ClickUp's Zeb Evans on the fundamentals of leadership

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Patrick Campbell

Have you ever been to the orchestra? It's a wonderful experience that folks from all creeds and classes can appreciate. It's also a spectacular lesson in cooperation. There are dozens of musicians playing individual instruments that combine to form this one cohesive orchestral sound. These are artists who are at the top of their game, oftentimes spending years, if not decades, mastering their craft.

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Patrick Campbell

But there's an interesting question. Who plays the orchestra? Much like a B to B size company. An orchestra needs someone to ensure cohesion. If you move too fast, the composition will start to fall apart. If you're all playing along to different music. You'll stall and have to regroup or even start over. And the conductor keeps everyone together. It's, of course, a thankless job because if everyone thinks sounds perfect, the unit as a whole gets the credit.

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Patrick Campbell

But if mistakes are made, responsibility falls upward. Meet one of the best conductors around. Zeb Evans. He's the founder and CEO of Click Since Founding Click up in 2016. Zeb has led the company of over 700 employees to become a major player in the workplace productivity market. Today, he shares with us his lessons and tactics that make click up operate like a world class symphony orchestra.

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Patrick Campbell

All that and more coming up next. From Padel, it's Protect the Hustle, or we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of B2B sass growth to make you an outstanding operator. On today's episode, Zeb Evans dives deep on the fundamentals of leadership. We talk about the role flexibility plays and feedback for pillars that drive click UPS prioritization.

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Patrick Campbell

How to Harvest leads with a wide marketing net click UPS brand awareness strategy and what most companies miss when going multi-product. After you finish this episode, check out the show notes for an in-depth field guide focused on what we went over.

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Patrick Campbell

Let's start things off. Who are you and what do you guys do?

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Zeb Evans

Yeah, So I'm Zeb Evans. Click up founder and CEO. I click up. We do all in one workplace productivity software. So the way to think about click up is that we replace all of your traditionally separate pieces of productivity software. So if you think about things like project management, knowledge management, docs, time tracking, workload, resource management, all of these things are usually separate products.

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Zeb Evans

And then what we've done is aggregate them under one platform with the intention of saving people time and making people more productive.

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Patrick Campbell

Now it's super cool, so it's good to learn that you're not just like a billboard company. You know, I see all these click up ads everywhere. But we'll talk about that a little more. For those who don't know if you've been in an airport or I think any larger conference hall or something like that, just click up ads everywhere.

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Patrick Campbell

So I want to ask you about that. But before we get into that, what's how did this company come to be like? Why? Why this? And I always love asking people to do kind of like workflow or productivity software because there's always a little bit of a personal piece. But then there's also like, well, this could seem boring.

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Patrick Campbell

So like, why did you do this over nuclear fusion or something crazy like that?

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Zeb Evans

Yeah, it's kind of a funny story. I mean, we actually started as an internal tool and we were going to build a Craigslist competitor where you could pay an app and remove the sketchy ness from Craigslist. Surprise hasn't really been done yet, but that's what we were working on. And prior to that, I had actually had four near-death experiences.

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Zeb Evans

And so this this like extreme obsession with efficiency and urgency was just kind of instilled inside of me. And so being that what it is, is we wanted to build our own productivity tool. We had a lot of frustrations at my previous company where, I mean, it wasn't it wasn't big, it was like 40 or 50 people. But even at that size, we were using 12, 13 different productivity tools and they call them productivity tools.

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Zeb Evans

They're supposed to save you time or they're supposed to make you more productive. And we couldn't help, but that was not happening. And they were so damn opinionated that it wasn't a flexible enough to work the way that we wanted to work. So we wanted to build a platform. What became Cook up naively, I thought we could build it in a month or two.

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Zeb Evans

And we got into it and, you know, we knew there was a lot more ahead of us, but we also knew that we were just super passionate about what we were building and that it was a bigger problem than just our own.

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah, it's super interesting and you kind of glossed over something that maybe you're not comfortable going deep on, but like near-death experiences, you've had four near-death experiences, which means your life probably a couple of lifetime movies worth of experience at this point. But like, what's. Tell us about that. Like how to connect the dots between those experiences and then the time and productivity piece.

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Patrick Campbell

If you don't.

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Zeb Evans

Mind. I mean, yes, the first one was it's actually kind of funny because each of them connect, so like to click up in some way and not directly, but indirectly. And so, you know, when I was ten, I was in a really bad accident and I was in the hospital for two months. And when I was ten, I mean, that was that was 20 years ago.

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Zeb Evans

And nobody and I grew up in North Carolina. Nobody had cell phones or laptop or even real connection to the Internet at that point. But in the hospital, they did. They had a laptop. And so I was able to get on the laptop and that's where I first started learning technology and loving technology. I was an entrepreneur since I was five or six years old.

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Zeb Evans

I was always the kid that was selling things. I was asking for wholesale toys from Oriental Trading Company, rather than toys for myself when I was a kid then. And so in the hospital I found that I could kind of marry this connection between entrepreneurship and technology. And so, you know, I didn't I say agreed my first love, I didn't code it myself.

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Zeb Evans

You use like a whizzy wig. Go, Daddy, Daddy. ED But it got me obsessed with that stuff. And so that was where like my first love of, of technology started. And each of them after that, you know, made me like my second one, I was robbed at gunpoint and now home invasion a home and oh, my.

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Patrick Campbell

Gosh, like a mugging. One thing, home invasions, totally another level.

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Zeb Evans

Yeah. Yeah. But that one made me realize that. And I was in college at the time, and that made me realize I college was not right for me. And I dropped out of college because of that and started really learning to code. You know, if I had known basic HTML up until that point. Yes, but I did really not a program.

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Zeb Evans

And so that that's when I dropped out of school and became obsessed with that. And it's not when I started click up, I did a completely different thing before this, more like social media, automation and management. But the point is, you know, it kind of like changed my path. Each of these changed my path into to where we are today.

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Patrick Campbell

That's wild. Yeah, I definitely went for the Oriental Trading Company game. I also got stood up in college, but it was it was more of like a drunken person, not something as scary as a home invasion. So I can understand or empathize with that helped shape you a little bit. That's really cool. And I think it's one of those things where when you guys started, you kind of mentioned this already where it was like, Hey, multiproduct, right?

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Patrick Campbell

Like, hey, like, this is what we're going to go after. Like, all in one, right? And there's always been this like ebb and flow between across like the decades of SAS at this point between all in one point solution, all in one point solution. And so I guess like at the beginning, why was it and you kind of alluded to this already, but ask it differently, but like why was it imperative to go all in one or at least most in one, like, why was that versus like, let's start here and let's see how that goes and then maybe we'll add these features and so on and so forth?

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Zeb Evans

Yeah, I mean, to be clear, Mike, my perspective actually is that we haven't really gone all in one versus point. You got more bundled versus unbundled. And so when you when you look at kind of bundling and compared to what we're doing, you know, Microsoft can can bundle is famous for by night. But they can bundle ten products under one roof.

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Zeb Evans

And you can look at Microsoft teams as a perfect example of this. You know, you get Microsoft teams plus, you know, ten different tabs at the top that maybe may or may not be Microsoft products. The difference is they're still separate products or they're still separate product teams or separate onboarding experience, separate change management. They may integrate the surface level with each other, but they don't actually integrate deep enough where it would be the same platform, the exact same ecosystem.

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Zeb Evans

And so what we're building is that singular platform, the same ecosystem where we may not have 100% feature parity with the point solution. Sure yet, but we'll get close to there someday. And so to answer your question, it's all about productivity, right? It's all about making people more efficient, making people more productive and putting things under one roof.

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Zeb Evans

And what we found from our customers is an example of like our docs product would be today, it's about 50% of a point solution, like a confluence or a notion. You know, in ten days from now it will be, I think, 80% plus some extra stuff that nobody else has has yet. And we've been working on that for a very long time.

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Zeb Evans

But the point that I'm getting to is that customers are okay with using that 50% for now because of the efficiency and the productivity that comes along with having that in the same platform where all of your other work is. And then eventually we get to a point where we can confidently say, Hey, you can replace your other tools with our internal tool.

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah, kind of reminds me of like Google Docs in the beginning, like Google Docs was obviously Excel, etc. were built over decades and they have every feature you can imagine. Right? But Google Docs is basically like, we're going to build this core and then we're going to add this like killer feature, which is, you know, being able to share in the cloud or something like that.

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Patrick Campbell

And then over time, all of a sudden spreadsheets get to their sheets, gets to the point where it's like, if you're hardcore, like you still want Excel, but if you're someone who needs to do like basically look ups and stuff, you're so into it. And so would you characterize that bundling as being like the equivalent, like feature that people go after?

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Patrick Campbell

And yeah, I guess I'll just add in there.

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Zeb Evans

Yeah. I mean, I think bundling, like when you look at it from a distribution lens, it's Microsoft is a perfect example where you know, they can they take five products and they give them for free through that, that that same distribution model. And so that's generally we've seen a lot of a lot of where the bundling itself happened, where like Microsoft Office, for example, you know, five or six different tools that are bundled together, but they really don't integrate with each other that well.

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Zeb Evans

Now you're starting to see them integrate more, but it's still a separate product experience. I think you can also look at like the more traditional project management. Look at Atlassian, right? They have several different products. Confluence and JIRA being two of the most popular and most well known. They bundle them together. You can purchase them together, but they're still two entirely separate products and separate ecosystems.

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Zeb Evans

They've started building integrations together, but you can have different people and Confluence versus different JIRA, and a lot of it is still very much a separate ecosystem.

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Patrick Campbell

So it's something where I guess one of the theses I have is like multiproduct or at the very least like tighter integrated products. It's just going to be like the future here, just because building software is not easy, but it's a lot easier than like ten, 15 years ago. Right. And so I think it's one of those things where I'm kind of curious, like, how did you decide on like the core 50% of these initial products or these features, depending to define it?

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Patrick Campbell

And then do you like is it one of those things where like as you kind of go up, up, up in terms of that feature stack, like do you find that users have a lot of friction there? Or is it something where like the core that it really didn't need that other 50%? So like, you know, talk about that a little bit if you don't mind.

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Zeb Evans

Really great question. And we we honestly we didn't know from the beginning and so we kind of created this new methodology for developing software where it was like instead of thinking for the future, let's think for just right now, let's think for the next week, the next two weeks, and let's ship 5% of a feature, 10% of a feature, and it'll only take us a week to do it.

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Zeb Evans

And then let's just hyper actively listen to feedback from customers and figure out what we should do next based on that feedback. And so we built a really cool feedback system that listens, ingest all of our feedback from from all these different data sources and aggregates it, and we're able to see where we went right and where we went wrong.

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Zeb Evans

And so, you know, to answer your question, like something like time tracking, you can look at a point solutions for this that built very, very robust time tracking. We built 10%. At first we realized we needed to build more. We built 20%, 30%. We probably got to 40% or so and realized that's all people needed for the most part.

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Zeb Evans

You know, there's always there's exceptions to that. Use the use cases that are going to be the really advanced stuff. But majority of users that one in time tracking started using our time tracking at roughly 40% feature parity compared to a point solution. So we didn't know in hindsight, right? We didn't we didn't know the beginning where we had to land, but we just kept iterating until we landed and we knew that we had like that product market fit for that, that specific feature.

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Zeb Evans

And that's what we've done with with pretty much every feature. Now, with that said, our core has to be tasks and projects like that is the core project management use case, but also the piece of your work that you just can't get around from. And so we have always wanted to be and I think today all our best in class in the project management side side of things and the flexibility and project management which prior to us was very opinionated and how you had to use project management software.

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Zeb Evans

It was it was super opinionated. It was either very complex, you know, Agile, JIRA software or very simple, you know, asana, like experience software. There was no there was no flexibility.

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Patrick Campbell

Or just wildly like way too flexible like Trello, but almost like oddly opinionated, right? Like it's like get to combined, but also like, we're not going to give you any other like tools, you know, to, to kind of go after this. That's super interesting. So like that actually like breaks a little bit of convention of what I thought about you guys because I think the project management piece being so core like that's the best in class thing because it seems like then you have two vectors, you know, you have multiple vectors, but from a product perspective to vectors that can go after, right, which is what are these things that are, you know, connected that

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Patrick Campbell

you can then bundle And rather than like fighting a point solution on the like 60% of features that are only for like the 1% people. But there's all these different 1% that need it, like going after that core. And that obviously brings in and I'm preaching to the choir here and brings in like a ton of people who are like, I want these things to talk to each other and not through some like intern built integration.

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Patrick Campbell

Right? And so I guess, like how do you then prioritize the next how do you prioritize? You've talked a little bit about prioritizing up, you know, 50% to more. How do you practice out? Like how do you prioritize like time tracking versus notes versus like all these other things?

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Zeb Evans

But I think it's important to look at like what we see it, what we see as the core. We see tasks or projects, we see goals which can be anything, it can be sprints, even that we see docs and then we see collab, collaborate. These like four pillars is what we call them mode of work. And so these things are the pillars, these things that are holding things up.

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Zeb Evans

And then there's outside of that there's like these ancillary kind of like long tail things, like time tracking, like resource management. And there really isn't as many as you would think that there are. You know, there's roughly 15 or so of those, those like more kind of secondary products to that that integrate with your four pillars of work.

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Zeb Evans

And so we didn't know we needed to build all of them, but we did. And so I think that, you know, there's a point where you get to where you're able to start building, building more. And when you're listening to customers, you know, whether or not you need to continue to continue building or not. Now we can't you know, obviously, we say one out to replace them all.

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Zeb Evans

Our messaging, obviously, it's just meant to grab attention. You know, we can't actually replace every single application yet, but it's meant to make you think. Yeah, it's meant to make you think about like, wait, there's no way somebody could play small. Let me let me look them up or let me think about them. Right? That's what marketing is like, getting somebody to think, getting somebody to look like you up are getting you to talk about it provoking and so like that.

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Zeb Evans

That's what that's what it does. But if you have that foundation there, even if it's you know, that 10%, 20%, 30% future parity, you will see that people do start start using it. And once we start seeing people use it and adopt it and we hear feedback, then we we go back and we iterate. We iterate until we get it, until we get it right into a place where it's going to be.

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Zeb Evans

But what we've done in the past and we've been around almost, almost four years and what we've done and until this year is build that foundation and this until the end of this year, it's all foundation. It's let's make sure we have all of those pillars and those kind of long tail keywords. They're maybe not, you know, feature parity where you can use them or replace complete your other complete solution yet, but at least the foundation is there and then from here on into the future, just iterate so we don't have anything else on, on the side.

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Zeb Evans

We, we have virtual whiteboarding that we're really releasing very, very soon. But outside of that, our foundation got there.

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Patrick Campbell

Okay. No, I like that. And then there'll probably be a future, maybe not recent, but like a distant future where it's like, Oh, let's, let's cross this particular boundary into this type of work. Right? And I don't know. I don't know if you've talked about this publicly. You remind me more of HubSpot than anything. Like, I don't know, like from a product perspective, like I think obviously very different products, right?

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Patrick Campbell

But the way that they've thought about how to go out and up. Right, like that's, that's kind of how they've, they've run it. And I guess before we get into some of the marketing questions, I'm kind of curious like how do you structure your product teams, right? Like, and I know you've obviously, you know, raised a good chunk of change at this point, but there probably always was, you know, that a chunk of change in the bank and also like it hopefully accelerated what you were already doing.

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Patrick Campbell

But I know with multiproduct teams there's always like everyone focus on one thing. Everyone you know, different product groups, like how do you structure those teams? I guess today.

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Zeb Evans

We we have squads or pods, whatever you want to call them are two of teams hyperfocus on each feature And for us it's it's more like that feature is a product And so so you have, you know roughly six, seven, eight people focused on on a feature slash product. You know, we've got about ten of ten of those teams today.

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Zeb Evans

And then we kind of have some some other teams that are kind of more ad hoc that they move around, that they float around like dotted lines. I think that's, you know, the only way to really scale when you get to a certain a certain size. But I will say that early on, you know, you don't need that.

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Zeb Evans

You really can have just exceptional product people that are really passionate about what they're doing and building and that they all they can do all of the jobs, they can do the user research job, they can do the job, they can do product management. If you got those people that can do it all, that's how you can start out in the beginning.

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Zeb Evans

And, you know, to be clear, I, I was the only product frozen for two and a half, three years, three years a year, year and a half ago, there wasn't anybody else. And so so it's it's okay to just wing it. It's okay to just figure it out. I think when when I was doing this, I was I was really worried that, you know, there's all of these all of our competitors have so much money and they had so many people and they've got the smartest people in the world.

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Zeb Evans

And it's just it's just not true. Like it's like any anybody can get any anybody can can do it.

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah. I also think like one of the thing that's kind of interesting is like you mentioned this before about like the flexibility versus the rigidity of like some of these tools and then how full featured there are is I guess the thing I'm wondering is like, how do you guys think about that square Like, like meaning, like how do you make sure that you're not so flexible that people, like, don't know what to do and they're like, Oh, what do I like?

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Patrick Campbell

I log in and I need instructions or tutorial versus like putting them because this is such a problem, especially in like the task management project management space, let alone like even you wouldn't think time tracking, but like, time tracking can get problematic this way. And so besides talking to your customers, like, how do you think about that?

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Zeb Evans

So I think, you know, there's this whole no code movement going on in the way that I see no code is it just means no opinion. And so for us, we aren't we aren't no code. We have an opinion. And how you're using our software, you're using it for work, you're using it to to be more productive, to get more done.

00;18;45;01 - 00;19;04;14

Zeb Evans

And so through that lens, each feature we build, it has an opinion of like what the future is. And we have these things called click apps where it's very, very highly flexible, configurable, basically applications or settings within within a product. And so they are opinionated themselves and what they are, but we think about it from our product team, which does it work for?

00;19;04;18 - 00;19;19;05

Zeb Evans

Does this individual feature work for two people and does it work up to 2000 and now we're starting to expand that to to, you know, 20,000 or more. But that's what we thought about from day one. It doesn't work for 2 to 2000. And as long as you solve for just those two personas, you really solve for almost everything in between.

00;19;19;14 - 00;19;35;17

Zeb Evans

You can build a future that has an opinion to it of like what it's for, but enough flexibility that works for a small team in a in a larger enterprise than it solves for everything in between. And that's what we've done since day one.

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Patrick Campbell

And that's is I think that you also have a very it's hard to measure, but you have an interesting North Star with like reducing the amount of time people like the efficiency of time. Right. And so you can look at what's going on and that's like that drives an opinion. I think the lack of opinion products they don't have like a North Star.

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Patrick Campbell

And I think that kind of is a good transition to talk about your marketing, right. You know, save one day a week all in one. You know, these types of things, like what's it like marketing? You know, a product that has so much surface area where you have this really broad like we save you time and it's like, why?

00;20;07;07 - 00;20;18;18

Patrick Campbell

It's like, yeah, I'm going to explore it, but it's hard to like see exactly what you do sometimes. Plus all these like little points point not solutions, but point like entrances into the product. Like, let's just start there. Like, what's that like? You got to.

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Zeb Evans

Win. I mean, I think to look at marketing in a couple of different ways, we look at brand marketing, like the whole goal is just making your brand more well-known, making your brand your brand credible. And so to do that through that lens, you want to cast the widest net possible. And that's what we do with like messaging.

00;20;34;07 - 00;20;52;09

Zeb Evans

Like one appropriates them all and save one day every week, you know, one out to replace them all. It actually surprisingly does does work for a lot of personas. But for for many it doesn't. You know, an enterprise doesn't want one app to replace them. All right? They want the world's best X, Y, and Z software. The world's best project management software.

00;20;52;22 - 00;21;09;22

Zeb Evans

And so we have to be very aware of that and reactive, as is always I coach our teams on is being extremely reactive when it comes to marketing and sales. And so as soon as you know what a customer wants change, everything changed instead of one out to replace them all. We are the world's best project management software, world's most powerful project management software.

00;21;09;22 - 00;21;26;12

Zeb Evans

And when we are targeting that, that persona that we know that needs that. So I think, you know, from from marketing perspective casts a huge net and then start to focus on where that cuts through that customer is what they really care about. And then vertical is it really focus on on the problem set that they have now, You can't fake it.

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Zeb Evans

You can't just you can't. And there are some companies haven't tried to wear you know you just you only do the marketing reactive that you've got your product actually has to do with use which it says it does also. And so you got to do everything right. You know, you can't just do marketing, just you sell and just go to market.

00;21;41;24 - 00;21;52;27

Zeb Evans

Your product actually does have to have to be able to fit into that flexible lens that marketing can do. But if you can do that, then you can really unlock a really magical growth.

00;21;52;27 - 00;22;12;17

Patrick Campbell

And so what's interesting is so the vertical is I thought was really interesting there. And I've I've actually seen at least on the broad campaigns, basically when I'm in airports, it's easier to click a bag and I take pictures and send it to our marketing team. So I've seen the like one app through the mall I've seen or whatever the variation of that is.

00;22;12;17 - 00;22;28;10

Patrick Campbell

And I've also seen the Save Saver Day a week. Overall, when you're measuring this in a brand and you measure it like it's always a debate, right? And it's probably not perfect attribution, which is fine. But like how do you how do you be reactive when you're running such such a brand orientated campaign?

00;22;28;13 - 00;22;46;14

Zeb Evans

There are some like platforms that claim to be able to measure that stuff. We haven't found anything that works for a while. The only real way to look at it quantitatively is through brand awareness. And so you can use platforms like SurveyMonkey and others that that measure brand awareness, which just means they go and ask X amount of people in a given location, do they know?

00;22;46;14 - 00;23;05;17

Zeb Evans

Click, have you heard of click? And so that's what we use to measure in these markets. And you know, when we we actually do it every quarter or twice a quarter, depending on on how much we're spending. And whenever we don't see a significant increase, if we're seeing, you know, we don't see like a 20, 30, 40% increase in brand awareness, we actually stop spending and we'll pull out.

00;23;05;17 - 00;23;21;14

Zeb Evans

But when we when we see a larger increase, we double down. And so it seems kind of counterintuitive, but when we start to see 30%, 40% increase, we double down and we continue and we we saturate it until we stop seeing that that brand awareness and then we immediately pull out as soon as as soon as it starts slowing down.

00;23;21;21 - 00;23;37;29

Zeb Evans

And that's a tactic that that's worked really effectively for us and efficient. And, you know, I get from the outside, it looks it looks unsustainable or looks like it's just, you know, blowing marketing dollars to do it. But we really are measuring it and being pretty reactive and sustainable when it comes to when it comes to the brand awareness play.

00;23;38;02 - 00;23;54;11

Zeb Evans

At the end of the day, we're buying time with this, right? It could take us all of our competitors or twice big competitors or twice as old or more as we are. And so they've got, you know, four or five or six years more of brand marketing ahead of us. And so we've got to buy time. And that's kind of what we're doing with this ironically now.

00;23;54;11 - 00;24;03;21

Patrick Campbell

It's really cool. And also a lot of those ad campaigns are now like, you don't have to commit to six months in most of them and like stuff like that. So you can turn them on, turn them off like really quickly.

00;24;03;25 - 00;24;22;16

Zeb Evans

Yeah. And we got really, you know, during COVID, nobody was buying out of home. And so so we did we got really see a rack rack bottom rates and we signed for longer terms. So kind of counterintuitive again to what you would think, but we signed for a year knowing that at some point people would start traveling again, right?

00;24;22;17 - 00;24;27;27

Zeb Evans

People would start seeing this again. But we got covered prices even today. I mean, we're paying covered prices for four out of them.

00;24;27;27 - 00;24;42;10

Patrick Campbell

And when you design like when someone comes to that page, I know you probably gotten some some heat for it, but there's a giant pop up that comes up right Like and until they talk to me about like I come to the website either through an ad somewhere to a landing, but like, how do you get me from the website to, like, sign up?

00;24;42;10 - 00;24;47;23

Patrick Campbell

Like, what's what's that experience look like? Because I'm with all in one or excuse me, multiproduct. It can be like very.

00;24;48;05 - 00;25;06;22

Zeb Evans

Very difficult for, for organic traffic for, for our kind of holistic organic traffic meaning branded so where you search click up and get to us we try to just show you everything that we have, hoping that, you know, you see something that you like and sign up, that that's really the best, the best that we can do. When we're doing intentional marketing, we're paid acquisition it.

00;25;06;23 - 00;25;37;14

Zeb Evans

The product is generally vertical eyes. So what that means is, you know, if you're searching, trying to find engineering project management software, you're going to come to an engineering management project management page that shows you all of the bells and whistles that you would normally find in a point solution like like an Atlassian suite and then shows you the difference between us and them and shows you all of the other things that you can do with click out versus X, Y and Z competitor that's been very, very successful for us is it's kind of that vertical ization play when when you know who the customer is, but when you don't art thesis is just like,

00;25;37;14 - 00;25;43;15

Zeb Evans

let's just show them you know, all the things that we have and hopefully they'll find something that they like, find something that they need.

00;25;43;16 - 00;26;12;21

Patrick Campbell

And for the folks listening, like you just have to go to the website, it's like the homepage is extremely well-organized, like it seems like there's a lot of stuff on there, but like the different sections I think are really powerful. And even I just saw it when I was looking the, the thing this is a tangential, but one of the hacks I think you guys do really well with, or at least from a marketing perspective, it seems, is like there's a lot of lock in when it comes to tools like this, whether it's Trello, asana notion, etc. and the ability to kind of import into click up I think is super, super powerful.

00;26;12;21 - 00;26;22;25

Patrick Campbell

It seems like you've spent some time there. So I guess like that's an interesting question. Like you might not know this, but of your customers right now, how many are coming from existing solutions and how many are coming from like, we haven't used anything.

00;26;22;26 - 00;26;43;25

Zeb Evans

Yeah, we only have this database. On if people import and roughly 40% of customers import that when they get into our product. Yeah. Yeah. And so is it you're exactly right that you know this was a huge that we took early on because it took it takes a lot of time to build these imports. This was this is no easy task and it's a lot of maintenance too and data mapping and validation errors that you get.

00;26;43;25 - 00;27;03;21

Zeb Evans

I mean, it's still not perfect today, but they're they're still good. And so when you can do that, you unlock a lot of the the hurdle to switching any product really is migration. Know how do I get all of my stuff from my previous product to this product and usually having a systems team do that for you or maybe a solutions team after the sale, do that, try to do that for you.

00;27;03;21 - 00;27;19;15

Zeb Evans

And it's not perfect. But we got into a way where you really can from most products, you can import everything that you have existing outside of click up into click, and it will just work right off that right off the shelf. And so that that in itself has been a huge like growth hacking thing for us early on.

00;27;24;16 - 00;27;50;09

Patrick Campbell

Because I know we got to, we got limited time here. So last kind of topic I want us to cover is second to last is operationally you've talked about you have multiple products got a lot of fronts in terms of marketing and you also want your team to react really, really quickly. Talk about that like I just a high level like is there something you're doing where you uniquely structure your exact teams, uniquely structure the or is there anything that like, you know, a lot of single product companies don't realize when they're going multiproduct or multi feature?

00;27;50;09 - 00;28;07;29

Zeb Evans

You know, I think you got to find people you can't sacrifice on your culture and you can't sacrifice on on anyone that you hire, especially leadership. So leadership usually, especially when you're scaling, everyone's like, I need this person, I need this VP of sales, and maybe this person is not perfect, but, you know, they'll they'll do a good job.

00;28;07;29 - 00;28;29;01

Zeb Evans

You can't do that. You've really got to find the absolute best person for the job. You can't sacrifice on your culture, even if it means taking longer than than it could to hire somebody. Because those people, those pillars, right. Those pillars of for sales, for marketing, for product, for creative, for design, for operations. All of those pillars have to have a leader in them.

00;28;29;01 - 00;28;42;18

Zeb Evans

And I look at them as their own business units. And so you've got almost like an entrepreneur leading each of these units and you've got to trust them to I mean, we went from going from 50 employees or over 750 employees today and a year and you have.

00;28;42;18 - 00;28;48;07

Patrick Campbell

750 people now. Holy cow, you may not realize it. You're that fast. Holy cow.

00;28;48;07 - 00;29;05;00

Zeb Evans

That's wild. Yeah. And so usually everything breaks down during that. And, you know, we weren't perfect. Things did break down, but largely we were continued to scale. And, you know, the only way to do that is really have those incredible leaders that have done it before to around you. I mean, so you've got to have a mixture between experience and experience.

00;29;05;02 - 00;29;21;29

Zeb Evans

I think for us also to answer your question, know we we hire people that are extremely obsessed and passionate about what they're doing. It means that we are focused on our mission. We are focused on our core and what we're doing. And honestly, we work harder than I think other companies. We have to in a very competitive space.

00;29;22;07 - 00;29;31;03

Zeb Evans

And so when you find people that are in this, along with the same culture, that that same kind of passion for for for building, it becomes a lot easier to scale.

00;29;31;10 - 00;29;45;18

Patrick Campbell

That's why Wild and I have so many more questions. So we do our time now based on that comment alone. But a couple of last questions have been, get you out of here. And these are a little more personal, but they're not pertinent. That makes it weird. So let me just ask, what was your first job and what did you learn from it?

00;29;45;19 - 00;30;05;00

Zeb Evans

My first real job was at a grocery store called Lowes Those Foods and North Carolina. I did. I worked in the produce the produce section, and I started to learn interacting with people, right? Interacting with what I think strangers is a better way to put it. So customer service, right? Customer support. You know, prior to that, I've had I had met a guy who was I was a DJ also.

00;30;05;09 - 00;30;24;25

Zeb Evans

I guess it was actually kind of around that same time. Yeah. And but that was more of like the kind of starting the business for that. And then I think another one is this was just kind of a funny one. It was my first job and I drove the monorail at Disney World. So I worked at Disney World for yeah, for, for seven or eight months and, and drove the monorail there and there.

00;30;24;25 - 00;30;44;20

Zeb Evans

Also, I learned customer experience. We have an extreme like everybody talks about customer focus and but we really every single person here cares so much about the customer and we don't care how much it costs. We have no rules on keeping our costs, our COGS down for for customer support. We have 24 seven customer support, real time customer support.

00;30;44;20 - 00;30;52;15

Zeb Evans

We have free onboarding, free set up like we don't care how much it costs you, you just want to make that customer happy. And I think I learned that from those those few early jobs.

00;30;52;16 - 00;30;57;29

Patrick Campbell

That's amazing. And then last question, What is your parents do and what did you learn from them?

00;30;57;29 - 00;31;20;26

Zeb Evans

They were both in the Met, in the medical field. My dad was a doctor. My mom was was in the hospital administration. And I, I think I learned from them work work habits. They worked a lot. And so I kind of learned learn that work obsession and and good work ethic from them. And you know, I think to this day, I certainly still have that probably a little bit too imbalanced still.

00;31;20;26 - 00;31;33;10

Zeb Evans

But that's the reality. I think nobody wants to talk about it as a startup. You know, everyone preaches work life balance all day, but the reality is that to build something exceptional, something legendary, like you're going to have to work a lot. And it's okay to say that.

00;31;33;10 - 00;31;45;03

Patrick Campbell

I love that. Yeah, I talk about the fit and whenever anyone asks in interviews about work life balance and I was like, Well, let's just reject the premise for a second and like, talk about this. But anyways, man, where can people find you anything you want to plug?

00;31;45;03 - 00;32;02;02

Zeb Evans

Yeah, I mean, click up itself, that click icon. We have free forever plans. Anybody can sign up in any day. You know, I myself is I met a few of and social media that's that's my old DJ name so I'm I PR people have tried to give me so.

00;32;02;20 - 00;32;06;07

Patrick Campbell

Much you got to keep on to your roots now It's awesome man appreciate exactly.

00;32;06;24 - 00;32;07;19

Zeb Evans

Thank you Patrick.

00;32;10;07 - 00;32;37;08

Patrick Campbell

A huge shout out to Zeb for doing the pod. Now you have what it takes to crush brand awareness. Today we talked about the role flexibility, plays and feedback for pillars that drive click ups, prioritization, How to harvest leads from a wide marketing net, click UPS, brand awareness strategy, and what most companies miss when going multiproduct. Oh, and if you want to support Paddle and the show, we would greatly appreciate it if you left a five star review of the podcast or the equivalent rating wherever you're listening or watching the podcast, gods like that type of thing.

00;32;37;08 - 00;32;50;24

Patrick Campbell

And you know, we like to appease the podcast gods. Thanks for listening. Make sure you subscribe to and tell your friends about Protect the Hustle, a podcast from Paddle Recover, the largest, fastest growing media network dedicated to the world of subscriptions.