ClickUp's CEO Ran the Sales Calls Under a Fake Name
ClickUp had 300,000 paid seats across 30,000 teams and no sales team, so its CEO took the enterprise calls himself under an assumed name.
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ClickUp has 300,000 people paying to use it and 30,000 customers. Those are the same population counted two different ways, and the difference is the first thing Zeb Evans corrects when you ask him how big the company is.
We measure customers on the number of teams. It’s about 10 seats per team would be our average. Team is just kind of the high-level organisational unit.
Zeb Evans, founder and CEO, ClickUp
Thirty thousand paying teams, ten seats each, at $10 to $15 per seat per month. That arithmetic is the company, and at the time of this conversation it put ClickUp just under $3 million a month in recurring revenue.
ClickUp had just taken its first institutional money from a position of not needing it. $35 million led by David Sacks at Craft, into a company that was profitable going in. Evans’ own framing: “Go as far as you can without raising to get product-market fit. And then when you do raise, you have the leverage.”
The number he would not quite give
Latka guessed $3 million in monthly recurring revenue. Evans: “We’re a little bit less than that.” Asked whether he would break a $36 million run rate by the end of 2020: “Stretch goal. We’ll see.”
The GetLatka profile records $30 million in revenue against 130 employees and 20 engineers for September 2020. About 40 of that 130 were in customer service — the largest single function in the company, and by some distance.
Asana versus Trello
ClickUp launched at the end of 2017 into what Evans calls “the most competitive software market” and got its first hundred customers with no budget at all.
The tactic was to write about other people’s products. “When people didn’t know our name, they weren’t searching ClickUp yet. So we did like Asana versus Trello, and just capitalised on those.” Reddit and Quora too. Evans did most of the SEO himself, on experience from a previous company.
He is unsentimental about the lag involved: “SEO is very long term. You’ve got to set it up for the future and know that it’s going to be years before you get real value from it. It’s starting to pay off what we set up two years ago.” By September 2020 ClickUp held first position for “free project management software” — worth about 7,800 clicks a month on Latka’s reading — and roughly 95 percent of users still arrived organically.
The fake name
When enterprise buyers started calling, ClickUp had no sales team. Evans took the calls himself, under an alias.
You kind of appear small when the CEO is the person doing the sales and answering the question. So I kind of had to do that early on.
Zeb Evans, founder and CEO, ClickUp
Latka: “What was your fake name?” — “Tyler.”
He hired a real head of sales, Tommy, at somewhere around $6 to $8 million in revenue, and describes the result as “rocket ship growth on the sales side.” His prior view had been the opposite. “I actually was in that camp before starting it. I wanted to go very slow and methodically with sales.”
What changed his mind was the shape of the product rather than the price point. “Going back to this flexible platform, you have simple use cases but also very complex use cases. The complex use cases take a hand-holding process.” That hand-holding, at the time of this conversation, was “a big portion of our revenue.”
The Craigslist competitor that wasn’t
ClickUp was never the plan. The company was going to build a Craigslist competitor where you could pay in-app — “Craigslist is actually the source of the largest fraud in the United States,” Evans said, “so that was our whole goal, preventing that.”
ClickUp existed only as a back-burner idea for an internal tool, born of the frustration of running fifteen different productivity apps at his previous company. They gave it a month.
“We got into it after that month and realised there was a lot more.” What made it real was proximity: after his third near-death experience the team moved to Palo Alto, “and fortunately there we met neighbours that had tech companies, and they just started using our internal tool because they asked us what we were working on.”
“I didn’t want to get in the most competitive software market,” he added. “It kind of just happened.”
One to two percent a month
The metric Evans is most obviously proud of is gross churn of 1 to 2 percent monthly, which Latka noted is unusual for the category. The explanation is a ritual rather than a feature.
We ship a new version of ClickUp every Friday. And it rallies our customer base around us listening to them, and they broadcast us because of that. People livestream the event. Everybody tweets about it.
Zeb Evans, founder and CEO, ClickUp
“It’s the preface for how we care and how we’re so intentional about product,” he said. “I think people stick with us.”
Net retention he put at “more like 150,” driven mostly by seat expansion. The paywall design behind it is deliberately counterintuitive: every user gets access to every paywalled feature, for 100 uses, without being told it is paywalled. “Users generally will optimise for the features that are free. So if you don’t really let them know that they’re not free, then they start using them.”
That base is still 95 percent organic, which is why customer acquisition cost stays low even while paid experiments run hot. “We can get paying customers for as low as a thousand bucks — we want to aim for low thousands. But as you know, when you start testing some of this stuff it gets expensive, a couple thousand, three thousand. The reality is our blended CAC becomes so low because of organic.”
Why take the money at all
Evans had been unenthusiastic about venture capital until he met David Sacks at Craft — “he’s obviously an entrepreneur himself and was more in the mindset that I was, letting us run the company and doing the same things that we’ve always done.”
The second reason is defensive, and he states it plainly: “We’re in a very competitive market, and everybody rips everybody’s features off. We have people copying our messaging, copying our ads, copying many of our features. So it’s a defensive play in many ways — it’s about getting our brand out there and getting market share pretty quickly.”
Where the $35 million goes is narrower than it sounds: paid acquisition and the new sales team, with organic marketing and customer service continuing to ramp. “I want instant demos, instant response times, twenty-four seven.”
Latka asked the obvious exit question — take the valuation to Monday.com and sell before you scale into them.
“I don’t really have any interest in doing that. I’ve kind of exited a company in the past, and I feel like this is the one to go public and create that meaningful, lasting business that’s here when I’m gone.”
Asked for his favourite business book, Evans named one that everyone at the company reads: The Slight Edge. “It’s basically about our core value of progress over perfection — kind of growing one percent every day.”
Sources — Zeb Evans interviewed by Nathan Latka, recorded 22 September 2020. Revenue, headcount, customer and funding figures from the ClickUp profile on GetLatka, with dates as recorded.
