Near Death Experiences Led Me to Found ClickUp AMA
I’m a serial entrepreneur and Founder of a productivity software company that was recently valued at $1 billion. I was born an entrepreneur and at 10 years old, I was in an accident, which would become the first of several near-death experiences. In the hospital, I learned HTML and built my first website selling wholesale DVDs. At 10 years old, I made almost $8,000 in one month but it ended abruptly when the feds showed up. In high school, I started a mobile DJ business, worked as a DJ for a major radio station, and toured as a road manager for a successful rapper. Over the next few years, I had 3 more near-death experiences. Each time, I immediately changed my life and course-corrected. The last and most recent one, led me to move to Silicon Valley and start a tech company aimed at saving people time and making the world more productive. My true goal in life is simply to make the world more productive AMA Questions to ask me! What keeps me up at night as an entrepreneur. What was that moment when I knew ClickUp Was solving a necessary problem? Our process in hiring and what I value in hiring as a CEO? I believe this is one of the most important processes to get in place early in every company! Anything related to building a software company. How my near-death experiences changed the way I work. #tech #productivity #projectmanagement #CEO EDIT: 1/27 - Thanks for all the questions, I really enjoyed them! I'll be signing off for now, but happy to speak through DMs.
What types of people do you like to or want to hire at early stages?
We like to hire the best of the best - people who are passionate about their work and always looking to grow their skills. One of our core values as a business is to grow 1% every day, and it is something we strive for with every employee, whether that's learning new skills in our respective roles, or taking advantage of the time ClickUp saves us to be able to explore new skills outside of our usual job descriptions. We also believe in working Smarter and Harder, and Progress over Perfection. Combined, these values have enabled us to move incredibly fast as a company and ship new features almost every single week. These core values and more are what make each and every person at ClickUp special. You can read more about our core values here: https://clickup.com/about
How hard is to find such people? Is it preventing you to grow faster than you want? Do you consider to be at the top of the market for TC to follow similar requirements as for Netflix engineers?
What’s your biggest failure and what did you learn from it?
My biggest failure was a fun one, it was an app called Mimri. The goal was to build a social network removing ego (no numbers of followers etc) and to give a way for people to record memories in their life It was supposed to be a replacement for Snapchat because at the time they only had 7-second videos and erased your biggest memories. Mimri had a cool interface that allowed you to: -Take memories up to 60 seconds -See other people's memories and connect with them -Allow you to easily go back and track memories and save them for life. -Connect with others and remove the ego from social media It was off to a pretty decent start and we caught some buzz, but didn't see the growth needed to sustain focusing on this for the next couple of years. It would be very hard to monetize, and we didn't have funding. The breaking point was when Snapchat came out with Snapchat "Memories", removing the ephemeral nature, and nullifying a lot of our impact. We failed fast, and saw the writing on the door - which was the biggest learning. I wouldn't have done it differently, I was just very glad that we gave up as quickly as we did. We spent less than 6 months on idea to failure. If it isn't working, change what you're doing, you only have so much time in life.
Who's the successful rapper?
I directly managed Killa J, who toured with Mac Miller and Wiz Khalifa. It was an incredible experience!
How did you validate the idea and stick to it? To an outsider, it looks like ”just another aggregator platform”, but clearly you are doing something very well :)
ClickUp was actually created as an internal tool as a way of solving the issue we had with having to manage numerous project management tools within our organization. Having each team on different tools was wasting so much time and slowing down our entire operation, so we decided to build a platform that enabled us to manage all work in one place. Once we built it we started sharing it with a few colleagues and it started to spread quickly from there. We soon realized that what we had built was solving a major problem for people, so we decided to focus full time on ClickUp! It's only been three years so far, but as we continue to add in new features and new users around the world, it's become very clear that ClickUp is meeting a massive demand as the one app to replace them all!
How is ClickUp better than its competitors? What's your exit strategy?
ClickUp does something that no other company provides - one place for all your work! There's no question that the productivity industry is a crowded and competitive space, with tons of tools that aim to help make people and businesses more efficient and productive, but too many of those tools only solve niche problems for specific types of users. Plus they are very opinionated about how their users must work. ClickUp aims to remove the barriers found in other productivity software by providing all tools, including task management, docs, chat, to do lists, OKRs, dashboards, and more, in one fully customizable platform for all types of users at all teams. We believe that businesses and users know how they want to work, and we simply provide the platform that enables them to work on everything together all at once. As far as our exit strategy, we believe that in order to truly change the way people work and make the world more productive, we have to continue to grow as a business and a platform and maintain our autonomy. Because of that, our vision is to build towards an IPO.
What's the necessary problem that ClickUp is solving? And is no one else out there genuinely trying to save that same problem?
The main problem ClickUp is solving is that people today have way too many apps to manage when it comes to their work or personal projects. From to-do lists to docs, chat, goals and task management, people waste so much time jumping around between tools and end up less productive and less efficient than when they started using productivity tools. ClickUp solves this problem by bringing all these features into one easy-to-use, customizable platform that works for everyone.
What are some traits you look for when hiring as a startup CEO (and entrepreneur)?
Can you tell us more about your near-death experiences?
^this. Many articles about this dude allude to this but don’t elaborate. Typically, this information is deeply personal and private (and that should be respected) but given that it’s been used in a show man-y, click-baity kind of way, yea, satisfy our curiosity. Otherwise it feels incredibly inauthentic.
My first near-death experience happened when I was 10. I was in a boating accident that put me in the hospital, and while I was there my appendix ended up rupturing. The doctors at the time thought my pain was associated with my accident and couldn't figure out why my condition was rapidly getting worse and worse. Finally, when I was a couple of days away from dying, a resident from Florida suggested they look at my appendix and he ultimately ended up saving my life. I was in the hospital a total of 2 months, and it was there I had my first brush with technology. I couldn't watch TV because commercials were all about food (which I couldn't eat most of the time I was in the hospital), so I used a laptop to learn how to build websites. Another near-death experience happened when I was 21 when I was robbed at gunpoint during a home invasion. They tied me and my two roommates up and put us in a closet where I was held with a gun to my head. It was a 17-year-old kid and he was so nervous his hand was shaking, i thought for sure he was going to accidentally hit the trigger. Luckily we made it out alive, but this was perhaps my most transformative experience as I had time to really think about my life and the changes I wanted to make. I dropped out of school the next day and began learning how to code - a life change that ultimately set me on the path to founding ClickUp.
How did you get your first 10 customers?
We didn't take any funding in our early days, so we had to find creative and organic ways to get our first customers. We started out by building landing pages and writing blog posts based on what people were searching - such as "asana alternatives". This led to our first 10 customers, which were mostly personal users or very small teams as our product was in its infancy at that time. What we learned with this strategy though was the power of speaking to and directly solving people's problems.
Thanks for doing this AMA! When you first started ClickUp did you know that your company would get this far? How does it feel to be the founder of a billion dollar company?
We always had the dream for where ClickUp would go, but it has happened even faster than we could have imagined! Our vision of bringing all your work into one place has been something that has resonated with our users from the very beginning, and it has helped our platform grow at an incredible rate. We are incredibly proud of this growth and thankful to each and every one of our users for helping us get this far, but we are still only just getting started! Our mission is to make the world more productive, and while it is of course exciting to be the founder of a billion-dollar company, we still have a long way to go to realizing our full vision as a company and we have no plans to slow down any time soon!