How Clickup Bootstrapped to $25m

please help me in giving Chris a warm welcome to the stage Chris come on up all right so click up is a hell of a story now most people know click up today because they read you on TechCrunch you guys have like raised tons of money but we're gonna go back to like the Glory Days the fun days the early days so um take us back to the VT uh Virginia Tech dorm room um and and you can feel free to share what any store you want there from the beginning days I've got some stories cleared so if you're ready so in the early days Zeb and I were at

college and we were always bored we were always bored I mean this one's live oh okay but these are all different nope this one's behind and this one's what they're just awesome yeah yeah um so yeah we're in Virginia Tech um we had a blast we're very bored in school and clearly very bored you see that you're the great a little bit of fun in between I don't know how this came on there but um that's for a speech I'm doing in Virginia Tech after this did you give oh really this is ironic I'm looping it in your PR team put in the sides I thought it was a fair

game oh well it's a fair game so we we were having fun so we had a party bus that we drove around we had a hot dog stand and we sold uh but then we decided he was trying to take it a little bigger um so we started managing a wrapper which I know no one probably saw coming but we started managing a rapper and actually from that as Willie Bill click up so we were managing a wrapper uh we wanted to really blow him up with PR so at Virginia Tech we had this big idea Zeb kind of learned how to I'm not gonna say hack Twitter but he definitely learned how to you know manipulate it before anyone else

this is back in 2011. and at this time no one was really blown up on Twitter for something unless you're actually famous so I decided to fake that I won the lottery and this went way bigger than we could have ever imagined so next thing I know I'm just hanging out I went out to the bar actually to toss which you might be familiar with and uh within two hours my parents are calling me like oh my God Chris did you win the lottery and I'm like how big are we what did you fake like was it I'm talking this is the biggest lottery of this time 640 million at the time this is 2011 this is the biggest lottery this time so everyone

thinks I won the lottery and I don't even tell my parents it's not true at the beginning because I want to ride this out I want to see what can come of this and again this is really just a blow promotion for our rapper but it really turned on to me um I didn't realize it was going to get this big but next thing I know we really my following is going up uh I do this big interview and mind you I'm a little tipsy I'm 20 years old um and I get up there and I'm like hey look I'm not liking all these other lottery winners if you're hungry at home I'm sending that money to you if you can't pay rent guess what it's coming to you but because this money's not about

me I'm giving it back and next you know I am famous Morgan Freeman's following me on Twitter Ron Artest I mean people that I that I've really looked up to are following me now uh but then I realized I was getting out of hand so I'm growing a lot of followers and from that you know long story short I got a little bit of trouble um a lot of trouble with my parents uh nothing legal I mean this is nothing legal yeah nothing legal right we got so much more fair trouble so it's fair trouble and so from that is when we realize the importance of followers um which is what I want to get into with I think a lot of people think they have to

focus on just one company but we really got into what we call fast followers we learned how to grow following Zeb was always about automation mind you back when we were in the rapping days the only way we could go on tour we got this opportunity to open up for Wiz Khalifa for Mac Miller but we can't do that we have school we have classes our parents would you know kill us but Zeb is such a genius the man builds a bot so that we can automatically get these classes and pick before anyone else and we get online classes so we go on tour we do this whole thing but then Zeb was like look we need to create a business like this whole thing means something people

people really care about social media following give context to what year was this this is 2012. you know 2011 2012 and we're still in college I'm about to graduate and you know I'm a year ahead of Zab I'm about to graduate and go work at cvent which I was very excited about as a fast-growing company but I always still want to work for Zeb on the side because this company we really started we started moving with it we started making a little bit of money meaning that how much oh gosh uh at the beginning very low you know a little bit here and there maybe

2K 3K a month but then as I left in left side because I was like I can't live off this I have to go work a CV you know I'll help you on the side Zeb calls me back in like six months how much do you make it this whole like corporate job and I'm like you know I'm making like 55 plus commission it's cool and he laughs at me he's like I just made that this month I'm like what so I understand like well let me get back on board and help you as we you know as this thing goes I want to get some of this money um so things roll out and um you know life is awesome we keep moving and from

there sea event grows I get my equity and I decide it's time to go back and work with Zeb full-time so we really grow fast followers you want to hear some cool numbers yeah we got to where we were making I mean like 600 something a month and this is it was more than that when I came down he was making about 80 or so with no sales team plg as he always likes to start it and we'll get to that too um the same way man we learned this in the early days and this is like 22-23 we're in Charlotte North Carolina we're big fishes because we're making pretty big money but then we also realized like because I've had another near-death experience you guys can research but

he's had a lot and they always shift they always shift what he wants to do and he looked at me he's like do we really want to be like these guys who who boost social so we started again building automation which was cool like a lot of the software you guys probably use now Zeb had it early automatically posting checking your stats we were doing that before anyone else and we were selling it to companies doing pretty well um we were basically how many people are on the team when you're doing 600 Grand a month eight with four contractors that's a high Revenue per employee we were doing pretty well and Zeb obviously you know was saving some because he knew he had something bigger and that's when he

looked at me and he was like let's go to Palo Alto man let's let's do something better let's not just do this whole beefing people on social media and that's when we went to our second Venture which I don't know if he's ever told you about have you heard about memory oh you do know about memory but you take it away this is a good one so we went into memory because we wanted to fix what we thought we had broken in social media Everyone Cared about the followers everyone's all about getting the likes and we felt like they were obsessed with it so we want to fix that and we jumped into memory memory was a very fun app uh it was it was almost like the swipe right swipe left of Tinder you could see people's memories if you like them you swipe right right

at the time Snapchat only gave you seven seconds and they erased your memories so we were like Hey we're coming into something we're the next Zuckerberg we're coming in hot and we were doing great and we put a lot of money into it and that's what we found Alex surekowski our CTO who stole from IBM he built their blue mix and we were fascinated by him he's up there on the left that's him on the left yeah I've never seen anyone like him he is absolute genius that's me looking a little sharper than them because they always you know what was the start was Zeb the money guy and you guys own like small amounts of equity or do you do 30 30 or how did you structure

it all yes zeb's always the zeb's the main guy and then Alex is more than me and then you know they're the Geniuses I always give them all the credit I was more the talker doing what I'm doing now having fun at the Verizon store in Blacksburg yeah I was a store manager that's a fun story too actually everyone got fired my second day there because they were cheating the numbers so they made me store manager well actually first they just asked me to cover the story for a bit and that's when Nathan came in and he's probably a little upset because I had to go to class and come back and everyone's waiting hey I'm sorry I'm the only employee and they

forgot about me for like three weeks and I wasn't complaining because I was getting all this commission and later they came back like oh my God we should have gotten fired we left you alone by yourself without any help and you kept the store going and the numbers actually higher so they gave me a store manager job I was coming in because I was getting charged too much it makes sense the numbers were off I'm like I'm paying Verizon so much they were cheating the whole Blacksburg anyways that's down that's done but that was a quick story quick aside there so what happened with memory so memory was doing really well and uh you know we were getting a lot of Buzz and we had just moved to Palo Alto we thought we were the next Zuckerberg

we really thought this was it and we put a lot of money into it until you know Snapchat came out with Snapchat memories ripped us off exact same thing I mean I mean it makes sense they should have done it anyway they added memories to the to the portion um so there we it was a tough time to be honest we ought to look at each other and think what are we going to do what was did you pre-revenue at this point oh we hadn't we were making no money yeah no money this was we were trying to get it to make money we were spending our money how much would you would you guys spent at that point a couple hundred grand I would say three

something if I had to go three million no no 300 Grand so just checking not a time yeah not three million no we weren't bawling like that you know Crunchies are expensive check the crunches were expensive but here's the good news at the time which you guys might not realize is we moved to Palo Alto we just hot I mean was that flew I hopped in a truck and it drive everything across uh but we moved the office from Charlotte actually no he drove too in his car we moved the office from Charlotte to Palo Alto and we moved to Palo Alto because we're some you know we're from Small Town Virginia North Carolina we kept hearing on the show Silicon Valley there was a place to be so we think we thought it was gonna be

like Vegas for startups not the case by the way but we did we did a good job because we were trying to get office space palantir at the time had bought up all the office space everything is like 90k a month and we're not trying to do that so what we realized is and Zeb was very smart on this he's like let's get a house in a strategically good location and we'll all live there and we'll do this Silicon Valley thing we'll do it the real way and that's exactly what we did so we moved to Silicon Valley and we had a house a block and a half away from where Steve Jobs built out his life CTO of Facebook lives here CEO of Intel

lives here and so of course we talked to them we used to host little parties for their kids and stuff so we could get cool and we definitely had the numbers on our dashboard and you know they so they could check them out but we started talking to them in the kitchen you'd invite the kids over and in your kitchen you'd have your your business numbers hoping that they would see them you read it 100 sure we put them out with his big yard we're like hey the kids getting out here we got drinks and food for everyone else here and there's like we had we had numbers we had TVs everywhere and we still do in the office now but we knew what we were doing we wanted them to see it and they thought we were interesting for sure did any of them write checks or you guys bootstrap this oh we

bootstrapped we bootstrap so here's the cool part so at this point we just lost memory and they all knew about memory and they were like you know what are you gonna do and at the time this is where click up came Zepp hated project management this wasn't new he hated jira hated osana hated Trello and we hated also that people would use different ones if you were you know a very new user you're using Trello if you're in marketing you probably use Asana if you're in development you he's jiren he was sick of jumping from platform to platform so he's like we're not going to do that we built what we called MCC

Mission Control Center at the time and that was just for us what year was that 2015. cool so we had we had Mission Control Center and uh they were like we'll be able to follow along so 2015 you're now at the all the way at the left side of this organic graph for click up eventual click up traffic yeah the very left side so we've gone yeah so this is a good time this is back where it started so they tell us why don't you just go to market with that project management thing you have it looks good like some of them were even using it because they didn't like it they were hanging out with us and saw it

and we talked to like you know advisors and people we looked up to and they're all like that is absolutely a bad idea the space is extremely crowded you know there's just hundreds they're coming up every day it doesn't make sense and how are you going to differentiate yourself and Zeb was like I'll never forget this he was like they all suck though like they're all they're not that good they don't let you work a certain way and he's like I actually see an advantage here because we can start from scratch these other companies have been around for a while we can build it in a way that's completely customizable because Asana makes you work this way you know it's sort of the other tools but we can allow you to work however you want and

we can become that tool everyone loves so tell us how you go from no organic traffic in a very competitive space everyone's already spending money on these keywords to Breaking by 2021 you're breaking 500 000 Organics a month this is awesome so a lot of different ways look we always want to be plg we believed it from the first you know I'm sure you've already heard it from other speakers here but he really believed in the product so one it was it was developing it was building as fast as possible I mean I'm talking I'll tell you the story this is really what I think there's two things I really think changes and I'll tell you as quickly as

I can it's 11 45 at night we're getting into the product right and Zeb made crazy promises early on and I've had to keep up with I'm my first sales rep and I'm only customer service rep so I'm answering and talking to everyone Zeb says hey we'll have you know this in two weeks can't charge in six weeks and he puts this long road map out and people are holding us to it and by gosh we were not on on time you know we definitely weren't but we did as close as we could and one day we had a big release that Zev had really promised that we had delayed already twice and

he's like I need this one out and Alex our genius in the blue same shirt I'm wearing now he um he he was an amazing he's an amazing coder and can do things faster than anyone he's like we're not ready he came at 11 45 we have our Chinese vegan takeout and you know and we're sitting here like just waiting to see if he tells us we're going to be ready to build everything else and he tells us it's not possible that there's way too many bugs and I'll never ever forget the Zeb was like why don't we just ship it anyway the most famous line in Click up history there let's just ship it and at first

like that's against everything we heard like it's it's a bad release like it's not we're gonna have problems and we don't have a bug team it's just like five of us maybe at the time maybe six and he goes yeah I got it but the people know what we're trying to do we're trying to build fast I think they'll understand and they'll send us the bugs and we'll quickly fix them and I was like well I have an idea that's cool you know when they when they send it to us listen instead of saying hey I'm so sorry let's say hey you're awesome customer thank you for pointing out that bug we're so sorry I'm gonna give you three months for your click up and I'm gonna be right back in touch as soon as

it's fixed people loved it they saw how serious we were because they sent us a bug they get free click up and then we'd come back so what year was that that you did that in 2007. okay and what year did you hit the first million of Revenue I want to say right towards end of 2017 early 2018 2017 all that time and don't quote me like 17 18. I could be incorrect no you're good you're good doing my best 17 18 is sort of when you hit that and so just because there's a real tactical thing for folks to take away here how did you literally break 500k Organics

so we were shipping fast right but the next the next strategy was we realized how important blogs and SEO and traffic was and everyone has their own strategies everyone can act like there's a perfect way to it we started off just writing everyone's writing a Blog I was writing I'm not a writer I was writing a Blog everyone's writing a Blog every two three days as much as you could take a Time write a blog the whole team that was like the whole team everyone has to write one blog per every four days we're all writing blogs we had this tool I think it was called Market Muse it would take my kind of crappy blog that I wrote and it'll say hey if you change these words around it would make your SEO

better I'm sure that's a good way to make even your bad teammates who are bad writers still valuable good blog contests.com it might still be up I'm sure if not there's tools like it but find something because they take it there's tons of these tools now AI this kind of stuff yeah copy AI is incredible that blew my mind when I saw it but that's not the only strategy so then we start looking around and look back in this day there's two other points I should get to one again we're staying on SEO and we're looking around and we realize that there are companies just crushing it here that don't even make sense like do we think

we're so much better than their product one is was work Zone and we just like why are there blogs ranking they're you know they're not that great they're ranking so what do we do I stalked the guy who I saw was writing Josh bilker was his name I don't mind saying it it's a guy named Josh bilker he worked for work Zone and he was putting it all out there and he was really crushing it for them they're ranking and they're ranking they're ranking so I hit him up and I was like what is it going to take man we need we need you to do this for us we need this I need the strategy I need to know what you did I need to understand it and we got them how did you get them so how

what was it what was it starting salary I don't remember we gave him a pretty high salary at the time Equity a tiny bit Equity under one percent under one percent yeah okay but enough to get them enough to get him because he saw workzone wasn't taking care of him really they didn't they didn't realize how valuable he was yeah um so we got him a pretty awesome rate you know Zeb worked it out with him I don't remember the exacts but Zeb was excited to bring him on it was a new strategy it was cool he drove this he he really left he helped driving we had we had other help and we we Advanced past him to be honest at some point but he helped now there's there's another Point

too um I'll keep thinking there's one thing we did was really important there we'll come back to it it'll hit you but a lot of organic traffic um where I want to stay early days here but I want you guys to understand like today sort of what this looks like right now Chris gets in trouble for this and his PR team will kill me so this is not coming out of Chris's mouth this coming out of when I interviewed Zeb on the podcast these are numbers from zeb's mouth uh which you know is that is a sales guy and is always you know projecting and so we'll see if 200

million happens or not as Chris leans over his chair and acts like he's not here um but uh this let's go up through 2019 because you guys did bootstraps 25 million so my question to you in a second is going to be sort of how you went from a million to 10 million Revenue but before I do that Zeb told me I have to share this with you guys because I didn't know about it and it's just like rare with the amount of interviews I did if you are a second time founder which Zeb had already made money on the first agency customers he was his first investor in Click up and he wrote himself on a convertible note a

million dollar check into the business out of three or five million dollar cap it was just if I want to say yes it's a 5 million cap and I think it was like 2.5 or 2.5 out of 5 million caps so think about what this does if you then wait right to go do your series a at a cap that's 250 million what are the convertible no convert at let's think about that for a second 2.5 into 5 million so its effect it wasn't a bad traffic

close the loop for everyone because there's eyes happening I I don't know the exactly yeah um it was it was it was high it was higher than I expected when I saw it I was like wow you really pulled this off sorry the point I'm make because the cap was five and he's now going they waited and grew so much to go to the 250. any of you who have raised Capital where you had control notes beforehand you know how you work with your legal teams and they go here's how all those Chemical Romance now convert into equity well he was that he was the 2.5 on the five cap converting right so you can do

the math what's 2.5 into 5 in terms of in terms of percentage equity right so true or false him writing himself his own convertible note early days saved him a lot of dilution in the series a round true it's just I've never heard this strategy before so anytime I get nuggets like that I want you guys to know about it we never did either yeah I was gonna say I don't know if Chris can even talk about this but and I didn't even fully understand when Zeb said it so you should just go look up Zeb CEO click up on YouTube and my interview with him is the first one he breaks it down and he

and then hit in the bottom right open up the trans the transcript that Google gives you and then control F convertible note and it will take you to the point in the interview where he says convertible note and he'll you'll see this whole strategy so let's go now back was that valuable a little tactic all right let's go let's go back to one to ten million yeah so how do you get up to 10. so a couple ways one we were obsessed with listening like in the early days even tried to start getting a lot of clients in we're obsessed with listening to customers so much so that we built a program I can't remember we

called it but this program would scour captera get app all these different review sites and it would take anything under a three-star review anything lower than that we would see why why does someone hate USANA why does someone hate Trello what were they upset about why they leave and then we're automatically reaching out we built automation we automated a lot of things automating is very good when you're small so we automating a lot of things so that way I'm able to get on the sales call I already know what they're upset about with Asana I already know what we're building to fix that and if we have it built it's on our roadmap and I can show them hey look I heard you I understand that you hate this I hate it too that's

why we built click up um we're gonna have that fixed in this amount of time and that's how we're starting to bring a lot of clients on um one of the big ones that we got was a huge one for me I was very static when we closed Randstad Randstad was a big deal for us I can't remember the exact numbers it was it was it was good more than 10 000 ARR yeah yeah for One customer more than a hundred not 100 right and that's and that in that frame I would say um so check this out we uh zevin built a system that would celebrate for every dollar because he want to pump me up because the rest are all coders and it's quiet and I'm like man I'm getting

dealing and no one cares you know like oh cool and I want to pump it up a little bit so that's like I got you he builds this program that allows it to every time I bring in a deal the dollar amount would make you know noises and sounds and all that throughout the house we're in an office now we're in San Francisco we're getting somewhere we're across from LinkedIn in a tiny little brick exposed office maybe a few more employees at the time but not a ton and we're in this office and you know I close I mean I'm this is a big deal for us it was at a point where again we were kind of not doing the best on money and we need to bring in more and he kind of puts some pressure on me which is tough when you know your close friends like

Hey we're running out of money again um and I'm the only sales rep so I really worked hard and uh at this deal Randstad I remember going back and forth and trying to make them feel as if we're fully prepared for them which to be honest at the time I don't think we were we had to hire a lot of people after this deal but long story short I closed the deal but afterwards the the sound is going crazy never had this much money come in so there's so sirens and you know everything going off and also they call back and I'm not doing a cell phone this is like you know early days I'm on a landline still so I don't know where to answer the call when they're calling back I think I'm going to lose this deal

so I had to hang out the window and almost close it to the point where my neck was out and take the call to answer their billing questions they had to make sure things are smooth but that was a big deal for us 60 second a big thing that we really like is 60 second feedback like uh like quizzes or whatever you want to call it feedback um templates we would send them out and we would just say hey look we using 60 seconds was key we sent them all the time one because people realized we weren't going to ask too much and it was quick so we got real feedback and then two uh they also understood that we had to think what was really important to us

because we only had 60 seconds you had like two or three questions so a lot of those are really big very cool so there's the five to ten you hear the organic strategy go pick them off from your competitors that's a great strategy because I already figure out how to do it to close the loop here and just so you guys see now you know personally a bit of the early days right so the next round I mean there's a 35 this is the first round of funding right was it 250 million dollar outside of Zeb putting in his own own money 35 million at a 250 million valuation uh no one reported that but Zeb released it on the interview which was great so they sold about 14 of the business there that was

in 2020 and this is what the and you can find this on gitlac again this is all sourced directly from zeb's mouth uh you have all the insights whether it's accurate or not we can read Chris's facial reaction as he reads this slide it's 250 I think uh yeah okay yeah so that that one is 35 on 250 but that condos convertible notes on the five that was Zeb in 2017-2018 right they did the series B 100 on one and then 2021 series C 404 billion and then the series e will be about a billion on 8 billion I

think right you got it for four billion four but 400 million four billion I know I just kept going to see if I could catch oh yeah we're not we're not racing right now we'll see if no no I think we're hanging out for a bit okay just checking yeah no we're I mean we're I mean I'm being serious I don't right now we're doing pretty good I don't see uh we'll see I mean we'll see but right now it's not probably the best time you don't want a secondary or anything we'll see I think I don't know I think we're we're hanging out uh somebody do want to tell you all though is like in the early days like don't think that before we had that the massive raise that we didn't try I was

in Palo Alto I was in a basketball league and I remember we got a meeting with Sequoia because the guy who's on my basketball team it's funny enough but it's way too early we're probably under we're probably a mill maybe a mill uh error maybe some dancing around it and we get this meeting with Sequoia and we're so excited I mean extremely excited and we come in and they ain't Us Alive I mean they were like this whole one app to replace them while I was cute but it's never gonna work and don't don't think Zab never forgot that um but yeah I mean it was uh you know we could have listened to them we could have just they asked they told us to Niche down come back you know pick a

niche and come back and then we'll talk to you because you guys do look like you're on to something but we didn't listen at all um and then you know we kept working until we didn't have that's why you asked me for a deck because we don't have an investor deck we never we haven't had one like at that point David sacks want to get in touch with us and that was that wasn't really taking interviews but he wanted to talk to David and David gave us a whole new perspective because he was very against funding he wanted to do his he didn't want anyone messing with him he was nervous with the whole getting kicked out of your company the Steve Jobs the Richard Branson who he looked up to um so yeah you know I think it's very important to to really focus on your own

and get as far as you can then let him then talk guys on that note give it up for Chris from Cleco thank you so much [Applause]