Have you ever sat down in a Marketing meeting, trying to brainstorm GTM campaign ideas, content, and how to revamp your site and no ideas are coming your way?
It’s one of those days where nothing brought to the table is really striking a chord. The creative juices are just not flowing.
That feeling is SUCH A PAIN. But guess what? There’s a workaround.
There is a secret weapon that will ALWAYS enable you to have the content, campaign ideas, and product solutions you need to captivate your audience.
And today’s brand of focus showed just how impactful that secret weapon was for growth, in their meteoric rise from a $20M ARR company in 2017 to a $4B brand in 2024.
Marketing Student, meet ClickUp.
ClickUp is one of the largest project management softwares on the planet in 2024, yet nearly 7 years ago they were just a tiny player in a space dominated by Asana, Trello, and Microsoft Project.
Their rise NEEDS to be studied, and that’s what we’re here for today LOL.
Founded by Zeb Evans in 2017 in a two-story house in Silicon Valley, ClickUp was originally built to give Zeb and his existing businesses an internal tool that was significantly cheaper than using Asana or Trello.
Quickly the team realized the internal tool they were building could solve so many problems for businesses worldwide so they formally launched ClickUp to the public.
Their focus was on product-led growth, giving free access in hopes larger teams would adopt their product and pay. It’s the common “freemium” model that absolutely crushes in SaaS.
But to get to that $4B valuation in an already crowded market they had to take their product-led growth to the next level.
ClickUp revolutionized the idea of finding NATURAL PRODUCT MARKET FIT. Meaning they weren’t focused on growing as quickly as possible but instead on how they could grow as efficiently as possible through organically finding the customers who needed their product the most.
Anyone can acquire customers if they have enough money and how you win a customer is ultimately how you can lose them, so ClickUp decided they wouldn’t pay to play. They wanted to win over users via the solutions they were providing, NOT the deals they were running.
To really dial in those solutions, ClickUp began getting active in small community forums on Reddit and socials, talking with potential customers. Feature requests, bug fixes, ClickUp was all in on the idea that customers ACTUALLY DO know what they want.
(They even built their own subreddit that has 11k+ members, which is more than Trello, Asana, and Monday.com all have.)
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This encouraged them to build their entire brand ethos around customer centricity and feedback loops. It all started with the internal team.
They built their team around a test and learn culture. They would hire based on a work-life imbalance, meaning they would search for the people SO OBSESSED with their work and who love solving problems. AKA the people willing to work 10% harder. (They did this while many brands were promoting the exact opposite, a work-life balance.)
This 10% was strategically placed though. The extra energy and focus would ALWAYS be back towards the customer.
The team built systems around gathering user feedback. Using Canny, they encouraged users to share their thoughts, they organized everything, and ACTED on it. If a user had a request on Monday about a GANTT chart feature, the new feature would be up and running by Sunday.
ClickUp didn’t wait until they knew the feature was perfect or that it had zero bugs, they JUST SHIPPED IT.
*So many layers to that, we can all just ship more, whether it be content or sharing that idea with the execs in the meeting. SHIP MORE.*
Which brings me back to the scene I set earlier, you know that meeting where no ideas are flowing?
The crux of ALL great ideas and campaigns that truly hit on customer needs, comes back to speaking with your customers. If you establish a consistent channel of communication whether it be through user feedback tools like Typeform, Canny, Hotjar or even a simple google form, you will NEVER run out of content and campaign ideas that HAVE IMPACT.
ClickUp turned their customer feedback engine into their biggest Marketing lever because they had substantially more data on WHAT their customers wanted, enabling them to deliver EXACTLY what their customers sought out. And this became their differentiator in the market.
It created this relationship with the brand that customers felt like they were being seen and heard by ClickUp, the solutions being custom built for them. And in an industry where it would seem unlikely to build brand affinity, ClickUp managed to do just that.
(Oh, and look they have a customer feedback and feature request section smack dab in the middle of their site.
To take your brand from 0 to 1, to turn your users into brand advocates, you HAVE to focus on the organic users. They’re hands down the most important piece to this puzzle if you want to grow.
You can shape your entire campaigns around their needs, build your entire product around their needs, and you’ll create this positive feedback loop where they’re telling every industry connection they have about your product’s role in their ability to be more productive.
