ClickUp Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2026)

(2) Clickup Revenue is $85m CEO Zeb Evans, Scaling to $300m in 2025 - YouTube

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(00:00) hey folks my guest today is ebb evans he's the founder and ceo of click up the all-in-one productivity platform that empowers more than 300 000 teams and 3 million people around the world to save time and live more productive lives he's a serial entrepreneur he started several software companies with over 100 million in revenue with a focus on building tools that increase productivity and save people time zeb you ready to take it to the top let's do it nathan how much of this productivity focus you know you casually mentioned in your in (00:25) your last round financing you've had four near-death experiences how how does that actually like make you move faster and how do you pass that urgency off to your team maybe hasn't had four near-death life experiences yeah i mean look at the end of the day those those experiences made me obsess over time and efficiency and productivity is is equivalent to time uh and so and on a personal level it's time on a business level time ends up being money so businesses should care about productivity more than ever individuals (00:55) should care about it more than ever for for where their time goes um and so you know for us it's it's easy to cascade down to everyone in our company when everyone sees the the impact of the product that that we're creating um we can kind of create that that obsession and that culture around saving people time and making people more productive now you 18 months ago had bootstrapped i believe you launched the business in 2017 you bootstrapped i think you shared up to like a 20 or 25 million run rate right yeah we bootstrapped until our series a (01:25) about yeah 18 months ago yeah but i mean again nice nice scale of revenue very capital efficient because you'd only raised i think 2.5 million convertible notes up to that point right correct yeah those those convertible notes are actually in mind that i use from a previous company to fund so yeah that's hysterical was that mango uh it's called fast followers it did social media marketing and automation oh really interesting okay but guys i'm bearing the lead here a little bit right because so 18 months ago only two and a (01:52) half million rates it sounds like his own money which is great but bootstrapped and he hadn't raised nabc and then said you know what i fell in love with david sacks at craft he talked about that on our last episode together so we're not going to rehash that but my gosh that something got in your blood because you raised about half a billion since then um what's driving sort of like where have you this is in my opinion this kind of capital you are now a capital allocator right and it's like how do you allocate (02:14) capital to hit this productivity goal for the world so like where are you allocating capital today yeah i got and i'll start by saying i think i'm i'm still i still have very much an advocate for bootstrap as long as you can until you get product market through through getting product market fit after your product market fit raise capital and efficient means when you know unit economics and you can spend capital and in sustainable ways i think so it's still as as you know as a ridiculous amount of money that we have (02:40) raised a half a billion dollars it's still we still very much focus on doing it in a sustainable way where we have a net positive impact after spending every single dollar uh and so to answer your question you know we of course marketing and paid acquisition is is a big piece of of growth in a spec particularly in a very competitive category we have to out market not maneuver our competitors but product and innovation and rnd always has to be top of mind as well at the end of the day the only defensibility that we have is (03:11) moving faster than our competitors and building better a better product and a better user experience than they can as well so you know acquisitions will certainly be on on our radar um and you know in the very near future um as is scaling globally we're opening offices around the world and uh being able to localize our product in several different languages as well give me a quick team update last time you came on you shared that you were just breaking about 140 employees i think you're over 600 now is that accurate and if so how many engineers (03:44) yeah we have we have uh just just uh shy over 800 uh employees today um and uh on the engineering side about about 100 engineers and so you've done a really interesting thing in terms of i think you have at least in terms of quantifying your engineering power based off number of integrations you've launched and all of your comparable pages where it's click up verse jira versus trello versus monday you talk about again more integrations why is that marketing line working so well and how have you instrumented your (04:11) engineering team to pump these integrations out so quickly and keep them updated yeah we we say we have to replace them all that's that's the familiar messaging that we place but the reality is you know we're not trying to replace every single application we do think that we can put all of your workplace productivity software in one place and and that is is ultimately our true mission and outside of that we play very nicely with every other integration on on the market and so we you know built our platform in a scalable way where we can build (04:39) integrations very quickly and we can also build features very quickly that that actually use separate teams that don't even affect our core product teams but are still within that same platform the same the same ecosystem so we've been very mindful of doing that since day one because essentially with our vision we're putting 15 different products inside of one and so it's it's you know traditionally that's not the thing to do in software right you're supposed to do one thing and do it well and we've kind of always (05:06) been the antithesis of that talk to me about growth so since 2020 when you decide to go in and do that series a 35 million series a how much have you grown revenue since then yeah we can't we can't really talk specific right for specific revenue numbers right now um but you know we've we've grown we now actually have 800 000 teams that that use our product we had 200 000 uh when we raised our series b uh and i believe around 100 000 in series a um so you know you can kind of kind of back the math out there and we've grown (05:38) roughly 4x since our series b now i think you said in the in the press release for the round you have 85 000 teams who are actually paying did i read that correctly yep 85 000 paying teams and so that's against 800 000 that are using you all together are you happy with that conversion or is there room to improve there there's always room to improve everything for sure and we just started building you know product growth teams that are more focused on uh activation retention and of course upsell monetization increasing our free our (06:06) free to paid conversions um so there's always room to grow in everything how are you structuring those teams can you tell me about the last like little swat team you put together and what they're attacking specifically how are you motivating that team we we have always had a very functional focus to product and engineering in the first place because it's such a wide product right you can't have everybody do everything every engineer do everything so we've always had these these teams focus around our core product now what we've done is is really (06:33) hyper focused upon very individual features so that you have a squad of five to six or seven people uh you've got a pm you've got an em you've got a few engineers and usually a designer that's tied to each of the project manager engineering manager uh product manager and engineering manager yep and then i cut you off sorry i just wanna i wanna note this down so those two are part of the five to seven squad who what are the other four and then you have engineers so depending on the feature maybe it's more back end (07:01) heavy so you'll have four just back in engineers if it's front end you'll have a mixture between those and then you'll have a designer that's kind of tied tied to that team which we don't actually count as part of that team so it'd be a plus one in addition to that because designers have multiple themes and and so that's that's what has allowed us to scale epd uh engineering product and design is building these hyper-focused teams that are focused on very very specialized pieces of of our product and product growth is one of those genes can (07:31) you go deep on one of those i mean can we talk about the new docs product a little bit more and the team specifically around that and how it's split up yeah so our docs product is actually one of our larger ones i think it's 12 people so it's it's it's kind of an abnormal abnormality there but it is a big piece of our product uh and so that is we have a real time collaboration there's two people working on real-time collaboration so that's you know if you picture any doc where you can see somebody's cursor and typing that stuff (07:58) is is very complicated to make great uh and so we have two people that are fully focused on on that uh and then within that that the rest of that team got five or so front-end engineers and and four four three or four back end engineers uh then you of course got our peanut product manager and you got an engineering manager um there as well and so docs was docs was one that we've been working on for a long time in the background it was probably a six month ongoing project that we've been working on um and because we really felt that (08:28) you know we needed to to to be the kind of the category leader there in our space and get feature parity with those point solutions in order for people to replace those point solutions with click up how do you think about putting together these many squad teams for digging for new ideas like the pm is talking to 100 customers a month they're testing some of the engineering and then can you tell me a story about one that you shut down where you spun that team up they tested it for x amount of time and it just (08:53) you said no because the metrics didn't work or whatever yeah we so we have a zeb team also and the the the zeb the zeb team is is for the things that you're talking about really it's for the bets right the big bets that we're taking uh and it's we really are our early kind of principal engineers that are on that are on my team and we take big bets i have an idea on monday and we'll try to get it shipped by friday lots of times we will test it we'll only put it in certain workspaces you've got to enable it um we'll see the (09:22) feedback from that and you know sometimes we'll shut we'll shut it down and and sometimes we'll we'll continue shipping um but it's it's the the fun it's the the fun please come on tell me about your lap because people read you in the press they go this guy can't do anything wrong his shirts look great he's got a great smile he's raising all this money what's the last thing you had an idea on monday and it just flopped on friday i mean it was just bad you know there's i think there's been several things that we we shipped (09:47) half-assed right we shipped 10 percent of it and we just never finished it a feature called lineup is honestly it's one it's one of those where the whole vision for it was to be able to prioritize your work and know exactly what people should work on next so picture a list of five tasks that each person has in your company that this is their priority um it just it just never took off it never really went in anywhere and so it actually still exists in our product and i i know we'll be able to get back to it at some point and (10:15) use automation to make it better but that was that was certainly a a flop round that team out for me how many people are on the zeb team six people six okay and is it pm em for engineers uh so i'm the pm in the em um so it's it's it's five engineers plus myself i love that okay very cool so you still get to participate in that on the ground test that stuff day one sort of stuff yeah that's nice you hold on to that all right tell me more for people that maybe you don't know i mean you're the guy that's in the videos you're doing all (10:45) this stuff but you do have a cto that you've worked with also at a prior company manga which sounds more like a venture studio where click up is the thing that took off tell me about your relationship with him yeah so alex was at ibm uh when i when i found him and i knew i needed a very technical um cto and co-founder to to build this thing with and so i had always been pretty technical myself you know i know how to code um but i was using old technologies i knew php um and i don't really know javascript at least in the (11:14) back and the back end side of it uh and so when you know when we were starting and by the way mango is just the the name for for the parent company for click up mango is a dba dba for quick so you always you that wasn't a venture studio you weren't testing a bunch of ideas it was click up from day one so you're right we were we were testing we actually were going to do a craigslist competitor where you could pay in app and remove sketchiness from craigslist and we built click up as an internal tool um in order to build craigslist and (11:41) we just kind of i had always been obsessed with efficiency and time again from those near-death experiences and so i was always that person that was trying to squeeze out an extra hour a day and trying to get an extra 10 more productivity for everyone on the team and that's why we built click up was so that we could do that and it wasn't one of those like slack stories where you know we were using it for years and then kind of decided that this was the product it was like a matter of a month it was like a month (12:06) where we started building this and we just realized we were more passionate about this than the craigslist idea and that there was a lot of opportunity here even in a very competitive category now zeb you had no idea alex had no idea where cook up would be today back then right so maybe you do things differently but back then did you guys just split to you know what let's just split equity right down the middle 50 50 day one or did you do something different um we did something different i kind of i i was the one that was funding (12:31) everything still so it was it was all it was all my bets um as far as the resources go and and i wasn't wasn't being paid a salary or anything like that so it was it was it was definitely different than than i think you can say that you can quantify that for what it is you're betting on yourself you had some success you said you know i'm going to fund this thing they'll take less equity but i'll pay them a lot i'm going to take nothing i get it where did you make money before click up yeah so i i've been entrepreneurs since (12:56) i was like five years old so i was always always doing something every year of my life i have i have some type of story of a hustle um but i actually was i i was i had a mobile dj company entertainment company and and a friend and i of mine were we were managing some rappers actually we were at we were averaging the attack and we were managing a couple rappers and and this was after your monorail days at disney i assume this was after my monorail day and and we uh there was a problem that we noticed where like and big big events (13:27) when this is i don't maybe it's not a problem anymore but when there's 10 000 people in one space you didn't have cell phone service back then and you couldn't send out tweets first and we were managing these rappers social media you couldn't send out tweets and so that's where my brain got spinning where i i wanted to just like being able to automate sending out tweets and then i wanted to be able to look at who's following you back then they didn't have apis to do that they twitter didn't have their own reporting (13:50) platform to do that and so i kind of just built things that scraped uh your follower list and was able to show like who's following you um you can automate engagement with people and so we kind of it was it was a sas model before i knew what sas was we started getting people paying a monthly subscription and and then it turned into more what we found the real money was in was managing more high profile celebrities social accounts in order to gain followers gain engagement um and increase the quality of their content based on who was (14:20) following them how much revenue in the best year there um several million dollars and you sold it i did not sell it i actually so i i had my third near-death experience and i realized during that period that um that business was not adding net positive value for the world i actually felt bad about it i was like we were inflating people's egos on social media you know and we spent four years of my life doing that and so i felt like i had wasted so much time um and so we shut it down that next that we paid everybody six months (14:51) at our company but but we shut the company down and and that was when i moved out to palo alto drove across the country from from virginia and thought that um you know i got to tell outside this like i was picturing vegas with startup lights you know just like startups everywhere and you get anybody that's been to palo alto it's like the sleepiest town in the world in fact they have an ordinance against putting signs up it's like the sweet the sweet green on the corner is the most exciting thing you're gonna see the (15:19) sweet green and the ice cream shops yes that's exactly right that's incredible okay so you shut it down in 2016 but what you're saying is you were running that profitably you took dividends enough where you could fund the two convertible notes early on into mango and click up exactly exactly so that was it was i mean we got to a point where you know there was we had like 25 grand left in the bank account so that was like enough for another month another month's runway really and i had a little bit of money left but wait when was that (15:46) deb what year um 20 had to be like 2017. 25k left in the bank yeah wow and through like you've been through like a million at that point then uh i think i think more than that it's probably probably two two million um and it might have been it might have been 20 2018 um but the point is that you know we we had about a month of a runway left and um and we were getting to you know we were getting to a point where we don't we didn't know if this was going to be successful or not and we could not raise raised funding at the (16:22) time uh and so you know i was i was like thinking to myself like should we you know should i invest a little bit more money i really only had like 100 200 grand left that i could put into it um and so i pulled my head out of product and started focusing on go to market and we added paywalls and we introduced promotions um for for one of the holidays that was during that month and literally in a matter of like 45 days you know we we were net positive we were we were cash flow positive um and so the bank account got really well i think it (16:51) got down to a couple grand but we we turned it around and we became we became that positive 2018 was that your first million dollar revenue or your million dollar run rate i believe so i'm i'm not i'm not the uh i'm not the numbers person nathan i'm i'm the product i'm the marketing alex is engineering he's definitely not the number person you had to be the number person back then i still was more fi like look when i realized we had 25 grand in the bank account i realized we had 20 that was the first time i realized it i should (17:21) have i should have been thinking about that six months ahead like how much are we burning and that was after we cut down a ton of our expenses where we're like with me before we're spending much more i think we're spending like 100 grand a month and we started cutting things down within like 30 days because i was like we're running out of money um so so so yeah i honestly haven't haven't really been that numbers person crazy well hey before we wrap up here i would love to get some numbers on you if you're if you're comfortable (17:45) sharing them i'm only asking this one because you've already shared valuation the press releases 4 billion recently a billion in 2020 but i don't know what you're raising 35 million at what valuation did you raise at the 35 our our series a uh was 200 million cool there you guys have a little bit of a little bit interesting news there if that's that's manageable i like how you're managing i mean you're basically selling 10 every time you're doing a round so you're really nicely managing dilution here you're not going to be one (18:09) of these ceos where if you go public you only own five percent right exactly and um a little trick if any convertible notes is a really great way with a cap um to invest in your own company if you ever want to invest in your own i don't i full disclosure i don't understand that i don't why did i give you leverage why don't you just put in money directly why do you need to put on a note well so i i put in a cap at five million um so essentially i was investing at a five million valuation and then when we invested 200 million (18:36) your nerds your notes convert um at that same i mean i i've got like another 30 or 40 percent of the company so it's basically a way where if that series a investor says please put up a 15 like esop pool you can sort of get some of that back with the note conversion because they're happening at the same time well you normally you know if you get and this was several years ago or five million was wasn't out of the ballpark i mean now five million is very low for for convertible note cap but if you have five million control note cap (19:06) you would expect normally to raise a series a much sooner right much sooner at like a 40 50 million valuation and then it becomes realistic when you raise that 200 those those those uh convertible node investors get a bit much bigger portion of the company than they would have previous previously hey last question before we wrap up i work two minutes over coming off of you have a hard stop here but cash and bank and mna how are you thinking about mna um there are our m a strategy is you know i i don't want to say too much about it we'll have (19:36) we'll have some announcements to make soon um but we only we only really focus on things that can be part of our core product core ecosystem we are our unified productivity platform right that's all no one's gonna build better than us i mean when i look at this product i don't understand how you look at anyone and say you know what we we're just going to build a better sexier version why would you ever buy someone and deal with the operational risk there well so we're not looking at competitors competitors to buy where we would we'd (20:02) have to roll up teams and roll up products but what we are looking at is somebody that these companies that built something that we were going to build that would take us six months a year to build we're buying time um and so if we can buy time and find people that are within our culture with our values but that also know how to move really quickly and have built something awesome um then then that's something that that we are we are open to and like i said we'll have we'll have some announcements to make very soon you think you're gonna (20:28) buy your way past 100 million bucks in ar next year with the acquisition announcement coming up we we will be we'll be far beyond 100 million next year you think would be more than 200 yeah no you seriously will be more than 200 yeah oh yeah that's incredible you're not you're not north of 100 today i have you right now peggy like 80. (20:48) that's close he's like he can't he can't comment i don't want to i don't want to push you too hard here that's impressive you remind me so much of johnny at hoppin like he came on a year and a half ago well she with no revenue and he's basically bought time and bought his way it's a crazy strategy is there enough deal flow out there for you where do you feel i can go buy a company doing 30 40 50 million in ar for a relatively okay price no no our m a strategy is is we don't we don't focus on the revenue part of it (21:13) our m a strategy is purely product focused product and team so aqua hire and and product interesting very cool let's wrap up quickly with famous five number one favorite book the slight edge is what we make everybody read at our company it's about one percent growth every day but i also i love everything storage updates as well yep number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um i'm always a steve jobs person number three what's your favorite online tool for building click up you can't this is gonna be hard you can't say (21:44) click up but you do so much you have to pick something else sigma that was hard for you okay so are you gonna be building tools i mean look at canva you'll be building tools for designers here you're gonna focus mainly on you know productivity teams we focus on on just productivity as as a whole um you know there will be things like virtual whiteboarding in the in the very near near future but at the end of the day you know we're not trying to compete with point solutions for designers number four how many hours of sleep (22:15) every night 4.5 that's not a ton is it no it's not i've i i actually haven't i was diagnosed with narcolepsy a long time ago and i went to a tony robbins uh conference and he only slept four hours a night and i was like i've got to try this so i used to be that guy i slept like 12 hours and i was always wasting time and i started sleeping less and i was more energetic i changed a lot of things so i mean i changed my diet changed my health but i also started was able to to sleep less um so yes i sleep four point five (22:45) to five hours now and i'm fasting great i love that all right five and then i think what you had a birthday right you're 31 now uh i'm 32 but you can you can say i'm 29. 32. there you go all right 32 years old and jeb situation married single single and no kids running around no kids just click up on the and the 12 product babies under uh last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 uh i always say this is like everybody's just figuring it out everybody's just figuring it out as you go whereas i used to think that all of (23:19) especially the big tech founders knew exactly what they were doing um and the reality is entrepreneurship is just figuring it out even when you get to our level and beyond the the you know the huge ceos that i talked to uh i just yeah i just i just spent a week with richard branson and he himself is just figuring everything out as he goes right just just really taking big bets and and hoping that they work out and then when they don't work out maneuvering really quickly and changing and so i wish i knew that that's what (23:46) entrepreneurship was but that's certainly one of the biggest lessons that i've learned guys click up 800 000 teams on the platform 85 000 are now paying caught north or around of 80 million bucks in revenue on path to break cod 150 200 million next year crazy growth going back to their series a 200 million valuation series b in 2020 a billion and now four billion but zeb is just getting started some interesting news coming up it sounds like on the m a side they're continuing to build great products for productivity teams one app (24:12) to replace them all or to empower them all or to power them all whatever is politically correct but zebra rooting for you man thanks for coming on the top thanks so much nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try (24:42) and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a (25:11) big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in (25:37) the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

[00:00] Hello, everyone. My guest today is Zeb Evans. He's a serial entrepreneur that started several software companies with over a $100,000,000 in revenue. Currently, he's the founder and CEO of ClickUp, a productivity platform where people plan their work. Zeb, are ready to take us to the top? [00:15] >> Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Nathan. [00:16] You bet. We were just chatting. Both both Virginia Tech dropouts. What was your first company dropout of tech? [00:23] >> Yeah. So I did a a social media firm. We did social media automation and management kind of at the early phases of that in 2009, 2010. [00:32] Very interesting. Okay. So give us sort of the download on ClickUp and I won't bury the lead. You guys bootstrapped. I think you launched in 2017. You bootstrapped. You just raised a bunch of money. We'll get into that in a bit, but tell us what the company does first. [00:44] >> Yeah. So ClickUp is a productivity platform to put all of your work in one place. Usually, have separate applications for project management, docs, resource management, time tracking, mind maps, all of productivity in separate locations. And ClickUp is just a place for you to bring all of your your work into one platform. [01:01] And are people loving it? How many customers do you have using it today? [01:05] >> Yeah. We've we've got about 30,000 paying teams that use us today. And and we've got about I mean, we have a lot we have a freemium product as well. So we have a lot of of free users. [01:15] Okay. Got it. So freemium. And and so you very specifically use sort of the word team. So do you measure customers based off teams or the number of seats inside those teams? [01:25] >> We numb we measure customers on the number of teams. Okay. So it's it's about 10 seats per team would would be our average. But, yeah, team is just kind of the the high level organizational unit. [01:35] And what is that organizational unit that's typically using you guys? Who are those 10 seats? What are their titles usually? [01:42] >> It it varies. You know, it's it literally it's it's all the whole goal of ClickUp was being flexible enough for you to work on it for any type of use case. I mean, it started as an internal tool. And so for that reason, you know, I mean, we have families that use us and then we have people that are, you know, sending rockets into space. [02:00] That is that is that is one organized family using you. Holy crap. I can't their Thanksgiving must be wild. [02:08] >> Yeah. I don't know if I'd wanna be in that family. [02:10] Yeah. That that's that's that's great though. Okay. So this is interesting. So you started from your model and then again is launch year correct? Was about 2017? [02:18] >> Yep. End end of twenty seventeen. [02:19] End of twenty seventeen. And you said this was an internal tool. What were you building in 2017 where you then made a decision to spin this out? [02:26] >> So we were actually gonna do a Craigslist competitor where you could pay in app and and like remove the sketchiness from Craigslist. Craigslist is actually the source of the largest fraud in The United States. So but that that was our whole goal was preventing that. And and while we were doing that, ClickUp had always been kind of an idea in the back burner just for an internal tool from the frustrations of having, you know, 15 different [02:47] >> productivity apps that we were using at at my previous company. Mhmm. [02:50] So you built this though, but it's still a tough decision. People build internal tools all the time. The decision to actually shut down the past thing. Right? Because you have a real opportunity to actually take the leap into the new thing is not easy. I mean, or or maybe it was for you. [03:03] >> Well, so so to be clear, we didn't actually get started on that that Craigslist competitor. It was in the idea phase and when we were like, let's just spend a month and create this platform where we can put all of our work there. And and that's what we did. And long story short, we we got into it after that month and realized there was a lot more. I had I've had four near death experiences. I had [03:23] >> I had my third one, and that was when we moved out to Palo Alto. And fortunately there, we do we we met neighbors that had companies, had tech companies, and we kinda just started they started using our our software, our internal tool because they asked us what we were working on. And and so, yeah, I mean, I I didn't want to get in the most competitive market software market, but it it it kinda just kinda happened. [03:45] >> Yeah. [03:45] It's a very competitive space. I also wanna 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 100 customers? Do you remember? [04:01] >> It was all organic stuff. I mean, blogging is not dead. Blogging helps a lot. Content is certainly king. We create helpful articles for people searching long tail keywords of competitive information or just product how to productivity hacks in general, things like that. So yeah. So we started with with organic stuff. I mean, you know, Reddit, Quora, all of that stuff still really works especially for your first 100 customer. [04:27] 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 versemonday.com and why people are switching or something like that? [04:38] >> Yeah. It's exactly like that stuff. I mean, I think we even did when people, you know, didn't know our name, they weren't searching click up yet. So we did like Asana versus Trello and just capitalize on those. [04:48] Yeah. 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, 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. [05:08] >> Know, honestly, I did most of the SEO. It was we're we're very very bootstrappy and and lean. And at my previous company, had a lot of experience doing organic marketing there. Yeah, mean early on it was just like three or four of us that were working on this. [05:23] Mhmm. And so is that sort of mind and just your background why you rank, you know, 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? [05:36] >> I mean, would say that's the start of it. Of course, have an amazing team now that that I don't I don't do that anymore. So we have an incredible team. But I mean, it look. It's it's a long term play. SEO is is very long term. You've you've gotta set it up for the future and know that it's gonna be years before you get real value from it. So it's it's starting to pay off what we [05:54] >> set up two years ago. And and again, it's just it's just about putting those pieces in place to where you have, you know, a great team that can crank up content. [06:01] What does your team look like today? How many folks? [06:04] >> We've got about a 130 people. [06:06] Okay. How many engineers out of curiosity? [06:09] 20. 20. Okay. And what what do the rest spend most of their time on? [06:15] >> Customer service is is huge for us. I want like probably 40 customer service people. We just started hiring our sales team a few months ago. We've got a a decently sized marketing team now. We're we're we're we were all organic until a few months ago, then we started doing paid acquisition. And so we've we've started building out that team. Of course, we have the ops team and our our product teams, design teams as well in QA. [06:39] >> I want [06:40] I wanna come back to how you are incentivizing your first couple of sales hires here because I believe your your model is a you were freemium, and now you're a low ARPU, high volume play. On average, what are customers paying you per month? [06:54] >> It's it's roughly $10.10 to $15 per seat per month becomes the average. So I mean, the ARPU is like $1.01 50 per per per user. [07:05] $1.50 per user. Sorry. So it's $10 per seat or oh, per year. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. So so 300,000 customers again or sorry, seats across 30,000 logos. Again, those 300,000 customers, it's somewhere between 10 and $15 a seat. You have so walk me through how you think about it for sales hire. A lot of people would say at this price point, unless you're doing a high volume of demos, you can't make the [07:27] commission structure work to have input touch on a sale. [07:32] >> No. I mean, ours I look I actually was in that camp prior to to starting it. I wanted to go very slow and methodically with sales. But we we have, you know, kind of an awesome head of head of sales, Tommy, and he's pushed us hard on on sales hiring and it's worked phenomenally well for us. I mean, I think that the reality is, again, going back to this flexible platform that you have simple use cases [07:57] >> but also very complex use cases. The complex use cases takes a hand holding process. And and so yeah. I mean, it's it started off, you know, small, but it's it's it's a big portion of our revenue today is is the hand holding process. [08:10] When did you hire that first sort of VP strategist in Tommy? Can I mean, can you tell me what revenue hit before you pulled that trigger? A lot of founders wonder when to pull that trigger. [08:20] >> We were around just a few million dollars in revenue, probably a little bit more than that. Would say $6.07, 8,000,000 in revenue. And and I mean we had of course, we had, you know, some enterprises reaching out to us and I was, you know, using a fake name to to to be the acting salesperson in some of the calls. But I mean, when when he joined, we we hired our first couple salespeople and it's just been [08:44] >> kind of a rocket ship growth on the sales side. [08:47] Why why did you feel you needed a fake name? [08:50] >> You know, you you appear small. Right? You you kind of appear small when the CEO is the person doing the sales and answering the question. So I I kinda had to do that early on. What was your faking name? Tyler. [09:03] Tyler. I love that. Alright. Alright. Cool. So 2017 blog post gets you going. You've now scaled up to about 300,000 seats using your platform across 30,000 logos at $10 a pop. What I mean, you guys are somewhere around 3,000,000 in MRR currently? [09:16] >> We're a little bit less than that. [09:19] Okay. A little bit. Do you think you'll break $36,000,000 run rate by the end of twenty twenty? [09:23] Stretch We'll see. Stretch goal. Fair. So so you it sounds like you had a meaningful revenue. Right? When you look at the $35,000,000 raise that you guys just did, lot of people would say that's a lot of money sort of for the first money into a company, but it sounds like you had scale. What was the tipping point for you where you said, know what, I'm gonna intentionally choose the sort of VC path, is very different [09:43] than the build a $20,000,000 profitable pay myself dividend as founder path? [09:48] >> Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. And I the simplest answer is that I I didn't enjoy many of the VC conversations that I had until I met David Sachs at at Kraft. And and, you know, he's obviously an entrepreneur himself and and kind of just I think was more in the mindset that I was and and kind of letting us run the company and doing the same things that we've always done. So I mean, that [10:13] >> that I would say would be the biggest piece to it. But I mean, second piece is is look, we're in, you know, again, a very very competitive market. And so we've had competitors, you know, everybody rips everybody's features off. And and we have people copying our messaging, copying our ads, copying many of our features. And and so it it's it's a defense a defensive play in many ways is is to do this. And I think that [10:35] >> it's it's more about, you know, getting our brand out there and getting market share pretty quickly. But what I always will advocate for is, you know, go as as far as you can without raising to get product market fit. Right? And then when you do raise, you you have you have the leverage to pull. Right? You you have the leverage. [10:52] Walk me through that conversation with David Sachs. Obviously, you had leverage before I assume you're profitable going to get a VC raise? [10:57] >> Yep. [10:58] Yeah. And obviously, you're not profitable now because you're now investing that cash. Correct? [11:03] >> We're we're trying not to be profitable. Yeah. We have to be. We're on the line. [11:07] Yeah. It's like once you raise, you you gotta invest it to drive growth. Right? [11:12] >> Yeah. Exactly. [11:13] Interesting. Okay. And your thesis, I believe you already touched on this. Your thesis in driving growth, you said, you just started really scaling up paid spend. You also just started scaling and bring on your salespeople. Anywhere else you're gonna invest that 35,000,000? [11:27] >> It's it's mostly that. I mean, of course, we're gonna ramp up our organic marketing side also. That's that's our engine behind. I mean, that's that's still vast majority of of sales today and and self-service. So we'll we'll continue ramping that stuff up as well as customer service. We're we're big customer service companies. I want, you know, instant instant demos, instant response times twenty four seven. [11:45] Last couple of questions here before we wrap up. Churn is obviously critical in this sort of business. What are you guys trying to optimize for in terms of gross churn monthly? [11:53] >> We're we're under 2% monthly. One to 2%. [11:56] That's okay. So that's incredible. I've talked to a lot of other people in your space and they are not under percent gross revenue churn per month. Are you doing anything specifically that you feel like is really driving those great numbers? [12:07] >> I mean I mean, we we ship a new version of ClickUp every Friday. And it rallies our customer base around us listening to them, and they they broadcast us because of that. But I mean, I I think it really just we've kind of created this, like, organic, like, fan base around releasing every Friday and shipping a new version of ClickUp every Friday. It's it's I mean, people livestream the event. Everybody tweets about it. I I think [12:31] >> that that has a lot to do with it. But it also is just like the preface for like how we care and how we're so intentional about product and and improving the product that I think I think people stick with us. [12:40] Now flip side of churn, when you have a a seat base of 300,000 paid seats, a 2 or $3 ARPU increase across that base starts to become meaningful. Do you have meaningful expansion revenue yet or is that something maybe for 2022? [12:54] >> I mean we do. Our net retention is very high. I think that you know it certainly obviously increases as you go up market for for retention. I mean, our our SMB I I don't have the exact numbers where SMB is. It's certainly less than our enterprises. [13:08] When you say high net revenue retention or or net revenue retention, what does that what does that mean? How high? [13:13] >> More like one fifty. [13:15] Incredible. So if you're turning 24%, you've gotta be expanding 75% to get to net one fifty. Interesting. And most of that is seat expansion or product like additional product features? [13:27] >> It's it's seat expand so our actual most revenue product is our middle tier, our our business tier, which is kind of the premium one. But the vast majority of people, it's like 95% of people start with the unlimited. So we do we do feature paywalls a little bit differently in the sense where everybody actually gets access to the feature that is paywalled. And they don't they don't really know that it's paywalled until you kinda start using [13:51] >> it. You get a 100 uses of of every of every feature. And and then it changes user behavior because users generally will optimize for the features that are free. And so if you if you don't really kind of let them know that they're not free, then they start using them. And and I mean, on the flip side of this, really, our our mission is just saving people time, making people more productive. And we we strongly believe [14:11] >> that lots of these paywall features do that. And and that's why we wanna get them in front of users. [14:16] I can feel folks listening to episode going right now. But Nathan, you gotta ask Zeb, if you don't tell them that it's paid upfront and you wanna get them addicted first and then throw a paywall up, there's gotta be pushback when you throw up the paywall. You've obviously thought through this. [14:27] >> I mean, look, there is there is some at the end of the day. But I again, like our our value I think is is outweighed on that and and people end up appreciating that they actually started using the feature that they would have not used otherwise. [14:39] Yep. Fair statement. Alright. Last question here on CAC. It sounds like you know the numbers pretty darn well. I mean if you're bringing on you know a new a new account with 10 seats, a $10 a seat, so a $100 per month account. What are you willing to spend to get that customer? [14:53] >> Yeah. I I mean, we're still figuring out all that stuff out right now. And and it greatly depends on what channel you're buying from. And we we can we can get customers for as as low as like a thousand bucks. Paying customers for as low as a thousand bucks. I mean, we're we're shooting we wanna we wanna aim for low low thousands. Yep. But honestly, it's you know, as as you know, when you start testing some [15:12] >> of this stuff, gets it gets expensive. It gets a couple thousand, $3,000. But the reality is our blended CAC, it becomes so low because of organic. You know, about 95% of users are still organic is that we can we can kind of spend a little bit more outside of what our our lifetime value would be I think for for most companies. [15:30] So before we wrap up with the Famous Five, is there anything you're like, I can't believe Nathan didn't ask about this. This is like the big thing right now. [15:37] >> I mean, I I know it's like we touched on all of the revenue stuff and I think that it's again, that this market is just it's so so hot and frothy right now. It's it's it's like the right timing market to be in. But I mean, yeah, it's it's always a competitor differentiation questions that we get, you know, like how how are you different from from your other other products? [15:56] Mhmm. What what you obviously got evaluation from Saks. Why not take that evaluation and go to Monday and say, wanna buy us before we scale and try and beat you? [16:05] >> I don't really have any interest in doing that. Know, I I I I think I've I've kind of exited a company in the past and and I feel like this is this is the one to go public and kind of create that meaningful lasting lasting business that that's here when I'm gone. [16:19] Public or bust? You heard it here first from Zev Evans. Famous five here. Number one, favorite business book. [16:26] >> Thanks so much, Nathan. Yeah. My favorite business book, I actually I actually love it's called The Slight Edge. Everybody gets everybody at ClickUp reads it every single day or every single time they start. And yeah, it's it's basically about our core value of progress over perfection kinda growing 1% every day. [16:43] Number two, there a CEO you're following or studying? [16:46] >> I love Elon Musk. [16:48] Number three, favorite online tool besides your own? [16:55] >> Front. [16:56] Number four, how many hours of sleep are you getting every night? [16:59] >> 4.5. [17:01] Four point very specific. Is that point two situation? Married, single, kids? Single. Okay. Got it. No. Because last question oh, sorry. How old are you? 30. 30. Okay. Last question. What's something you wish you knew ten years ago when you were 20? [17:17] >> It's a great question. I mean, I I think that tech was gonna be the hot thing and that I would have learned coding earlier than than I did. [17:25] Guys, there you have it. ClickUp, flirting with called $3,035,000,000 dollar run rate serving over 30,000 companies across 300,000 paid seats that can average 10 to $15 per month. They're driving great growth. They just did their first round, $35,000,000 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. Our first 100 customers [17:49] all came from sort of organic and SEO inbound now testing many more channels. Zeb, thanks for taking us to the top. [17:56] >> Likewise. Thanks, Nathan. [17:59] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it. And the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday, 1PM central. [18:24] Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a [18:44] big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You wanna get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up [19:05] for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. If you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We gotta [19:24] push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright. I'll be in the comments. See you.