How much profit can content marketing make? Can free content also be exchanged for paid users? Let’s take a look at the content marketing operation methodology together! This article introduces in detail the methodological marketing model of ClickUp cold start combination punch, using a large number of cases and data to display it. Children's shoes who are interested in content operation and content marketing must not miss it!
With the C round of US$400 million in the fall of 2021, the valuation of ClickUp, which has been online for less than 4 years, jumped to US$4 billion. More than two years ago, the unknown founder Zeb Evans was still worried about the company's life and death.
A few days ago, I was in "How to build a US$4 billion SaaS rocket?" This magical entrepreneurial story is introduced in the article "Article of PLG's King ClickUp". It is better to eat with this article!
Today, let’s try to parse ClickUp’s growth skills from scratch:
- How to use content marketing to obtain massive precise traffic? How to ensure that new versions are released every week without overturning? How to exchange for paid users with the promise of
- for free?
Welcome back, let’s continue!
1 1. ClickUp cold start combination punch
combination punch 1: Need empathy + content marketing
I started with Basecamp, then we had Jira for engineering, Trello for boards, Asana for marketing teams, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Slack, Confluence for Wiki… we had 10+ different productivity applications. I started with Basecamp, used Jira for research and development, Trello for kanban, Asana for marketing, Google for Google documents, forms, Slack for wiki... There are more than 10 different productivity tools in total.
I’m a huge design and user experience person, it became insanely frustrating for me using JIRA and Asana. I felt like Asana was far too little whereas JIRA was way too much in terms of complexity and features set. Asana functions are too simple, and JIRA is too cumbersome.
I feel like no one was paying attention to details, to the things that actually mattered to make people more productive. The series of soul complaints on
are all personal experiences and intuitive feelings of founder Zeb Evans. After all, as a king of scrolls, the ultimate pursuit of time and efficiency is deeply engraved in the bones. This is why ClickUp can reach PMF so quickly.
The founding team empathizes with users is the soul of the product In addition to the CEO himself, CTO Alex Yurkowski also has a deep feeling. Because the entire company team itself is using this product, even the R&D team that is in the back end can experience the product value at any time and is more likely to be motivated.
In addition, in order to ensure the enthusiasm of the production and research team, the company will also pass on the positive feedback from users to the research and development team, rather than just receiving negative energy such as bug reports all day long. The function of hitting pain points + further optimization experience = the most solid base for high-speed growth. On this basis, content marketing is almost the only winning weapon.
As mentioned earlier, the content assets accumulated by Blogging can almost sustainably bring clues and traffic. When talking about this topic, Zeb always underestimates that "we attach more importance to SEO." In fact, the King of Juan will not take the ordinary path. Conventional content marketing practices will try to avoid directly selling products, but instead indirectly stimulate users' interest in the product; SEO will also give priority to choosing the long-tail keyword as the entry point (such as Notion).
However, ClickUp chose to start with tough problems, mainly hard and soft articles, and relied on a large amount of straightforward content to dominate the list of red ocean keywords such as "task management tools" and "free project management software ".
Picture: ClickUp's iron head SEO strategy
In order to achieve this, Zeb almost rolled his sleeves on his shoulders, daily update blog! I wish I could hang the entire Google "How..." and "What..." on ClickUp link, sweeping over 60,000 keywords.
Picture: ClickUp Early blog page (19-20)
(1) Agile
Topic: What is Agile Marketing ; How Do You Implement It?, How to Apply Scrum to Personal Projects
(2) Functions and integration
Topic: Gantt Chart Milestones: Ultimate Guide, How to Use ClickUp to Set Goals for Your Team
(3) Lifestyle
Topic: How to Make ClickUp Unicorn Chip Cookies, 3 Things I Learned Bootstrapping ClickUp to $20M ARR in the World’s Most Competitive Industry
(4) Productivity
Topic: 5 Tips to Increase Your Sales Team’s Performance, How to Automate Tasks in 2020 (Ultimate Guide)
(5) Project Management
Topic: How to Build a Project Management Dashboard (2020 Guide), The Ultimate Guide to Google Project Management
(6) Remote Office
Topic: The Role of Real-Time Connection in Remote Work, The 7 Key Benefits of Remote Teams
(7) Software
Topic: Top 8 Annotation Tools (Features, Pros, Cons, Pricing), Monday.com Review 2020 (Features, Pros, Cons, Pricing)
In addition to using SEO to solve traffic problems, the company also invests a lot of resources to provide tutorials and seminars to increase retention and conversion:
Figure: ClickUp First-party product tutorial
Figure: The corresponding "online course" was designed for users at different levels. This high-intensity content output has lasted for several years. The direct result is a continuous stream of natural traffic.
Of course, 100% of the hard work is done in-house. The actual situation is that internal teams are the leading and external institutions are assisted as leverage (bearing part of the writing work and resource import).
In fact, when I noticed ClickUp 2 years ago, I was a little confused. Will this overwhelming and straightforward advertising have a negative effect? You should know that doing ClickUp case studies is a very painful thing. As long as you touch the edges of the keywords, the search results are overwhelmingly covered with official soft articles and hard advertisements. Even the results of searching for keywords like "ClickUp Sucks" are soft articles...
Does the user accept this strange setting when a strategy that is too vigorous to a certain extent?
It is obviously not possible to rely on brute force alone. The core skill is targeting target keywords.
Think of high intent terms that have high traffic and low competition.
The more obvious the keywords that have high traffic/competition ratio.
For example, the search volume of "OKR" may be much smaller than "How to set annual goals", but the former has more accurate traffic and the ultimate commercial value is also higher. Therefore, it is necessary to insist on regularly and quantitatively reviewing the effects of different contents, and to ensure that the intention can be converted into commercial results. At the same time, it will be combined with some redirected delivery, such as adding product advertisements to users who have read OKR articles, and the effect will be more obvious.
With these simple and unpretentious content strategies in the front, the company successfully achieved a phased victory from starting from scratch. After completing continuous financing in 2020, ClickUp, which has sufficient food and supplies, has also begun to blossom in both culture and sports, online activities, social media, video memes...
Picture: ClickUp's annual online event "Level Up"
For example, since 2020, we have held virtual online activities every year, and the "Wang Po Live Selling Melons" is not blushing and heartbroken:
- ClickUp How does the company use ClickUp product
- Important functions have been introduced
- ClickUp's marketing strategy
- How users of various types use ClickUp's
- Industry KOL experience sharing
On weekdays, the creative department led by CCO is also running at full speed. The two series of videos #ReturningToWork and #WorkSchooling released on Youtube are praised, and in conjunction with ListenUp (ClickUp's user ambassador) continue to create memes and play memes, gaining a lot of natural traffic and clues.
Of course, memes are not made at will, the purpose is to relate the product and search intentions as much as possible.
In short, ClickUp's first set of combination punches is to create a good product based on empathy for demand, and then continue to output content marketing around these common pain points.
Content marketing is the hardest but the most correct thing!
Combination Fist 2: Quick Release + Customer Service
Generally speaking, a 2B software should make new decisions on version updates and functions. On the one hand, it is necessary to ensure that it will not have a negative impact on users and avoid disturbing users too much. On the other hand, it is necessary to repeatedly test and troubleshoot bugs.
I personally have always believed that good products should be subtracted more than addition. The typical case of
is Notion, which has always maintained a restrained attitude. In four years, the version number has been updated less than 20 times, and there are only a handful of new features released every year.
However, the presence of love may be a feature engraved into the Zeb and ClickUp genes, which is not only reflected in marketing strategies, but also in the product development process.
Don’t be perfect, just ship something try something and then fix it later.
Complete is more important than perfection. Post it as soon as possible, try and make mistakes, and solve the problem again
He is here, he is here, he is here, he rolls up with the mentality of letting himself go! The early release of the new version of
ClickUp is: every! week! five!
is planned in weekly units, which is almost unheard of in the 2B software field. In an interview, CTO Alex talked about a new feature being planned. The host asked casually when it will be launched and answered 2 weeks later.
The host was shocked on the spot: I couldn't even cut
For example, Loom was once a high-frequency application within the ClickUp team, but there were often bugs at that time, so an engineer recommended himself and took a few days to complete the research and development and release it online.
In order to respond to Zeb's frequent inspiration, the company also set up a Zeb team, with Zeb personally leading five R&Ds to explore experimental functions, and quickly go online for a few days to try it out. If the data feedback is not good, it will be decisively cut it off. Behind the small-step and fast-running production and research rhythm, there are many unique settings:
Picture: ClickUp The concept of production and research
- Zeb firmly believes that (early stage) technical debt is nonsense. No company has lost its technical debt. More of it is dead. has not been made in product . If there is a problem, it will be time to solve it.
- does not need to do front-end automation testing. Because the automation test covers incompletely and the product iterates too quickly, it is better to simply skip
- likes to build wheels by yourself. After all, the demand is relatively non-standard. For example, in order to summarize paid orders for users within 24 hours, CRM
- is self-developed and developed to provide good service and promotion, and self-developed CRM
- opposes remote office. The efficiency loss is too great. If you want to send it, you will come to the company
In this rhythm of changing wheels while driving, ClickUp for the first year of online launch. 287 new features were released, and more than 230 functions and upgrades were launched in the following year. Since then, it has maintained the iteration speed of more than 300 functions for each year.
is a joke, no matter whether it is making products or content, Zeb is still a reckless entrepreneur with a detailed look. There are two important factors that ClickUp is not a big failure today: user portraits and user services.
user portrait: Small B and Big C
can be roughly calculated from the revenue data and user scale. The average team size of ClickUp users is about 10 people, mainly small B and big C users. This team group is the comfort zone for cold start of PLG products, and the user's thinking mode is closer to the C-end.
Zeb admits that rapid release does bring risks of user distancing, but he also firmly believes that as long as valuable updates can be continuously provided, users will eventually choose to forgive.
In order to cope with more and more product functions and avoid users being "lost", ClickUp has designed corresponding novices interfaces and starting routes according to the identities of different new users. If you are an individual user or a small team, some complex functions will be folded by default, hiding deeper to ensure that the product is lightweight and easy to use.
As mentioned above, this has been taken into account when designing the product architecture. Each functional section is completely independent during development, and users can switch freely. Even database has been designed to take into account efficiency and performance as much as possible.
From the perspective of small B and large C, sometimes experience is more important than function.
Figure: PLG is all about user experience. PLG compares user experience
User service: timely response and feedback closed loop
In order to maximize user experience, ClickUp spent a lot of effort to form a 7×24 customer service team in a very early stage:
- official channel provides response speed within 30 seconds
- new users have 30 minutes to start the guide Du
- holds online teaching activities from time to time
. When the company's team has a scale of 120 people, R&D only accounts for about 20%, and more than half of the remaining teams are operations and customer service; when the team size of 1,000 people, R&D has been diluted to less than 15%, and a large number of operations and customer service have been expanded, including adding teams in many places around the world such as Ireland , the Philippines, and Poland.
Even if you are facing small customers, ClickUp chooses to tilt the weight from Software to Service on the SaaS balance.
Zeb attributed this concept to Disney's work experience, which later evolved into one of ClickUp's core concepts: attach importance to user experience, invest in user services, and actively communicate with users.
Note: Although I did this in the early days, it is difficult to invest heavily in human services for small customers. In fact, in the later stage, the company gradually faded this ultimate service experience, and instead helped to lower the user's threshold for use with stronger reusable means such as videos, guidance tips, tutorials and templates.
In addition to services, ClickUp also attaches great importance to user communication and feedback:
- For a long time, Zeb will personally view each user feedback and comments
- will only conduct research within 60 seconds. It is easier for users to accept it and can force the team to refine core issues
- firmly believe that users are the best consultants, allowing users to push the product team to do addition
In order to maintain close communication with users, ClickUp uses a series of tools and platforms to use Canny, Pendo, questionnaire, community (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to be summarized into a system for unified analysis.
Figure: Canny may be one of the few tools that the company has not chosen to develop, and if a high ticket demand is consistent with the company's vision, it will be included in the product roadmap.
Just ship it and see what happens.
release is just for release. Let’s see what will happen.
release quickly ensures that the product can quickly keep up with user needs, while customer service covers the risks caused by rapid release. The two complement each other and can ensure the smooth operation of this high-speed growth machine.
Combination Fist 3: Pay Wall + Active Promotion
ClickUp once disclosed a set of detailed business data at the beginning of 2021:
- .3 million team users, about 10% of the payment rate, MRR just exceeded US$2 million
- paid users CAC about US$3,000, but only accounted for less than 5% of all payments html August churn rate 1-2%, NDR (amount renewal rate) is as high as 150%
First of all, I have to say that even after polishing for half a year, the company's optimization of payment was not good enough at the time, and there is still a huge gap compared to the current level (CACh recycling period 12-18 months). Fortunately, there is still a large amount of free traffic, which has brought 95% of paid users, significantly lowering the overall CAC.
From another dimension, the monthly churn rate is 1.x%, which means an annual churn rate of about 20%. Referring to the NDR of up to 150% and the MRR with explosive growth, we can guess that ClickUp has excellent paid new additions and user purchases.
total users are rising rapidly, and paid conversions are also done well. How can
ClickUp make users get deeper and deeper? First of all, we have to mention that ClickUp's unique PayWall design - neither Free Trial nor Freemium - many paid functions are designed to have limited experiences, and free or low-level users can use a limited xx number of times.The "routine" of the practice of
is that users often start using it unknowingly. At first, they did not realize that this was a paid function. After using it, they already felt the value of the product deeply and could get a very high payment rate. Of course, promotional methods should also be fast, accurate and ruthless!
Picture: ClickUp never hides itself as a competitor. The low-price flat price is available for
. Review ClickUp's product positioning: spend 1 portion and get the value of N portions of tools - for small customers, cost-effectiveness is always a necessity. Under this concept, ClickUp is almost always "promoting". In addition to the limited-time discounts that cooperate with paywalls, there are also many permanent promotions and discount mechanisms, including the annual paid price being directly paid to 55% off, and the fact that new users will receive vouchers after completing a series of actions. The first promotional event of the
product after it was launched in 2018 brought in US$100,000 in revenue, and the payment rate once reached 40%, with the effect being outstanding. So much so that in the early days, the company held discounts and promotions almost every week. I even opened a bargaining entrance for users on the price page: Is it expensive? Don't leave, leave the information and let's have a private chat.
Picture: ClickUp's pricing page and bargaining portal
The core purpose is to lower the psychological threshold for users to pay:
valuable content
↓
simple and easy-to-use product
↓
Quick iteration function
↓
Exceeding experience
↓
Cheap ticket
↓
"full of routines" paywall
↓
User: I'm talking, I'm buying, I can't buy it
This set of combination punches, each user is "sinking deeper and deeper" in the funnel.
2. The challenge of ClickUp and chicken soup
Zeb condenses the spirit of many years of entrepreneurship into 9 core values:
- is not limited to the first in the industry, and it is necessary to provide users with the best service in their life; at the same time, it also helps themselves solve problems
- despise mediocrity
- enters perfect
- exerts brain and physical strength
- grows 1% every day
- straightforward
- keeps the pain points in mind and builds a system
- do good with the flow
- keeps anxiety and optimism
Picture: ClickUp The company's values
, which is full of chicken blood and offensive style, seems so out of place with the current universal aesthetic of "innovation, restraint, and grouping" in the SaaS circle in North America. Zeb has also been criticized by employees as an abnormal narcissist. This controversy is also indirectly reflected in the company's valuation - ClickUp's revenue scale is about 1.5-1.8 times that of Notion, but the valuation is only 40% of the latter.
In terms of business, ClickUp, which has both rapidly expanded its size of users and employees, has also encountered many "growth troubles" one after another: will the
- product function continue to be added, will it become more and more bloated and affect the user experience? How to break through the "small customer bottleneck" of
- , and how can the product open up medium- and large-scale teams or enterprise-level customer markets?
- can maintain the company's unique corporate culture and atmosphere after starting global recruitment? How to find the balance between radical growth and universal aesthetics, so as to get a higher valuation premium ?
I am looking forward to what kind of answer Zeb will deliver.
But no matter what, looking at the first four years of ClickUp, it has become an undeniable growth case at the textbook level.
- Choose a proven direction. As long as the market is still growing, you are not afraid of competition in the red ocean.
- stands on the shoulders of giants to solve the leftover pain points. One or two are enough. Try to completely solve the problem of
- PLG: write blogs frequently, pay attention to experience, listen to feedback, quickly iterate
- NPMF, refinancing amplification
especially the cold start stage of starting from scratch. It may be the most replicable growth script, which is worthy of repeated reading of every entrepreneur.
When I was sorting out ClickUp's growth story, I seemed to have drunk a bowl of thick chicken soup: I may not rely on any strange tricks and tricks to make a Global SaaS product well. I will not deceive people by using my brain to make products and using my heart to treat users with my efforts!
complete reference:
https://www.ai-bees.io/articles/zeb-evans-productivity-platform-ceo-helping-the-world-save-more-time
https://kareemazees.com/the-clickup-growth-strategy-scaling-to- 20m-arr-in-2-years-in-the-competitive-work-productivity-category/
https://www.toplyne.io/blog/clickup-the-product-led-productivity-tool
https://storychief.io/blog/clickup-content-marketing-strate gy
https://hop.online/digital-strategy/clickups-video-marketing/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBQ3MfOxWOE;ab_channel=SaaStr
https://clickup.com/blog/3-things-i-learned-bootstrapping- clickup/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76imOav2gao;ab_channel=EICAgency
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vqR1nBqdYA;ab_channel=PAPERLESSMOVEMENT%C2%AE
https://blog.getlatka.com/product ignity-software-company-clickup-hits-almost-3-million-in-monthly-revenue-from-300000-customers/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_wRAc7JatI;ab_channel=InTheir20s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n hVouHaO6so;ab_channel=NathanLatka
https://moderncto.io/270-alex-yurkowski-cto-co-founder-at-clickup/
https://soundcloud.com/meetdemio/how-clickup-reinforces-their-product-led-growth-engine-with-p pc-and-attribution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsyDN9WP9y0;ab_channel=HeyDigital
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb2FhE8TMB0;ab_channel=MoreSaaStr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W F__hIjZV8;ab_channel=HopOnline
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9FsaxmLxlg;ab_channel=ZenPilot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFkjaIS6DBA;ab_channel=Traction-ACommunityforInnovators
Author: JK; WeChat official account: Randomclub (ID: randomclub)
This article was originally published by @ Randomclub. Everyone is a product manager. Reproduction is prohibited without permission.
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