SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Clickup Close To $34m in Revenue, Competing in Project Management Space with 300,000 Paid Seats
08 Oct 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We've kind of created this organic fan base around releasing every Friday and shipping a new version of ClickUp every Friday. People livestream the event, everybody tweets about it. I think that that has a lot to do with it.
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And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.
We've got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Bean before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.
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Hello everyone, my guest today is Zeb Evans. He's a serial entrepreneur that started several software companies with over $100 million in revenue. Currently, he's the founder and CEO of ClickUp, a productivity platform where people plan their work. Zeb, you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Nathan. You bet. We were just chatting. Both Virginia Tech dropouts.
What was your first company dropping out of tech?
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Chapter 2: What is ClickUp and how did it start?
I've had four near-death experiences. I had my third one, and that was when we moved out to Palo Alto. Fortunately there, we met neighbors that had companies, had tech companies, and they started using our software, our internal tool, because they asked us what we were working on. I didn't want to get in the most competitive software market, but it just happened.
Yeah, it's a very competitive space. I also want to touch on that here in a bit because anytime I see someone with real revenue in a very competitive space, it's clear to me that they've built some mousetrap that other people have not thought of. So take me back to your original mousetrap. How'd you get your first hundred customers? Do you remember?
It was all organic stuff. So I mean, blogging is not dead. Blogging helps a lot. Content is certainly king. You know, we create helpful articles for people searching like long tail keywords of, you know, competitive information, or just productivity hacks in general, things like that. So yeah, so we started with organic stuff.
I mean, you know, Reddit, Quora, all of that stuff still really works, especially for your first hundred customers.
Do you remember those first original blog posts? Was there a particular other platform you were targeting that you felt you were doing something better on? So you would do something like ClickUp versus Monday.com and why people are switching or something like that?
Yeah, it's exactly like that stuff. I mean, I think we even did when people didn't know our name, they weren't searching ClickUp yet. So we did like Asana versus Trello and just capitalize on those.
Super smart. So you have a, this is very much sort of an early SEO play. You were inserting yourself in the decision-making process of people looking for these tools and then eventually said, oh, by the way, we have one. Exactly. Super compelling. Interesting. So what did that original team look like? It sounds like you had some SEO brains on the team early on.
You know, honestly, I did most of the SEO. We were very, very bootstrappy and lean. And at my previous company, I had a lot of experience doing organic marketing there. So yeah, I mean, early on, it was just like three or four of us that were working on this.
And so is that sort of mind and just your background, why you rank in the first position for critical keywords, like free project management software, according to Ahrefs, brings in what, 7,800 clicks to click up every month?
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Chapter 3: How did ClickUp acquire its first customers?
Okay, got it. No, because last question. Oh, sorry. And how old are you? 30. 30. Okay, last question. What's something you wish you knew 10 years ago when you were 20?
That's a great question. I mean, I think that tech was going to be the hot thing and that I would have learned coding earlier than I did.
Guys, there you have it. ClickUp, flirting with called a $30, $35 million run, right? Serving over 30,000 companies across 300,000 paid seats that count average 10 to 15 bucks per month. They're driving great growth. They just did their first round, $35 million round, but they had all the leverage. They were profitable, had many millions in revenue.
Today, they've got a team of 130 people scaling quick, 20 engineers scaling up their sales team, marketing team of 40. First 100 customers all came from sort of organic and SEO inbound. Now testing many more channels. Zeb, thanks for taking us to the top.
Likewise. Thanks Nathan.
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