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.

Je n’en connais pas vraiment les origines, pour être honnête. Je pense qu’il y avait beaucoup de gens qui l’appelaient programmation visuelle avant cela, ou développement visuel et ils remontent même assez loin dans le temps et vous commencez à arriver à des choses comme Yahoo ! Pipes, qui est un précurseur de Zapier, vous regardez aussi des choses comme Dreamweaver, qui était, vous savez, peut-être même un précurseur d’autres choses. et je suis sûr qu’il y avait des choses même avant ça aussi.

Aussi longtemps que les humains ont travaillé sur des choses, nous avons essayé de trouver de meilleures façons de les faire et, comme avec les langages de programmation, nous avons toujours essayé de déplacer une couche d’abstraction vers le haut. Et pour moi, aucun code n’essaie de déplacer une autre couche d’abstraction vers le haut de la pile pour rendre les choses beaucoup plus faciles pour les gens.

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.

Souvent, ça commence du côté opérationnel de la maison. Ce sont ces gens qui, peut-être, ont un tas d'ingénieurs qui sont embauchés, mais ces ingénieurs sont souvent déployés contre le produit primaire qu'ils construisent. C'est comme "Hey, notre travail est de construire ce x de classe mondiale. Et ce x est vraiment ce sur quoi nous voulons passer tout notre temps." Cependant, pour faire fonctionner l'entreprise, nous avons besoin de toutes ces autres choses. Nous avons besoin d'un CRM. Nous avons besoin d'un outil de facturation. Nous avons besoin de marketing par e-mail. Nous avons besoin d'une gestion de projet. Nous avons besoin de toutes ces autres choses, et nos ingénieurs ne nous aident pas souvent à faire en sorte que tout cela fonctionne mieux ensemble.

Les ingénieurs se concentrent sur le problème vraiment difficile de la livraison d'un produit aux clients finaux. Et c'est donc souvent dans le cadre de la gestion de l'aspect commercial des choses que les responsables des opérations commencent à intervenir et à déployer une pile sans code pour rendre les choses plus efficaces, faire en sorte que chaque vendeur soit un peu plus compétent dans son travail, faire en sorte que cette chose qui prenait toute la journée ou toute la semaine se produise instantanément.

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.

We have a lot of customers that are part of the physical economy, I'll call it where, you know, the restaurant owners, they’re storefront owners or something like that, that predominantly do their business that way. And we had a customer, in Wisconsin, called 'The Ruby Tap', that had a wine bar. And basically overnight they had to close up shop, but that night that they built an online curbside pickup order style app that allowed people to drive by and pick up wine. They did it overnight and then started making money the next day, I think the next day, they'd said, “Hey, we have made like 50 bucks over Stripe in the first day,” or something like that.

And, to me, that kind of agility and innovation that no code provides to these types of small business owners is game changing. These are folks that had these tools not existed, they really, truly would have been dead in the water, like it's just no choice, just nothing, no option, other than to close up shop. But because tools like Adalo and Zapier exist, they have a fighting chance. They can use their own creativity, they can use their own intuition to try and keep their business afloat. To me, that's where I've seen a lot of creativity recently that has been uplifting for me.