to to help us up to this point um so like i said we're gonna go through a different a few different workflows we'll go through the story of kind of how we got to this point and talk about some different workflows that we created using these tools to get there and just calling them out along the way as mentioned earlier swag up is basically a platform that takes this really messy process that is you know buying and distributing swag you know at a corporate level and makes it really simple through one platform so if you think about you know companies like google and facebook and amazon and pretty much any high growth company they have so many different needs for swag and they're managing it all kind of like in silos where every team kind of does it a little bit differently they have different vendors for it it's hard to stay consistent from a brand perspective economy's a scale of lumping orders together with different teams so and also global fulfillment is just very difficult so we've developed this platform that the entire company basically can get on and place their orders and manage inventory and distribute cold boys so um but you know it wasn't always really like that i mean what we are now is so different than you know where we started really originally started this company out of my mom's house literally you know it's that kind of standard startup story where you start a company out of your garage um it's you know it's literally a garage that was turned into an office out of my mom's house and i was working you know like katie had mentioned went to william and mary um after that dropped out about two and a half years in and joined you know nfl player steve weatherford on a fitness training business um and then after that after a year of working on that it went really well um decided to leave and join a vc firm that my buddy had been running in in new york city around hospitality and kind of travel management startups and just kind of that being there and and being around all these startups again i realized how important swag was to them you know there's so many like i said you know swag and culture and brand um have become the new ways for for companies to go to market um and you know you're building defensibility by building this culture around your company and swag plays a really big part in it but there just wasn't really any interesting companies out there doing it you have you have companies like moo and sticker mule who have done a really good job of crafting a brand around you know printed merchandise but swag is really the much bigger opportunity because you're not stuck with just business cards and just stickers you know it's everything it's branded hats and water bottles and backpacks and these packages that you send out um but there's no real brand for it you know you have these four imprints and custom links that are these big e-commerce platforms but they have no real services and they don't really understand how startups work um and and then on the other side you have like these agencies that are you know like red antler style or branding and marketing agencies that you know they they're great and the output's great but there takes a really long time to get anything done it's really expensive so we kind of want to be somewhere in between kind of like take the branding and positioning of a of a direct-to-consumer company but with the product focused ease of use and scalability of like a sas company and kind of bring that together and take it to the world of swag and layer in this like really great brand on top of it so at night basically i you know when i was at the bc firm i was there for about four months and and at night i would just start to think about it and figure out you know where are we going to get started um you know i knew i knew what people had wanted i had a good sense of what startups were gonna want but i didn't really have the like the tools or the know-how to to get it into action or to build a full-fledged product but something that i think is really important and it kind of ties this entire narrative together it's just this idea of resourcefulness um and there's just so many tools and so much information now at our fingertips that it really doesn't take a whole lot to take the first step in launching a business like it there's just so much out there and it's really kind of stripped away the excuses to a degree i think 40 50 60 years ago you know starting a business was a huge you know task first off required a lot of money you know required a lot of know-how you know distribution was very difficult but now you have things like you know tools like wix type form trello zapier um you know lots of others you know quickbooks you have things like google analytics like there's just so many ways that that you can get started and get initial feedback and and these tools are really the wix type warm trello is after really the fundamental kind of infrastructure that helped us start and and was allowed us to get off the ground without much you know resources so you know we were basically we just wanted to create something you know initially that was super simple it was visual and interactive and showcased to startups a curated list of swaggers so stuff that people would actually want to use stuff that was high quality um and and put wrap it up into an experience that was just a lot more simple than than what has been out there before katie and i and the group were talking about you know their own experience buying swag and it was very much you know these websites that have 30 40 50 000 items on there and you have no idea what to do or you know the only way to get started with them is you have to call them and i know myself from a consumer standpoint i don't want to deal with that you know i wanted i wanted to have something that was that resonated with the workflows and and how startups work so so this was kind of like the initial you know idea of what we had built and you know you can even see the little banner that says create create a free wix site i think we were too cheap to even pay for the the more premium plan where they can take that away and you know like i said we want to create something that was really visual and interactive and you know typeform is really the only way that that we could do that you know you can't just put in you know a google form or something like that and just request you know get requests then little you know check boxes marked or something it's just not just wasn't the same kind of idea so you know we combined putting this basic website together on wix and type form and and got some simple google and facebook ads running and again these are really simple things that you can learn you know easily google ads and facebook ads there's free videos on youtube all that kind of stuff i learned a lot about it working with the nfl player um and just kind of teaching myself but so we got these initial ads up and and literally within days started to get some some inbound interest one of the first big ones that i remember was soylent and if you know soylent they're like that meal replacement shake that everyone kind of makes fun of silicon valley people for drinking um because it's just so typical it's like i don't know it's just funny but they reached out and they wanted to do stickers with like their bottle on them and some other things um so that was you know once we saw companies of like that statue starting to reach out literally within days while still working at the dc firm you know it started to give me the confidence that you know maybe there's something here and then about a week or two later we got an inbound inquiry from a company called uncharted play um i think now they're called uncharted power out in harlem and this really cool startup that takes kinetic energy and helps you know create energy for third world country little villages and stuff like that and they had this idea that they wanted to put together a hundred different swag packs and at the time i don't really know if we knew what that meant or called them swag packs but they want to put together like bundles of items for all their new hires so it was going to be this tote bag and it was filled with a sweatshirt and a bottle and a notebook and some pens and stickers and everybody was going to get it and it was a hundred of these and they were a hundred dollars each so it was a ten thousand dollar order and you know up to that point when i started the company was 22 years old i think i just turned 22 in may of may of 2017. um you know i had never seen ten thousand dollars you know at least i wasn't directly responsible for generating any sort of 10 000 orders um and it just seemed really crazy that anybody would even give us that amount of money kind of being in my mom's house and not really having a legitimate business and and we don't have any credibility we didn't we haven't really worked with anybody if you look on our initial site a lot of the logos were people i knew that you know helped me just do a few orders in the beginning like we didn't really have much to to go off of um and and if and we saw like okay if they want to put these packs together there's so many different use cases for these whether it's new hires partners customers subscriptions you know people really love this unboxing experience kind of like getting a birch box or a bark box or something but you know the the process of putting that together was so logistically intense that i knew that if we can streamline that process we can make you know we can build a really big business because like i said there's so many ways that people can use this but they don't want to you know because it's too much too much work you know if you try to do this yourself you have to deal with 10 different vendors you have to have space in an office to assemble packages you have to know how to handle global logistics there's just a lot of pieces so i knew if we can create an experience to allow people to build out these packages really simply that we'd be able to get into the door with a ton of really great companies because i knew that other swag you know providers just didn't want to deal with the headache of this but with that in mind we needed to change up the site of it because it didn't start off where we had this pack builder it started off it was more of an inquiry form but once we made that conscious decision to switch solely as like a swag pack company and make that our positioning we needed to build out you know a more intuitive kind of user experience to do that so you know that's where we got into the original pack builder so this was our our core kind of product um you know that helped us generate over five million dollars in revenue literally within the first i would say 18 months where this was the core kind of way and funnel into our website um and and we thought it'd be cool to kind of outline these workflows and in ways that are really visual so that you can see them and really visualize how we did it versus just seeing some screenshots and you can see the different kind of you know apps that we used and where zapier played a role and we even highlighted them if you look in the bottom left the actual statistics straight from type forms you can see how many people were on it how many responses um all that kind of stuff so basically the way that the pack builder worked was like i said we started off with a wix site and the reason i really like wix and it's not on here and it's kind of almost to a degree i feel like they have a stigma like if you tell somebody like oh i built my site on wix i feel like people kind of look down on you but now webflow all of a sudden is like this big thing and everyone thinks webflow is cool but wix was never cool um so i don't i don't really get it but i wix is really great because they they allow you to start with a blank white slate if you really want and you know i i tried other things like squarespace and other website builders but i didn't like them because they're very templatized whereas which you can literally just start with a white page and just design it however you want so that's why we decided to do that and typeform and wix have a good partnership but you can also just insert them through iframes and iframes allow you to basically like skin a typewoman throw it on a site to make it look natural i think that was one of the best parts about typeform is that they don't try to like get in the way and like take over the show they allow you to embed it within your own experiences and make them feel really natural and that and that's why it worked so well because it really felt like it was part of the site um so so we had the site on which we built out this type form and as you can see there we made it really visual we made you know we had about 10 to 12 options per category and companies would go through that and be like okay am i do i want to add a water bottle to this box yes or no and then you'd see all the water bottle options so we use like conditional logic from type form and you just keep going through section by section do you want to add a t-shirt to your pack yes or no you see the different options there were some limitations to it but you know for the most part it worked really really well and what we did is we just connected those via zapier to trello and slack first off i'm a really big proponent of using slack as like a notifications channel i think it's a great way to keep the team engaged have a lot of transparency and it's great for morale so you know constantly we're seeing in our stock channel every time the leads are coming in how much you know those leads are for and when you when you get a you know today we had a couple interesting ones for like a hundred twenty thousand eighty thousand but it's really exciting to see that happening on a live basis um it's not like a huge workflow thing but it's it's just nice for the team to be able to see stuff like that um and then trello is where we really we kind of treated trello like the mini erp system you know it was like our order management system and it's really powerful the only issue with trello is that you know we and we saw this is that once you get really big with it and you have a lot of files on it it starts to get a little slow um so that that's what happened we started to like duplicate our our cello boards a lot so that they got quit uh quicker again but it was really helpful because we started to layer in third-party designers over time you know we have a design team out in latin america that handles all the mock-ups and we needed a way to communicate to them basically how these orders were going to go and the projects they need to work on get the files all that kind of stuff so trello is a great way you know to just be able to show all the responses from typeform straight in there so that you know that can get communicated to the design team they can work on it right away and what that allowed you know initially i was doing the designs and then a buddy of mine was doing them what this allowed is no matter if it came in at 10 a.m 2 a.m 5 p.m you know they were just going to the team and we might be sleeping and they could start working on it and and it was really valuable and it allowed us to have kind of like a mini crm as well where we can see kind of the stages of the deals of where they're at and then we use zapier again for once those deals got to certain stages where it would automatically send out an email with a proposal so we'd grab the files we'd send them over to the to the client for a proposal we'd have the the message kind of pre-formatted and just allowed us to save a ton of time because again bootstrap company started out of my house i had maybe 25 000 in my bank account which i almost blew all of it on a wework office for for no reason because i'm an idiot um you know we didn't have much resource to go off of so anytime you can kind of get more out of the few people you have there you can leverage their time you know it's super important so like i said this was the bedrock foundation of you know how we got off the ground and we did it literally built this in in one night obviously it evolved over time but it was huge and it generated the first five million dollars for us um but then after that what we realized was that you know a big piece of what we do is physical you know we we get a lot of business and we've grown a ton by you know people getting to experience the packages in real life and then they see it and they tell other people where they got it and they share it on social media so we knew if we can get sample packs in people's hands really quickly and effectively that they'd be so much more likely to buy you know because it's not just like this idea that they see in a pdf on a on a computer it's actually something physical they can bring it into a meeting with their boss and and the reason why you know the real story a lot of times you you do the right thing after doing the wrong thing and learning the lesson the hard way but we have this really big deal that we're working on with jeffrey's which is a big bank in new york city and i think i think it was a 600 000 deal and at that time we had never even come close to something like that and it was just they were a prospect they weren't it wasn't like we closed them or anything and they loved you know everything we put together the proposal the presentation the mock-ups looked great and then at the last minute i i was following up with them because i didn't hear and then she tells us oh well your ceo loved everything you guys did but they decided to go with another vendor because they sent us a sample yes and it was like even though they didn't like the items as much and they didn't like working with them as much as us people are very like risk averse and they want to see something physical so from that point on we decided we're going to make sample packs a huge piece of the business and part of you know the whole inbound kind of process when when needs are coming in and and these sample packs help generate about over 25 of our revenue you can attribute back to sample packs and and the process was it's relatively similar to the process we built out the the pack form but so we had had the wick site obviously and a landing page specifically for these samples and we built a lot of like ad campaigns that went straight to it as well especially on some other social platforms and you know the type form is pretty simple just a way to gather their information and a few qualifying questions uh in terms of like what position are you in how many packs might you need a year like when are you looking to get started that kind of stuff and then also if it was u.s or international we had this conditional logic to throw in stripe um because you know for the longest time we were just doing free samples no matter where it is over 92 done but international ones can get a little expensive um so we decided it's worth to just charge 25 bucks for international so the stripe integration with typeform is really helpful because we can just easily just charge right there we didn't have to go back and have our team reach out and be like oh by the way this is 25 and it's also not a good experience to do that um so from there we connected those responses into type into zapier and it was a relatively complex zap because it goes into a few different places but the first place it goes into is slack again because like i said it's great for just transparency and visibility to be able to see all those leads coming in um it's also good if it's like a big company then you can know like i gotta reach out to these people right away um and then the other place it went into is is salesforce um salesforce basically generates the lead and generates all the information in terms of where we have to fulfill it and that was sent through to our swag up app basically so since starting we've built out a swag up zapier app and that allows us to automatically send packages out every time you know a new fulfillment request comes in so the same way that a sample pack comes in and gets fulfilled automatically is the same way that a client's packed that comes in gets fulfilled automatically so sample packs are really huge for us getting off the ground and it's helped us kind of build this mini brand around swagger because there's so many people that have our products out in the world now um and then over time you know the next one we want to talk about is redeem pages so over time you know we didn't go out and set out and know exactly what people wanted you know we didn't know that we're going to build this swag management platform we didn't know we'd need an api we didn't know how we would use our zapier app and we just kind of uncovered these things over time and one of the things that we've uncovered over time was the the idea of these redeemed pages so basically if you think about it clients and you know we want to take out all the friction in the process so we want to give them no reason to say no to us we want to give them you know no no reason why this is going to be too hard for them to execute so we want to provide them the tools and one of the tools is the idea of redeem page which is basically a web page that allows our clients to collect responses for things so if it's new hires or interns or customers they can send this link out automatically to them it could be unique urls it could be you know regular urls and they can go in and fill out the information through our typeform that we built out here using conditional logic based on if it's us international um and we basically shoot that through zapier using the swag up app again into our crm or erp which is salesforce and then automatically fulfill those packages so you know like comcast is one of our clients for example they use these redeem pages for all their new hires so it goes out in one of the onboarding emails they go into the page they fill out their information we're automatically fulfilling packs so in the past we used to have like all these google spreadsheets and we were managing these requests we'd have to have a logistics manager go back in there and check all the ones he shipped send them out keep track of the cost that they didn't pre-pay it was just such a nightmare and when we figured out this workflow and obviously it doesn't necessarily work for all businesses but just get you thinking about different ways that you can do stuff once we figured out this workflow we just started to have packages shipping out automatically it was a huge help and now more than ever with with coronavirus going on we're shipping out thousands of packages a month you know five ten fifteen thousand packages or more um and there's no way we would have been able to manage this process manually without automatically integrating it through our zapier app and into our erp and then a cool thing that we like we've layered on with a few different companies is adding in like a feedback survey at the end so you know the pack goes out and we put this delay step within zapier that's like okay within seven after seven days of the package going out we want to send a feedback survey to the person that got it so that we can figure out you know what were the items that they really liked you know what was their response to it did they really enjoy it and that gives you know that and we've seen the feedback and it's really strong and that gives our clients a sense of them making the right decision you know and it's something that they can go back to management with and like hey this has been the impact of swag packs and new hires at nasdaq you know this is really exciting and it just keeps people bought in and really interested so that that was another really you know important thing and we've now kind of you know since starting you know 18 months then we've brought in our cto now we have about 35 software engineers so now i mean some of these workflows continue to progress and we'll go into like how many we still have but we've also used these as like testing grounds for product development so now we're building out our own interface for redeem pages and we'll still use you know the zapier app and stuff like that but you know we've done it in a way where we've learned from these experiences and continue to build on them um and then inevitably you know with with all the growth that we've had you know these workflows have made us really efficient but at a certain point you need more people i mean 18 months in i think we still had 15 people now we're 17 19 months since then we have 65 so we've had 50 people over the last year and a half joined the team and it's really difficult to manage that you know in terms of keeping track of candidates um and there's lots of systems out there for stuff like this there's lever there's bamboo hr um you know there's lots of different ats's and applicant tracking systems but they're expensive you know i don't know about you but i'm kind of cheap when it comes to buying software like i don't wanna i just feel like spending five to ten grand for something like lever that is basically a glorified trello board just doesn't make that much sense you know so we we always try to get creative so we built out this careers page in web flow that really mimics our site it looks basically exactly like our site and they just link to a type form application and it's one application for all positions and there's some conditional logic in there based on the position that they're going after in terms of like which questions we then ask them um and we use zapier then to connect those to both slack and trello and again i like slack notifications because it gets the conversation started if we see cool cool applicants come in we start commenting back and forth you know leadership in the team is on there um and then trello like i said is really we just looked at like other applicant tracking systems and kind of mimicked the different stages that are in it so you know first reach out scheduled first call second call not a fit or sent out a proposal whatever it is all different stages we can keep track of it in there and we have the main kind of people involved in hiring on there to leave comments and everything like that and then based on the different lists that the cards went into we could trigger different actions so for example if the list was called you know reached out you know initial reach out that would just pre-populate a message that had a calendly link to automatically book time with these with these people to join the team um to set well to schedule the first call um alternatively at the end if it wasn't a fit that triggered a different email so it's just it's just these little things it's like how do i save five percent here five percent here five percent here and in aggregate it starts to really you know it starts to really help um and then lastly one of the cool integrations that we did with zapier was that once we um decided we were going to hire them we put them into a final list that was like offer sent out or i can't remember the exact naming for it and what that does is it automatically fills in the relevant information into a docusign and sends the offer letter out to them we use this for a couple other things internally like processing um partnership uh agreements and some other you know some service level agreements for clients so we use zapier to connect through docusign that way but again just trying to find you know because at the back end of our business i think one of the things that a lot of startups kind of you know neglect and i would i'd say i i do it too is like you don't put a lot of resources in the back end like finance and accounting and hr and you know that types of stuff we have artem on our team who's a partner of ours and i feel bad for him because we just give him so much stuff to do um but it's like one of those things it's like if it doesn't generate revenue it's like hard to allocate to but you have to then find ways to make that process easier for those people um and this is one way that we've done it uh and then lastly the last work i'll go through is honestly the simplest one in here um but it's it's still fun you know look it it's so basic but it's just the idea that when invoices are generated in in which then generates invoices in quickbooks they go into our slack channel and i would say this is the mo this is my favorite slack channel and the favorite integration that we have because it just shows all the times that invoices and deals are being closed in salesforce and the team just has so much fun like we we're very transparent where every single person the company sees every single deal that closes for no matter what the amount is whatever it is um everybody can see it and it i i love to like everybody getting and rallying around like all the deals that are happening when when one of the salespeople closes one you can graduate them all that kind of stuff like that bust each other's chops um so i think sometimes too it's not just about how robust and crazy the workflows are it's like how effective they are and what they do to to the culture and um and morale so you know there's so many other ones that we've built out you know so i got today we have 164 different active type forms running right now and every day we add more uh we have over 50 active zaps and if you include the ones that our our clients are using from our our own zapier app it's much more than that like i said zap our zaps power sending out thousands of packages a month for example we have bread finance as a client of ours they use our zapier app to connect into um salesforce so every time they have like closed one deals they're automatically sending out packages um and then you even see we're even seeing large enterprises elect to use our zapier app and do it that way versus like building out these full-on integrations or like building out apps for workday or for paid core they're like oh well if we can just do it through web hooks with zapier this is so much easier you know they can get it set up in an hour or two versus having to bog down their team to set up integrations so it's not even it's not just an internal way to save time it's also a way to help your clients save time and integrate into your system so i think getting started using other zaps and zap your apps out there is super valuable but then getting to the point where you can have your own and let it power your business i think is really is really huge um and like i said now we're at 65 employees and i i think we'll probably get to over 100 within the next 12 months and we've been hiring throughout this entire situation um you know i think la in the last month we probably hired four or five people and have plans to do the same for this next month um and it's not to say like you don't want to get hung up or proud about how many people you have because at the end of the day you know you want to be efficient and you want to get as much done with as little people as possible but there's certain businesses that are very difficult to kind of you know do that with and ours is very operationally intense we have our own warehouse we control kind of a lot of the supply chain to a degree so that's why i have so many people this year we'll do over 12 million in sales i think it'll probably even be higher than that given kind of what we've been seeing lately um and as katie said we have over now we have over 1300 customers so and and they range anywhere from high growth series b and c startups all the way up to big the biggest companies in the world like walmart and and nasdaq we've done all this without raising any money and i think the last thing i'll bring up before katie jumps in is that you know i think it's really important to look at like where we're at now and and how these tools and bootstrapping you know what the impact of that was i would say you know conservatively that the company is probably worth maybe 25 million i think more but let's say it's worth 25 million today every one percent is worth 250 000 so if you're you know the general kind of seed round that you're going to raise from investors they're going to want like 20 of your company which today is worth about 5 million dollars and you know the easy thing is just to be like hey i'm going to start this company i'm going to raise 300 000. i'm going to raise 500 000. but like think about what that means down the line if you can even shave off five percent of that or 10 percent and not be so relying on that outside capital you'll think about how much of that equity you can keep and as long as you're like creative with it you can keep it and then you can use that to incentivize new hires and you know actually put it to work when you need it versus in the stages where you're still kind of like ideating um where i don't think it's worth kind of deploying money on it just yet so um that's that's all i got i'll i'll send it over to katie now hopefully that was helpful but we'll go through a few more questions as well yeah wow it's pretty amazing to hear everything you've done that's pretty cool um so i guess i have a few questions for you just as we kind of wrap up and then go into q a but can you give us maybe your greatest piece of advice as for all of us as we're kind of growing our own companies yeah i don't know if it's like the greatest one it's always hard to like pick like what is the number one thing but yeah something i think that's really important is just really staying focused solely you know on what you're doing and what you're trying to achieve and on your customers and make solving your customers problem your ultimate mission i think so many people get focused on you know what is the competition doing you know what you know hype and pr and companies that are raising a ton of money but it's you know none of that is really necessarily indicative of future success i mean if anything you know we've seen over the last six months that a lot of the companies that have raised the most money are actually the ones in the worst positions you know i think it's really you you personally you're in that business day in and day out you know the how strong or weak the business is and you know what you're capable of and i think you know more people would benefit by kind of keeping their heads down and just focusing on their customers as much as possible and kind of letting the noise outside kind of be um and it's kind of ironic because we're on this you know webinar now with thousands of people that are going to see it and kind of pr to a degree but for the first three years really we didn't go out and do anything i was just telling you how we didn't really even post on twitter or instagram you know for the longest time so i think just focus on your customers as much as possible early on yeah i love it doing your own lane kind of thing um okay cool so what's a not so great lesson that you've learned i mean i feel like every day you learn about five new things that you you shouldn't be doing uh and they constantly evolve and you probably make the same mistakes over and over again but you know one of the recurring themes is that i i think it's very difficult to hire your friends you know i when you're bootstrapping you don't have a lot of money i think it's really natural to go look into your network and like hey do you want to join this thing that i started like i like you i trust you like come join and to a degree that's helpful because you don't have to worry about the trust factor we you don't think you have to you know it's easy to find them they're willing to sacrifice a little for you they they might not need to make like 200 000 right away um but it comes with a lot of downsides as well you know like you know it becomes very difficult to think rationally when you're dealing with your friends um you treat them differently than you treat other people when it comes down to make hard decisions you end up not making them or you end up neglecting them or they end up ruining a friendship so i think before you start bringing on friends i think you have to really think about like hey there's a 50 50 shot this doesn't work out and no matter what you say up front it's always going to be a hard thing to kind of go through to have to let go of friends or we even had a situation where a friend of mine that was part of this you know ended up you know the the relationship really started to deteriorate to a degree where you know by the end of it he started stealing from the company it was it was a tough situation and they're really hard kind of situations to deal with so i'll just say think twice before you hire friends yikes yes good advice um okay is there anything that you do differently some kind of similar you know related to people in hiring i think the biggest mistake that i've made and i think a lot of stars make is not hiring the best people you can as quickly as possible you're not making those hires sooner um and and you know especially with a bootstrapper's mentality you're trying to always find a deal you're like oh this person's only 55 grand a year um but they're really good and we can put them in a few different situations or like this person's 75 but this person 60 you're like okay we could probably make the 60k work but that incremental difference in in the long run will mean nothing and like the difference between good people and great people is so wide and and the impact that they have it really compounds whether it's to the positive or to the negative and the sooner you get great people in your company the sooner you'll start to break out and as a leader you'll be able to step back from the day-to-day and start to do the really kind of essential work and the thinking and the strategizing that's important to kind of get to the next level and i think for the first two years i really felt that i was like a slave of the business to a degree like i didn't think that i'd be able to get to a point where me or some of our partners wouldn't be the ones that have to do everything um but that really changed when we started to hire really great people and pay up and and and be okay with it you know and i would do that 100 times over i would do it a lot sooner if i could awesome love it so okay so now where can everybody find you if they want to buy some swag or ask you questions i mean me personally i'm you know i'm very open on on social media it's just at michael martoche m-a-r-t-o-c-cci my email is in my twitter bio my dms are open if you find me on linkedin you can message me i'm very i love just talking to people about business in general um and then the company you know it's just swag up pretty much everywhere on we don't really post that much but um our team is is really active on our email and on intercom on our site just team swagup.com but yeah it's pretty pretty easy to find us awesome thanks and then quickly if um anyone is interested in checking out more about zapier we have a youtube channel that shows all of our zapier 101 videos how to's and we also do a zapier 101 webinar about once a month but you can also go on to the site and go to roles where you can pick your actual role and figure out um what kind of zaps you can set up based on if you're in marketing or sales or whatever um and then if you have questions you can go to zapier.com help and type in your questions and get any support that you might need um and then there's typeform here typeform you can go to typeform.com if you have questions you can go to help.typeform.com and then they are all over social and you can find them at typeform so go check them out and next we're just gonna jump right into questions it looks like michael we got a lot of questions here for you right so water before we start yeah um okay hey swag up team first i want to congratulate you for a great user experience i ordered a sample box from you last week and a few days later i already received it across the globe my question is how many print shops are you working with and how do you handle all the logistics you should ask ask christina or director of operations she might have a different answer but i think that's really the hardest part of this entire business and it's why it's so attractive and why there's so much opportunity is because the logistics and the operational component of it is so difficult you know it's not it's one thing to just build a site and say we do swag packs it's another thing to actually be able to execute on it especially as you you scale i mean like i said we have every day we have 20 30 40 orders coming through you know for for new orders for companies and it's really difficult and and the suppliers i mean to be frank or not the greatest you know it's they're not tech savvy so it's very difficult to tap into live inventory levels be able to send them orders automatically in any sort of fashion like that so figuring out the operations is really the key part of the business and you know we deal with lots of different providers we have i would say probably eight different screen print and embroidery shops that we deal with on a on a weekly basis we're trying to consolidate it down to preferred partners we've even toured around the idea of doing it ourselves but we really want to stay focused on our technology but i mean all in all there's probably 150 different vendors and you know companies are always wanting to do something that's different or out of the usual kind of selection and that kind of creeps into how many suppliers you work with but um the operations is tough yeah okay um great answer and also i just wanted to reiterate that we will be sending out the recording on monday so look out for that and if you do have questions put them in the q a box and we'll continue to monitor those okay this is for you again michael did you ever consider shopify over wix what made you choose wix yeah i mean i've built plenty of shopify sites i mean so before swag up when i was in in college we had a site called cheapcustomprinting.com it's literally the worst name ever but that's where i kind of got my start in custom printing we had you know we were selling custom printed flags after learning a little bit about that in in college putting them up in dorm rooms kind of like barcelona sports style and that was on shopify but the issue with shopify is it's very you know unless you're a developer it's very constrained you know it's very much you know sell something on e-commerce and what we do is very custom it's not like you know just this iphone is a sku and you just put it on a site and you sell it every project is custom branded for that user and it's also not necessary experience where people are ready to buy up front you know they want to submit their information and start a project but it doesn't mean you know you don't get a lot of people that just go on our site and like okay we're gonna drop 20 grand and buy stuff like they want to go through a process and and talk through it and design the items so i just don't think shopify is really set up for a business model like that um it could work for more like an e-commerce style like we just sell bulk water bottles but for our model it just didn't really make sense for us okay great um all right do you use an app for your pricing options or matrix on your pricing page on your website and if so which app do you use no i mean a lot of what we do now is is custom built so you know everything really lives within our erp it's kind of like our data warehouse and that's what's reflected on on the website so you know our cto dac is first off he's just a really really smart guy you know he under not only does he understand software architecture and you know development he really understands business too and he can kind of see the playing field a few steps ahead and know where we're going to run into problems and you know we were when we first started we're not first started but when we first started with dak brought him in as a cto we were looking into some erps like netsuite but they're too restrictive you know they're too out of the box you have to use it their way whereas salesforce not really historically thought of as an erp but it has the underlying foundation to where you can build around it and on top of it in a way that's really flexible um and and for as a two-for-one kind of special you can also use it as a crm you know and manage the sales process so that was dac's decision to build out our whole erp there and that's where our product catalog lives all our supplier data you know pricing information and we have our own kind of formulas in terms of markups and what our cost is and shipping costs and that's just what gets reflected on the on the dashboard in lifetime when we were originally the initial version though was just showing rough estimated prices on the site you know and just saying okay this bottle is going to be around eight dollars you know because you're never going to have the perfect solution right out of the gate you just have to figure out what is what's good enough for now to to keep going and then let's figure out the rest later okay great this kind of relates in a tiny bit like have you this question is have you transitioned away from third party tools to building these workflows in-house now that your business has grown and if yes at what point did you make the decision and investments to do so yeah i think you just have to look at you know what is the ultimate product you're trying to build in can you achieve this with existing tools and then if not then we have to do something else so like it's not like we you know made a black and white decision we're going to stop using no code tools and workflows like like i said we have over 50 active zaps running in 150 for different type forms um but we also know that there's some other things that it just does it's just not possible to to manage that way like for example we couldn't use trello any longer as a system to manage orders first off there's just way too many there's no like history or account level data if somebody wanted to reorder that product you can't like go into trello as a database and be able to reorder that product like so we have to start setting the foundation um about like i said about 18 months and we brought in our cto and about four to five months in we started to develop everything um so you know i think and i don't think you just stop using these tools in general either because we still use them as testing grounds for new functionality so like that redeem page flow like i said we've been using it for a while we still use it but it's also informing us what we're going to develop when it when it becomes time to develop that and we'll continue to do that if we want to try out building something else within the dashboard we're probably going to do it using these no code tools first and and play around with it and see how it goes so um it's it's a never-ending process really awesome we got a request to see if you can um stop sharing your screen so they can see you better okay so we want to close up um also since um i'm just going to give you a quick break because we got a question about zapier here um lori are you on the line to do a live question i'm here okay awesome um so we have two questions here one is how do apps connect to zapier all right well that is that is zapier um that is what we do uh so we have we integrate with over 2000 apps uh you can see the list at zapier.com apps um so what happens is each of those apps have created an integration on zapier um which then each of those comes with a series of triggers and actions so that you can build into your zap so basically you create your zap you add the you integrate the app that you want to use you choose the right trigger and or action and as the thing happens uh on in that app on your end it sends it to us and then we move it along through this app and all of the apps that are connected to this app that makes sense i feel like that was a little oh i thought it was i thought well here's another question for you too is how does zapier deal with api changes across all the connected apps and communicate that with customers so they're prepared for these changes all right so that is something that we do spend an awful lot of time making sure that we are aware of um we have some of our integrations were built by our team so our engineers built it so they maintain it so we keep an eye on our partners apis if they're announcing that things are going to change they usually give you know six months to a year which gives us six months to a year to make sure that all of those changes are reflected in our integration if the integration is built by the partner themselves hopefully they would be aware of api changes on their own site and on their own app so they would then make the changes to their integration in terms of letting customers know for the most part it should be fairly seamless and you won't actually see any problems um there are cases where we've had apps do a total overhaul to their api which was ended up being an overhaul to their app um and so a lot of that will depend on sort of how we deal with it if it's a massive massive update and we need everyone to move to a new version uh we will send everyone emails um you'll also if it's a less large one that we need to send to everyone what you'll see is you'll be able to keep your original app with the original api and your app integration in your zap will just be flagged as legacy legacy apps are still available where where they are uh so your zap will still work we're not gonna just automatically break it on you and switch you over without telling you um and then so legacy is an indication that at some point you probably will want to move to the new version but do that at your own leisure when you can deal with it as opposed to like immediate everything's going to break if you don't great okay thank you lori appreciate it and we also have rachel on the line from typeform if she can pop on it i okay we have a question here um what are the benefits of typeform versus hubspot forms if you're using hubspot as your free crm that's a great question thank you to whoever answered that and thank you so much michael for giving such a wonderful presentation um as katie mentioned it's such a fun story and i was so excited to hear it um and i want some swag as a result um so hubspot is a great tool and great partner and friend of ours and with that side we have an integration with hubspot so if you're a typeform user and you want to pull any of the information that you're getting from your typeforms um into your hubspot contacts we can do all of that and hubspot forms is a great free tool typeform also has a free version and the thing about typeform that we um three main things so better engagement um statistically 72 more people are more like or type forms on average get 72 more response rates than traditional forms and surveys and a lot of that has to do with our second value which is just a better brand experience so typeform was built by two designers and with that art and design is a huge part of um typeform so you can embed videos gifs emojis different colors um you can view our template gallery um and the third thing is just better data and so being able to kind of see um as the responses come in um and also you can have different logic jumps so if you're capturing legion and you want to qualify certain leads you can design a quiz with typeform you can use some of our advanced features like hidden fields to be able to pull in the name so let's say hey michael thanks so much for signing up let's get your email and it just makes it feel um more personal so as we say every interaction counts but i encourage you to check out typeform.com sign up for a free account and and launch your first night form and see how it goes awesome thanks rachel i love typeform even though i need to learn how to make gifts put gifts in it and make it pretty okay next question michael um okay we've gotten quite a bit of questions about your team let's let me just try to see if i can combine some of these okay does everyone on a swagnap team have a different expertise in relation to the platforms like salesforce type form zapier or does everyone know how to use all platforms yeah i think it evolved i mean initially it was really i mean i i feel very strongly about that startup founders really have to be generalists you know it really requires especially if you're going to be bootstrapped and you you haven't you don't have the credibility to hire a bunch of great people um i think you need to be able to figure out how to do everything yourself first especially if you're going to hire people to do it how are you it's going to be difficult for you to you know be able to judge their performance or their ability to do something if you haven't done it yourself so i really did a lot of the initial stuff i really i built out the wix side i built out the typeforms i figured out google analytics like and i think that first off that's the first step um but then after that point you know it was mostly it was still really me and that's not to say that's a good idea like you don't want to be too reliant on one person but i was really managing most of it now as we've kind of introduced new tools like salesforce and having some of our own native experiences um you know we have we have like a head of salesforce development and back in engineering and front-end engineering and ui ux designers who all kind of own their little piece of the the platform um in a way that we didn't have before but it was really it was really me managing it initially but at the same time you know we didn't it didn't it wasn't very dynamic like we didn't have to change it all the time we didn't have to go into you know wix and type formula to make edits it was kind of like a setting and it was good for a while um so no i think and i think in general you don't want to hire experts in in the beginning either you know you don't want people that are oh like this person's like a trail expert or something like that you need everybody to be well-versed in everything and i think it was more of that kind of environment um early on i can't even remember at this point because i feel like three years ago was like 30 years ago and it was so different um but i think in general at a startup you'll fit you'll do better with people that can learn how to do a little bit of everything love it this kind of this question kind of goes along with that what are some of the biggest needs in terms of the types of people you need to join your team for higher global scaling like what do you find is the best way to find great people yeah i mean i think i think part of it it comes down to finding those first great people that are going to be the leaders and then hiring underneath them and letting them use their networks and their experience at other companies to bring people in with them i think it's hard to like fill out the bottom not the bottom but you know the core kind of infrastructure and then place a leader in top i'm a i'm a much bigger proponent of finding great leaders and let them build their team underneath them and let them kind of use their history and track record and network to kind of bring more people in so any of the best tires that we've had had been those types of people but at the same time we've we fared really well with angellist as a platform to find um new employees i think as opposed to something like linkedin or indeed or some of the other platforms angellist really attracts a certain type of person that wants to work at a startup and understands that kind of culture so some of the best hires that we've had have have been there but in terms of like what we need i think generally speaking you can never have enough great sales people you know we've had a really small sales team up until this point and now we've just brought in the director of sales and we're starting to hire under him um and i mean i would take 10 more sales people tomorrow if we found 10 great people so if anyone's looking for a position definitely reach out because we're always always in the market to hire great people that that want to do you know work with customers um and then you know the warehouse component of the business the fulfillment side of it it's kind of really difficult to hire for you know especially with you know unemployment benefits being so high you know people don't really want to work right now you know because there's no points like you get to stay home and you can make more money than hourly work so we've we've struggled finding great talent in the warehouse and you know we talked about one of those lessons you know hiring great people as soon as possible i think in the warehouse that was one of our biggest mistakes was trying to find like a warehouse manager director of operations that was like cheap um you know we went through three different people before we found the right person it's just a big waste of time so um i think operations is difficult to hire for for sure yeah okay it looks like we are out of time we did the whole hour thank you everyone for all of your questions thank you michael and rachel and lori this was an awesome presentation great story love to hear it um everyone can look out for the recording sent out on monday it'll be in your inbox and i thank everyone for joining us on a friday afternoon

Channel: Zapier

Views: 16,574

Keywords: zapier, typeform, no code, automation, automate, how to use zapier, how to build without code, build no code

Id: Dm7uMUPnyTc

Length: 59min 18sec (3558 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020