How ClickUp Bootstrapped to $10m ARR and Scaled to 9-figures in Revenue with Zeb Evans
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 19 September 2024
⏱️ 104 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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He’s had six near death experiences, and we talk about how those influenced him throughout life. We also talk about some of his early businesses, including one that had the FBI at his house when he was a kid, and lessons driving the monorail at Disney.
We also get into the founding story of ClickUp, bootstrapping to $10m in ARR, hiring mistakes from scaling too fast, why Zeb likes hiring users, how ClickUp shipped generative AI features so fast, its new chat product launched earlier this week, and the trend of software convergence.
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(02:11) Zeb’s first near death experience
(08:19) Childhood businesses that had the FBI at his house
(18:23) Lessons from driving the monorail at Disney
(25:19) Mistakes scaling from 100 to 800 employees in one year
(31:04) Dropping out of college after being robbed at gunpoint
(33:19) How building a CraigsList competitor led to ClickUp
(35:32) Three waves of ClickUp’s product evolution
(39:25) How the product slowly got worse over time
(44:45) Hiring the guy who built Microsoft Teams to rebuild ClickUp
(48:11) Zeb’s favorite interview question
(49:59) Daily 5am standups in the first year
(54:28) How ClickUp got its first customers
(57:16) Bootstrapping to $10m in ARR with strong retention
(58:13) Zeb’s best kept secret, user surveys (and how to run them)
(1:02:42) The trend of software convergence
(1:08:26) Reasons Zeb likes hiring users
(1:12:19) Why VCs didn’t invest, and why it led to a better business
(1:19:02) Raising from Craft, Georgian, and a16z
(1:21:08) Peter Thiel: “I think you’re right”
(1:24:35) How ClickUp was early to AI
(1:28:03) Launching chat and video calls to hit ClickUp's original vision
(1:32:02) What Zeb’s excited and cautious about in AI
(1:37:24) Why Zeb journals every day
Referenced:
ClickUp: https://www.clickup.com
ClickUp’s new chat feature: https://clickup.com/features/chat
Follow Zeb
Twitter: https://x.com/dj_curfew
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zebevansclickup
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | We never had early on crazy insane growth, but that growth was compounding. |
| 0:05.2 | But to me, it didn't feel like we were ever successful. |
| 0:08.0 | And I didn't really have anything to go on. |
| 0:09.8 | We didn't have investors. |
| 0:11.5 | We were growing 30, 40% a month. |
| 0:14.6 | And we had gotten to close to 10 million in ARR, but I didn't even know that we were doing well. |
| 0:22.4 | Welcome to the PEO. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Manac Capital. Keep listening for my |
| 0:27.4 | conversation with Zeb Evans and how ClickUp bootstrap to 10 million and eventually nine figures |
| 0:32.8 | in revenue. We built ClickUp as an internal tool at first. We talked about his first business, selling products online as a kid. |
| 0:39.3 | And so I come upstairs and there is two like FBI looking guys there. |
| 0:46.3 | Why he dropped out of college? |
| 0:48.3 | A 17 year old kid put a gun to my head. |
| 0:52.3 | How they got ClickUp's first customers. |
| 0:55.0 | We built this script that would scrape all of the review websites. |
| 1:00.2 | And anybody that would give any of our competitors, three stars, two stars, one star, |
| 1:05.0 | we would try to match up their name on LinkedIn and go message them. |
| 1:09.2 | And that actually worked pretty well. |
| 1:12.3 | Hiring mistakes, scaling from 100 to 800 employees in a year. |
| 1:16.3 | We hired people that didn't care about the company and didn't care about the mission. |
| 1:20.3 | Then they hired more people like that. |
| 1:22.6 | When they had to rebuild the product from scratch. |
| 1:24.5 | If we had any near-death experience in our company, it was that period. |
... |
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