Media training 101 for small businesses

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Great news: you just scored a big press interview to promote your business. The story will expose your brand to the perfect new audience and drive meaningful traffic to your website. So…don't blow it. Yes, just as quickly as the excitement for the opportunity arrived, the realization that you now have to do an interview sets in. I get it—press interviews can absolutely be intimidating. The resulting coverage represents a significant opportunity to acquire new customers, drive sales, or raise awareness, and you want to be sure to represent your brand well and really compel the audience to check out your company. On top of that, you have to contend with adrenaline and nerves in the moment. You may be thinking, "So many other business owners are so polished and articulate in their interviews. How am I going to pull that off?" Deep breath. A successful interview is usually the result of good media training: preparation and practice in advance of an interview. I've tr...
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Work from home apps: The 15 tools we use most at Zapier

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As more people transition to remote work, we've received lots of questions about what work from home apps we use internally at Zapier. While different teams will require different tools for working remotely, we thought a peek into our tech stack would help you figure out what you might be missing. So here's an excerpt from the Zapier Playbook about the apps we use to work from home—and how we use them.

Main communication tools

Slack

Our virtual office. Use Slack to chat about your work.

People in team-content talking about what they're up to that day.

Async

Our home-built internal blog. Use Async to show your work.

An example from Async

Quip

Our internal knowledge base. Use Quip to document your work.

A screenshot of the Zapier Editorial team folder in Quip

Zoom

Large company meetings or external meetings are usually conducted on Zoom. For smaller internal meetings, we sometimes use Slack video calls.

A large meeting in Zoom

Other communication tools

Google Calendar

Keeping your Google Calendar updated helps your teammates schedule time to meet with you. The latest Google Calendar update has a lot of features that make it easier to schedule across time zones.

Gmail

We don't typically use email internally, except for notifications. Email is mainly used to collaborate with those external to Zapier.

Google Docs and Sheets

We tend to use Google Docs and Sheets for more specific, one-off tasks, as well as for writing blog content. Since it's not all housed in one central location, your best bet is to search Slack for references and links to the docs. If you decide to create content in one of these apps, be sure to link to your content elsewhere.

Coda

Some teams use Coda for planning and project management. It works a bit like a combination of Quip and Airtable.

image of Coda

Airtable

Some teams use Airtable for project tracking, storing data, recording notes, and more.

Editorial calendar in Airtable

Jira

We use Jira as our task management system for all software projects.

Screenshot from Jira

GitHub

If you're looking for a non-app issue or pull request, or maybe even a specific hardcoded user error message in the codebase, you can probably use GitHub to get the most context quickly. For example, you might search the code base for an error string like "This Downloadable Not Found" and look at the file and the git blame to track down who was involved (or relevant issues or PRs). Anyone can do this—not just engineers.

GitHub issue

Stack Overflow

We have a Stack Overflow for Teams site for private questions and answers relating to Zapier.

Rover

Rover is our internal "App CRM" where you'd go to look at the bugs for all of our app integrations. This also powers much of the issue trackers that our partners see in the developer platform. You can also find out how popular different triggers and actions are.

Looker

Looker is where you'll find the answer to most of the common data questions like "how many users did we add last week?" or "how close are we to our team goals in January?" It connects to the backends that the data team maintains and you can even explore and create your own "looks."

Screenshot from Looker

Help Docs

We have extensive user help docs, but they aren't just for users. When you do all-hands support, you will become very familiar with our help docs.

Related: The remote workers' toolkit: 30+ productivity apps and tools to help you work smarter, not harder



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