A Growing Startup Uses Automation to Keep Its Team Small

On the cosmic scales, the benefits of having a growing company far outweigh the negatives. It means your product resonates with an audience, that you're doing something right. But it also means you need to make hiring decisions, sometimes for roles not essential to your core product, but to running a business. It means dedicating large chunks of money away from essential practices.

But what if you didn't have to? What if, instead of hiring an engineer or a team of engineers, you could build with automation? That's what business travel software company TravelPerk opted to do. To keep costs down and their team small, TravelPerk automated as many of their processes as they could.

Instead of bringing on engineers to help build custom software or connections between apps, Gigi Pridor, VP of marketing and growth at TravelPerk, realized they could use app automator Zapier to connect their apps—at a fraction of the cost of an employee.

About TravelPerk

Traveling is hard. Organizing travel for an entire company is even harder. In the eyes of TravelPerk's founders, most business travel companies operate with outdated technology and poor support. Founded in 2015, TravelPerk aims to simplify travel for companies, saving them money, time, and of course, stress.

With a focus on stellar customer support and easy-to-use tools, TravelPerk brings business travel into this century. It's no surprise they utilize automated workflows to make their processes as efficient as their product.

Connect Apps Without an Engineer

"We needed to integrate a plethora of tools and systems to run TravelPerk lean and efficiently—and not lose ourselves in code," Gidi explains. To keep their coding to a minimum, and free their marketers to craft the tools they need, Gidi brought Zapier into the fold.

In Zapier, Gidi transformed his marketing team into de facto-developers. By constructing Zaps, our word for automated workflows, TravelPerk's marketers connected apps on their own, without relying on developer resources.

With a few clicks, Gidi and his team automated their work and connected apps that otherwise couldn't.

TravelPerk's Tools

The Workflows

The simplest Zaps tend to alleviate the most manual work. Whether that's updating contacts in Intercom or notifying your team on Slack about new Salesforce leads, Zapier's automation saves the TravelPerk team from the monotony of repetitive actions. Here are a few of their biggest time-, and dev-, saving workflows:

"The native Unbounce to Autopilot integration is too basic to do the job we want it to do," Gidi says. "Through Zapier, we can enrich the data that we send to Autopilot and have a more relevant follow-up flow after people opt-in through one of our resources."

"It's hard to let these apps talk to each other natively—you need developer resources to get this done, but Zapier allows us to bypass certain things, so we can create powerful segments in Intercom," Gidi explains.

TravelPerk likes to share their sales numbers and new leads with the entire company. To do that, they connect Intercom and Salesforce to Slack, keeping everyone in the know.

TravelPerk utilizes automation to keep their costs low and only hire when they have to—and even better, they get to hire only the rolls they need to advance their product.

Since they don't have to spend time, resources, and brain power on creating integrations from scratch, Gidi and his team spend more time growing the company with growth campaigns and learning data insights.

Want to save yourself time and money like TravelPerk? Give Zapier a try for free.

All images courtesy of TravelPerk.