The 17-year-old’s hand shook as he pointed the gun at Zeb Evans’ forehead. Adrenaline flooded Evan’s body as the metal rubbed against his skin. Then, in that moment of extreme uncertainty, he gained clarity.
His identity didn’t have to be defined by a diploma.
“When I pointed the gun at my head, I realized this is not what I want to do with my life,” Evans says.
Evans was a student when he was the victim of a burglary. Fortunately, no harm was done to him, but his future had a new perspective.
“[I realized,] I don’t want to go work for someone else. I don’t want to continue learning business because you learn business by doing it,” Evans says.
The next day, Evans dropped out of school and began working as an entrepreneur. Twelve years after the home invasion, Evans is now CEO and co-founder of ClickUp, an all-in-one productivity management tool valued at $4 billion.
The robbery wasn’t the only near-death incident that shaped Evans’ journey. Since that fateful day, Evans has experienced a series of life-changing moments that shaped his entrepreneurial path and contributed to his current work: revolutionizing the project management industry with ClickUp.
A bedridden entrepreneur
When Evans was 10 years old, he suffered an accident that left him hospitalized for months. In a time without modern smartphones or tablets, Evans got his hands on the only public laptop in the hospital. While he was bedridden, he started browsing eBay and Alibaba, looking at products and finding out what was selling.
“And this is where I began to combine my love of entrepreneurship with technology,” says Evans.
He began buying and selling Disney DVDs locked in the infamous “Disney Vault,” with some discs valued at up to $100. His business acumen continued in high school and college, where he started an entertainment company to manage local musicians.
After his second life-threatening experience in college (the robbery), Evans found himself with an incomplete degree, persistent part-time work, and a lack of capital. He found his most valuable asset in his entertainment business: the custom social media tools he built from the ground up.
“Twelve years ago there was nothing like this,” says Evans. “I just always wanted to create things and give people experiences. It was just always in me.”
So he founded the social media marketing company Fast Follwerz, which quickly grew into one of the largest of its kind in the United States.
But something was missing, and Evans would need another brush with death to figure out what it was.
I’m tired of fueling my ego
Four years after founding Fast Followerz, Evans suffered a seizure in a movie theater. After several tests, Evans eagerly awaited a prognosis. His father had a brain tumor when Evans was growing up, and Evans assumed the worst.
“During that week…I realized that we [Fast Follwerz] haven’t really contributed much net profit to the world,” says Evans.
In his view, the social media industry was more about ego than community. And Fast Followerz fueled that ego.
“I wanted to right this wrong, so to speak,” Evans says. “But I also wanted to create something that had a much bigger impact.”
“I wanted to right this wrong, so to speak. But I also wanted to create something that had a much bigger impact.”
His recent health scandal proved to be an anomaly rather than a tumor, but it motivated Evans to sell his social marketing company and move where all starry-eyed entrepreneurs dream: Silicon Valley.
Evans had imagined Silicon Valley as “Vegas with startup lights,” but he found Palo Alto’s reality had less sparkle than the Sunset Strip. “Palo Alto is the sleepiest city in the world,” says Evans. But during his first year in the Valley, working on his next business idea, he didn’t get much sleep.
Mimry was Evans’ first entirely new technology startup. Together with his business partners, he developed a video app for a social network to capture moments in users’ lives from a first-person perspective. Mimry’s goal was to eliminate the self-centered aspect of social media that had angered Evans when he ran Fast Follwerz.
The problem was that many people are drawn to the self-centered aspect of social media. Mimry collapsed within a year of Evan’s arrival in Silicon Valley.
Undeterred, Evans embraces the lessons he learned from this experience. “If I hadn’t done that, I don’t think ClickUp would exist in the same form today,” he says. “There are so many things you learn when starting your first tech company, no matter how tech-savvy you are, that if you don’t go through the process you just can’t learn it.”
After Mimry, he shifted his focus to fighting another giant in the tech space.
The solution that became ClickUp
ClickUp was originally a means to an end. Evans wanted to create a competitor to Craigslist by making communication between buyers and sellers more secure. But before embarking on his next startup project, Evans wanted to solve a productivity problem that had plagued him since his first company.
“It was just this bunch of productivity tools. And they’re supposed to make you more productive, but I couldn’t help but think that using all these different tools made us less productive.”
He began researching powerful productivity platforms like Asana and Trello to see if there were ways to unify their solutions. As he and his team began developing their custom tool, they discovered that they weren’t the only ones frustrated with the costly and complicated technology stack required to launch many businesses.
“We initially thought it would just be an internal tool aimed at saving us time. And then we shifted that to saving time for the world when we realized there was a big need for that,” Evans says.
“We initially thought it would just be an internal tool aimed at saving us time. And then we shifted that to saving time for the world when we realized there was a big need for that.”
In 2017, Evans gave up the fight against Craigslist and started building an all-in-one productivity solution: ClickUp. He founded the company in typical 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 at which the team worked on their product back then. If they chose to build a feature on Monday, they would ship it by Sunday.
“In the beginning, it’s all about the product,” says Evans. “We were 100 percent community-led, 100 percent community-driven, and I was the product person — the only product person.”
The first version of ClickUp was built in six months using $2.5 million from the sale of Evans’ previous company. To compete with the productivity industry establishment, the team used an organic SEO strategy by targeting search terms related to Trello, Asana, and productivity software.
Evans attributes ClickUp’s rapid growth to the user community and their active participation in product development.
“You have to leverage your users,” Evans says. “You can’t take action on everything, but you can take action on the trends, the general patterns that people bring up all the time.”
Scaling to billions
ClickUp proved successful from the start and the team quickly outgrew their original home/office space. In 2020, ClickUp was named Best Project Management Product by Proddys, the gold standard award for the product management community.
That’s when Evans first started approaching investors. Investors were shocked that ClickUp wasn’t wasting money and even more surprised that the company was profitable.
“If you can build a profitable business first, you know you have a business,” Evans says. “Too many companies take money and don’t have a real business.”
“If you can build a profitable business first, you know you have a business.”
ClickUp raised capital through a high net retention model, meaning the company expected to expand its customer base and that those customers would then pay back tenfold.
“If you raise a lot of capital, it’s okay to grow inefficiently. But you have to understand how to do it [move] towards efficiency,” says Evans.
With a profitable model, investors and active users, ClickUp has experienced explosive growth over the past two years and now has offices in San Diego, Salt Lake City and Dublin.
Evans says the biggest challenge of ClickUp’s rapid rise has been managing culture. The team is 40 percent remote, but Evans says remote communication can only help so much in building a cultural connection. That’s why the company brings the team together in person several times a year and encourages local employees to be in the office twice a week.
Evans’ other culture keeper uses the company’s core values to coach employees. “I think as a founder you assume that everyone sees the vision,” Evans says. “But the reality is that very often people need to be empowered with this stuff.”
Evans says it’s also important that core values evolve with the company.
“You have to accept that it’s dynamic,” he says. For example, one of ClickUp’s early values was “progress not perfection.” As the company grew and its systems became more robust, the value was adjusted to “Progress to Perfection.”
Keep learning: Self-made mogul Emma Grede on Building SKIMS and Good American
Tech startup tips from Zeb Evans of ClickUp
- Choose data wisely: Be careful when choosing the database structure. Choosing the right structure can make or break your business.
- Be Fast and Furious: If you have a compelling product idea, don’t wait. Speed is your greatest ally when it comes to turning a concept into an actual technology company.
- Product > Architecture: Don’t get caught up in making your architecture perfect. Put your energy into making your product as valuable as possible to your target audience.
- Use what is available: Cross-platform technologies make building a technology company easier. Don’t build a feature from scratch unless it’s unique to your product offering.
- Recruit for Culture: Hire contractors who fit your culture and encourage them to recruit new talent.
