How Zapier Built a $1.4M Social Pipeline with Ordinal

About Zapier

Zapier is the world's leading workflow automation platform, connecting 9,000+ apps so businesses can move work across tools without writing code. With nearly 800 employees and a product used by millions, Zapier has long set the pace for how modern teams operate.

Challenge

When Zapier first approached Ordinal, they had recently started posting on executive socials. The program had been live for ~6 months and they were looking for a tool to help them scale and drive results quickly on socials.

The first goal was to build the executive and employee advocacy program from scratch. At the time, Zapier had a contract with a legacy social media management platofrm, but ended up managing the majority of their content through manual processes and Google Docs.

"We looked at the tools available at the time and none of them really made sense. We just wanted people to be able to post on their own and still get the data."

The problems stacked up fast:

• Managing multiple leadership profiles. With leadership and executive socials starting to scale up, Zapier was looking for a centralized tool to manage their social content.
• Expensive, underused tooling. A legacy platform was bought for employee advocacy, analytics, and scheduling - but the team barely used it. It wasn’t optimized for executive content and felt like a bottleneck for users trying to scale.
• No way to prove ROI. After the initial excitement of growing from nothing, leadership started asking: is this making money? Limited data and analytics meant there was no way to quantify the ROI of social content.
• Scattered, unactionable data. LinkedIn engagement lived across disconnected tables and tools - impossible to hand off to sales or connect to real pipeline numbers.
• No tool was built for how AI-forward social teams actually work. Existing tools weren't designed to plug into AI coding environments like Cursor or Claude Code - leaving MCP-first workflows impossible.

Solution

"Ordinal helped us out very quickly in terms of getting people excited again about content. People in the company are literally asking to use it - it feels like a little club of people that keeps asking to be let in."

Zapier replaced a legacy social media management software platform with Ordinal and rebuilt the entire executive social operation - now supporting 10–15 leaders, driving influenced pipeline, and feeding LinkedIn intelligence directly into the sales process.

• Employee Advocacy - From Vibes to Verified Pipeline: Zapier’s team started adding UTM links into executive and employee posts pointing to Zapier's weekly workshops and events - then tracking who clicked, signed up, and entered the sales pipeline. For the first time, they could put a real pipeline number behind social - “That was the big unlock for us.”
• Earned Media Value - A Language Leadership Already Speaks: Measuring executive social ROI was always a hard sell - until Ordinal added EMV tracking within 24 hours (not an exaggeration!) of Ryan's request. Having a dollar figure that answered "how much would we have spent to buy these eyeballs?" made the ROI of social clear-cut. Organic and paid social stopped being separate conversations. These EMV stats have also increased posting frequency - several executives within Zapier’s leadership team have actually started to compare EMV numbers against each other to see who is leading from a value-driven perspective.
• Ordinal MCP - Building What Didn't Exist: Zapier’s team connected the Ordinal MCP into Cursor and Claude Code to build infrastructure that didn't exist anywhere on the market. With Ordinal’s MCP, Zapier’s team was able to easily draft posts, pull in context across different sources like Slack to inform content, and build analytics and reporting dashboards to measure post performance.
  
  Zapier’s team has also built internal apps on top of Ordinal’s MCP that connects social to their internal workflows. For example, using the Ordinal MCP + Zapier SDK, the team has created an always-on app that’s connected to a Slack form - when employees request a social media post through the form, the social team is notified and can react to the message with an emoji to automatically drop it into the correct day in Ordinal.

• Scaling Without Becoming a Bottleneck: After setting up Zapier's Chief People Officer with Ordinal MCP in Cursor, the CPO was querying his own performance data independently within days. New hires ramp just as fast - Zapier's newest social hire was pulling aggregate executive metrics via Ordinal MCP in her first week.

Results

• $1.4M in influenced pipeline generated through executive and employee advocacy in H2 of last year — likely 2–3x higher when accounting for untracked attribution
• $2M+ target for influenced pipeline this upcoming half with Ordinal
• 10–15 leaders now receiving active social support, up from a CEO who posted fewer than 10 times in a year
• Replaced a $60,000/year legacy software contract with a tool the team actually uses - and lines up to be added to
• 25-35 hours saved per week
• Custom LinkedIn intelligence dashboard built on Ordinal MCP, surfacing ICP-filtered prospects with AE assignments and direct HubSpot links
• Executive self-sufficiency: C-suite leaders including the Chief People Officer now query their own Ordinal data directly via MCP - this data is then automatically used to improve the quality of future posts when drafting posts via the Ordinal MCP.

"I fell in love with vibe coding and figured out how to use it to scale a program at Zapier - at the exact same time that the social media MCP I needed was released. That's kismet." Ryan Quindlen, Social Media Manager @ Zapier