Wade Foster

You know, for the longest time, when we started Zapier, no code wasn't a thing. Right? No code has really been a thing that as a “term” has existed since, what, 2018? 2017? Maybe it's fairly new and so we, you know, we started Zapier in 2011. And at the time, we sought out to solve what felt like a somewhat simple, but fairly pervasive problem, which is that there's all these new apps that are popping up left and right, and all the customers, all the end users of these tools, want them to work with everything else that they use.

Now almost a decade later and our job at the time was like, well, maybe if we just made it a little easier for the end user to be able to set up an integration between those tools that could be useful. And turned out over time, it's more than just useful because all these end providers, you know, the MailChimp, the Salesforce, the G Suite's of the world, it's really difficult for them to build a big ecosystem of integrations, it's just a hard thing to do. Even if you are a very successful business.

We realized that over time, Zapier had a much bigger value to play. It wasn't just helping with these like little simple one-off integrations, but it really acted as a bit of a workflow tool that helped folks connect these tools, but in a way that actually felt more like building workflows. It felt more like logic. It felt more like coding, in some sense. In some ways, even though most of the people who use Zapier don't know how to code, many of them don't know what APIs even are and so just the ability to help people connect the building blocks of the web together in a way that creates a thing has been something that I think when no code became a term and a thing, it was like, well, Zapier is the thing that provides all the logic for all these tools.

I think no code sometimes gets a bad take. Because people are like, “Oh, you can't build great things with no code.” I don't really think that's the point of it. I think no code is really about empowerment. It's about helping folks who have ideas who want to get a job done — be able to do that stuff.

They don't have to wait for engineering. They don't have to wait for IT to go make this stuff happen. They can use tools like Adalo, or Zapier, or a Webflow, or an Airtable, or what have you, to build the thing that works and solves the problem that they have.

To me, no code is all about helping that set of people make that happen. It's the sort of this democratization of building things that is really useful.

Realmente no conozco los orígenes, para ser honesto. Creo que había mucha gente que lo llamaba programación visual antes de eso, o desarrollo visual, e incluso se remontan lo suficiente y empiezas a llegar a cosas como Yahoo! Pipes, que es un precursor de Zapier, también miras cosas como Dreamweaver, que fue, ya sabes, tal vez incluso un precursor de otras cosas, y estoy seguro de que también hubo cosas antes de eso.

Desde que los humanos hemos estado trabajando en las cosas, hemos estado tratando de encontrar mejores formas de hacerlas y, al igual que con los lenguajes de programación, siempre tratando de mover una capa de abstracción hacia arriba. Y para mí, ningún código está tratando de mover otra capa de abstracción hacia arriba en la pila para que sea mucho más fácil para la gente.

I'm doing the no dash code, but I hope I hope I'm not starting a flame war or anything… oh gosh I lost half my customers right there.

I think the exciting thing is you can start to see a lot more tech enabled businesses move a lot faster. There's so many businesses [...] you know, small restaurants, you think a small real estate agent, you think of an attorney or accountant or all these sorts of just service industry businesses or small mom and pop stores that have back office needs.

No code lets them run such an efficient shop, which is really important, even more so now than ever, because they have to find ways to be scrappy, and endure through some of these tough times. I think no code really is about putting the power in the people's hands to make things happen.

Muchas veces comienza desde el lado de la operación de la casa. Son estas personas las que, tal vez, tienen un montón de ingenieros que son contratados, pero esos ingenieros a menudo se despliegan contra el producto principal que están construyendo. Es como: "Oye, nuestro trabajo es construir este x de clase mundial. Y esa x es realmente en lo que queremos pasar todo nuestro tiempo". Sin embargo, para dirigir el negocio, necesitamos todas estas otras cosas. Necesitamos un CRM. Necesitamos una herramienta de facturación. Necesitamos email marketing. Necesitamos la gestión de proyectos. Necesitamos todas estas otras cosas, y nuestros ingenieros no suelen ayudar a que esas cosas funcionen mejor juntas.

Los ingenieros se centran en el problema realmente difícil de entregar un producto a los clientes finales. Y así, el funcionamiento del lado comercial de las cosas a menudo es donde la gente de operaciones comienza a entrar y desplegar una pila sin código y hacer que las cosas sean más eficientes, hacer que cada vendedor sea un poco mejor en su trabajo, hacer que esto que solía tomar todo el día o toda la semana suceda instantáneamente.

I think you can just do more things, like you can do more things faster, cheaper, it's more available, you have more people that are capable of doing it. You can solve more different types of problems and enables everybody to go faster. So, to me, it's sort of like a superpower where you can just help more folks get things done. I think it enables a whole new set of knowledge work.

I think the more people that can build stuff is good for society. If the internet was sort of like a first wave of enablement, it's like, hey, some random person who learns how to code in the middle of Missouri, can now spin up a website and start making some money. No code, I think, just adds another order of magnitude, because now it's not about learning code. It's you just have to learn some simpler tools. And so it just adds a whole swath of people [who] now are able to do a whole set of new things.

I can tell you this, it feels like it will be a foundational shift in how work happens, and I feel pretty confident in that.

I don't know that that will ever happen... You know, actually, now that I think about it, it's possible that you would more people with active zaps than they would making PowerPoint presentations in a given week. So it depends on your definition of apps.

For colleges, it's less than five years.

For grade schools, less than 10 years.

Next year, less than a year.

I still think we have a while here — let's call it a decade.

Yeah, you could get like a TurboTax style thing in the decade.

I bet we'll see something in less than five years.

Less than five years.

That's interesting, because Obama was all about learn to code. I bet we will see something in the next four years if we haven't already.

Tenemos muchos clientes que son parte de la economía física, lo llamaré donde, ya sabes, los dueños de restaurantes, son dueños de tiendas o algo así, que predominantemente hacen sus negocios de esa manera. Y teníamos un cliente, en Wisconsin, llamado 'The Ruby Tap', que tenía un bar de vinos. Y básicamente de la noche a la mañana tuvieron que cerrar la tienda, pero esa noche construyeron una aplicación en línea de estilo de pedidos para recoger en la acera que permitía a la gente pasar en coche y recoger vino. Lo hicieron de la noche a la mañana y luego comenzaron a ganar dinero al día siguiente, creo que al día siguiente, dijeron: "Oye, hemos ganado como 50 dólares con Stripe en el primer día", o algo así.

Y, para mí, ese tipo de agilidad e innovación que ningún código proporciona a este tipo de propietarios de pequeñas empresas está cambiando las reglas del juego. Estas son personas que si estas herramientas no hubieran existido, realmente habrían estado muertas en el agua, como si no hubiera otra opción, simplemente nada, ninguna opción, aparte de cerrar la tienda. Pero debido a que existen herramientas como Adalo y Zapier, tienen una oportunidad de luchar. Pueden usar su propia creatividad, pueden usar su propia intuición para tratar de mantener su negocio a flote. Para mí, ahí es donde he visto mucha creatividad recientemente que ha sido edificante para mí.