How ClickUp 100X’d Revenue in 3 years with Melissa Rosenthal

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Turn your internal employees into influencers. They represent your company. They can speak to really interesting things happening within your company. And if you build them up and you build their profiles up, you're going to have a lot of reach. A lot of reach that is organic reach, because you're not going to be building it from a brand page. We this at Cheddar. I think we broke LinkedIn, but I don't know if you've ever seen these gadget videos that used to appear on LinkedIn all the time, these bizarro gadget videos, and they were posted by a man named John Steinberg, who was the founder of Cheddar, our CEO. And instead of building our brand channel, we realized that we would have way more reach through John. So we built an entire media channel out of him and we racked up millions and millions of views. I need some traction.

You need some traction.

Let's get some traction.

Hey, what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over a hundred thousand people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more.

Do you want to give us just a quick overview of what ClickUp does?

Yeah, absolutely. So ClickUp is an all in one productivity platform that brings all of your work into one place. So instead of using different tools and different platforms for your docs, your goals, team tracking, dashboards, you can do it all in Clicka Allows for visibility and really collaboration in one tool.

That was fast. Very nice. Should do a pitch competition. That would be good. 100x growth. That's a lot. By throwing out the old B2B playbook. What was so wrong with that?

I think there's nothing wrong with the old B2B playbook, but there was a lot of blue sky opportunity to evolve it and I Think my background, I didn't build my career in SaaS. I came from media really gave me this perspective that you could add a lot of value to a B2B brand, especially in a highly competitive space. We are in next to CRM, the most competitive space in SaaS. So doing the same thing over and over, it wouldn't work. And for us to go up against these hundred billion dollar behemoths to just simply follow the motions that had been built for us, I just felt like there's a really great opportunity for us to reinvent and build a playbook that of course incorporates all of the motions that you need to grow a company, but also really focus on brand and focus on building brand from day one and doing it early rather than playing catch up. When you realize that brand is a differentiator that's going to separate you from your competition.

What does that look like for ClickUp? How would you define the ClickUp brand?

So brand for me is really everything that your customers, future customers, touch, interact with in any capacity, right? The minute that you land on the site, the minute you're served an ad, the experience that you have on our social channels, thing that involves that interaction is brand for me. So to build that and make it best in class and have it be differentiated and feel different and feel great was something that I wanted to set out to do immediately. Build that North Star of having the best in class brand interaction, no matter where you interacted, touched, experience, the company.

The product, that sounds so easy. We'll just build a great brand. How do you do that?

So I think when I first started, I thought a lot about when I was at BuzzFeed and I was at BuzzFeed very early. So the company was an experiment at that point in time and we, we didn't know what would work and we spent hundreds of thousands of hours experimenting with types of content and understanding what would resonate with people and why. And building the entire company was built on emotional connection and figuring out content that emotionally resonated with people. So when I started thinking about how do we build this brand that feels really differentiated in SaaS, it made a lot of sense to start there and think about what is our Persona in market. Can we be humorous, can we add a level and an air of humor to B2B marketing and position ourselves as that kind of like heroic jester, right? And I think a lot of that came from this experience that I had and how people connect. And for every SaaS company that I had experienced, there are a few that are really great at doing this and they've added humor. Webflow has incredible tutorial videos where it's just the right amount of humor. And I appreciate all of that that we went into building that. But I felt like there was this really blue sky for us to build something that felt that emotional resonance. And what we decided to go with was that humorous angle. We can be self aware and do humor in a smart way. That isn't try hard. That can get people's attention.

Because that's the risk, right? Humor can backfire pretty quickly.

Yeah, it's definitely a risk. And I think luckily I joined at a point where the company was early enough. I joined, we were between 60 and 70 employees and we're 1,000 now. So some of the things that I did back then certainly wouldn't repeat today.

Tell us more about that.

I'll tell you a little bit about that. A lot of marketing experiments and channels and things that I wanted to go into, including podcasts and audio spots and things that I knew where knowledge workers would be listening to. We would run campaigns and the messaging was an experiment and we would add certain aspects of humor into it. Some did not land.

I'm gonna press you on that. What did not land?

So we ran a. We ran an audio ad on Spotify and we wanted to play off of the. Of the notion of work hustle culture. But we had a female narrator read it in a voice that maybe didn't resonate with a lot of people. Luckily we did that early on enough and said this is not where we're gonna head with the brand. We're gonna add humor, but it's not gonna go into that like. And then we really started to perfect our voice through both our out of home advertising that we went into and through our performance ads. And we definitely also tested the waters in certain areas that were extremely polarizing. And I think knowing that as a risk up front, having the support of the executives at the company and understanding that could it be a potential risk is something that's very important when you're going to do an aggressive marketing campaign or something. That could be very polarizing.

Sure. And humor worked for you. Right. Might not work for everybody, but how does a startup figure out what their voice should be? Their brand voice?

I came in at a time where the company had grown primarily through plg, which is incredible. And I think we were at that point where we could add a little bit of fuel to the fire. And if we're going to add fuel to the fire, why not do it in a way where we can add that personality and that humor through performance marketing. It's basically a billboard in itself. Right. Millions of people will see that ad. Let's make it special, let's differentiate it. Technology has become so democratized and all of you know this, like, feature parody is so common. Everyone can build something that would have taken five to seven years in a year, now, in a couple of months. So for us to be able to differentiate through voice and through personality was something that was really important. So we started doing that through performance marketing. We would create and ad campaigns that had that humor in it. And we weren't just focused on just selling features, we were selling the outcomes and we were selling the idea of productivity in a humorous and smart and funny way.

And that's important, right? Because it's one thing to have a brand and a brand voice, but if it's disconnected, like, I can be really humorous, but if my product is, I don't know, something from SAP, it's not going to land necessarily.

Yeah, that's a great point. I came into the company and I took the role because of what had been built prior to me walking into SAP saying, let's create, like, humorous ad campaigns and everything's going to be funny. That wouldn't have been a good fit. But at ClickUp, our CEO is very vibrant. He's bright, he's exciting, and he shines throughout the product. And a part of me was like, this is really great because I see it in the product already. I see what could be built on top of that to add brand to it. And that's what made it that natural fit. People already loved the product. There was already a huge fan base around it. The colors of the logo. I didn't brand the logo. And that was a huge selling point to me because I was like, look how vibrant this company comes off as. What a great way to just take that and run with it.

Sure. Logo is one thing. Right. But how do you connect the product and the brand, even organizationally inside the startup?

Yes. So not a sales pitch, but it's really great using ClickUp internally because we can see a lot of what the product team is building and we can see a lot of what they're working on. So we try very often to connect people brand to product in many ways. And there's so much overlap between the designs that we're putting on our landing pages that we're testing, but things that we would work on with them. Even the experience of brand it, of course, it's around you. Right. It's my ability to rent space in your mind by being memorable. But the other parts of brand really involve the product experience. And the beauty of how we kind of work is it works both ways. So we'll create something. We'll create our. Our Nike splash. We have this very colorful splash that kind of appears at the end of our ads. And our product team saw that we were working on this with our advertising and our motion graphics team, and they said this would be an amazing loading mechanism within the product. So then we worked with them to develop that loading mechanism, which then carried through to other aspects of actions that would happen when you something and the entire product should be celebratory, right? It's about completing work, it's about collaboration, it's about getting things done with your teammates. So adding that element of celebratory heroicism into it with that hint of humor when you land on certain pages, when you import certain companies and you get rid of them, we have a couple of funny little graphics that pop up. All of that should really connect to the brand. So that's how we incorporate it into the product as well.

What about building that product, though, in a way that it's one thing to have funny graphics and stuff like that, but do I need that from the beginning? Is it something I need right at my start?

Yeah, I feel like you do. I think if you're playing catch up with that, you're too late. So I think when you're building the product and you're starting out, every little thing that you do matters so much. And it also, you see the response. So when I came in, we did these short little videos of our CEO as an onboarding experience where he is using a giant tweezer to make a ship in a bottle because he saved so much time using the platform. And I was like, this is just like a positive little, like, nice experience. The people are going to come to the forum, it's their first time, and they're going to experience this onboarding video and hopefully it brings them joy. And we added this share mechanism out of it. And the responses that we would see on Social every single day really showed us the data that, like, people really enjoyed that experience. So it was small things like that that we can incorporate into the product immediately. That gave us those signals that it was worth doing from day one. But I think no matter what you're building, what stage you're at, like building these smart, small things into the brand and into the product, rather that users love and Enjoy. And gives them an endorphin boost when they do it. I think that has a viral. Has a K factor in itself.

It's one thing to go viral though, and then actually turn that into leads and getting that growth going. There's always a risk. Oh, I'm humorous. There's funny ads, but that doesn't necessarily turn into users and revenue in the long run.

Yeah, it's a flywheel. Right. So there's. We're not just putting billboards up. We have our motions. We have now a sales LED motion. We have a self serve motion. But it really does convert. And again, it's a lot of it is, hey, how do we rent that space in people's minds and then serve them ads that make sense for them when they're at the stage to buy?

Can you talk about that a little bit more? Because measuring the ROI of a brand is hard. Right? It's like I spend. I don't know where 50% of my advertising money goes. I know half works, but. Yeah. How do you measure it? How are you doing it internally right now?

You mean you can't measure dollar for dollar billboards?

Maybe not.

Yeah. There's a lot of ways we measure it. Of course, there's the qualitative survey methodology that we do where we'll measure. This is specific to billboards, where we'll measure it in certain markets that we're running versus other markets where we have a blackout and it's over periods of time where we can tell, has our brand awareness increased, has the traffic increased? There are metrics we're able to measure. The other piece is we're incorporating a lot of our brand Persona and our personality into the performance ads. There's direct metrics based on how are those performing. If they're not performing, we're pivoting and we're killing them immediately. So it's very clear. And I think the. That's the beauty of it. Brand isn't just something that's just like general awareness. You can build brand through every aspect of that. And you see it in customer tickets. You see it on sales calls, in chorus. People mention, oh, I saw that really funny ad. We get people writing in, hey, can you send me that ad? I've never seen that happen ever. People are asking, hey, you didn't list your ad on YouTube. Can you send it to me? Because I want to send it to my boss. Obviously we're not like documenting that in Salesforce, but I'm taking screenshots of that and when I have to put a presentation together of, hey, is this working? It's. Look at all these. Look at the qualitative data too.

Do you say billboards? Billboards, like on the street Billboards here, Buses, airports.

Yeah. All out of home. Yeah. I'm a huge believer in it and I think it comes from. I lived in Manhattan for a really long time and when you're stuck on the subway, sometimes your phone doesn't work. Sometimes you're just like thinking and what do you do? You look up and the ads that kind of stuck out the most to me always were the ads that I would see on the subway stations and platforms because those are the. It's the only moment in time when you're away from your work and away from your day where you're not distracted and you're thinking about them. And I was like, we have to incorporate that into our strategy. And again, we're in such a hyper competitive market that our ability to be next to our competitors, physically next to our competitors, an out of home strategy made a lot of sense.

Sure. Now, most startups at your stage here are probably not yet thinking about billboards, but are you actually anybody here doing billboards? Nope, not yet. Not yet.

Not yet.

Oh, one company over there. We'll talk about that later. What about. So a lot of companies, the first thing they think about though is kind of content marketing and SEO and those kinds of things, Right? How do you think about that?

Yeah, of course, I think it's table stakes to have an SEO and content strategy. What I do believe in though, is that you have to be now hyper niche because just creating a blog is not going to generate the millions of web views that it once did. So you really have to be smart about what your SEO content strategy is and start going hyper verticalized, but in a very strategic way. I think there's other SEO plays too, that aren't just based on blog content. We're exploring those as well. But I think that's important from day one. It's just figuring out what your angle is there. Because just writing a blog is. Unless you're a giant company that owns all the SEO, you're not going to really have a shot there.

All I do is write blog posts. I feel a bit bad now, but what about other channels? When I think about B2B, when I think about marketing channels today and influencer marketing and things like that.

Absolutely. I think influencer marketing, I've seen more B2B companies use it. I think it's a brilliant way. I also think that you can turn your internal employees into influencers. And I believe in that marriage of external influencers and internal influencers. The people of your company, they represent your company, they can speak to really interesting things happening within your company. And if you build them up and you build their profiles up, you're gonna have a lot of reach. A lot of reach that is organic reach, because you're not going to be building it from a brand page. We did this at Cheddar, I think LinkedIn, maybe we broke LinkedIn, but I don't know if you've ever seen these gadget videos that used to appear on LinkedIn all the time. And it was like these bizarro gadget videos. And they were posted by a man named John Steinberg, who was the, the founder of Cheddar, our CEO. And instead of building our brand channel, we realized that we would have way more reach through John. So we built an entire media channel out of him. He was the media channel. And it didn't matter. People didn't care that it was coming from John. And we racked up millions and millions of views. So I think thinking strategically about, like, how do you turn people internally into influencers as well as partner with external subject matter experts? I think that's the marriage you should look for in your influencer strategy.

Sure. And LinkedIn is one thing. What about TikTok?

Oh, I thought I heard it. Yes.

I thought somebody was really excited about TikTok.

You know, I think everyone should start trying to figure out what the TikTok strategy is. Am I fully confident that TikTok is like the marketing channel of the future? No, I'm not.

Especially for B2B.

I don't know. The answer is everyone in B2B is now paying attention to it because they're supposed to. But honestly, like three months ago or this longer now, six months ago, everyone was like, you have to have a Clubhouse strategy. So anyone that poured hours and resources into Clubhouse should have waited three months. And I don't know if that will happen with TikTok, but some of the things with the algorithm that I'm seeing now already are signaling to me that there's going to be a big shift in the way that you're able to market organically on TikTok.

Sure. We'll stream this on Clubhouse and see who watches. Listen, it's not streaming on Clubhouse. Yes. What's next? Like, we've got all these motions now. What are you thinking about as you want to be forward looking? Right. What comes next?

Yeah, we're hyper focused on building the next phase of the product, which is really exciting and I think it's really, it's up leveling the brand. It's telling that story. It's telling the story of how ClickUp really brings people together to work together collaboratively, but in a fun way and making that experience fun. I think ClickUp. Thinking about ClickUp as that record of truth of all of your life's work is really exciting to me. And something like a Spotify wrap. What if you could have your life's work as, as a document that you could share out with people rather than just a LinkedIn portfolio or a LinkedIn profile? I think there's a lot that we can do there within the product externally that can create a viral coefficient there, but there's so many exciting things that we can do with just people's ability to share out what they're accomplishing that I'm really excited about building brand in the capacity that it tells that story.

And allow people to build their own kind of private brand that way. Is that what you're thinking about?

I think so, yeah. I think if we can enable and empower people to build their own brand through, through the work that they're doing on our platform, then we've won. That's the ultimate goal. It's really to empower people, make them more efficient, make them feel proud of what they've accomplished and to be able to. And to do that in a really cool and fun way, I think really will help them build their own personal brand, empower them within their own industries, their own companies as founders, to be their own media channels. There's so much that we can do there, so I'm very excited about that.

Awesome. Hopefully they're humorous about it, but not.

Too much little humor. You're heroic and a little bit of humor.

Awesome.

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