2012 is the first complete year Zapier has been in business and it's been a whirlwind of a year. We thought it'd be fun to take a trip down memory lane and look at the top 12 posts on the Zapier blog from this year have been.
You Are the Exception to the Rule - June 2012
Developers have a knack for not believing in themselves and for questioning whether or not any good product will succeed. The good news is that if you are a developer "you are the exception to the rule." Most people can't program. Most people don't want to learn to program. If you can build a simple SaaS application that automates tedious parts of someones job then you can sell that for good money and make a living. Don't worry about what the haters say.
How 3 Dudes from Missouri Built Product, Found Paying Customers, and Got Into Y Combinator - October 2012
A year ago Mike, Bryan and I were literally three dudes hacking nights and weekends to build a product. A year later we've built a successful product, got paying customers and landed a spot in Y Combinators summer batch. This is our story.
Learning to Hack - The Tipping Point - July 2012
Bryan, Mike and I aren't formally trained programmers. We all picked it up for fun and to scratch an itch. Bryan shares his experiences learning to hack and the tipping point that helped him become a full time developer and a technical co-founder.
Finding Early Customers When You Aren't Internet Famous - April 2012
Finding customers as an early startup is one of the hardest tasks around. It seems harder when you don't have tens of thousands of twitter followers, a happening blog, or a huge email list. This post runs you down a few of the basic things you can do to get early customers when you aren't internet famous.
Why We Sent 25,000 Messages to Users Before We Launched - July 2012
Building a product from scratch that will support you, a co-founder and your collective families is hard. Really hard. Worst of all it doesn't come with a playbook. So what was our approach? Talk to customers and potential user. A lot. Like a whole lot.
Tools to Bootstrap your Startup Weekend Idea - October 2012
When you want to put together a web applications or a prototype really quickly like commonly done at Startup Weekends and Hackathons it's often nice to rely on tools that can handle a lot of the heavy lifting without you actually having to write a ton of code. Mike demonstrates in this post how he built PRLibs using webhooks, Zapier, and Posterous.
When You Should Build, Not Buy - October 2012
99% of the time buying is the best decision for a startup. That may be a slight exaggeration, but the sentiment is true. This post outlines when and why building might be a good option for certain processes in your startup.
How We Support Hundreds of Web Apps - December 2012
Support for web applications can be fun, challenging, crazy and a whirlwind. Zapier supports hundreds of web applications because Zapier provides integrations with hundreds of web applications. This post outlines how we handle the madness.
Introducing a Better Free Plan - November 2012
For the longest time the Zapier free plan was limited to to five hours syncing. Now it's 15 minutes. The people rejoice.
Backbone.js and Chrome Extensions - February 2012
Backbone can be pretty complex for new users. Mike outlines how he got his feet wet building a Backbone Chrome extension for Zapier.
Sentiment Analysis for Humans - December 2012
Sentiment analysis is pretty dang hard. Always has been. The Semantria integration with Zapier lets users easily do sentiment analysis using hundreds of different sources and no need to write complex code or deal with APIs.
Integrations: Simple Marketing for Developers - July 2012
Finding lead sources is tough when you don't know anything about marketing. Any easy way to tap into existing marketing expertise as a developer is to build a useful integration with an existing service and tap into their marketplace.
