Zeb Evans - Building ClickUp to $60M in Revenue

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What is going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode, we have zeb Evans, the CEO and founder of ClickUp, a company that offers project management solutions for businesses. Zeb Evans is currently based in San Diego, California and founded ClickUp in 2017. While running a previous business, Evans felt frustrated with having to use several different types of productivity and project management softwares. Here's a quote from Zeb. You don't know where tasks are. You don't know what people are working on. You certainly don't know where to find things or put things, he said. When I exited that company, this was the problem that I wanted to solve with ClickUp. ClickUp now claims more than 1 million users, including teams at Google, Samsung, and Uber. Now Evans believes artificial intelligence will radically change project management software and how we approach work. Before we dive into the episode, please take a moment to share this episode with a friend. I personally use ClickUp for my businesses and it has been a phenomenal software and like I said, I absolutely love it. So make sure you check it out. And with that being said, let's dive into the episode with Zeb Evans, the CEO and founder of ClickUp.

All right, what is going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today we have Zeb Evans, the co founder and CEO of ClickUp. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Zeb.

Thanks for having me, Casey. Happy to be here.

So first off, man, I just want to say congratulations on all of the success with ClickUp. I know that you guys recently raised $35 million, which is phenomenal. But for those that don't know what ClickUp is, I'd love for you to give them the overview of what it is that you built.

Yeah. So ClickUp is a platform where you can put all of your work in one place. So what that means is, you know, usually you'll have separate applications, or maybe you're just using spreadsheets for things like tasks and projects and your chat, your communication, and, like, your docs. And so what ClickUp is, is it just puts all those together in one place so that all of your work is together. And the goal of doing that is to save people time. So that's kind of just. Our mission is saving people and, you know, eventually being able to put all of. All of your.

Oh, you froze there a little bit. Can you say that again?

Yeah, just the last part was. And eventually the goal is to save you one day every week.

Got it. I love that, man. When did you create ClickUp? Where did this begin, man?

Yeah, it's a good story. So we. To take a step back at my previous company, I've been on for my whole life, by the way. So I've always been, like, starting companies since I was like, three or four years old. And at my most recent one, we started with basecamp with just one person, just myself, and we ended up with like 100 people spread out between 10 different productivity apps. And the whole goal was to make you more productive, yet we were feeling the opposite by using so many different applications. I didn't know where to put the work. I didn't know who to talk to or what people were working on. So ClickUp really was just. It was an internal tool that we built for ourselves. We were going to work on a completely different project. It was actually going to be a Craigslist competitor where you could pay an app and remove sketchiness from Craigslist, have, like, a review system and just remove that fraud from the country and the world. And basically, we got deep into building ClickUp for ourselves, and we started sharing it with just friends in San Francisco, and it took off. So we realized that, you know, our mission of kind of like saving ourselves time is really a mission that transformed into, like, a world mission of saving people time.

Yeah, for sure, man. When you guys look at the landscape of, you know, so many productivity apps, Slack and Asana and all these platforms, where were you guys focusing to begin with? Because I know as someone that uses ClickUp as well as I've used many other productivity apps, there's something about them where you guys have, I would say, cracked the code on what it really means to be productive. But what was the goal from day one when it comes to how are you going to compete with these other platforms out there?

It's a great question. So what we realized was that why we the problem we had originally, which again was having to use so many different applications, was because they were always so opinionated. Each of them had their own opinion about how you should work and what you're going to be able to do with their tool, which has created a lot of limitation around what you can use it for. So, you know, for example, if you're a marketing company, you couldn't use the same tool as an engineering company. But you know, many people work with marketers and engineers in the same company, or they're working with contractors, or you're a mom and pop shop and you're working with a contractor that's building your website. So we had to remove that opinion agent, really. And what we did was just build a platform that was so flexible that you really could use it for anything. I mean, we literally have families that use us and then we have SpaceX that uses us for sending rockets into space. So user that uses ClickUp. And really from the beginning, it was all just about building a platform that was so customizable and flexible that it worked for the way that you work.

Yep, I love that, man. When you first launched from a software perspective, how did the process go of getting your first user and then starting to get other companies on board? Because that's obviously the goal of any software that's looking to get customers. And you guys have done that so well. So what was your launch strategy and how did you go about obtaining these higher level clients and companies to use your platform?

Yeah, great, great question. So it's really, until two or three months ago, we grew completely organically, meaning we did not pay for a customer. Customers came to us from referrals, word of mouth or SEO. So our very first users and customers were just through SEO. We would just do the classic long tail keywords for things that people were not providing much content for, at least valuable content for, but that people were searching at a decent rate. So, you know, it starts with even, even small things like people. 100 searches a month. Right. If you can get something with very high intent for 100 searches a month, that means, you know, you could get 50 users per month for that, which just isn't a lot at first, but it compounds. And especially if you do 10 of those, you know, that's 500 users a month. So that's kind of our strategy at first. And then all it was was obsession with the product. And so we have this kind of like flywheel of free users coming in and then we have this obsession with like making the product better and listening to those users. And then we keep doing that. And it's this cycle of people referring other people and inviting other people into the system. And eventually, you know, to your point about getting into larger companies is it always starts with just like a single person or a small team at that company, and then it branches out from there. Right. So they tell, you know, Susie about them working with this new platform and how it's so much better than X, Y and Z. And then Susie's team uses it and then, you know, tells Jerry's team.

Yeah.

And then it just starts growing within enterprise.

I love that, man. I know I said at the beginning, but I saw the article. In the whole PR campaign, you guys raised $35 million. Let's talk about that. Obviously that was more recent and I'm sure that's been game changing for you guys, but what has that done for the company? And what are you excited about with the new funding that you guys have?

Yeah. So we've to take a step back. I didn't really. And I'm from North Carolina, so I didn't even know what fundraising was when I was living there. So when we moved to San Francisco to start ClickUp, we didn't even think fundraising was an option. Right. I had, I just had no idea. It seemed so foreign to me. And so we did it for that reason. Plus, we still just wanted. We still thought we could do it ourselves. And, you know, I would absolutely advocate for doing yourself as long as you can, especially until you get product market fit. I kind of advocate if you can do it organically without paying for users, do that all day, you can grow faster and more sustainably. And so that's what we did. We got to product market fit and to decent scale doing it ourselves. But then ultimately, as you mentioned, we're in the. This actually is the single most competitive software category in the world. The second is CRM, but the project manager space is twice or three times competitive than CRM. So it's, you know, to really make a name for ourselves and to like plant our, our flag, so to speak. We kind of had to get somebody that has done this before, somebody with a little bit more experience than us and that can carry us into like this next phase of growth. But, you know, to be clear, we do. We always want to stay sustainable and not be one of those companies that's, you know, blowing $10 million per month on marketing.

Yeah, for sure. By the way. Well, part of North Carolina I'm From Virginia. So neighbors. Nice.

I'm originally from Winston Salem and I lived in Charlotte for a while. I went to school in Blacksburg though.

Okay, very cool. Yeah, I'm right around, came from Richmond. I'm in Scottsdale now. I'm moving to LA soon. But I want to talk about that. Like prior to ClickUp, I know that you said you've always started businesses throughout your entire life. Where did this bug for entrepreneurship come from? And prior to ClickUp, where were you spending your time?

No, I don't really know where it came from. Nobody really in my family was an entrepreneur. And really from the beginning, since I was three or four years old, I was a kid that was selling things. I was always doing that stuff. I guess my uncle did have. I would go to his house in the summers when I started my turn, probably 12 or 13 and went to go work for him. He had a kind of publishing business in Nashville and so that certainly sparked it a little bit more. But I had really always been selling things. Since ever I can remember I was creating and selling things. I mean I got suspended probably 10 times in school for selling candy to DVDs to T shirts, like everything.

Yep, I love that. With software, what made you interested in building a software? That being obviously a highly competitive space. But when did you get into software and what did that process look like as being an industry that is not only competitive but requires funding and user growth? And it's something that, you know, has a lot of lessons to learn in that process.

Yeah, you know, I had always. So when I was 10 years old, I was in. I was at a near death experience basically and I was in the hospital for a long time, a couple months and I there, I got a laptop and I. That was where I first started, like not really learning how to code, but learning how to build websites with like easy, easy build websites. And so that was where like I first kind of married this technology with entrepreneurship stuff. And then ultimately when I was in school, I went to school for about a year and a half at Virginia. Very cool company. And there was a lot of inefficiency in the way we were doing social media. So I had another near death experience and I dropped out of school and I learned how to code. And I really don't know exactly why I thought that that was the way to go, but it just, it just felt right. It was like a gut thing. And I was like, I'm just going to learn how to code and do this. And then I built an application to really automate a lot of social media. And that's how I got started. That's really how I got into it, you know, and I had, of course I had no this way. I also tell everybody, it's like anybody can do this. You know, coding and stuff feels so foreign to people, especially if you're not living in California. It's very, very foreign. But like, really, anybody can pick it up in a matter of months and you can create your own things.

I love that, man. Where do you see most tech founders going wrong when launching a new product? I know that you talked about obsessing about the consumer and the utilization of the actual product, but where do you see brands going wrong when launching a software specifically?

Yeah, there's a lot of ways, but I think that, you know, people overthink the end user and they overthink developing software. They. You kind of like, the general consensus is, you know, you need a user research team and a UX team and UI team and a bunch of designers and front end and back end and, you know, 50 different people to build something. And like, with great people, you really don't, you really don't need that many people. And the reality is it doesn't have to be perfect. It's like just we. Our number one core value is progress over perfection. So just release things, just like, get it out there to people, get their feedback and then, and then make it better. Iterate over time. Users will be very forgiving of you, especially early on. So I would say that's the biggest mistake is like, there's lots of people, they don't ever ship anything. You know, they'll blow through two years worth of money, and at the end of those two years, they have nothing to show for it, Nothing done. Because they were always searching for perfection.

Yep. No, I love that, man. Right now I'm building a software in the podcast space and it's something that I've, you know, after talking to a lot of people, I'm focused on just getting something launched and it's great to hear that and I'm sure a lot of people will benefit from that. And I want to talk about that. You know, the early days where you're launching your mvp, you're getting your first users on board. What did you learn from that? Being that you weren't focused on perfection, but just progress. And what did that look like early on?

Our users always drove our roadmap, at least part of our roadmap to some extent. So I always had this vision of like putting your work in One place, like I mentioned early on, so if what people requesting aligned with that vision, then we would build that first. You know, we'd build pieces of it, different features that users really wanted. And we use a feedback platform. We use. It's called Canny C A N N Y. There's several of them out there, but I love canny. And basically it's a really simple like board and so you can vote for, you know, what is most important to you and you can add feedback there. And that kind of determined our roadmap early on and determined what we build next. You know, if a lot of people wanted time tracking, we would add time tracking.

Yep. Very cool, man. When it comes to scaling a team, especially in these times where it's a lot of stuff is virtual, how have you gone about building team culture and hiring the right people? Especially nowadays when, like I said, a lot of things are virtual and it's. The landscape has shifted.

Yeah, it's. You know, we had always been at least set up for working remote. I mean, we are a tech company, so you have like those foundations in place, plus we use ClickUp, so it's like, it's just perfect for remote work anyway. But I did always, in all honesty, like, I wanted a. My first company, my first real tech company was remote, or at least 95% remote. And I wanted a company where we had like this human connection. Right. This is like personal connection. Especially early on. I would advocate for that. I really would. Nothing beats being in the same room with somebody. Especially like in a startup when you're there, you know, all day, all night type of thing, nothing's gonna, Nothing's gonna beat that. It's. It's just not. But after you kind of have that mvp, then yeah, of course, you know, to just to really scale. It's all about finding the best people. Right. No matter where you are or who you are, it's just about finding the best people for the job. And so to do that, the answer is going to be remote a lot of times. And that's why today we do hire remote people as well. So there's like, there's a balance to it, you know. And I would say the founders are like the key people to the company. They really should be together. And then kind of the rest of the team you can hire remotely, if that's your prerogative.

Totally. And I know that you talked about a core value, which is progress over perfection. Do you have any other, I would say, mantras that you've used as a founder and CEO that keeps the team aligned, that allows you guys to stay on track together. And if so, what are those?

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, our biggest thing that we care about as a customer, so customer experience comes first. Like that is another huge core value. We preach all day, say yes, empower ourselves to say yes, even if it means losing money. And so we, first and foremost, that's what kind of builds the foundation of our company. I mean, that's what every business is built on as customers. And I think we've lost that in many ways. But the second thing is growing 1% every day. So we have everybody read a book called the Slight Edge when they start with us, and it's really just about doing little things that add up and they compound over time. And that's how you win, you know, if you can. It's very hard to change the world and just start changing the world. Right? Because you think about, how do I get to the end of.

Yep.

It goes along with progress of perfection. Whereas, like, if you can just do 1% a day, 1% every day, then eventually you'll get there and you'll figure it out.

Totally. The name ClickUp, I've always been curious, where did the name come from and what made you choose it?

Yeah, there's, you know, people, everybody has their own, their own kind of story. But the actual truth really is just that at my social media firm before that, social media automation company, we had always had the name ClickUp in our back pocket because, you know, it's about clicks, right. And social media, it's about increasing clicks. And so when we were brainstorming, you know, when we were, we used ClickUp as an internal tool, Right. So it didn't really matter as much what it was named. So we kind of just started calling it ClickUp because we already had the domain and we had everything like that and then it just stuck. You know, we did consider changing our name early on, but when we ran surveys and tests, like, we found that ClickUp was a really, actually really good name, that it was easy to remember, it was easy to spell, and it's two simple words. If you can put two simple words together, then it's really easy for people to remember.

Totally. What would you say is the most challenging part about what you do as a CEO?

Yeah, hiring always comes down to whether or not you're going to be able to scale. Hiring, I would say, is kind of first and foremost, but at the end of the day, CEO's job is it becomes problems At a certain point where you have great teams, great managers and they're able to solve most of the problems, but the problems that they can't solve are the ones that are the most challenging. So the most challenging problems come to the CEO and that's ultimately kind of what my job has become more is solving the biggest problems.

I love that. What does your day to day look like as a CEO? You have a great team, you're building a phenomenal product and you're always iterating. As the CEO, where do you tend to spend your time on a day to day basis?

Yeah, it changes every day is the short answer for sure. But I still, I look at like a couple buckets and my mornings are like busy work more so like getting emails done, answering everybody's questions, kind of thinking about those problems that I talked about. And then as you move to afternoons, it's more meetings, like kind of one on one meetings or meetings with customers. And then my nights are all product, right. So I love like products, my passion and that's what I love doing. So my nights are always, always product. But I mean I'm sure you know, you guys have talked about like routines before. I can't like preach enough about routines. Especially in the morning, you know, when you wake up, like have a routine, wake up at the same time or similar time, exercise, eat something very light if you're. Yep, a juice. Right. That's what I do every day. And I write my journal also write my journal right when I get up. And you kind of like write big problems for the day, things you're going to do, thoughts, you're feeling those. It seems so dumb, like it really just seems so dumb. But like that, that stuff is life changing. It really is.

Totally. I wanted to bring up too, I know that recently you're posing on Instagram, the billboards that you guys have all over, what does that feel feeling like? I know that you're posting it, but to be able to have some billboards up and to represent the brand as you are, just as the CEO and the growth that you've had, what has that felt like? I know that it was important when you were posting it. It was super cool to follow along, but billboard ads, it's something I saw you guys recently doing and I wanted to talk about it.

Yeah, it was very surreal seeing it for sure. I mean San Francisco is the city of software billboards. Every billboard is software there. And so it's unlike other city in the world. It's not, you know, it's not kind of just throwing them up and, and doing random mass marketing like it is your target audience to many extent. And so I had always wanted to, it was like always just a dream of mine, you know, to have a billboard. And we got them and it was, it's been very surreal and it was so cool going to see them. But the reality was they actually performed really, really well. You know, we saw. It's hard to measure billboard like responses like billboard success because it's not like a direct, you know, click where you can track the ID and things like that. But with a billboard you actually can measure uplift when you turn them on. The day you turn them on and you look in location. Even Google Analytics can do this and it shows you like the locations of conversions and locations of traffic and you turn it on and you can see a very big uplift in traffic. So it's actually been worth the money, believe it or not.

Very cool. That's super cool to see, man. And I know that you guys crushed it when it comes to the simplicity of them. I wanted to touch on social media. How have you guys as a company utilized social media for growing the brand, for talking to customers? And how important has that been for you guys?

You know, we've. So if you combine like Reddit and Facebook groups, there's Twitter stuff, but there's, there's this whole community and our community has been more valuable than anything. Like really priceless and kind of that goes back to what I was talking about, how you get those first users and you develop things based on their feedback and then they bring more users into the system and that creates that community. And so we know when we're not there to help them or when they have questions that are just outside of the realm of customer service, they want to know how to set things up. There is a community of advocates and champions there for new users. So it's, I mean, I can't even put a number on it. It truly is priceless and we would not be in the same position if it wasn't for those communities for sure.

And I have a couple more questions before we wrap up. One of them is just looking into the future of productivity and the apps that are out there. What are you excited about with ClickUp? Personally, I know that you touched on it earlier, but just moving forward into this new year and beyond, what are you excited about?

There's lots of feature things that I get excited about on a day to day basis, but like the big vision for me is again, it's the same version. It's just scaling it right to the whole world. And so if we can, at the end of this next year, if we can increase X percentage points and we're still fulfilling that mission of saving people time and putting all of your work in one place, then I'm a happy camper. That's my ultimate vision and goal. And that's what we're always tracking towards. It's just saving people time.

I love that. Last question before we wrap up, Zeb, is if you were to look back along your journey of starting ClickUp to what you know now, what advice would you give yourself if you were going back and starting on day one?

You know, I don't know if I would change too much, but I would say that I worried a lot early on.

Right.

You're getting into a really competitive market and I would just say, like, trusting my gut more, you know, like you just really have to, you'll hear everything under the moon of, you know, you can do this, you can't do that. We were always told we wanted to build software for everyone and everything and you know, that's not smart to do. Right? That's not what you're supposed to do. And in most cases, I think that's true. I think that's right. But we were just, we had the right timing and the right kind of vision for the productivity space. And so I stuck true to that. But it was, I can't tell you how much I worried about it for sure and second guess myself. So I really would have told myself, like, you know, don't second guess yourself, just keep going. And we probably could have gone even faster than what we did for sure.

Last but not least, for everyone that's been listening today, that's wanting to stay in touch with yourself and the entire ClickUp team, where's the best place they can learn more. And most importantly, stay in touch with yourself as well.

Yeah, so ClickUp.com is. We have tons of resources there. If you click on the Learn tab, But also on YouTube, if you just search ClickUp, like there is kind of like Casey mentioned, there's a massive community of people out there to like help you understand the product and learn the product. And myself, I'm zeb@ClickUp.com or j curfew on social media. Yep, perfect.

Well, Zeb, I just want to say again, thank you so much for coming on today. I'll make sure to link that all down below so that the listeners can check that out. And again, man, thanks so much for coming on. I love ClickUp myself, and I'm looking forward to what you guys create in the future.

Likewise, Casey. Thanks so much.

Monarch. Legacy of Monsters An Apple Original Series the world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th.

This place.

It's not ours. Believe me. The most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise. Legacy of Monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV Plus.