Billionaire marketing lessons from ClickUp’s CEO | $4B valuation

When you get close to death, like you naturally, you naturally gravitate towards that because you're like, oh shit, time is really actually the only thing that matters. Health is really the only, the only real problems that you, that you can have. And that's what I, what I realized is that I was, I was wasting time in school.

All right, everyone. Today we've got Zeb Evans, who is the founder and CEO of ClickUp, which is an all-in-one productivity app, but I'm oversimplifying that. They're doing really well right now, raised over $537 million from marquee investors such as Andreessen Horowitz. They're used by amazing companies such as Google, Amazon, and Nike. Founded in 2017, so they're growing like a wildfire. Zev, welcome to the show. How are you?

Great. Thanks for having me, Eric.

Yeah, thanks for being here. So you've got— there's a lot of stuff that I want to unpack, but first and foremost, I'd love to learn a little more about kind of what your story as it's led up to ClickUp. You worked at Basecamp before, right? So I'd love the story.

I've never worked at Basecamp, but I've used—

I use Basecamp.

Basecamp, and so that that was certainly one of our our founding principles around the productivity category as a whole being being broken and inefficient was that my my previous startup it was still relatively small like thirty-five or forty people but we used fifteen different productivity products one of them was Basecamp but then we used fourteen or so other different ones and through that journey was where I had the dance with project management and productivity software where I felt that what we were doing as a team and how we were collaborating and working through software was, was highly inefficient and broken. And so that's what led us to create ClickUp as an internal tool at first.

Got it. And by the way, when you launched in 2017, these other tools were out there, right? The Asanas of the world, the Trellos of the world. Right. So what made you want to come into such a competitive space? Because usually people would run.

Yeah. You know, I mean, first of all, I think I've always liked competition. I think it keeps things really fun. And in certain categories, you're always on your toes and I have an extreme urge to what we were doing. But the reality is that we didn't choose this. We're building this as our own tool and not trying to get into this category until we really started building the tool and realized how, frankly, obsessed with productivity I was. And I had had several near-death experiences, and I had one prior to this one. And I really just— we overvalued time and overvalued efficiency. And so when you think about even that category, back then, those tools were highly opinionated in how you had to use them. And so you did have to use multiple tools in order to get, to get work done. And so the very first concept that we created was really just— it was being able to switch between lists and boards. So you could have— at the time, Asana only had lists, and at the time, Trello only had boards. And so that was what we created as, as a tool for making ourselves more efficient. And ultimately, that was the start. down this journey of building ClickUp.

Got it. So I, I personally, I mean, I've heard really good things about ClickUp, but I haven't used it. Right. So how is it different from these other tools? Because I think, and correct me if I'm wrong here, it's sounding like it's kind of more of like a, like an all-in-one to just make life easier.

Yeah, exactly. So it's a solution that really replaces all of your workplace productivity tools in a single unified platform. So when you look at like the categories of productivity, there's project management software, lots of competition there. There's docs and knowledge bases, lots of competition there, OKRs, collaboration, communication, the list goes on. Each of those has their own set of competitors, but we don't have any competitors that are like an abstraction layer above that, that really can compete in everything and build that single unified platform, which aims at saving people time, making people more productive.

Got it. And so for you guys, early days, like I mentioned earlier, very competitive market, right? So how do you think you guys really started to stand out and really take off?

Yeah, there's, you kind of have do a lot of things right early on in a category to break into it, or at least a competitive category to break into it. And so we certainly did some unique things on product, right? That's the first and foremost thing when you're building a software company or really any company that produces some type of product. The most important thing to figure out early on is product. Like, you've really just got to go all in. The only thing that matters is product. And then after you think you figured out product, The only thing that matters is building a business out of that product. How do you create a sustainable business where people are actually going to pay for it? And then it's about people. And so early on, you know, we figured out product and then we naturally started to figure out product market fit and how and who would buy this product. And then you have to hire the right people and build the organization to support that.

Got it. I'm curious. I want to take a step back too. So what were you doing before ClickUp? I just want to kind of understand your entrepreneurial journey.

Yeah, I mean, it started very early since I was like 4 or 5 years old. I was always selling things. I got suspended 3 times in elementary school for selling candy. So I've gotten— I definitely have like some type of story every year from my life. But the first real business that I had prior to this one was social media marketing before that really existed, where we would increase engagement and followers on social media accounts. And that was a result of having an entertainment company where I managed a couple of musical artists and I was doing their social media. In a highly inefficient way. It's all, as you can see that, see that trend of, of when I see inefficiencies, I try to solve them. And I built our own tool there, um, to really automate a lot of what we were doing on social media and then started selling that.

Got it. So it sounds like, um, because when you think about like a Basecamp and when you think about a lot of these, um, even, even, uh, you know what Andrew Wilkinson did with Tiny and they built that Webflow and then they shut it down, but, um, they started agency first and then they built, uh, they built the product business. It sounds like a similar journey. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Very, very, very similar journey where we were kind of dogfooding our internal tool and trying to figure out how do we solve the problems that we were aware of? But then by virtue, you kind of, you kind of solve other people's problems also.

Got it. And I love, I mean, it's just different mindsets, right? So you're swinging for the fences here with the capital that you've raised, whereas like a Basecamp, they've kind of kept it private. Same deal with Tiny. So what's your kind of thinking like, how far do you wanna take this thing and what's the reasoning behind it?

We've always wanted to go IPO with whatever that I was doing next, and this this is you usually get one big hit in life, right? An opportunity to do to do one one big hit, and this is what I had always wanted to be prior prior to this that company that I created frankly I didn't feel like we were creating net positive value for the world. It was it was very much we were like inflating people's egos on social media, and so I had my third near death experience. And I realized that really quickly as I just kind of like, the business was successful and, you know, by all measures, like it was, it was still a great outcome. But it wasn't something that I felt like if I was gone or if the business was gone, that like the world would be a better place. As cliché as that sounds, it was, it was the reality. And I think it took like really being close to death to figure that out. Like, if I'm leaving here right now, would I be happy with what I've done?

Yeah.

And the answer was, was no then. And so then the next thing that I wanted to create was that, where we create such a large organization and product and offering something that truly does help people. We're making people more productive. We are totally saving people time, and we hear every day about how that's changed their business. So for us, it's about making that indefinitely last and really infinitely last. And to do that, you've really got to create a a public company. And also you got to do it in the right way, right? There's lots of— going public isn't just the way to, to make a sustainable business. Like, you've got to do a lot of other things in the background. But the point is that that is, is, is the way that we can create a really long-term sustainable business. And, and that's what we are on the path to do.

Amazing. And you're the sole founder, correct?

I have a co-founder also who's our CTO.

So $537 million over 5 rounds. What's the valuation at right now? Wow. $4 billion. How does that feel when you talk to your friends about this or you talk to your family about this? I have a $4 billion company.

It's still surreal, to be honest with you. It's still very much— it's like the goalpost moves, and so you always have to stop and smell the roses and celebrate all of the little wins along the way. I think too many people don't do that and they just stay in the grind and move the goalpost indefinitely. But we certainly did that where you celebrate every win that you have. You make sure to be present, enjoy everything, celebrate with the people that you've built things with, and then keep moving. There really isn't time to just stop and think indefinitely and celebrate what you've created. You've got to do it in waves, and that's certainly what we've done. So it still feels surreal to some extent.

I love that. I mean, I feel like there's definitely a lot of perspective, especially you didn't have just one, but two, but three near-death experiences. So I want to talk about that. So whatever you're open to open with sharing. Um, maybe we can start with the first one and kind of what you learned from each one, or— yeah, I'm curious. So—

Yeah, I'll, I'll breeze through a few. I've actually had 5 now. Um, I had one as soon as 4 or 5 months ago, but the, the first one was when I was 10 and I was in a boating accident and I went to the hospital. And long story short, I— it was, it was actually not life-threatening injury at all. But I had this huge— the first night after the accident, I had this huge pain in my— it felt like a knife going through my back, like somebody stabbing me in the back. And it was a— they actually didn't know what it was at first, but it ended up being a ruptured appendix. They thought it had something to do with the accident, and so it was not diagnosed correctly. And so I was in the hospital for a few more weeks and literally dying because my appendix had ruptured and nobody knew. And last minute they said I had like less than a day, a day left. They had another like pediatric expert review the charts and said that it was, it was like an anomaly of the way that it looked, but it was totally ruptured appendix. Point is, I went to emergency surgery. I was, I was, I was good, but I was in the hospital for another 2 months after that. And at that time, you know, it was 20 years ago when I was 10. And at that time, you did not have access to technology. Nobody had cell phones or laptops or anything like that. And but in the hospital, they did. We had a laptop and I became kind of— it was kind of the very first time where I married my love for entrepreneurship with technology. And I found websites like eBay. I mean, Alibaba had just started to be created. And so I started finding these marketplaces and that was where I first learned to buy and sell things online. So that was that first one. And certainly I think each of those pointed me in— each of those kind of course-corrected my life, honestly. But But that one was like the start and the pivotal one of pointing me towards, towards technology.

Amazing. So in that case, your near-death experience, I mean, what your key takeaway there was like, oh crap, there's a lot I can do with tech, right? Um, I, I, because I feel like there's a key takeaway for each one and maybe there's more, right? So let's, let's go with number 2. What happened there?

Yeah. And then that is certainly the key takeaway, especially because I grew up in like a very small town in North Carolina and nobody, nobody knew technology there or even had heard of coding. So it put me on the path that I would not have otherwise found. The second one is actually robbed at gunpoint in a home invasion, and a 17-year-old kid put us in a closet, put a gun to my head, and that was where I had that first— like, was it— wasn't everybody talking about out-of-body experience? It wasn't really an out-of-body experience. It was just more of like an extreme clarity to where I was at in life and like the future. And I realized then I was in college at this time. I realized that I needed to drop out of college. That was when I really just like, I had that extreme clarity and I knew I was wasting time at college. Each of these kind of had a little bit of theme of time also. I mean, when you get close to death, like you naturally gravitate towards that because you're like, oh shit, time is really actually the only thing that matters. Health is really the only real problems that you can have. And that's what I realized is that I was wasting time in school. And so I'd been at school for about 2 and a half years, and then I dropped out immediately after that. And I did not know what I was going to do. I didn't have like this vision of what I was going to do, but I just had the vision of knowing that I needed to drop out of school and go really do something. For me, school was not helpful. I was studying business, and you learn business by doing. You don't learn business by going to school. back when you get out of school, you still don't know how to build a business. So there's certainly, don't get me wrong, there's certainly some value for certain degrees. I think very specialized degrees, a doctor or a lawyer, certainly if, you know, you're going to be a mechanical engineer and things like that, like you need training. But I think the vast majority of degrees are totally worthless and a waste of time.

Yep. I'm with you on that. I actually went to UC San Diego, which is where you live now. But I only finished it for my parents, right? I always wanted to drop out like 1,000 times. So I'm with you. And so, okay. How about the 3rd, 4th, and 5th? I want all the experiences.

Yeah. So the 3rd one was when I had my previous business. I think I just referenced this one. And basically I was in a very, I would say stressed out state, like perpetually during that business, especially towards the end of it when it started growing. It was just, it was a lot to manage, especially because our customers had really high expectations, like really high. It was, you're managing their egos. Right. And so you have really high expectations for that. And when things go wrong, they're pissed, rightfully so to some extent. So we, I just was not in a good mindset. And I had a seizure and I went to, you know, obviously you go to the hospital first, but then days after and weeks after you start doing tests. And my dad had a really bad brain tumor when I was growing up and it could be hereditary. When I got tested and found that I didn't have epilepsy, which is what almost all seizures are from, is epilepsy. I kind of self-diagnosed myself with having a brain tumor. I was just like, okay, well, this has to be it. And you're Googling things and that's all you can find about why you would have seizures. And so for a good week there until I could go to a specialist and get a full-blown test, I kind of had self-diagnosed myself again. I'm like, oh, this is another near-death experience. Maybe this one is the death experience. But during that journey was when I realized that I was really not, I think, realizing the full potential that I had in my mind. It felt like, it feels weird to say, but it felt like I just was running out of time and I didn't accomplish what I was supposed to accomplish. And so that was what I learned through that third one was that I needed to do something else. And I had no idea what I wanted to do. The first idea that we had actually was We created a video social network where the whole goal was removing ego on social media. It was called Mimirri, M-I-M-R-R-I, and the concept was not showing other people number of followers that other people had. So you could see how many you had, you couldn't see how many other people had, and then there were a few other things in there, but it was basically just about capturing moments in your life rather than taking videos or pictures of yourself. And we failed really quickly on that one. We learned a lot of technical problems through that, like If we hadn't done that, ClickUp wouldn't really exist today because we would have made too many technical mistakes during that period. So I'm always a huge proponent of anybody that wants to get into software, build something on the side or build something first that you frankly don't expect to be the thing that you're going to do because you'll learn so much doing that. And that journey is totally, totally priceless. But then we wanted to build a Craigslist competitor where you could pay in-app and remove sketchiness from Craigslist and make an amazing user experience that didn't exists. I don't think— still doesn't exist because at the time Craigslist was the largest source of fraud internally in the United States. So if you exclude like credit card fraud from outside, the largest source of fraud was Craigslist. And I had been scammed so many times buying and selling on Craigslist my whole life. That was the problem we were solving while we built an internal tool in order to build that. And that internal tool ended up being ClickUp.

Got it. Okay, cool. So here's what I have so far. First near-death experience. I mean, you, you learn kind of, uh, the, the tech, right? That, that's the, that was the tech kind of, um, you know, idea bulb, right? And then number 2 was the value of time. And number 3 was just really going for it, right? And so actually a follow-up question on that one, when you're doing your agency, like when you had this experience, like how big was that agency? Like, uh, revenue rate range-wise?

Total revenue, we probably did $7 million over, over the course of a few years.

Okay. Got it. Yeah. I mean, so, so pretty good, right? And you're like, but no, this is not for me. It's time to really go for it and then swing for the fences. So that's the third time. Okay. Let's go with number 4. Yeah.

So number 4 was, was actually a repeat of number 3, just, just 2 years, 2 years later. Uh, and I, you know, when, when, when I went to do diligence on, on what had happened with the seizure, it's actually called a convulsive syncope. It's like this thing where, um, not to go too, too deep into like medical terminology, but it's this thing where you could kind of overload your brain and trigger a seizure and it's, it's relatively Pretty rare, but it happens. It's more common than people think. It's more common than I thought, for sure. I had it again a 4th time while I was traveling, and I was in Jamaica actually doing a product onsite, and I had one there. And that time I realized, kind of similar to that 3rd one, I was way too, I think, not in the moment and stressed out, frankly. And that was where I course corrected to getting very deep into mindfulness and meditation and stoicism and all of the things that like I do every single day today religiously as my routines. Like that was where I started them was during that one. And that's what's kept me really sane honestly. I mean it's hard. As everybody knows, it's very hard building a business. It's highly stressful. People that haven't done it, you know, I think probably that most of the audience can relate even just building anything within a business is very difficult, and people from the outside probably discount how difficult it can be. And so it's a very stressful, stressful thing to do. And, you know, but there are ways to deal with it, right? There are ways that you can really make yourself happy throughout the entire thing and less stressed while going on that journey. And you really have to take care of yourself, so to speak. And it doesn't mean that you can't work hard. I think there's— those two are not mutually exclusive, whereas I think the, you know, you really get this net around work-life balance everywhere. And I'm actually not saying that. I'm still the most imbalanced person on work-life. I way, way skew towards work. And but you can still do that in a very mindful way, and you can do that while enjoying the process and having fun.

Yep. I love that, man. And so, I mean, number 4 is actually From what I'm hearing, it seems more like mindfulness, right? You're already kind of going for it, the mindfulness. You're adding on a layer of, of, um, you're just continuing to evolve. All right, number 5. I, I think this is all great, and I think at some point you got to write a book about this, which you're probably planning anyway. So.

So, so number 5 was in, uh, Thanksgiving of this, this past year, and I was coming back from a friend's house for Thanksgiving dinner, and it's probably 5 or 6 minutes from, from my house. My girlfriend was driving. I had just got that new Tesla, literally days before, and that thing goes really, really fucking fast, way too fast. And we were driving, and it's also a very weird wheel. It's a very weird steering wheel where you don't have a top of it. And we're going around a corner and it picked up really fast. So I think she was going too fast for sure. So definitely not blaming the car, But when you're turning, you also can't really turn. If you need to turn fast, there's nothing to grab on top. It's a yoke steering wheel. And so when she tried to turn, it didn't turn. And we hit 2 trees, actually hit one tree, bounced off another, totaled the car. Very minor injuries. We were extremely lucky. And frankly, Teslas are so safe. The top 3 safest cars in the world are Teslas. Had we done that same thing in a different car, honestly, we would've probably died because when you go straight into a tree, usually the car, the engine, it hits the engine, engine goes inside, kind of crushes the car. Whereas Teslas have essentially a steel cage on the batteries outside. And when you hit something from, from the forward or from the side, it bounces off rather than like crushing in. And, you know, it's, it's, it certainly, I think, saved our lives.

How fast were you guys going?

I honestly don't know, but I would say it probably had to be 60 or so.

Damn. Okay. Well, glad you're still here with us. Okay. So what's the key takeaway from this one?

So this one was, for me, this was just a reminder. I saw this as a reminder where every, I think it's very similar to any lessons you learn in life where they stick with you a little bit indefinitely, but they're really on your mind for that first year or so. And then after that, you kind of start to forget about things as hard as you try. And as much as like, I still remember these things and do, and still have meditations about them, it's easy to forget. And I think I forgot. I think I forgot how, you know, how really fragile life is and how urgent we have to be on the planet. So all of these near-death experiences, I mean, if you talk to anybody at ClickUp, we preach urgency over and over and over again to continue moving quickly because life is short.

I love that. I mean, it's short-term urgent, long-term patient.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. So just to recap for everyone, and we'll get into some marketing stuff and then we'll work towards wrapping here. So, um, first, near-death experience, um, you know, the, the holy moment of tech, right? And then next one was time is limited. The third one is go for it. Um, so led to ClickUp, right? Fourth one is mindfulness, right? Fortifying your mind. Fifth one is nothing is guaranteed. So, so that, that's how I've taken it, but that's great, man. Well, glad to still have you here. Um, so I'm curious, I mean, Before we get to some of the marketing stuff, how have you scaled yourself as a CEO? So there's these experiences, right? But what else have you done? You're in, you know, you're in different entrepreneur groups. Um, I'm wondering, do you have any coaches? Like, what are you doing to scale as a CEO right now?

No, I think you— a large— the fastest way to grow is by doing. Um, the, the caveat to that is that you have to be very humble while you're doing it and, and be extremely aware and in touch With the things that you're not good at as you're growing. And when you realize those things, that's when you have to learn more. And so I actually don't— everybody was shocked when I said this, I've never had mentors. I've certainly read a lot and I listened to podcasts and listened to those types of things. And I think that's what gives you like that fresh perspective. For things like software, an example of this is I kind of figured out product by doing, but I didn't know software metrics. I didn't know software financial terminology. And so that type of stuff, as soon as you— first time you get asked, hey, what's your net retention? I don't know. So I went and you Google it, right? You figure out what it is. You do as much diligence as you can to grow and to learn. And then eventually by virtue of that too, you'll find other people that have done it before that you can talk to. And so early on, it really is just about, I think, learning by doing, but not just by experiencing it. It's also learning by doing and realizing what you don't know yet, and then going out and learning each of those things individually on your own. And if you can do that, you can really scale yourself. Then once the business gets larger, you're able to really hire a lot of people that have done it before. You can hire people that have seen what it looks like on the other side, or they see— they've seen the movie play out before. And those people are very, very much priceless in your journey because they are the ones that can give you that advice, right? It's kind of like bringing on your own advisor because you hire somebody that has seen it before, done it before. You've got to make sure they're great. You've got to— you also have to make sure that you understand that no 2 paths are the same. So you can't do things exactly like that person did in the past. Like, don't get me wrong, certainly cannot do that. But you can listen to their context and experience that they've had and weight their perspective higher than other perspectives when you're making decisions. So those couple of things, really, it's not rocket science. It's really just kind of making sure that you're constantly learning. One of our core values is growing 1% every day. So I make, you know, most of the company does something, they get 1% of something every day. It's an arbitrary number. But the point is that you're learning something, right? You're taking an intentional 10 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever you can squeeze in to do something, to learn something. And, you know, I still, of course, do that today.

Cool. And what are your core values? You mentioned urgency, getting 1% better. What else you got?

Yeah, we've, we've always had number one as being our customer experience. So providing that the best customer experience that customers have ever had. I've lived and breathed customer experience since day one. We have, you know, you actually call somebody at ClickUp, you can get free coaching at ClickUp, even if you're on a free plan. Very, very different than other software companies. And it is expensive for us, but for us, it's about providing that best customer service. You mentioned growing 1% every day. Work hard and be an owner is one of ours as well. It's very— we're very transparent that this isn't the complete work-life balance company. We're not saying you have to be totally imbalanced all the time, but we just, we realize that if we Can work 10% harder than our competition. We can that compounds, and you can do so much more in a given year if you work just 10% harder. Normal fucking sucks is another one of ours. It's basically just of course it's meant to grab attention, but it's also it's it's really just meant to make you think about not doing things a certain way. Let's always try to do something different. Pay it forward with random acts of kindness. Random acts of kindness is our way of giving back. It's not it's not a way of just saying raising hand like every company does usually, and they virtue signal and say, "Hey, here's a problem. Here's a problem." But they don't do anything about it. it. It's our way of actually giving directly, making sure that we're truly making an impact. Have fun, find joy, be you. There's always going to be stressful moments. Every single day there's problems that we're solving, but holistically, you've got to enjoy the people you're working with, and you have to be able to have fun while you're doing it. And finally, be transparent and direct with optimism is our 7th core value. Optimism is a huge part of our culture, and we screen for We screen basically for not being a pessimist. You can't have eternal optimists around everywhere. You'll have your heads in the clouds. But at the same time, you don't want to be with people that are always pessimistic. Like, it's, it's, it's not fun to work with those people.

Yep, I'm with you. Those are— those all sound amazing, and they're all, they're all actionable, right? It's not just like one word, right? Which I don't believe are core values. Um, cool. So look, on the marketing side, um, you guys did that Super Bowl ad. So what did that cost again for 30 seconds, right? For how much?

I believe it was $6 million.

$6 million bucks. So I think you guys might've done a minute then. Um, so, okay. What was the thinking behind that? How'd you guys do there?

The thinking around it was we had always, I mean, we're, we're a hugely creative, creative company. Like I'm, I'm a very creative person. And so we did things very different than other software companies do, or created our entire creative team, including video production and animations, photography, design. All of those things were created in-house. So we built, we built an in-house house agency, a relatively large one, 60 or so people. And with that, we were able to crank out some of the world's best creative, at least in software, and I think globally. So we did that over the past year and a half or so, and through that journey, you know, realized that we have an incredible team that can make the quality of a Super Bowl ad in-house. And that's exactly what we did, is we, you know, set a goal, of creating some incredible spots. And we did, we created a couple of them and we were all very comfortable that they were great enough quality to be a Super Bowl ad. And so we ran with it. It's always about when you go into a competitive category and you're the youngest, right? We're 4 years, our competitors are at least 10 years, 10 to 15 or more years old. When you go into a competitive category, you have to punch up. And we did this from the very beginning. You've got to appear much larger than you are. And a Super Bowl ad is a way to do that. You know, it's not something that obviously you can recommend for every business, but in our category, it was very much a game of branding, a game of awareness, and a game of credibility. And you get all of those things from doing big bets like a Super Bowl ad, doing out-of-home advertising, trying to make publicity stunts. All those things contribute to being able to punch up.

Got it. And I know for Coinbase, when they ran their ad, it was like a QR code that was just bouncing around for a minute. Um, you know, they shot up to the top of the App Store, site broke and all that. Um, is there any, anything quantifiable for you guys in terms of ROI?

Yeah, you can, you can do pretty deep data analysis. So we ran in 16 regions. Um, we didn't run a national spot and the 16 regions allowed us to see the difference in regions where we didn't run the ad. And so you can actually measure that difference, and over the coming day is certainly the biggest one that you're going to get the difference in, but it really actually lasts more than that. And so you can look at those differences in data and then abstract out what value that Super Bowl ad created for you. For us, it did not create the value that we paid overnight, but when you extrapolate out like the growth that comes from the customers that we did gain, Over the course of a couple of years, it starts to make economical sense when you have a high net retention. But the real thing that you can measure is brand awareness, and brand awareness is what we measure quantitatively, which is basically just how many people know about your brand in a given area or a given demographic. And we certainly saw a significant increase in that after we ran the Super Bowl ad.

Got it. And somewhat similar to the Super Bowl ad. So I moved to Miami less than a year ago and I see a lot of ClickUp. I mean, I'm just looking at a train go by right now. There's a ClickUp wrap on it. There's ClickUp billboards everywhere. So what's the thinking there? And, you know, let's just— what kind of ROI have you seen with the branding on that live branding? We'll call it that.

Yeah, that's all about— it's all about brand awareness. And that's what we measure in cities like Miami is before we start running ads, we measure brand awareness there. And then after we run them, we We continually run brand awareness there, and we make sure that it continues to increase. And where it's increasing the most is where we actually double down. You kind of— it's kind of counterintuitive where you think, you know, you're increasing the most in one area, you're not increasing as much in the other area. What we found is just like, that means it's working. That means the out-of-home advertising is working. And so you double down until you start to see a decrease, a pullback, and then you pull back out of a given area. So we have roughly 10% brand awareness today. Our next goal is to get closer to 15% brand awareness, and out-of-home advertising is a huge way of doing that. Anecdotally, though, there's a lot of things that go along with it. I mean, it's— customers all of the time are using us because of seeing some type of ad or seeing a billboard on their way home or seeing a Super Bowl commercial or creative thing that we've sent around. So, so there's, there's a lot of anecdotes there that are hard to measure, but quantitatively we aim for brand awareness.

Got it. And you got— I didn't look at the site yet, but is it a product-led motion with—

Oh yeah.

Okay, got it. Amazing. Cool. So one final follow-up on that one. How are you guys measuring brand awareness?

Yeah, there's tools out there where you can— they do it for you, really. SurveyMonkey has one. I believe Qualtrics has one. There's a few of those like research firms that will do brand awareness studies. And basically what you do is they're paying for somebody to answer a question. So they go to a given market, Miami, for example, and they can target specific demographics like household income. And to give you a little bit like deeper sense on analysis, but holistically, you just look at how there's 2 ways of doing it. There's aided awareness and unaided awareness. And aided awareness means you're given a list of products to choose from. And you ask which ones you've heard of, right? So we'll say, which of the following productivity tools have you heard of? ClickUp being one of them. That's aided awareness. Unaided awareness is the same question but with no answers given. So there's no option for you to choose from. It's just for you to write them out off the top of your head. So obviously unaided awareness is always lower than aided awareness, but we measure both.

Love it. Cool. And this is just for fun. How much do you guys think you guys are spending per year on marketing right now?

Well, for out-of-home advertising, for things, things like trains, We were spending roughly $6 million a quarter, so about $20 to $25 million a year. For paid acquisition, we're spending about $100, $120 million. So all in, I'd say $150 million or so a year.

Love it. Yeah. At some point I'd love to, you know, maybe 6, 12 months later, maybe you guys IPO or something, love to get you back on and talk about, nerd out more about organization structure and all that. Cool. So working towards wrapping up here. So if you had to pick one book that's had the biggest impact on your life, could be business or personal, which book would you pick?

The Slight Edge is, is one that we— in fact, every single employee still reads The Slight Edge when they start at ClickUp. And that's where a lot of our core values kind of came from, like that 1% growth per day mentality. I love it. I think it's a really quick read and gives you like a fresh, a fresh perspective. On life and on just kind of growth mentality in general. And then on like the outside of business stuff, any book by Thích Nhất Hạnh. I love Thích Nhất Hạnh. He does a lot of great kind of short-read mindfulness books that can, you know, can keep you sane and give you a new perspective on life.

Thích Nhất Hạnh, is that— he's Vietnamese?

Yep.

I'm looking at it right now. Okay, cool. I've never heard that name. Maybe I need to add to cart after this. Cool. And then how about your favorite business tool that's not called ClickUp?

You know, to be honest with you, I'm very hard on products. Like, I'm a product person. I'm definitely the product founder. And so I'm very critical when it comes to other products. As you grow as a company, you kind of have to use the bad software. And I'll give you an example of that is like, I love HubSpot and we use HubSpot for our CRM. And I think it's a great— it's a really great product. We use it for our CRM early on. So that's the answer that I would give you. But today we don't use them anymore. We switched to Salesforce and it's because they've created this very much category leader, but also category owner outside of small SMB. So when you, when you start to grow past that level, those people that are running the system, right, the heads of sales, heads of the revenue operations and the systems, they essentially force you to use something like Salesforce. So it's very hard to love soft enterprise, enterprise software. Small business software though, there's— and medium-sized business software, there's, you know, there's a variety of tools that are, that are really great out there.

Cool. Love it. All right. So Zeb, this has been great. What is the best way for people to find you online?

Yeah, on LinkedIn, I'm Zeb Evans and I love kind of connecting with anybody there. Send me a DM. I'll always, I'll always respond.

Cool. You're back on the Twitters as well, I've seen.

I am DJ Curfew.

All right, DJ Curfew. Follow Zeb, everyone. Zeb, thanks so much for doing this.

Thanks, Eric.