ClickUp, this grassroots team started from scratch, created nearly 200 million US dollars in ARR from 0, with no external financing and blood transfusion at all. It has created a new world in the field of collaborative SaaS with an All-in-One productivity tool. This article will tell you the story of ClickUp's unique growth, come and have a look.
Imagine you are an investor in a Silicon Valley VC fund. One day, a 28-year-old entrepreneur rang the doorbell of your office and then briefly introduced himself:
- Sophomore dropped out of business school in an engineering college in the United States
- started his business after working as a train driver at Disney for a year. He mainly engaged in social media, navy and zombie fans
- tossed and turned his husband after 5 years. The company closed down and started a new entrepreneurial direction: the Great Red Sea Collaboration SaaS
- product direction does not look for any vertical scenes, and directly fights with Jira, Asana, and Monday's big brothers,
- CEO, CPO, and CMO, all of them are themselves. The CTO was recruited by him on the forum. At that time, he was still struggling whether to have a full-time
. When facing such an entrepreneur, would you give him a letter of intent to invest?
Congratulations, I missed a unicorn worth 4 billion US dollars: ClickUp.
, an unknown grassroots team, delivered an explosive growth report card within four years after its launch, creating nearly 200 million US dollars of ARR from 0. With an All-in-One productivity tool, it has created a new world in the field of collaborative SaaS with cloud-like experts.
Picture: ClickUp's advertising on the "No. 1 expensive" Super Bowl
With the creative advertising on the Super Bowl this year on this year, ClickUp's traffic reached a new high (imagine that it is equivalent to a C-round SaaS company cast an advertisement to tease the founding ceremony in the Spring Festival Gala). What’s even more interesting is that this team’s ARR from 0 to 20 million US dollars in 2 years was a process of starting from scratch, with no external financing and blood transfusion at all.
Due to the abundant information, the first draft was written 16,000 words. In order to ensure the reading experience, I will tell you this unique growth story in two times. The old rules. Listen to a story in the first half and increase some knowledge in the second half. I hope it will be helpful to you. Today, let’s first listen to a story: What is the origin of
- ClickUp and its founder? Why can
- ClickUp start from scratch in the Red Sea track? Will
- ClickUp maintain its original intention after continuous financing?
Next, please pick up your curiosity and review the past and present of this PLG Volume King with me. Let’s jump in!!
1. Destiny Entrepreneur Zeb Evans
ClickUp is Zeb Evans.
He claimed to be a destiny entrepreneur. Although he was born in an ordinary employee family, he started buying and selling toys at the age of four or five. At the age of 10, he was knocked by the FBI for selling pirated DVDs on the website. Later, I went through countless directions, including mobile DJ App, entertainment content, rapper brokers, including the social media fans and agency operating company Fast Follower mentioned at the beginning.
said he was a train driver but he was not a title party. Although Zeb had torn a lot, he only had three of the most proud professional experiences on his Linkedin homepage. The sophomore monorail train driver at Disney was his only working experience.
Picture: Zeb Evans' Linkedin Homepage
Dropped out of college is not because of laziness. On the contrary, Zeb is a well-known workaholic. In his eyes, even going to college is a waste of time.
Entrepreneurship cured Zeb's narcolepsy. He maintained a 7×18 work intensity continuously, went to bed at 0 o'clock every night, and got up at 4:30 in the morning. This entrepreneur, who was covered in stimulants, served as the only product manager and marketing manager two years before the company was established. Until the company's valuation reached US$4 billion in 2021, he also served as the head of the market and products as CEO.
In order to improve the company's human efficiency, Zeb learning idol Elon Musk only recruits hard-working and capable employees, and calls it "10x employees".
In an interview, Zeb introduced his own method of recruiting 10x employees, which is simple, crude and outrageous: add a column to the recruitment registration form "Demand for Work and Life Balance", and then directly reject the candidates with medium and high demand! !
A sentence made the host confused and stuttered for a while before he could get back to his words.
Driven by such a wild founder, ClickUp employees once worked more than 14 hours a day. Even Zeb has to admit that the biggest challenge for the company is recruiting.
In order to increase recruitment efficiency, Zeb designed a strict scoring system, and even background checks are used in the form of scoring, which is completely data-driven. For example, if a candidate on a customer service team scores below 8 in terms of optimism and motivation, even if the interviewer likes him, he will be rejected.
Every time I read Zeb's interview or speech, in addition to feeling the chicken blood like "Wolf of Wall Street", there is another very obvious feeling that Zeb's pursuit of saving time and improving efficiency is engraved in his bones.
He speaks and does things very purposefully, and his style of answering questions is simple and straightforward and does not go around. He also has a huge amount of information. He often repeatedly emphasizes helping users save time and solves the pain points shared by themselves and users. It was precisely because of this original intention that ClickUp was founded.
2. ClickUp
Zeb, which started from scratch, is always used to introducing company products in a plain language:
ClickUpisaproductivityplatformtoputallofyourworkinoneplace, oneapptoreplacethemall. (ClickUp is a productivity platform that can gather all work in one place, and one application can replace them all.)
"replace them all", how big is this sentence? Let’s see who “they” are:
Picture: ClickUp and his competitors
Over the years of entrepreneurial experience, due to their ultimate pursuit of time and efficiency, Zeb and his team will purchase many collaborative SaaS tools, such as Basecamp for R&D (later replaced with Jira+Trello), Asana for marketing, Confluence for content management, etc.
After closing the social media fan company, Zeb originally planned to do a Craigslist without false information (similar to 58.com), but the first thing he suffered was that a team with few people had to purchase several collaboration tools.
After thinking about it, Zeb decided to build a wheel first.
More than a month later, the prototype of this All-in-One collaboration tool was born. Although it is a bit simple, it is enough to meet the daily collaboration needs of small teams. Even different functional teams can collaborate in parallel between different spaces of the same product.
Figure: ClickUp's product structure
Each task and subtask can be given priority, and then assigned to anyone on the team and notified in real time. Each task can be presented in different views (kanban, Gantt chart, list, calendar, etc.).
Looking at the prototype of this product, Zeb slapped his thigh:
Wheels are not fragrant? The car is no longer built, all-in ClickUp!
In order to "replace them all", ClickUp has currently covered a total of 15 major categories of collaborative products, including the collaboration whiteboard that just launched this year, which put the battle flag at Miro's feet.
Correspondingly, the production and research team, like the product functions, is also parallel and disassembled. The smallest product team consists of 5-7 people, including 1 PM, 1 designer, and 3-5 R&D.
Picture: ClickUp's product page
I mentioned the concept of NPMF in the article "I learned these three things in the process of making ClickUp 20 million US dollars ARR" 2 years ago. Today I want to discuss the story behind these 20 million ARRs.
"From a Bootstrap" corresponds to English: "Bootstrap", which is also one of the tags ClickUp puts on itself. But the initial stage is always so difficult. At the beginning, Zeb's self-raised $1 million was burned out in half a year, and then he was forced to add 1.5 million. At the worst, the company only had 5,000 yuan left in the company's account.
Finally, 45 days after the product was officially launched, the company reached a break-even line! Revenue exceeded US$1 million in 2018.
Considering that there are other business interferences, the startup cost of ClickUp itself may be much less than the self-raised 2.5 million.
A few years later, Zeb, who has survived this near-death experience, reviewed this experience: compared with ten years ago, cloud-based infrastructure is becoming more and more abundant, and software development costs are gradually reducing
In short, it is:
As long as I am poor enough, you have no way to do it.
However, don’t think that the founder can’t eat grapes and say that grapes are sour. Please feel the power of ClickUp’s free traffic:
Figure: ClickUp’s free traffic scale estimate
“Free job” is a technical job. Early ClickUp almost pointed out all the limited skills in both the “blog” and “bumping porcelain” directions.
1. Cold start skill [Blogging]
Before 2020, the company had neither sales nor marketing team, and 100% of the users came from free natural traffic (even if by 2022, the proportion of new users brought by natural traffic will still be as high as 70-75%). Coupled with the natural propagation effect of collaboration products, these traffic continue to fission and amplify step by step.
SEO by writing articles in the official website Blog column or well-known forum, is already the standard skill of every PLG company; but before the product is launched, ClickUp is probably the first company in the entire network, at least the first volume of the entire network.
Startablogbeforeyou’veevencreatedyourproduct. (You have to start blogging before the product is created.)
sounds a bit counterintuitive, but that’s how all the early users of ClickUp did. Do not do any outbound marketing, focus on outputting content and teaching user methodology.
Content marketing and SEO are the strongest skills of ClickUp . I will give a more detailed introduction in the next article, so stay tuned.
2. Cold start skill [Bumping porcelain]
What inspirations do I bring to Global SaaS companies in "Reviewing the growth path of Notion from 0 to 10 billion US dollars? 》This article introduces Notion used some "smashing" strategies in the early days, but it quickly faded.
and ClickUp not only used this trick, but also used it more and more vigorously and continues to this day. On ClickUp's official website, there is a special page for comparing competitors, and ticked all of your columns without blushing. With the continuous increase in functions, this table has expanded several times in the past few years, so large that even a single image cannot capture the panoramic view.
Figure: Comparison of ClickUp's competitors, one of which is slightly outrageous
. However, compared with this straightforward and rough "asymmetric comparison", what ClickUp is more controversial is some radical marketing methods.
For example, after the competitor Asana uploaded a new feature release video, ClickUp directly followed up with a cheap and casual video, mocking the other party for using 100 engineers to take five years to strike out a feature that it had already had.
Picture: ClickUp complains about Asana's video
similar. In a video that mocks Jira's difficult to use, he even created a homophone and did some SEO around this meme... Where do you guess the domain name of abedatool.com point to?
Picture: ClickUp complains about Jira's video
In the face of criticism and accusations, Zeb did not shy away, believing that these "sarcasm" to competitors are not fabricated out of thin air, but more of resonance with the existing negative emotions of users, and venting the big fuss of the world - if the world had not been suffering for a long time, how could these articles and videos have traffic?
However, after so much "Compare", "vs", and "alternative" traffic, can users really convert?
really has it! And the effect is outstanding!
Peopleusually comeforonething and thentheystayforeverythingelse. (The user usually comes for a certain request and then stays for other functions.) Aaron Cort, vice president of operations at
, used the above sentence to vividly describe the process of user conversion and retention. New users register for a single function (such as OKR, project management, etc.), and then gradually incorporate other scenarios into it.
The industry has been discussing whether "All in One" is a pain point or an itch point. ClickUp provides everyone with a new perspective here. Users may not necessarily come for it, but may stay for it. In other words:
"All in One" does not reduce CAC, but Churn (churn rate)
In the early days of ClickUp's cold start, the user base was mostly small teams with less than 5 people or even individual users. Compared with expensive and complex vertical products, the simple but easier to use ClickUp is easier to reach their sweet spots.
, especially for end users, the conversion rate may not be the proposition of whether the function meets the needs, but a contest for how to make users excited as soon as possible. After all, users' attention and patience are limited. It can be seen how important aha moment design is in the PLG concept.
is related to user experience, and new products can always find relative advantages.
3. When the rocket is filled with fuel,
may be due to self-knowledge or it may be due to ideas. Zeb did not spend too much time in the early days to convince VC to invest, and always believed that stepping on the accelerator before reaching PMF is invalid. A good product that reaches PMF is the growth engine, and funds are just fuel. Especially when the product reaches NPMF and then starts financing and investing in the market budget, it can accelerate this sustainable growth.
Figure: ClickUp growth curve, data comes from founder interviews and third-party estimates, for reference only
The fragrance of wine is not afraid of deep alleys.
, a rising startup, was soon spotted by VCs, completing a total of US$135 million in the summer and winter of 2020, and completed a US$400 million Series C round in the fall of 2021. ClickUp, who had ammunition and full of food and grass, stepped on the two accelerators hard, opening the second stage of explosive growth.
1. PLG Rocket's throttle [Paid Delivery]
After two years of cold start and reaching NPMF, Zeb has a clearer understanding of the market:
- This is a market with huge space and still rapid growth.
- It seems that the Red Sea track is extremely competitive, but there is no winner-takes all
In the US SaaS circle, Magic Number is popular in the US to evaluate the company's customer acquisition efficiency. Magic Number = (the company's revenue for a quarter - the company's revenue for the previous quarter)* 4 / The company's market and sales costs for the quarter, roughly means whether the company's market and sales costs for one quarter can be recovered within one year. Usually this number 1 will be regarded as the dividing line for an excellent SaaS company. In the first half of 2020, ClickUp's Magic Number = 2
Thinking of this, Zeb was determined to bet on the big ones and began to form a market and operation team to try to break through the limits of natural growth. At that time, Aaron joined the company as the No. 25 employee and began to take the lead in building the entire paid delivery and monitoring system. In addition to the well-known Google, Youtube, and Facebook, various software review websites are also the focus of Aaron. For example, Capterra is a good CPC channel. Although G2 Crowd can also launch CPC, it is more user-centric and a leverage platform that can generate a lot of benign interaction and communication with users.
Figure: ClickUp's CAC Payback monitoring system Once
starts to be deployed, you must lock in core business indicators. No matter how much the scale of the delivery, the core indicators cannot be changed. Aaron focuses most on the CAC payback period (rather than the well-known LTV/CAC), which is related to cash flow after all.
Regarding the CAC recovery period, the usual standard in the industry is 18 months, which is consistent with the core concept of Magic Number mentioned above, but there is a slight difference in the judgment standard caliber: the standard for Magic Number = 1 is the overall caliber of the entire company (including natural traffic and payment), while the CAC recovery period of 18 months is a single-referential payment channel.
In short, use data to monitor the effect as much as possible.
Figure: ClickUp's multi-channel quantitative attribution system
monitoring system is the first to be responsible for establishing a multi-channel attribution system, which correlates each user's click with a specific channel, whether it is paid or natural, with UTM parameters attached.Aaron, the person in charge, first built the first attribution system with attributeapp.com. On this basis, he developed his own BI and analysis platform, and directly took the numbers from Snowflake and then did attribution analysis and visualization.
2. PLG Rocket’s throttle [Brand Creativity]
In 2020, ClickUp tried brand advertising for the first time.
is right, offline billboard.
Picture: ClickUp Test of offline advertising
The first set of billboards was launched in San Francisco in June 2020, and then it spread to airports, railway stations and bus stations in all core technology cities in the United States, and finally achieved unexpected results - in addition to being effective in customer acquisition and purchase increase, it also has significant gains in recruiting employees.
- company looks for leading institutions Clear Channel as an agent. Each delivery test will measure the effect by monitoring Google search traffic. In the end, the data proves that the effect is very good - excellent billboards can indeed resonate with users.
- is similar to the experience of traditional fashion offline advertising. The delivery density is very important. Under a limited budget, it should be concentrated in key areas and intensively placed in key areas, rather than sprinkling peppers throughout the city.
- On the basis of existing brands (for example, Clickup chose to be released after the financing news was announced), the amplifier effect of offline advertising is more obvious.
The dense offline advertising quickly allowed the company and products to penetrate into the topics of people's daily discussion.
By the end of 2020, the booming ClickUp recruited another general: Chief Creative Officer Melissa Rosenthal. As the 9th employee of news aggregation platform BuzzFeed, Melissa is also a founding member of the video content platform Cheddar, with extensive experience in marketing, video creativity and branding.
She used this word to position ClickUp's brand strategy: "Personality".
Northstarofmaking this brand feel human and personifying the product.EveninaB2BModel, the best type of branding when you’re’respeaking topeople.Youknow with the consumer approach. (The core goal is to personalize the product and make the brand human. In the consumer field, the best brand strategy is to make users feel like they are communicating with real people, and it is still effective in the 2B field.)
The traditional brand strategy is a top-down perspective, while "Personality" is a bottom-up perspective, composed of details of interaction with users on each touchpoint. In order to combine the company's brand image with the founder's vibrant temperament, Melissa chose to add some humor and heroic to "Personality".
and video is the most intuitive carrier of this strategy.
Previously, all the company's employees and users onboarding videos were personally responsible by CEO Zeb. In Melissa's words, she "added fuel to the fire" of the company's video strategy. In particular, the video content is elevated from tool attributes to brand strategy.
On ClickUp's oil pipe page, these brand-oriented videos are about 30-40 seconds long, and most of them are concentrated in the first half of 2021, and then match the linkage and memes from other channels. The highest video has exceeded 18 million views, which is very simple and clear to show ClickUp's product advantages and brand philosophy.
Picture: ClickUp's most watched brand video on Youtube
From the results, rocket-like development cannot be separated from the blessing of capital, but the most distinctive and worthy of study is the growth strategy that starts from scratch.
Author: Jinkai JK; WeChat public account: Randomclub (ID: randomclub)
This article was originally published by @Randomclub. Everyone is a product manager. Reproduction is prohibited without permission. The
question picture is from Unsplash and is based on the CC0 protocol.
The views in this article only represent the author himself, and everyone is a product manager platform only provides information storage space services.
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