In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, we talk to Zapier’s Alison Groves about growing a tech startup to 1,000,000 users.

Want to grow your software company to 1,000,000 users? In this episode the Business Systems Explored podcast, we speak to Alison Groves, the Partner Marketing Manager at Zapier, and find out exactly how she did it.

Zapier is an intuitive automation platform that connects your SaaS apps together. In the beginning, Zapier was doing cold outreach to software giants like Salesforce, asking them if they could build integrations for their platform. Now, there are over 500 Zapier partners — Process Street included — and that’s because of the partner marketing work Alison has been a part of.

For a business that survives on the cooperation of other businesses, Zapier has quickly shot up the ranks and become the go-to platform for connecting apps that don’t have native integrations.

How did they forge such great relations with so many big companies? Listen to the episode to get the growth strategy they used.

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Thinking of starting a side project?

A month back, I realized I was getting to the point where I wasn’t bothering to take lunch breaks. I read as a big part of my job, and I didn’t want to get involved in anything heavier than reading articles. Frankly, I was bored during my lunch breaks and I got annoyed I wasn’t doing anything productive.

The solution?

After brainstorming several side project ideas, I started making a personal website.

This was the perfect amount of work because I had (very) basic HTML skills and needed to learn only CSS and how to deploy the code.

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One of the most painful aspects of having a distributed or remote team is something that’s incredibly basic: video conferencing.

Video calls are the main way to get face-to-face time with your colleagues in other offices or working from home, so you may be doing multiple calls per day. For each one, it takes at least 5 minutes to create the call, coordinate everyone to join the call, and get the audio and video working properly.

A company of 10 where everyone does 5 video calls per week will lose over 200 hours of productivity per year due to setting up video calls.

That’s why distributed companies like Foursquare have created an alternative to the traditional video call. At Foursquare, they use something that they call “The Portal,” which is an always-on video conferencing platform that’s constantly running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with one end in New York City and the other end in San Francisco.

What you end up with is more than a video conference—it’s a gateway that gives you the ability to appear in the other office and work face-to-face just by walking up to the screen. Here’s how you can set a portal up for your own distributed company or remote team.

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Every business uses spreadsheets. For years, Microsoft Excel was the obvious choice, but as
software migrates to the cloud, Google Sheets has emerged as a worthy opponent.

Some of the things both programs can be used for:

• Complex calculations
• Storing, sorting, analyzing and filtering structured data
• Generate code, keywords, or any type of list
• Create standard operating procedures

So, which one should your team use?

At Process Street, we took a deep dive into the features of the two hotly contested spreadsheet programs to determine the victor, once and for all. It all comes down to this: Microsoft Excel vs. Google Sheets.

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On April 18th Zapier announced their newest integration with the Swedish smart button called Flic. I’m not known to go insane when finding out about apps and integrations – in fact, a year ago I probably didn’t know what an app means (no, I’m not kidding). But working for a SaaS startup has made me put on my techy pants and actually follow the news and trends.

However, nothing prepared me for this!

I love Zapier – we all here at Process Street do. (If you don’t believe me just check out Ben Mulholland’s author page, not only are most articles about Zapier, he wrote a 111-page ebook about it — download HERE). But this integration made me drop everything and enthuse to my husband about all the things I’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t because this didn’t previously exist.

Now don’t get me wrong – I absolutely adore the idea of pressing a button to inform the world of the fancy brunch I’m about to have with my girlfriends. But being a 20-something startup employee with a tech-obsessed husband and a new found interest in apps made me think of all the more everyday uses for this invention.

I’m not going to bore you with the specific details of my personal life but I will let you in on my 19 Flic use cases that might (without exaggeration) change my life, and yours.

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With legions of social activists paving the way, we’ve been dealing with the lack of workplace diversity in America for over a decade. And although you’d think that tech startups—with their productivity solutions and their open office spaces—would be at the forefront of the gender equality movement, the numbers tell a different story.

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On November 18, 2014, Microsoft Azure went dark. Thousands of the cloud computing service’s customers experienced downtime on their sites for over 9 hours. When they flooded Microsoft customer support to ask what the hell had gone wrong, customers learned that it wasn’t some glitch, natural disaster, or devious hacking scheme.

It was pure human error.

Microsoft deployed an update without running through the standard operating guidelines specifically laid out for this scenario. Instead of rigorously checking that the update was good to go, engineers shipped it on the assumption it was bug-free. This wasn’t just this one-time incident—engineers at Azure regularly violated standard operating procedure because 99.9% of the time, it was a total waste of their resources.

And it’s not just Azure that does this—habitual violation of process leads to a ton of mistakes in all kinds of IT arenas.

When I was 16, I landed my first “real” job which so happened to be in IT. I had just passed my CCNA with the help of my dad (apparently the youngest person in Australia at the time) and was hungry to get my hands on some real technology.

But once I started, I found there was rigid process everywhere, and configuring a live Windows 2000 server was a totally different experience to tinkering with my fathers machines at home, with serious consequences for not following the process.
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[ Download our Free Ebook ] – Click here to download our free 111 page ebook on “How to automate the tasks you hate at work using Zapier“.

Unless you’ve recently come back from a ten-year vacation in the wilderness, you probably have a computer, laptop, or smartphone that you use on a daily basis.

But even with all the modern technologies and products available to us in this 21st century, the daily struggles of organization and productivity remain.

Thankfully, there’s an app for that (quite a few, actually). At Modernize, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best and most efficient smartphone and tablet apps to help you organize your life. Take a look and get downloading!

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Help me. I’m on a laptop running Windows 8 right now.

Like many others, I hate it and think it’s the worst operating system since the not-so-distant Vista.

If I didn’t have to use it, I might be able to appreciate for a second that Microsoft made a bold design decision that actually ended up being influential.

Microsoft’s Metro design language was one of the first instances of flat design in technology and it came in the least likely form: a terrible mp3 player nobody bought apart from this one kid at my school. The short-lived Zune.
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Have you ever been asked for your email address to see extra blog content? It looks something like this:

That’s a content upgrade. I’ve written pretty extensively about them in this blog post on lead generation, so if you need an in-depth look at the topic (plus the psychology of why it works), that’s the place to start.

They’re great tools for blogs connected to businesses because they capture the contact info of people who are likely to want your product or service. They get the valuable content, you get another email on your list of subscribers plus a free pass to market to them. The best part is that it’s not just any old email address, owned by someone who doesn’t care what you’re saying. It’s the email address of someone who is:

1. Interested enough in what you’ve got to say to give away their email address

2. The perfect fit for your product

It’s doubtful you’re the sort of person who turns down leads, so if you aren’t already using a way to capture emails with content upgrades (or you’re doing it in an awkward way), you’ll want to check out these four tools.

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