In the tech world we tend to get self centered. When B2B startups talk about customers, many times they mean the unfunded startup down the street. Not the business that has been running for decades and is just trying to keep up with the times.
These are the companies that power the backbone of America and abroad. These are the companies that only the biggest of tech companies have been able to sell to (think Salesforce and Intuit). Part of it is because we don't know how to reach out to these customers. But another part is that we don't understand how they adopt technology.
With that preface here's an unscripted response I got yesterday from a user asking him how he uses Zapier. But unlike most of these emails it's not just about Zapier. It's about how his centuries old company tries to stay ahead of the curve with technology. And how technology gets adopted. With that I'll let the rest stand on it's own.
I run a very old fashioned business that hasn't changed much for 100 years. Back then we'd get telegrams from China and Japan ordering steel plates. We'd read the requirements and then send a telegram back. Sometimes we'd get an order and then we'd put some big steel plates on a ship - some plates are 40 tonnes each - and they would be delivered 8 - 10 weeks later.
Move forward a 100 years and not a lot has changed. The plate quality is better, we use email instead of telegrams and the ships are bigger and sail faster.
Like most small businesses we have a cobbled together patchwork of systems with most of the transmission done manually. Amongst others we use - Wufoo, Salesforce, Xero, Google, HelpScout, Wordpress and more. So when I cam across Zapier I was initially in Geek heaven. This is cool and it will solve all my problems. Well not exactly.
When you're running a small business the most important resource is time. Specifically the boss's time.
Unlike most tech start ups we don't have bright enthusiastic peeps who will rapidly adopt the latest cool idea. Change is slow and grudging because familiarity with the old systems is far better than the short term disruption that the new brings. So you can't dump software on the team - you need to set it up - then play with it yourself, then iron out all the bugs, then brutalise a victim and make them be the guinea pig.
Then you need to find a way to stop them telling everyone how shit it is whilst you fix the new bugs and then start trying to implement the darned thing. Moving from Outlook to HelpScout has taken us 8 weeks so far and will probably take another 8 for everything to be bedded down and working smoothly.
Limited time and lots of resistance means that this is the life of small businesses. The gains are worth it though. I want to give one example of how we have thought of using Zapier and the issues that we have faced with it. We have some data that we receive regularly that we want to get into Salesforce. For various reasons we use Force.com so most of the integration is to standard objects - i.e. Wufoo's - don't work because we don't have them. Zapier lets us create new custom objects - which is totally cool.
Now this task - is something that we should do daily - it's repetitive and boring - but unfortunately we can't pass it back up the supply chain - and because the data is unstructured it can't be obviously automated. Parsing it may be possible - but that hits the management time trade off again. So we thought - lets create a Wufoo to Salesforce Zap. We'll then hire a virtual assistant via Elance to process the data for $3/hour. (Won't give them direct access to Salesforce as that costs too much for another licence and we're not really sure how to lock everything down to keep them where they should be). We'll give them a HelpScout account - and forward all the information to there. They'll then transcribe it into a Wufoo form which then zaps it across the ether into a new Salesforce custom object.
Proved the technology in 5 minutes. Got it all set up in about 30 (45 fields to move across). That is the easy part - Now I have to define the process in a structured way that gives me an output that delivers reliably and which I have high confidence in - but which does not require me to spend as much time doing quality control as it took to do the process to start with. Oh - and then we have to start worrying about data security, operative reliability, standardisation.
There's always the thought that this might be another failure - Experimentation means failure as Seth Godin points out. When you are small the costs seem higher. Then there are all the little tweaks.
We get it 80% right on the first run through. The trouble is that as we work through this there are so many little exceptions and rules and caveats that we had never written down that what had seemed like a simple process has become a twisted thorn bush dripping with blood.
Aaargh.
And yet as we do this we have the vision that this is yet another part of the jigsaw that will enable us to scale. So going back to the Steel - not a lot has changed on the surface - but under it lie hundreds and hundreds of little zaps ready to be implemented - each helping us to structure and organise our data faster - and that translates back into customer happiness and support. That's why I use Zapier.
Denis OakleyOakley Steel LimitedHelping You Build Better Boilers
About Denis: "Denis runs Oakley Steel, Asia's leading supplier of carbon steel pressure vessel plate, and BeyondTransition.com - the worlds best triathlon guide."
