Angela Bunner, a senior leader at ClickUp, explains how the company's freemium strategy drives growth by letting the product speak for itself. ClickUp achieved 150% net retention by iterating weekly based on customer feedback and offering free guest licenses that fuel viral adoption. The company grew its support team from 150 to over 800 employees in one year to keep pace with expansion.
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Hopefully that was a quick little chat with, you know, giving you some ideas of how ClickUp has really achieved product growth. And, you know, really the last 5 years, we've outpaced our competition as far as the growth in our customer base. And really, I think it's testament to how we've focused on listening to our customers. You know, we constantly are listening to customer feedback. We're leveraging that in our design process in the product. We're rapidly iterating with weekly releases. Product managers and engineering is always listening to the customers, listening to the field, whether it's customers themselves or internally, the field organizations that are interacting with our customers. You know, let the product speak for itself. Like, like I said, that freemium model works because the product speaks for itself. Like, they— users are out there trying it and using it and they get excited about it. And that's what's bringing in, you know, growth on new teams, expanded teams, enterprise deals and whatnot. And really, to me, one of the key reasons why I love ClickUp is that we really value our customers and we build trust through that type of transparency and partnership. It's only by providing that culture internally in the company, as well as with our customers, of being transparent about, hey, these are the things that we're working on. These are, you know, this is the vision of ClickUp. And listening to our customers is what gets them even more excited about the product and our future and really, you know, ensuring that everybody together are going to be more successful. I think that was my last slide. I have a few minutes here, it looks like, that I can open up to questions. Let's see. First question, how do you then expand them to a whole team? So with ClickUp, like I said, it is very much bottoms-up motion. So when one team gets hooked on ClickUp or starts using it and they see value really quickly, It's very easy for you to go in and add new teams either in a self-service motion or to contact one of our sales reps to help you expand to the broader organization. We have a lot of customers that have come to us, and this is one of the reasons why I've joined ClickUp over the last year is that we've had such momentum in the self-service market that we had more and more customers coming to us saying, hey, we want to use ClickUp enterprise-wide. Help me and show me how to use it in a different use case. Help me sell it to my upper management because my use— I'm outgrowing my use case that I have now, and now I need to use it more broadly. Are there any more questions? What were your challenges as an organization? I think the biggest challenge we had is growing over the last year to meet the needs of our customers. So the organization, the product was built basically in 3 years and grew tremendously. And over the last year, like I mentioned, we built an entire sales organization, support organization, customer success organization. When I started last March, we had about 150 people. By the end of the year, we were over 800. And that growth was really to scale to support our growing customer needs. Like I said, if you look at the charts of our growth compared to our top 4 competitors, like our curve was totally outpaced as far as where we are in the lifecycle of, you know, 3 years timeframe and how many customers we had. So one of the biggest challenges we had was being able to scale the organization to support the needs of our customers. And that's where we've done tremendously using ClickUp actually to onboard new people, get them out there and effective and collaborating in a virtual world, right? Which is even harder. And being able to be successful in continuing to innovate and continue that growth. And so the fact that we are outpacing and overachieving our targets in all aspects, whether it's in sales, you know, onboarding, adoption, and support tickets and response rates, the success across the organization, I think, is really a testament to ClickUp and being the platform that we collaborate You know, in, in this virtual world that we, we are, because, you know, I hired all of my team totally virtual. And so it's, it's been super exciting to be able to have a platform that we can all collaborate and standardize on while helping our customers at the same time. Whoops, I just closed that question on accident. Can you give insights on your renewal rates and net retention? Our net retention is actually like, I think, leading, industry leading at 150%. We are expanding faster than we are churning, which is really exciting. And I've been in this space, like I said, for 22 years and having replaced many other tools, like that's unheard of. And the reason why I've left previous companies is just because it got demoralizing when your product was sold at the vision and I was the sales engineer out there. So I was selling the vision and it became shelfware or end users hated it and they started using other tools and just used your tool because they had to, right? Management told them, you got to go update your status. And then, you know, team members are going out there and using XYZ tools. So that's why ClickUp, I think, has really done a really good job for my bottoms-up motion and keeping our eye on and listening to the end users. but also being able to grow to meet the needs of the top-level buyers. It's a bottoms-up motion as far as growing the product and innovating, but also meeting the needs of your buyers at the top level as well so that you can support multiple use cases across your organization. And they are typically expanding after 1 year or even sooner. You know, a lot of our accounts are just on a monthly basis adding users because as they add teams, they're like, oh, We need more people on there. And I think one of the key things that grows for product virality is by collaborating and engaging other people. You know, the number of times I've heard stories of like, oh, you know, I saw that I was tagged in this task. By the way, one of the key things that we've done is we have guest users that are free licenses that you get a light access to the product, right? It's a great way to engage more users and people so that when they're in the product, they're like, wow, actually I want to do more. And that's how you really get the expansions even before like a year contract is up. You're continually adding more users. How do you implement a grow 1% mentality across your teams, making customer priority? I feel like everybody that firstly, when we hire, I'm always looking for folks that are hungry, hungry to learn personally, like hungry to help and grow the company. And folks that are genuinely, you know, focused on customers first. I think, you know, that type of hunger, integrity, and customer-first mentality is, is really a core value that I'm looking for in people that I hire. And as we work as a team, we're looking at all the time what our customer feedback is, what is their success rate with customers. We've implemented surveying and CSAT across the organization, across the customer lifecycle, so that I make sure that during the demo, in the presale cycle, like getting feedback post-demo, post-win, or post-close. How did we do? What did— why did we win or why did we lose? During onboarding, listening to our customers and how's the onboarding going during onboarding or after onboarding? And then post-sales, you know, during adoption, like constantly on a quarterly basis running CSATs and NPS so that you're listening to customers in addition to all the other meetings that I've talked about, like Canny, message boards, you know, customer advisory boards and things like that. So having multiple touchpoints and surveying throughout the lifecycle really makes everybody in the organization focused on customers and their voice. the voice of the customer, and we've got dashboards that kind of surface all that as well, so that you're always thinking about how do we improve that journey for them. Probably have time for one more question. Looks like we're done. No more questions. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate, you know, you sticking around listening and asking questions. If you've got any more and you want to follow up, you can reach me out on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to talk more about ClickUp, talk about product growth, talk about my experience or, you know, living in the Bay Area. So have a great day. Thanks a lot.
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