Zapier Saves a Startup's Founder 40 Hours—Each Month

As digital products become more common, product delivery has to be even more reliable than the mail—after all, we live in an age when physical products arrive as soon as two or three days after ordering. A poor digital delivery experience can leave a customer feeling ripped off—after all, if the product is digital, why can't it be immediately delivered?

Swapnil Wale, founder and director of Techno-PM, a project management template producer, wanted reliable product delivery. He wanted to quickly and automatically deliver his products—the sort of task he wouldn't need to constantly monitor. When he found app automation tool Zapier, Swapnil cut hours out of his process.

About Techno-PM

After 15 years in IT and project management, Swapnil Wale created dozens of presentations, pitches, projects, dashboards, and more—all the things you need to manage tasks and measure results. Realizing he had a veritable library of resources, he took these templates and started Techno-PM, selling his tried and true resources to fellow project managers.

By utilizing Zapier to help deliver his products to customers, Swapnil boasts of happy customers and a better approach to his work.

Instantly Deliver Digital Products with Automation

For a time, Swapnil manually sent out the template a customer purchased, eating into time better spent managing growth and creating new resources. He would watch for a new purchase, confirm payment was accepted, and then send out an email to the customer with their digital product. This wasn't a maintainable process, so he sought out a better way to work.

Once Swapnil discovered Zapier, he realized the solution to his product deliveries was at his fingertips.

"We were looking for a stable mechanism that would deliver our digital downloads after payments were complete," explains Swapnil. "Most payment gateways we looked at did not have an effective way of ensuring users get the download."

Now powered by Zapier's automated workflows—called Zaps—Swapnil rebuilt his process with efficiency in mind. With just a handful of Zaps, Swapnil redefined his work and cut out 40 hours of manual tasks every month.

Techno-PM's Tools

The Processes

The heart of Techno-PM's work is delivering project management templates to customers. To make this as fast as possible, Swapnil built a Zap that connects PayPal with Gmail. Every time a successful purchase is made through PayPal, a Zap triggers, sending an email to the customer with a link to their download.

This one Zap ensures the delivery happens instantaneously once the payment is successful, cutting down on fraud.

This was the original Zap, but Swapnil added an extra step to build up his newsletter list. By adding a MailChimp step after the Gmail step, Zapier places the customer in a specific MailChimp list.

While this is a multi-step Zap for Swapnil, we've broken it out into its pieces so you can fit it into your own processes:

This isn't the only way Swapnil builds his newsletter. Depending on what a customer purchases, their sale funnels through either eCommerce store Shopify or digital product marketplace Gumroad. When a customer makes a purchase from either, Zaps jump into action, taking the customer's information and adding them to MailChimp.

Simple and effective, these Zaps give Swapnil back an entire work week, every single month.

With the manual work handled, Swapnil gives bigger tasks the attention they deserve. "I get to focus on strategic goals for the business rather than day-to-day operations," he explains. These Zaps help Swapnil manage the details while he works on the big picture creating more templates, marketing, and expanding Techno-PM.

Curious to see how much you can do by freeing up a full work week's worth of time each month? Give Zapier a try for free.

All images courtesy of Techno-PM.