If your team subscribes to 10 different software tools, you’re not alone in wrestling with the overwhelming sprawl of productivity apps. Entrepreneurs have taken notice.
ClickUp, which launched in 2017 to consolidate everything from project management to document collaboration and now chat into a single tool, has grown explosively to a $4 billion valuation, hitting $278.5 million in revenue in 2024.
Twelve million people at companies like IBM, Netflix, and Spotify now use ClickUp, which recently launched an AI-powered chat feature to take on Slack, Teams, and other communication hubs.
Fast Company spoke with CEO Zeb Evans about why he’s betting on teams using fewer—not more—platforms, and how the company hopes to stand out in the increasingly crowded productivity marketplace. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Beyond the rise of remote work, what do you see as the biggest changes in how teams work together in recent years?
I saw a report recently that said even smaller organizations average 150+ SaaS apps. This leads to so many issues, from reduced productivity for individual employees to lack of alignment across teams.
If your marketing team has one tool and your engineering team has another, multiply that across your company and you have a major app-sprawl problem. The more apps your team needs to use, the more disconnected and frustrating work will be.
And of course there’s been the arrival of AI, which has completely changed the landscape again, and arguably more than the rise in remote work did. I think we’re only beginning to see how AI will shape the way teams work.
Given that explosion of AI, what specific changes are you anticipating in how teams function over the next 24 months?
Right now, unless writing is a core piece of how you work, you likely aren’t yet seeing 10x productivity from using AI. Most people think of AI as a separate tool that is mainly a prompt and a response.
Over the next two years, we’re going to see how AI converges with the apps we use today and doesn’t require a prompt. The best teams will get a major competitive advantage by using AI to complete end-to-end tasks and projects and get full-context answers to their questions.
Product and engineering teams will see extreme productivity increases from AI over the next year or so. With this, of course, companies will build more software in a shorter period of time. This will lead to the future state of software—”super apps.” Huge platform products will be developed that replace traditionally separate apps, just like ClickUp is doing today.
Teams tend to have a love/hate relationship with their project management setup, whether they’re on Notion, Monday, Asana, Basecamp, or whatever else. What are common misconceptions about this tool category, and what surprises have you encountered in competing in it?
The biggest misconception currently in our category is that true “all in one” actually exists.
The reality is that all of these project management apps require separate chat, call, and video meeting tools. We started the convergence towards one app in our category, but even for us, this was just a future aspiration, until now. We were called crazy for believing we could converge several separate categories, and I’m utterly focused on unlocking unprecedented productivity through doing so.
Importing data from one tool to another might be easy, but how can teams overcome the pain of switching costs in terms of new interface, new log-ins, and general inertia?
That’s a great point and there’s always a learning curve to new tools. That’s part of the reason we’re excited about introducing chat—people know what to expect since Chat is such a familiar experience, which makes it perfect for onboarding into a broader platform.
As far as general inertia, getting rid of multiple apps in favor of one saves both time and money, so the value is crystal clear, which makes people more willing to overcome any overhead or hesitation in switching to our platform.
Setting aside tools for the moment, what tactics help the most effective teams spend more time actually getting work done rather than work about work, i.e. meetings, sending updates, etc.?
Three of my favorite tactics for driving work forward are to have efficient meetings, avoid using direct messages, and automate updates instead of writing them manually.
For the meetings, I replaced 1:1s with my executive team with small group syncs and we got so much more work done, faster. Scattered 1:1 meetings throughout the week were a waste of time for this group and contributed to siloes.
Direct messages often do the same thing: create silos and remove context. I default to sharing more in public and group settings in order to increase context and alignment.
And things like project updates are the “work-about-work” that I absolutely hate. We’ve focused heavily on using AI to automate traditionally manual routines like writing updates and doing stand-ups.
Why launch a new chat tool? What’s broken about the current chat tools people use to discuss work, like Slack, Teams, and email?
Team communication is totally broken in existing chat products. These tools actually create the largest loss in productivity today within companies. Context is constantly lost in channels and threads, and the actual work happens outside of chat, creating even more lost context. The endless stream of notifications and messages results in employees being distracted and overwhelmed.
Toggling back and forth between chat and other work management tools costs employees time. With ClickUp Chat, you can talk about your work and actually do your work all in one place. We solved the toggle tax problem and the context problem; and we totally converged work with chat, enabling an entirely new world of productivity.
What are the primary apps in your own productivity/creativity toolkit?
ClickUp is literally where I spend 100% of my productivity time. When it comes to creative tools, I’m a huge fan of Figma.
You’ve had multiple near-death experiences. What impacts have those had on your entrepreneurship?
I don’t think people put a high enough value on their time in general. Each near-death experience gifted me a reminder of how short life is and how valuable time is. I have this crazy urgency that constantly follows me and has greatly impacted how I built ClickUp (and is the driver behind why we started it in the first place). I’m obsessed with saving time and unlocking productivity—it’s part of our DNA and has played a huge role in my personal entrepreneur journey. Without my near-death experiences, ClickUp would certainly not exist in the same way it does today.
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