Zapier is a company that values learning from the experiences of successful entrepreneurs. They take inspiration from five key figures: Patrick McKenzie, who built his business around long-tail organic keywords; Dan Martell, who emphasized charging customers from day one to validate ideas; Eric Ries and Steve Blank, who preached the importance of customer development and finding real problems in the market; Ash Maurya, who teaches lean startup principles through his bootstrapped software-as-a-service startups; and 37Signals, which emphasizes simplicity and attention to detail, particularly in copywriting. Zapier aims to apply these lessons to its own business, including creating custom landing pages for web apps and asking customers to pay a small fee for access to the beta program.