The Ledger
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Evans: Founders should bootstrap until product-market fit before raising VC
“I'm still, I still have very much an advocate for bootstrap as long as you can, until you get product market fit through, through getting product market fit after your product, product market fit, raise capital and efficient means when, you know, unit economic…”
Evans: ClickUp's sole defensibility is speed and superior product experience
“The only defensibility that we have is moving faster than our competitors and building better, a better product and a better user experience than they can as well.”
Evans: ClickUp Rejects the Software Rule to Do One Thing Well
“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 been the antithesis of that.”
Evans used a $5M convertible note to net 30% more equity
“Well, so I put in a cap at five million. So that, so essentially I was investing at a five million valuation. And then when we invested at two hundred million, your nerds, your notes convert at that same, I mean, I got like another 30 or 40% of the company.”
Evans used a fake name on early ClickUp enterprise sales calls
“And I was you know, using a fake name to be the acting salesperson in some of the calls.”
Having the CEO run sales calls makes a startup appear too small
“You kind of appear small when the CEO is the person doing the sales and answering the question.”
ClickUp lets users try paywalled features 100 times before blocking access
“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 really know that it's paywalled until you kind of start using it. You get a hundred uses of every feature.”
Evans shut down his profitable previous startup rather than sell it
“I did not sell it. I actually, so I had my third near death experience and I realized during that period that 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 med…”
Evans: ClickUp was down to $25,000 with one month of runway
“We got to a point where, you know, there was, we had like 25 grand left in the bank account. And so that was like enough for another month, another month's runway really. And I had a little bit of money left, but not that much.”
Evans: ClickUp reached cash-flow positivity in 45 days after paywalls
“We added paywalls and we introduced promotions for one of the holidays that was during that month. And literally in a matter of like 45 days, You know, we were net positive. We were cash flow positive.”
ClickUp maintains a monthly gross churn rate between 1% and 2%
“We're under two percent monthly, one to two percent.”
Approximately 95% of ClickUp's user base originates from organic channels
“About 95% of users are still organic”
Evans: ClickUp pre-Series A notes were funded with personal capital
“Those convertible notes were actually mine that I used from a previous company to fund.”
Evans: ClickUp Has Over 800 Employees and Roughly 100 Engineers
“Yeah, we have just shy over 800 employees today. And on the engineering side, about a hundred engineers.”
Evans: ClickUp grew to 800,000 teams, 4x since Series B
“We now actually have 800,000 teams that, that use our product. We had 200,000 when we raised our series B and I believe around a 100,000 in series A. So, you know, you can kind of back the math out there and we've grown roughly four X since our series B.”
Evans: ClickUp's Lineup feature was a flop that never gained traction
“A feature called lineup is honestly, 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's each person has in your company. That's this …”
Evans: ClickUp's prototyping squad is five engineers plus Evans as PM and EM
“So I'm the PM and the EM. So it's five engineers plus myself.”
Evans: ClickUp was originally an internal tool to build a Craigslist competitor
“We actually were going to do a Craigslist competitor where you could pay in-app and remove sketchiness from Craigslist. And we built ClickUp as an internal tool in order to build Craigslist.”
Evans: Burned through roughly $2 million bootstrapping ClickUp early on
“I think more than that. It's probably, probably two, two million.”
ClickUp had approximately 30,000 paying teams as of October 2020
“Yeah, we've got about 30,000 paying teams that use us today, and we've got about, I mean, we have a lot, we have a freemium product as well, so we have a lot of free users.”
ClickUp hijacked search by targeting competitor comparisons like Asana versus Trello
“I mean, I think we even did when people, you know, didn't know our name, they weren't searching ClickUp yet. So we did like a sauna verse Trello and just capitalize on those.”
ClickUp relied entirely on organic user acquisition until mid-2020
“We were all organic until a few months ago, and then we started doing paid acquisition.”
ClickUp's average revenue per seat is $10 to $15 monthly
“It's roughly 10, 10 to 15 dollars per seat per month becomes the average. So, I mean, the ARPU is like one 50 per per user.”
High-touch enterprise sales drive a significant portion of ClickUp's revenue
“I mean, I think that the reality is again, going back to, you know, this flexible platform that you have simple use cases, but also very complex use cases, the complex use cases takes a handholding process. And so, yeah, I mean, it's, it started off, you know,…”
ClickUp waited until $6M to $8M in revenue to hire sales leaders
“We were around just a few million dollars in revenue, probably a little bit more than that. I would say six, seven, eight million in revenue.”
ClickUp approached $3M in monthly recurring revenue by October 2020
“We're a little bit less than that.”
Business tier generates most revenue despite 95% of users starting on unlimited
“Our actual most revenue product is our middle tier, 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.”
Evans: ClickUp acquires paying customers for as low as $1,000
“We can get customers for as low as like a thousand bucks paying customers for as low as a thousand bucks.”