When Zeb Evans built ClickUp from Life Threatening Moments was his last book. After selling a business for $ 2.5 million, Evans decided to use his experience to build a business that had a net positive impact on the lives of those he helped. He co-founded ClickUp, an all-in-one productivity management tool now valued at $ 4 billion.
In the beginning, the value of his early clickups was in their progress. Each of these clickups has been updated to reflect their progress toward perfection. Evan and his team were able to find many stores struggling with expensive tech stacks. So they set up shop in Evans Silicon Valley Home and built clickups to solve their problems. The ClickUp team is now celebrating their win and continuing the company.
As a child, Evans was involved in an almost fatal boat accident. While recovering in the hospital, he was treated with multiple feeding tubes and morphine, which quickly worsened his condition. A broken appendix and an induced coma later led to Evans’ rebirth as a motivational speaker. His life-threatening experiences encouraged his desire to build a company that would help others in similar situations.
ClickUp is a cloud-based project management system that manages tasks effectively. It is an all-in-one productivity platform for teams and businesses. In addition to ClickUp, he is also the founder of Wemakefuture, a manufacturer of digital machines. It’s all based on the same login information and integration with Jira Software Server.
To build the right team and strategy, ClickUp needs to hire a leader who will be able to manage the team and create an overall strategy. Cybersecurity is a growing market. According to cybersecurity ventures, there will be 3.5 million vacant positions in the sector by 2025. Fortunately, Evans has already met Tyson Baber, a Georgian who has worked in the cybersecurity space for many years. After some strong referrals, he hired Chris Bender as Vice President for Security.
Another feature that sets ClickUp apart from other collaboration tools is its ability to integrate wikis and documents into a project. Unlike Notion, ClickUp allows users to integrate other documents and resources into a project. Users can also view various to-do lists on one screen. Similarly, they can see the progress of the project and all its possible combinations on a virtual keyboard.
The software is designed to replace individual workplace productivity tools such as spreadsheets and project management. In addition, ClickUp can be customized to fit many verticals and usage cases. It lists over 25 different use cases and has helped millions of users and teams in different industries. ClickUp offers tremendous value and protects sensitive data. If you have never used ClickUp before, I highly recommend it. If you are interested in learning more about ClickUp, do not miss this excellent resource!
To prevent hacking, use security tools. Cybercrime could cost $ 10.5 trillion by 2025. ClickUp is making significant investments in cybersecurity infrastructure, including a deep commitment partner in cyber-security. Its security capabilities have enabled the company to receive several hundred million dollars in financing in October 2021. In the next few years, the startup could reach $ 4 billion in valuation. Its customer growth has exceeded all expectations. With cybersecurity, ClickUp has a reputation for security and trust among its customers.
In addition to its free plans, ClickUp has many paid features. You can start with the free version and then upgrade once you have built a large enough customer base. But you should know that it has limited features, such as a lack of export-to-PDF feature. The only way to export dashboard snapshots to PDF is to use print-to-PDf. But this does not do it in a useful way. Nevertheless, it is still worth a try.
Foundr Magazine publishes in-depth interviews with the world’s largest entrepreneurs. Our articles highlight key takeaways from the cover feature of each month. We spoke with Zeb Evans, co-founder of ClickUp, about the disruption of the project management industry. Read excerpts from that in-depth conversation below. To read more, subscribe to the magazine.
The 17-year-old shook his hand as he raised the gun to Zeb Evans’ forehead. Adrenaline overwhelmed Evans’ body as the metal rubbed against his skin. Then, in that moment of extreme uncertainty, he gained clarity.
His identity does not have to be defined by a diploma.
“I had this realization when I turned the gun on its head – that this is not what I want to do with my life,” Evans said.
Evans was an undergraduate student when he was the victim of a home invasion. Fortunately, he was not injured, but his future has a new outlook.
“[I realized,] I do not want to work for someone else. I do not want to continue learning business because you learn business by doing,” Evans says.
The next day, Evans dropped out of school and started working as an entrepreneur. Twelve years after the home invasion, Evans is now the CEO and co-founder of ClickUp, an all-in-one productivity management tool valued at $ 4 billion.
The robbery was not the only fatal incident that marked Evans’ journey. Since that fateful day, Evans has experienced a series of life-changing moments that have informed his entrepreneurial path and contributed to his current work: disrupting the project management industry with ClickUp.
The Solution That Became ClickUp
ClickUp started as a means to an end. Evans wanted to create a competitor for Craigslist by making buyer and seller communication more secure. But before embarking on his next startup project, Evans wanted to solve a productivity problem that had plagued him since his first business venture.
“It was just this clusterf ** k of productivity tools. And they should make you more productive, but I could not help but think we were less productive by using all these different tools.
He began studying hard-hitter productivity platforms like Asana and Trello to see if there were ways to unify their solutions. As he and his team began to build their custom tool, they discovered that they were not the only ones frustrated with the expensive and complicated tech stack needed to open and run many stores.
“We thought at first it was just an internal tool to save our time. And then we moved that to saving world time after realizing there was a great need for it.
In 2017, Evans stopped fighting Craigslist and began building an all-in-one productivity solution, ClickUp. He set up the business in signature Silicon Valley fashion: a two-story house where the small team worked on the first floor and slept on the second.
Evans still misses the speed with which the team worked on their product in the early days. If they decide to build a feature for a Monday, they will send it until Sunday.
“It’s all about the product in the early days,” Evans says. “We were 100 percent community driven, 100 percent community driven, and I was the product person – the only product person.”
The first version of ClickUp was built in six months with $ 2.5 million from the sale of Evans’ former business. To compete with the productivity industry establishment, the team used an organic SEO strategy by targeting keywords associated with Trello, Asana, and productivity software.
Evans attributes ClickUp’s rapid growth to the user community and its active involvement in product development.
“You have to use your users,” Evans says. “You can not act on everything, but you can act on the trends, the common patterns that people are constantly bringing up.”
Scaling to Billions
ClickUp proved successful right out of the gate, and the team quickly moved out of their original home / office space. In 2020, ClickUp was named the best project management product by Proddys, the gold standard award for the product management community.
That’s when Evans started reaching out to investors for the first time. Investors were shocked that ClickUp did not burn money and even more surprised that the company was profitable.
“If you can create a profitable business in the beginning, you know you have a business,” Evans says.
“Too many companies are being funded, and they have no real business.”
ClickUp raised capital through a high-net retention model – meaning they expected to expand their customer base, and then pay back those customers tenfold.
“When you raise a lot of capital, it’s OK to grow inefficiently. But you have to understand how you move into efficiency,” Evans says.
With a profitable model, investors and active users, ClickUp has exploded in growth over the past two years and now has offices in San Diego, Salt Lake City, and Dublin.
Evans says the main demand of ClickUp’s rapid rise was the management of culture. The team is 40 percent remote, but Evans says remote communication can only go so far as to build a cultural connection. Therefore, the company personally brings the team together several times a year and encourages local workers to be at the office twice a week.
Evans’ other cultural preservers use the company’s core values to coach employees. “I think, as the founder, you assume that everyone sees the vision,” Evans says. “But the reality is that people with this thing need to be reinforced very often.”
Evans says it’s also important to develop core values alongside the company.
“You have to be OK with it being dynamic,” he says. For example, one of the early values of ClickUp was “progress beyond perfection.” As the company scaled and its systems became more robust, the value was adjusted for “progress toward perfection.”
