How ClickUp CEO Zeb Evans grew ClickUp to $300M revenue and 100K customers in 2025.

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

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//www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhVouHaO6so

Transcript

(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...