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Wade Foster: Zapier today is giving your favorite agent, Claude Code Cursor Codex, you name it. Access to every tool that you might use. I’m gonna show you how it’s helping us at Zapier grow our business. Can you help me generate a Sunday Outreach email to the 10 outreach accounts? Draft them in Gmail for me, so now it just goes and does this for me.
Great. Let’s just do a screen share.
Andrew Warner: You got a big announcement. What is it?
Wade Foster: We are launching the Zapier SDK into open Beta. Now, this is one of those things that might seem like not such a big deal on the surface, but it is actually sneaky. One of the most powerful things that I think we have ever, ever launched at Zapier.
I’ve been using it for the last two months and it has completely changed how I do every single task. I have. So what is it? Well, people know Zapier because we connect to your apps. Uh, you know, we’ve got this like massive library al, almost 10,000 apps that Zapier hooks into. Well, what the SDK does is it allows you to bring all those connections, all those tools safely in.
To an agent harness. So if you’re one of those people that’s already using Claude code or Codex or cursor, day to day, you hook the SDK in and now that coatings that that agent has access to all of the tools that you connect to Zapier. Now, this is powerful because even if you’re not an engineer, I am not an engineer.
I have like written zero lines of production code in my entire life. You need to think of it as like having this like magical assistant that can just go do crazy amounts of work for you. Uh, and I, it literally has changed how, how I do my work. Um, and it’s pretty easy to get started. So let me, uh, let me share my screen here real quick.
Okay. The, the getting starting part might feel intimidating at first, but I promise you it’s pretty simple. So you come here and this is the setup, and right here we’ve got this command for you and you can just copy and paste it like this, and all you gotta do is go to your agent. So you just paste it in and you hit enter and it will go install.
All the magical za Zapier capabilities, uh, the, the SDK into, in this case cursor. Now I’ve already done it, so I’m not gonna rerun the command here for us, but now you can just d go do interesting things with it. So, for example, let’s just do a test run to make sure this works. Um, I’m gonna put on, uh, demo mode so you can’t see, but I’ll say, uh, you know, show me the last, uh.
10 mentions of, you know, Wade, uh, in Slack. Let’s see. Let’s get rid of this, of Wade in Slack.
Andrew Warner: And by the way, demo, demo mode is what?
Wade Foster: So demo mode is this cool little skill I built for myself because I show off these workflows all the time. Mm-hmm. People wanna see this stuff and I wanna show the real thing, but the challenge is my real stuff has.
All my real work in it and personal information. Uh, so I made this like skill that is, I call it demo mode. And basically it allows me to run real requests, real things that I might actually do in the world, but demo mode, um, basically like rewrites it so that they’re like re redacted or like changes the names of things so it doesn’t actually show off.
Stuff that, uh, might actually, you know, leak, zap your confidential information.
Andrew Warner: So if I was in your CRM, my name Andrew Warner might be Andrew Mason, and then a phone number might be changed to 3 1 0 5 5 5 1 2 1 2. And now you’re not leaking my information out.
Wade Foster: Exactly.
Andrew Warner: Okay. All right. And so now it is connected to your Slack, and while it’s doing this and it’s doing all this research, what’s the difference between this and MCP that you did before that also connected?
Um, all the tools.
Wade Foster: So MCP is a powerful tool, and soon MCP will actually be the SDK under the, the, uh, under the hood. But what the SDK can do, especially when you’re using an agent harness, is it can, uh, run arbitrary API requests. So, whereas the MCP has all the Zapier trigger in action library predefined out of the box.
The SDK can say, Hey, I have access to, uh, Slack’s, API docs. I can just go do anything I want that the Slack API allows me to do, which means it’s much more flexible for a wide variety of workflows. Um, and here you can see it’s, it’s come back and shared, uh, a sanitized view of the, the last 10 things that have sort of popped up in, in slack for me.
Teammates said they need to miss a recorded meeting because they have a co conflict. A comms pr, uh, flagged a sensitive AI jobs question that Wade should probably look at or avoid saying. You can see here, this is a simple thing that you can do, which is, you know, fetch the last 10 mentions of my name in Slack.
But you can also build more complex workflows. So for example, one of the things I wanted to start doing was build a better relationship with our enterprise customers. Now at Zapier we have HubSpot, which is the CRM. Everybody on the team uses.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Wade Foster: Um, but HubSpot is a very complex piece of software and I only wanted to do a very small.
Thing, which was every Sunday I wanted to go email 10 enterprise customers and just check in, see how things were going, did they have any feedback for us? How could we make the product better, et cetera. And logging into HubSpot felt like overkill. Plus HubSpot isn’t the only thing. That has interesting information about our customers.
We also have information in Databricks, which is our data warehouse. We have interesting information in Gong. Mm-hmm. Which is the tool that records all of our, uh, meetings with our customers from our AEs and our CSMs. And so I wanted to build a simple CRM that pulled all the data together into one UI and then helped me go generate emails for those customers.
So let me show it off real quick. Um, let’s say, uh. You know, please open the C-E-O-C-R-M.
So here you go. This is my personal C-E-O-C-R-M. Uh, and you know, it gives me a couple of quick highlights at the top, the number of enterprise accounts we have, how much they’re paying us, it buckets, and, uh, a number of accounts that need attention for whatever reason. Uh, it tells me how many accounts have a champion, uh, in, in them, uh, and how many of ’em have like a real strong power user associated with them.
But then it basically just lists out all these accounts and, you know, I can pop into it and I have like a quick little panel that shows. You know, some more detail about the account. I wired up keyboard shortcuts so I can like quickly toggle through all of them, uh, and, you know, see all of these accounts, um, which is nice.
But the, the main workflow that I cared a lot about was this outreach one. You know, in here it’s got 10 recommended accounts for me to go reach out to and, uh, you know, connect with for whatever reason. So this is pretty handy, but. You know, once I sort of had identified these accounts, I thought to myself, well, it’s, it’s nice that, uh, I’ve identified the account.
I’d really just like some help, uh, you know, coming up with what I should email these, these accounts. And so that’s where I started to say, you know, Hey, uh, can you help me generate, um, a Sunday outreach email? To the 10 outreach accounts, draft them in Gmail for me, please. So now it just goes and does this for me.
It’s incredible. Like, it, it, it, it sort of has all these accounts pulled in from HubSpot, from Databricks, this context from Gong. So it, it has all this information about what makes. These accounts interesting or not interesting. It knows why certain accounts need attention or not. It’s suggesting 10 That would be useful for me to go ping and then it just says, alright, I’ll go draft an email for me now, I like having it draft an email still rather than just send the email because I still wanna have myself in the loop.
Uh, I still think that I write better emails than than. These tools do, but it usually does a good enough draft that I can just tweak a few things and be like, great, you know, send it for me. Uh, and so this system, this would’ve been, would not have been possible or easy for me without the Zapier SDK, because its SDK is able to sort of pull in safely all the data from all these systems and take action in all these systems.
On behalf of myself.
Andrew Warner: And the reason it do, it’s doing that is it’s pulling it from all these different locations and from your CRM, which is pulling data in from HubSpot. Mm-hmm. And it knows to then start drafting these messages out on your behalf.
Wade Foster: Yeah. And you can see here, right here, while it on the screen, I found an existing Prospector workflow.
So Prospector is the name of this workflow now it’s got the CRM short list, it’s got recent touch suppression. So it’s basically saying, Hey, here’s some accounts you should not email. I added clay verification over time, and this was because our HubSpot, um, didn’t always have UpToDate contact information.
And so I used Clay to basically check, Hey, does this person still work at this company? Is this person like the right person in the account to reach out to? So I added that. Um, it has, uh, actually, let’s lemme scroll back up so I don’t lose that. Uh.
Andrew Warner: By the way, that clay part is just brilliant. You told me about this before we got started.
Essentially you said, look, I, I could message some people, but I realized sometimes their emails are out of, uh, out of date. Sometimes they’re no longer at the company. Totally. Well, what do people do about that? They use clay. Well, if they use clay, then frigging a I’m just gonna connect clay in here and now I could use clay through this agent.
Wade Foster: Totally. Um, you can see I built in a wade style draft generation. So this is another thing where I mentioned. These things don’t write emails as good as I do. Mm-hmm. So I basically fed it a bunch of emails that I’ve written before and said, here’s how I like to write emails. And so it said, and then I built a skill that’s like, Hey, here’s how Wade likes to write emails.
Um, I taught it how I like, and then it, then it goes and, uh, builds like a signed Gmail draft. So it like adds in a, my, my Gmail signature in a very specific way that I want for these, you know, outreach emails.
Andrew Warner: Yeah.
Wade Foster: So, you know, every step of the way I’m basically just able to give instructions to this.
Like I would to another human where I’d say like, Hey, can you make it like this? Can you do it like that? So I don’t have to know all the underlying technology that’s going on. I don’t know how it’s doing all this stuff. I just know that I’ve got an amazing coding agent in cursor inside of Cursor, and in this case I’m using GPT 5.4, and then I’ve got the Zapier SDK, which allows me.
To hook into all these different tools and pulls data in and manipulate it in interesting ways. But I don’t have to figure out how to like actually solve these problems. And as a result, I find myself every single day, first thing in the morning, I just talk to the agent and I say like, Hey, what work have I done recently where I should build new workflows and build new agents and build new stuff?
And it will start proposing them to me and says, here’s the next thing you should build. Here’s the next thing you should build. Here’s the next thing you should build. And as a result. I’ve started to build up more and more of these workflows that, uh, just run for me and more and more of my day, uh, is getting automated end to end, um, which is pretty freaking awesome.
Andrew Warner: I. Gimme a few more use cases. This is number one for me because this is, yeah, real relationships with real customers. You keep connecting with them. It’s going to build your, your relationship, build your revenue, and also help you understand what they want Totally. Uh, so you can create better products for them.
How about a basic one, like, uh, daily briefs?
Wade Foster: Yeah. I do a daily brief every morning. So every morning at 6:00 AM it kicks off. It goes and checks my calendar. It checks my to-do list, it checks my email. And based on all that stuff, it says, here’s the important things you need to do for your day. Uh, you know, here’s the, you know, you’ve got a big focus block in the morning.
In the morning. Make sure you spend time doing this. This is the one thing you have to get done. If you do this thing, you win the day. Then, you know, here’s, uh, these three meetings that you have in the afternoon and, uh, here’s a prep specific for that meeting. So you have each meeting, uh, a, a Google Doc that gets generated that says, um, what I need to know for that meeting, which is fantastic so that I do every single morning.
Um, another simple one, A lot of times those meetings have. Pre-read docs, so they’ve got a big Google Doc. Those I just fire into the system and say, uh, I have an exec review skill, and I run that against the Google Doc and the SDA goes and fetches all the information. Sometimes it’s multiple docs. She fetches it and then it reviews it for me and says, here’s, here’s what you need to know going into the meeting.
Here’s the questions you need to ask. Here’s the things you need to know about. Here’s a fourth one. I review every single job offer that goes out inside of Zapier still.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Wade Foster: Um, I used to go manually review. Dozens of scorecards. Um, for, for each applicant, I would go review their resume. I’d go look at their LinkedIn.
I would make sure that we were running a really tough, rigorous review cycle Now. I just point it to the Ashby, the, the Ashby profile. So Ashby is our, uh, tool that we use to run interviews and keep track of applicants.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Wade Foster: So when an offer comes my way, I point it at that URL, the agent, the the SDK goes and fetches the application and it fetches all the scorecards on the candidate and then it fires off an advisory council.
The advisory council and analyzes, uh, it generates multiple, uh, personas. So like a ruthless CFOA wartime COO operator, a contrarian board member, a recruiting expert, like it creates all these sub profiles and then each of those subagents goes and reviews the candidate and says, yes, you should hire this person, or No, you shouldn’t hire this person.
Is this person a bar raiser? And it allows me to audit our own hiring process to say, Hey, are we actually doing a good job here? Or not. And that was a task that used to take me, you know, 30 minutes per every candidate. And now it’s down to like five. And that’s the power of these tools is if you, you know, start to stack them, you know, all the, all of a sudden, like, you know, this 30 minute task here, this 30 minute task there, they all get shrunk down to.
Five minute tasks, two minute tasks, and then you find yourself with big new blocks of time during the day and you start to go, well, what else should I work on? You know, I can, I can run this, maybe I should launch a new podcast. Maybe I should spend more time on social. Maybe I have a new idea for this product.
And so I find myself actually doing way more work than I ever did before. ’cause I have tools like this, but it’s fun. Like the more work is not actually. From a, from a time sitting in front of keyboard thing, it’s not actually that I’m spending that much more time in front of the keyboard. It’s just my throughput.
My velocity is just so much higher, which, um, and it’s fun ’cause I’m just not like sitting around waiting for, you know, this stuff to get done. It just, it just does the work for me. It’s great.
Andrew Warner: Let’s talk about some other things that I’m gonna be able to do with this, because I’m gonna be using this now that it’s out.
Uh, the number one thing that comes to my mind is I do need a daily brief and it should pull in since I’m posting on YouTube and I want more views, I wanna understand what’s hot on YouTube. Right now. I have access to YouTube through an API, it. What basically what I want is for it to start analyzing it as part of my daily brief.
I have somebody on our team who just feeds me articles that he finds that he thinks I’m going to, that, that are gonna be helpful for me. I’ll add that into the daily brief and pull it outta Slack into there. Um, I like to know how we’re doing with Mercury. I’m assuming I could attach my Mercury Bank information in to know what our, what our burn is.
Wade Foster: If, if Dapper supports the app, uh, you can hook it up and then the agent has access to the API and so anything you can do in the API. Zapier will help you tackle it.
Andrew Warner: Okay. And then if Lauren in our Slack is saying, Andrew, this is an urgent thing to look at today because it has access to my Slack and it’ll have access to my calendar, it could just put it on my calendar to free time based on my requests.
Wade Foster: A hundred percent. Mm-hmm.
Andrew Warner: Okay. I see all the different things that I can do with this. Your CRM is my favorite so far. What I’m wondering is how did you find these things that you’re doing on a repeated basis to turn into automations? How is it identifying what those are?
Wade Foster: So here was what hooked me. I made a concentrated effort to say, I am gonna do all of my work inside of Cursor, and just said, this is where I’m gonna do all my work.
And. Even at first when it was maybe a little slower because I wasn’t quite used to the workflow yet, I still forced myself to do it that way.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Wade Foster: Then every week I would just ask it, Hey, look over everything we did together this week and give me ideas for new tools, new automations that we should go build.
That would make my. Work much more like faster, higher quality, better, et cetera. And it would propose three or four or five things. And of the, you know, five things it would propose, I’d be like, great, let’s go build three. And we would just, we just do that process over and over and over again and it just starts to compound.
And plus, once you start, once you start automating a few things, you find that your own brain starts to get, mm-hmm. Um, better at spotting opportunities because you’re like, oh, I remember this other thing I did that was kind of like this. I can probably do this. In the same way or a same version of it. Uh, and so it’s like a habit, like the more you do it, the better you get over time.
Andrew Warner: How are you saving it? Are you asking, um, whatever AI tool you’re using to save in an MD file, what you just did so you can analyze it at the end of the week?
Wade Foster: Yeah, so mostly, so there’s two things I do. Um, one, you can just ask the agent to review all of your chats. You don’t have to save it. You can just say, look at all the chats that I’ve had.
Andrew Warner: Wait, it can look at chats even though I’ve closed the chat window.
Wade Foster: You can, yes. So you can say, review every chat we’ve had this week.
Andrew Warner: I thought that was the problem with Claude Code, that I can’t get it to look at all my past chats.
Wade Foster: Uh, I, it works well for me inside a cursor,
Andrew Warner: so, uh, I won’t do that. Okay.
That is killer. Yeah. Look at all my chats this week, so I don’t even have to have it save at the end of a conversation. Exactly. And then just tell me what we could have automated.
Wade Foster: Just tell me what we should have done. Yep. Uh, okay. And so that’s a big one. Then my, my, my approach is I usually do it the manual way first.
So like, I’ll usually just like, you know, pop open in a new chat and I’ll just start yapping at it. And then if I find myself. Doing the same thing kind of over and over again. Then I’ll build like a skill for it. So for example, one workflow I did a lot was I’ve got this meeting coming up, the team has this Google Doc, can you help me review it?
I wanna know what’s strong in the Google Doc, what’s weak, what type of questions I should be asking, da da da da da da. And so I just kept doing that over and over and over again. And so that got turned into. The exec review copilot. And so now anytime I wanna run that, I just do exec review, copilot, I copy paste in the Google Doc or docs, and then it just goes off and does all that stuff.
So these things just, so, so then I kind of graduate to there. And then you often can find, well if, if I am, uh, if I have, if I know I have a meeting and I’ve already got the doc. Why am I the one that’s sort of waiting to go do this? Can I just have it, um, right in my daily brief, like in the morning it should just go look at what’s in my calendar.
It should be able to see that in my calendar this doc exists. So it should just go ahead and kick off the exec review, co-pilot, and then the link to that prep should actually happen inside my daily brief instead of me having to be the one that triggers this stuff. So you start to like, go from just manual, like I’m just doing this all the time to now.
As you do, you find yourself just doing these things over and over and over. You’re just progressively adding like small little features that make it slicker and slicker over time.
Andrew Warner: Is the daily brief a skill that’s then part that is triggered by Aron job?
Wade Foster: Yes, I have Aron job triggering the uh, the daily brief.
Right now.
Andrew Warner: Wait, can we get the skill that you use for demo mode, the skill that you use for the executive review co-pilot, something that will help us create a daily brief similar to what you’ve got?
Wade Foster: Yep. Sure can.
Andrew Warner: We’re gonna have a link to it in the show notes. Alright. I’m really excited to play around with this.
This is so freaking fun. And the idea is that I’m just gonna keep coming into Claude, giving it more access, um, I use VS code and just seeing what I can do and what I could have it do for me.
Wade Foster: Love it.
Andrew Warner: Hell yeah. Okay. Hey, my agent says that if you watch this far, you’re gonna wanna subscribe and Google thinks that if you watch this far, you’ll wanna watch that video.
