Raise only after product-market fit
“After your product market fit, raise capital in efficient means when you know unit economics, and you can spend capital in in sustainable ways.”
Founder conversationUnicorn $50m+
How ClickUp Went From a Month of Runway to 800,000 Teams and a $4B Valuation
Zeb Evans explains how he self-funded ClickUp to cash flow positive, organizes engineering into small feature squads, and uses M&A to buy time.
Zeb Evans · Clickup
Published February 22, 2024About this resource
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What you’ll learn
Zeb Evans, founder and CEO of ClickUp, explains how he funded the productivity platform with money from his previous company, Fast Followers, and turned it cash flow positive within about 45 days when the bank account ran low. He covers growing to 800,000 teams with 85,000 paying, running engineering in five to seven person feature squads, and an M&A strategy built on buying product and team time rather than revenue.
Read the source passagesKey moments
Find the ideas you need and go straight to the source.
The Zeb team big bets cadence
“I have I have an idea on Monday, and we'll try to get it shipped by Friday.”
Paywalls turned cash flow positive
“And literally, in in a matter of, like, forty five days, you know, we we were net positive. We were we were cash flow positive.”
Investing through a $5M note cap
“So I I put in a cap at 5,000,000. Yeah. So so, essentially, I was investing at a 5,000,000 valuation.”
Acquisitions as a way to buy time
“these companies that built something that we were going to build that would take us six months, a year to build, we're buying time.”
Resource files
- Watch video
Video
Zeb Evans
Founder & CEO · Clickup
- Company revenue
- $200M
- Team size
- 1000
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