ClickUp 3.0 - Unlocking the Future of Productivity with Zeb Evans

All right, welcome everybody to Agency Journeys. Your host, Gray MacKenzie from Zenpilot. This week I have the awesome privilege of having a, a repeat guest on the podcast, but also someone who's, who's had a really meaningful impact on my life over the last five years through his work. And that is Zeb Evans, founder and CEO of ClickUp. Zeb, congrats on five years, five plus years now, and welcome back to Agency Journey.

Thanks for having me back, Greg. Super excited to be here again.

I'm excited your apparel choices have not disappointed. If anyone's not watching this on YouTube, go check it out there. But I've got a handful of different places I want to take our conversation today, but just wanted to start a little bit with kind of on the journey side of things. We were just talking about the most fun part of the journey, but if you look back at the last five years and had to break it into specific phases and maybe you don't think about it this way, but I'd be curious if you do. Do you think about the journey in terms of here's phases? Obviously you get the ClickUp evolution, hey, we had 1.0 and then the big move to 2.0 and now 3.0 is in the works. But are there specific phases you look back on?

Yeah, it's a great question. And there certainly is the first phase of any startup that is building something that is really for a product. So it doesn't have to just be software, but it can be hardware also is it's all about product. So you've got to. And this can be, I've seen this last 10 years in some companies. So there really isn't a time limit on these phases. But the first one certainly is. It's 100% about are you creating a great product and is there some type of competitive differentiation between your product and what exists out there? And so that's that very first phase. It's before product market fit. Everybody talks a lot about product market fit. I think product market fit is that second stage, which is really just better said as can you create a business out of the product that you built? And there are many great products that have competitive differentiation that have been unable to figure out the business side of things. Great examples of these are now it's obvious in hindsight, social media, advertising, but at one time that was not obvious, that that's how you can figure out how to create a business out of that product. So there, after you're able to figure, if you're able to figure out the business side of things. Then it becomes a scaling challenge. It becomes, are you hiring the right people? And so I break scaling down into two pieces. So it's like scaling A would be hiring the right leadership, the people that can build, the people that can hire, the people that can scale yourself. Because especially as a founder, it really is about scaling yourself at the end of the day, especially as you're growing to a larger company. So generally speaking, you'll be around, I would say 50 employees at that time. 50 to 100, maybe more, maybe less, depending on if you've raised significant amount of funds before that. I think raising funds plays into how these stages are amplified very much. But I'm always a huge proponent of raising as little money as possible until after you get to the scaling phase. Because I think you make better decisions on product and I think you make way better decisions on go to market, how to sell the product. If you have a bunch of money in the bank, then in some ways you kind of skip step two because you don't need to, you don't need the money. So you fail to figure out the business. And in some ways you may not figure out the product at the best way that you could. So again, just recapping, it's phase one, product phase two, how do you make a business out of the product, product, market fit? Phase three is broken into two. 3A is leadership, the leadership to build and hire the teams and then be part of. Phase three is individual contributors, the middle management layer, really scaling out the headcount of the company. And those three phases are really the journey that we've been on until today. Always, though, after those, and ongoing during these three phases, there's this operational excellence that you have to have a focus on. It matters just as much at the beginning as it does at scale. The difference is that it's very different operational excellence at the beginning versus scale. And so that's something that I'm still focused on today is how do we make an excellent operational business out of what we have?

Yeah, you kind of answered this just as we were chatting before recording. I was going to ask you if you had a favorite one of those. What phase do you feel like you relate to the most? And you kind of mentioned a lot of the joy or a lot of the fun is actually at the beginning, but you're kind of too focused on surviving that.

It's.

That it's hard to enjoy that.

Something that I've. I've really learned in life is it's important to enjoy the journey as you're experiencing it. Because always, always 100% of the time, you're going to get on the other side, whether that be on, like, a good side or a bad side. Failure versus success. And you're going to regret not enjoying that part of the journey, the journey more. And so. And so it's like that grass is greener analogy where you're on, let's say, the third phase, and you look back and you're like, damn, that first phase of building the product was so much fun. It was a really small team. That was the best part of the journey. But if you flip positions again in that first position, your mind is, hey, are we going to survive? I don't know if we're going to be able to eat next week. We don't have enough money to pay ourselves. Is this a product anybody will actually pay for? So there's always going to be that, no matter what part of the journey you're on. And this is true for all of life. Like, this is true for family, it's true for relationships, it's true for health, fitness, whatever you want to put it at. There's always going to be a different place that your brain, that voice in your head, wants to be at. I think it's really important to control that voice in your head and just enjoy experiencing everything as you experience it. There's a lot of really, really stressful things and things that cause anxiety, especially on the third level of scale when you have a lot of employees. Those employees and their families go into your thinking as well. And those customers, we have hundreds of thousands of paying customers today. And so we really want to fulfill our promise and make all of those customers happy. So there are a lot. There is a lot of weight carried with that. But again, there's still a way to enjoy the journey while we're doing that. And I like to think that I've kind of mastered that at this point.

Yeah, that's a great point. Every time we go on a road trip, I tell the kids, what's the one thing we know for sure something will go wrong? Like, there will always be problems. Let's enjoy the good parts of this. You're kind of hitting on, like, the professional level of stress. You've gone from, like, four scrappy guys building out a product early on and pivoting to, hey, you're the CEO of a startup that was valued at $4 billion and is growing incredibly rapidly. Like this, this journey over, like, from the outside. The. The world looks at the person who I talked to like four years ago when you guys were. Were super early on. And the person today is like two totally different people. What's that been like, come on, maybe more personal side, like, how has that changed? Just kind of those relationships around you, friends, family, like that, that level of.

Engagement, you know, it's a good question. And I think somebody told me early on, always keep your. Don't keep your circle too big. Right? It doesn't mean, like, keep it so small, but don't keep it so big. And I think that's important for no matter where you're at in life, you think you can only have so many really close friends and relationships that really, really matter, and that those people that are there for you no matter what, you see this in people that win the lottery. You see this in a famous music artist that everybody comes out from the woodwork that wasn't there for you when you're going through those hard times. And so it's important to remember that. And it's also important to appreciate the people that were there for you during those hard times. At the same time, as you grow as an individual and as I've grown as an individual, there, it opens up more doors to different relationships, different levels of relationships that you may not have had access to before. And so it's important to, I think, be appreciative of being able to do that and to somewhat take advantage of having access to those relationships and learning from those people that have done things much better than I have or much better than our company has before. So I think there's kind of two ways of looking at it. There's like that really personal side of relationships, and then there's that professional side of relationships that also is personal, but allows you to grow much more in that professional mindset.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I want to talk about. I want to spend some time on ClickUp 3.0 and kind of direction of the company, but maybe a couple questions before we get there. The first one would be if you look back on the contribution of ClickUp to the overall project management space and you may buck the project management label, like, maybe we want to go to work solution, work management. Some of the other, like, expand beyond the category. But when I look at like ClickUp's overall contribution to the larger space, there have been like, pretty much every tool now offers you a lot of flexibility in how you view your underlying data or your tasks or whatever. And a lot of that, I think, stemmed from your early work. Is there something else and that might be it, but is there anything that sticks out to you is like, hey, this is the contribution to the larger ecosystem, like what's the main thing that ClickUp has done to change the way PM operates today?

I think there's a couple of things. One of them you touched on is customization and flexibility. When we started, that was one of the primary reasons I built ClickUp as an internal tool. At first it was literally just to be able to switch between list and board and that was the primary function, that was the differentiator that we were using ourselves. Then it evolved to total customization and flexibility. Another example early on was multiple assignees. I don't know why people platforms were so opinionated about being able to use these or not, but you needed like, why can't a user choose? So I took that principle and we applied that to everything inside of ClickUp to enable flexibility, to enable customization. We always thought of a two person team and we thought of a 2,000 person team. And if we solve for those, it did naturally solve everything in between. Now we think about even a little bit even larger than that. So I think that that was one contribution that we made for sure is that that flexibility and that customization. I think the other thing is viewing your work, which to some extent ties to flexibility and customization. But again, that was the thing that we invented was being able to switch between views. And it sounds like table stakes today because now everybody does have this, but at the time you weren't able to switch between a list view and a board view and a calendar view and a timeline view. And that was what made us really special with that ClickUp v1 and then going into v2, where it wasn't just switching explicitly, it was also creating additional views on top of that singular view of work. I think the third thing though is when we started, I can't tell you how many times people told us that this was stupid, this philosophy around product isn't going to work. You can't do more than one thing well. And that that has been proven over and over and over again. And we always just stuck with that vision of being able to do multiple things well over time. We weren't naive enough to think that immediately we could just do everything well. And we still don't today. But over time you can do more than one thing well. And that's where this category actually headed. And it took a few years, it was probably three, three and a half years into the journey when that started really shifting, but it certainly shifted And I think it's very obvious now that the other players in this category are trying to do more than one thing. Well also we do have still a head start on them, but it's, you know, it's becoming competitive in that doing, doing multiple things well, putting all of your work in one place and just touching on 3.0. I think it gives us that extra couple of years of differentiation where it will change the category again.

Yeah, let's talk about that. What's the like, how do you sum up ClickUp 3.0?

Yeah, the first thing is quality and, and quality early on for people that use early versions of ClickUp, it's changed a lot. And over time we've learned a lot of new principles, we've all learned new methodologies, new ways of hiring, new ways of scaling engineering. And I think the way to look at it is that we're taking all of the best principles and lessons that we learned from the past five years and we're rewriting a lot of our product in order to have that best in class principles of product quality. Product quality is broken down for us into reliability. It's does it work when you want it to work? It's performance, is it fast? And it's product quality, it's user experience quality. Is it easy to use? Does it make sense? Is it consistent, is it beautiful? Are the little details met? And that's the really first and foremost and most important thing about 3.0 is that quality of product experience. And as we've done so many different things, we have basically 15 products inside of a product. It's important for us to take that breather and really get the house in order and make sure that the foundation is there for the future. So once we do this once, we don't have to do it again and we can continue building floors on top of this foundation. But it was important to some extent for us to rewrite the foundation of the platform. And that's what's taken the most time. I mean, we've been working on this for almost a year now and a lot of it is done and, or close to being complete. And many of these things we're going to release just rolling releases. It's not going to be, hey, I need to switch to 3.0, because so many of these things are really crucial in people's workflows for performance and reliability that will just release them immediately over the next few months. The product behind 3.0 though is outside of the major design overhaul, which will not feel it's not going to feel unfamiliar to people. If people went from 1.0 to 2.0 of ClickUp, there was a very different experience. It was a totally different product to some extent, different user experience, different everything. It's not going to feel unfamiliar, it's just going to feel much more clean, much more consistent, much more connected. I think a lot of the dots in ClickUp don't connect today. We built a lot, but maybe we built the MVP or we built the V1 and we didn't connect it to the rest of the platform. So every feature, every product will feel much more connected. But the third thing, and this is the thing that will be Last in the 3.0 release, the 3.0 journey, is communication and to some extent, collaboration. Also, I think that we know based on data that the most commonly used page in ClickUp, believe it or not, is the notifications page. That's where a lot of people live out of, is answering notifications. Also combined with the most inefficient way of using ClickUp is email notifications. It's so inefficient in the way that people use email notifications, not just with ClickUp. With every product, what we're trying to do is really rethink how communication works inside of software products. I think the other problem I really want to solve is Slack is the most distracting thing in the world for me and I literally have to turn all Slack notifications off. And still I'm so OCD where I go in there and every five minutes I'm checking my notifications and then marking them on read and then setting reminders. And I think asynchronous communication needs to change, especially for the future of work and the way that we are working now today with largely remote, largely hybrid work. And this is an evolution towards that. And so that's the piece that I'm most excited about. The third version of the platform, along with people management, I think that it's really hard to know what people are working on today and to make sure that people are working on the right thing and to enable the individual to know what is most important. Individuals, they have to ask, hey, what is the most important? What should I work on next? And managers at the manager level have to. It's a manual process to go figure that out. And I think there's a lot of opportunity there to attach these things to initiatives and goals and to be able to measure productivity inside of a company. So that part is really important to us on 3.0 also.

Yeah, that makes Sense. Do you guys internally, is there a standard framework for kind of managing goal? Whether it's the OKR framework or kind of something custom around ClickUp goals feature. Do you guys have a standard across the team methodology?

We actually use a list inside of ClickUp that has our goals features, our actual okrs there. Our goals product is we'll get a total revamp along with 3.0, but it'll probably be like 3.1, 3.2 a few months after we release this. But we are working on that now and people, if people have feedback for that, send it to me zeblickup.com because that is. Is one of the things that I think is very. I don't think goals are something that any product has solved really well to make it fun and not too key result focused where it's. It's just all about updating a metric and it's all about figuring out some arbitrary metric. I think that's where you get into trouble with goals is really strict key result methodology where every single thing has to have a number. The end of the day it's really hard to put a number on things and most of the time teams are just making it up. And I think that that can hinder growth and it can hinder productivity because you may set your bar too low, but you also may set it way too high and you over focus on that metric rather than focusing on building the best thing possible.

Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense tied into 3.0. I mentioned this kind of in categories right now. Do you put ClickUp? The easy answer is probably like, I don't want to put ClickUp in a bucket. But if you had to describe the bucket that ClickUp's in right now, do you call it work management? Do you call it like, how do you think about that?

Internally we see 3.0 as more of a hub, a platform. You know, there's a lot that has been going on in the background this past year also. We've always said one app to replace them all. And it's great. Marketing attacks every single Persona that you could think of. I mean, teenagers are like, what the hell do they mean? Are they replacing my Instagram and my imessage or, you know, what could that possibly mean? And that's what it's meant to do. It's meant to strike curiosity and for people to talk about it, to Google it. It's brand marketing. What we really always thought though was really one app to replace all of your productivity software at work, which usually was broken down into several different pieces. But at the end of the day, we know we've never been naive enough to think that we can replace all of your software or even all of every company's work productivity software. It is about connecting. At the end of the day, I think there's a lot of sources of record. What we're trying to build is a source of truth, like the source of Command center where you go and all of your work and all of your connected products and connected applications are there and, and present it to you in a way that you know what you need to do for that day. So whether it's. It's a Figma file or Google Drive or Salesforce or whatever other product that you use for your particular role, that must live and breathe inside of ClickUp and you should be able to update those things and work on them and organize them and plan your day and you should be able to search all those products from, from one place. I think that the really cool thing that we've been working on is, is relationships and meaning you can draw a relationship between a ClickUp task and a Salesforce deal or a ClickUp task and a Google Drive file so you don't have to ask people anymore, hey, where is that ticket? Where is that file? Where is that customer? It all lives in one place and I think that's a huge advantage to saving people time.

Yeah, we're seeing that even in like the Obviously more the HubSpot partnership is being announced right now and playing around with what's like that's a huge step forward for us in terms of a ton of automations that we're currently setting up for dozens of agencies. Using third party tooling is now becoming a lot easier just to do natively. So I'm excited to see that continue to happen too. As you guys have grown, the ecosystem around ClickUp has also grown a lot. You've got obviously firms like what we're doing. We built an entire business around. Hey, we're just going to standardize in a vertical that we know well. But we're going to build on top of ClickUp because we think that's the best project management tool for most agencies most of the time. Obviously we want to maximize our market share, but we also want to be experts in one tool. So you've got service providers on top of it, you've got consultants, you've got content creators, you've got people now who are building some cool kind of tech on top of ClickUp. We've got this utilization and profitability plugin that we've kind of put in. That's only client facing, but you've got other folks who've built little bits of tooling that sit on top of ClickUp and can be, whether it's an extension or something else that's out there. Is there anything that you've seen? Or on the flip side, anything that is like, hey, somebody should build this. We don't want to tackle this right now, but somebody should build this tooling anything that you've seen. That's like the most exciting ClickUp ecosystem development to you.

I've started the journey of really looking deeply into how can we create the best app developer platform on top of ClickUp. And I think there's examples of companies that have done this well. And what we're trying to do right now actually is emulate how other apps have been created in other app developer platforms, like, let's call it around Slack or Microsoft Teams. If we can do this right, then it means that people can copy and paste their applications that they've already built for another platform inside of ClickUp, and then it works immediately. Because the biggest, the biggest hurdle to developer platforms is developing the products, developing the applications on there. It can take a really, really, really long time to do that, and customers don't see value out of it immediately. But if we can make them work as if they were working, if they already worked inside of another product, then it gives us a couple years of leapfrogging. And that's what I've been focused on, is how do we do that and how do we also open up the front end of our product so that people can build really cool applications on top of them? So, yeah, I mean, look, there's a variety of examples there, but I think our one thing that I've really indexed heavily on is widgets. Things that can go inside of tasks and go inside of Docs and go inside of anywhere inside of of the product. And so what we've been working on recently is putting widgets inside of Docs and slash commands. So you can create a bar chart, you can create a graph really easily. No matter where you're at inside of the product, what that opens up the doors to is people could put any types of widgets in there. It doesn't have to just be a graph. It could be a list of something from outside of ClickUp. It could be a graph from data using outside of ClickUp, data used from Salesforce, for example, or from HubSpot. It could be buttons. I Think buttons are a really cool opportunity for us where you can click a button and it performs an action or performs a workflow inside or outside of ClickUp. And then of course there's a variety of just features that people have requested that we'll never be able to build that. I think having a developer platform allows customers to build those either themselves or along with the community or partners like yourself.

Yeah, that makes sense. I want to ask one more question and then I've got some random, some audience sourced, goofy questions here that I'm going to wrap up with. But this is around the growth side and last time that you were on, we talked a little bit about what's working and what's worked for ClickUp to grow so rapidly. I had Melissa Rosenthal on the podcast to talk about, you know, what are you guys doing with out of Home and some of the rest of the creative that's working really well for ClickUp. But in terms of untapped or not yet optimized growth channels, is there a channel that you're looking at expanding on Partners? Could be a larger channel, obviously a consultant's network right now and there's partner work, but there's a million different channels out there. Is there one to you that's like, oh man, I'd love to build on this or get into this channel.

I think community in general is the one that we pioneered early on. And community is definitely, it's the user side of community, but it's all in the evangelists, advocates, ambassadors, whatever you want to call it, that side. And it's also the partnership side, like that ecosystem. Community side was something that we were really great at early on. And to be honest, I think we kind of dropped the ball this past year or so. And that's what I've been working on, picking up the past couple of months is putting the right people in the right places and giving freedom and giving more autonomy to those communities to build on their own and to grow on their own. We ourselves, we do not have plans to, we're not going to be able to scale our internal services department as fast as we need to. And we knew that was going to happen. And so we've got to lean on the community and partners. And I think that there's a lot more that we can do there to help our community, help the ecosystem, help businesses like yours really grow and benefit from the growth of ClickUp for now and for the future also. So I think that's really important and top of mind for me right now as far as marketing channels go, there's only when we talk about paid marketing, paid marketing is very obvious around the channels that you can, can do. What's not obvious is the efficiency that can be gained from those channels. And just to give you an idea is we're 70% more efficient than we were just six months ago on overall paid acquisition. Usually at scale, efficiency goes down. But we've really been able to dig into the data and figure out how can we drive more efficiency through paid marketing. And it's simple things as getting better ads, getting better content, and it's more complex. On the, on the complex side of data science, it's who are we actually targeting and why and what are they doing is it. And what type of conversions are we having? Who, how many people are they inviting to the platform after this? And really zoning in on those kind of N+1 users where you can acquire a customer and they'll invite other customers and they'll tell other people about us. And then finally a lot of influencers are really, really important for us also. And so that goes to the small level, the ambassador side, but also to the large side, like these business influencers or productivity influencers, or even people that are kind of motivational speakers for businesses that can really engage their community. And I think there's still a lot of greenfield opportunity and productivity as a whole for customers that are using our prospective customers that are using spreadsheets still to get work done, they're using just notes, they're using just Google Docs. And there's so much opportunity there to help them save time, help them become more efficient. And so those, those three things are really, I think that's our opportunity for this next year.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, there you go. We got bonuses here. I asked for one, we got three. That's awesome. I've got a couple phones here. Do you have a favorite nickname?

So my old, I used to be a DJ and my DJ name was DJ Curfew because I was DJing one time. I had a small, I mean it was just myself a DJ company in North Carolina during high school where I would do sweet 16s and actually DJ at a local radio station also. And I got the name DJ Curfew because I had to be home by midnight and I would have to pack up a sweet 16 or a birthday party or whatever it may be at like 11 o' clock in order to get home. So friends, friends still call me Curfew and I, I'll always appreciate that.

That's awesome. Which is also ironic given your, your sleeping habits. Give me favorite slash guilty pleasure snack.

Ooh, McDonald's french fries.

Wow. Okay.

McDonald's french fries. Yeah, that, that's the. I probably do it like once a month. I actually had, actually stopped and had them yesterday and that, that's the thing that I just. McDonald's has the best french fries in the world.

That's awesome. Where do you buy your clothes?

A variety of places, I think. You know, there's, I think the issue that I've gotten into now is it's like it's a self fulfilling prophecy is I have to wear crazier and crazier shirts and colors because when I don't then people give me shit for it and they're like, what are, you know, you're not wearing Zeb shirt, you're not wearing Zeb outfit. So a lot of online places, honestly, Google shopping is really helpful in image search. You can look for what's similar to another shirt and then you just get a ton of hits on that stuff. If you even just search colorful shirts or colorful button down or colorful attire in Amazon, lots of things come up and that's kind of what I look for.

Have you had anyone come to a meeting yet trying to wear a Zeb shirt? But they clearly don't normally wear a Zeb shirt for sure.

That happens a lot internally and externally, but I greatly appreciate it when it happens.

That's awesome. What makes someone a great office guest.

In the sense of employees or people that are. No, no.

An external guest coming to ClickUp hq.

You know, we get a lot of. Honestly, I think that when people, when people come to the office and they actually just walk around the office, that's, that's a great guest. We have a lot of, we have a lot of guests that just come just for, for one particular thing. But if you go around and talk to people and talk like everybody at ClickUp's very friendly and very open and excited to talk to people. We want it, we really want to hear what people, people are feeling and we want to feel that empathy for customers and for prospective employees and business partners, whatever that may be. So I think that's a successful person. It's somebody that comes and hangs out rather than just comes for their, you know, their 30 minute meeting and then it's out.

Yeah, makes sense. Last question is one that's related back to 3.0, which is will this be. This come from. A couple different people ask me versions of this, but all of them were old time like long term ClickUp users. Will there be an upgrade? Like I actually have to opt in. You mentioned parts of 3.0 are just gonna be rolled out. Will there be like an opt in to a 3.0 platform or is it just a seamless upgrade in the current app?

It's a great, great question. The majority of quality improvements will be just automatic. Automatically happen for everybody. So what that means is performance and reliability. Those two things are just going to happen automatically when we have a big user experience change along with some new features like I'm talking about on the communication side, that will, will happen as a manual change. And so for people that weren't here for 1.0 or 2.0, you opted in, you could say, hey, I want to switch my workspace. It was by workspace, switch it to 2.0. You could switch and then you could switch back. You could switch back to 1.0 also. And so I want to preserve that. I think that worked out really well for us. It's not the end of the day. There's a lot of change management involved with changing user experience. And again, we're not going to go, we're not doing the same thing from one to two where it's an entire. It feels like an entirely different product. It will still be. 3.0 will be very, very familiar to everybody. You'll know how to use it, I think in many ways you'll know how to use it better and easier. It will feel cleaner, it will feel more consistent, it will feel more connected. And so I think that those things will really benefit a lot of users immediately. And I think most people will enjoy switching and really see that benefit, but at the same time, we want to allow people to switch back. So the first phase of 3.0, which is, is this year, which is primarily around quality and some other things like universal search and making our search just incredible. Incredible. That stuff will happen for everybody as, as it. As it's ready. And then early next year when we have more of that second phase and third phase of 3.0, those things will be opt in.

Yeah. That's awesome. This has been really fun. You've been generous with your time. I know we're tight on time here, but I appreciate you coming on and being willing to share here today. So thanks for making another stop on the Agency Journey podcast.

Of course. Thanks so much for having me.