Zeb Evans: Productivity Platform CEO Helping the World Save More Time

No Time to Waste

Time.

Just like water, it drops faster than you can catch it.

Just like money, you either have too little or too much.

Just like people, it grows and expires.

Time’s up!

Our featured founder, Zeb Evans, learned the real meaning of time and its value after his many tests of time.

Early Beginning

Zeb Evans was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. Like Yousef Abuzuaiter, who also hailed from North Carolina and started his entrepreneurship early, Zeb Evans admits that he also wanted to be an entrepreneur since he was three years old.

However, he owes his entrepreneurial attitude to many near-death experiences, four, to be exact, including one when he was ten from a boating accident that left him bedridden and dependent on morphine and feeding tubes in a North Carolina hospital for days.

It turns out that the boating injuries were not the only danger at hand. Doctors were perplexed about how to save his life as his health progressively deteriorated. Zeb  Evans' life might have expired if it hadn't been for a fortunate discovery made by a visiting resident who advised looking for a ruptured appendix.

That was the first of Zeb Evans' four near-death experiences, including a home invasion in 2012 during which Zeb was held at gunpoint, which changed the trajectory of his life. A sensation of clarity had come over Zeb Evans, just like many other survivors of NDEs or near-death experiences.

Evans believes these incidents have prompted him to reconsider the value of life and, as a result, to pursue productive and meaningful ways to spend his time. It crystallized the way for him to achieve unprecedented success in his life and profession and prompted him to start a company that may assist others in doing the same.

Zeb Evans’ Education

Before dropping out of college after experiencing a near-death experience, Zeb Evans studied tourism and hotel administration at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

It was Evans’ gut feeling that he should quit school early and learn coding from the ground up.

Then, in 2011, Zeb Evans completed his master's degree in business at Virginia Tech.

The Idea That Eventually Led to ClickUp

Zeb’s early near-death experiences allowed him to consider his future and current career course. After he realized that college wasn’t meant for him and began learning to code, Zeb created an application to schedule tweets—the Fast Followerz app. 

The platform was used by many, and the company was successful, but Zeb Evans decided to relocate across the country to Silicon Valley after another near-death experience.

Zeb Evans related during an interview with Authority Magazine,

Before founding ClickUp, he was also the CEO of Curfew Entertainment and both the founder and CEO of Mango Technologies.

ClickUp

Zeb Evans was concerned that his previous company, aimed solely at inflating consumers' egos via social media, and would not grow into the scalable, inventive company he had hoped for. He and a few coworkers founded Mango Technologies after settling in Silicon Valley, with the initial goal of developing a safer Craigslist.

What began as a Mango internal project management tool evolved into ClickUp. They would tell people about their original company in Silicon Valley, but many were more interested in their project management software.

The concept for ClickUp occurred to Zeb’s team at one of his previous companies. Zeb Evans and his team needed an internal tool to assist them in functioning more efficiently by streamlining the excessive number of standard workplace tools they utilized.

Zeb Evans may have started many start-ups like Hamet Watt and Mark Pincus but is in ClickUp which he found beneficial to others. As ClickUp proved helpful to them as an internal tool, it expanded on its own; demand was so huge that Zeb Evans and his company were dragged into the marketplace.

That's when Evans understood how valuable it would be to share their platform with other businesses.

As a result, Zeb Evans, the company’s CTO, Alex Yurkowski, and the rest of his team altered gears and created ClickUp in 2017.

​​ClickUp's first version was constructed in six months using $2.5 million from the sale of Evans' previous company. To compete with the productivity industry's established competitors, the team employed an organic SEO approach focused on target keywords related to Trello, Asana, and productivity software.

ClickUp: To a Better Location

ClickUp was an instant success, and the company rapidly outgrew its original house/office location.

The advantage of starting in Silicon Valley was that everyone was working in technology. They talked about their product in coffee shops, and other businesses began utilizing it. This enabled them to develop organically while bootstrapping most of their funds until their Series A in 2020.

ClickUp found that San Francisco was not the California they had anticipated and that paying six figures for all jobs was not feasible. After considering Austin, Salt Lake City, and other emerging tech hotspots, the team fell in love with San Diego and relocated the company's headquarters there.

Since the company's relocation to San Diego, the team has concentrated on acquiring talent and teaching people about the platform. ClickUp recognizes that users are intelligent, and the company aims to provide a platform that encourages customization.

ClickUp: Scaling to Billions

Zeb Evans began reaching out to investors for the first time at that stage. At the time, Zeb reported using most of his savings to start the business. Investors were astounded by the fact that ClickUp was profitable rather than incurring losses.

Zeb Evans’ ClickUp secured funding using a high-net-retention strategy, which means they anticipated growing their client base and then having those consumers pay them back tenfold.

Zeb Evans attributed ClickUp's rapid success to its user community and active product development participation. Evans said,

The platform combines all of an organization's work into a single application. The app's ultimate purpose is to save time by assisting workers in job coordination.

Documents, reminders, calendars, and in-app messaging are all available. Its tagline is one app to replace them all because of its diverse portfolio of services, and ClickUp's clients have included Google, Nike, and Uber.

Since its inception, ClickUp has witnessed fast development, rising to a billion-dollar worth in just a few years. Since its founding, ClickUp has been one of the fastest-growing SaaS firms, collecting $100 million in funding in December 2020. Zeb Evans told TechCrunch's, Lucas Matney,

LevelUp 2021

LevelUp, ClickUp's second annual productivity conference, was held on November 9th, 2021. Around 45,000 individuals enrolled from all over the world to discover how leaders are reinventing productivity via powerful new work tools and strategies.

Evans’ Journaling

Zeb attributes this success to steady, incremental progress. As ClickUp’s CEO, Zeb Evans aspires to grow by at least 1% daily.

Similar to tech founders, Luis von Ahn of Duolingo and Rachel Romer Carlson of Guild Education, Zeb Evans has aimed for his technology to always be aligned with his goals in helping others with what he can offer.

Zeb believes success is impossible without transparent systems to stay productive and focused. Zeb follows this leadership principle frequently. For this reason, Evans journals every morning and evening to keep track of his thoughts and goals.

Zeb shared in an interview with Heidi Sander of Medium (published in Authority Magazine) how journaling helped him to be more calm, mindful, and resilient. His journals prove that the CEO of a productivity platform is practising productivity by its embodiment and sharing his reflections:

“What prompted him to start journal writing?”

“What kind of content goes into his journal?”

“How did journaling help him heal, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually?”

Zeb Evans – Net Worth

Zeb Evans' primary source of income is his business, ClickUp.The company raised $100 million in its second round of venture capital investment in December 2020. Over the last year, revenue has surged by more than 900 percent.

Entrepreneur Zeb Evans is also responsible for several other projects, including creating a healthy fast-food restaurant. As a result, ClickUp’s Zeb Evans has a net worth of $10 million.

Awards and Honors of Zeb Evans

ClickUp received The Proddy Award, the gold standard award dubbed the Grammys for the product management community, as the best project management product in 2020.

AI bees – Clicking Up with ClickUp

In 2018, AI bees started its operations to help businesses succeed in solving their clients’ ongoing and potential problems using technology and data-driven methods. We offer sales and marketing solutions for B2B companies that are proven to outwit and outpace the market. We thrive on delivering reliable and consistent results for your business.

But there’s one enemy that we had not outwitted—productivity management.

Our CEO and Founder, Brian Hadi Attarbashi, and Chief Sales Officer, Hamied E. Salehi Kermaniwas, were looking for project management tools to improve productivity and implement an efficient work system.

AI bees Process Manager, Jayson Ermac, is the most affected by the lack of productivity management the company was facing. Evaluation and improvement of business processes are the responsibilities of process managers. They work across a variety of departments and industries. In addition to ensuring the efficiency of business operations, process managers create and implement improvements when necessary.

As the process manager, his role involves a heavily structured and smooth process. Jayson Ermac shared,

Seeing how chaotic email was and not getting anything done, AI bees then outsourced a third-party project manager to help our AI bees process manager set up the system we are currently suited for.

What are your responsibilities with ClickUp, and what does your day look like?

‘’My daily tasks on ClickUp vary. Since there are new team members that I assure in from time to time, my day would sometimes look like training during intro calls to present the workspace to clients. "

But as the process manager, solid systems are the heartbeat of his job, and ClickUp is now integral in performing them every day.

Jayson is responsible for training and introducing new team members and clients to ClickUp and inviting members to join the workspace and platform, preparing the necessary processes for the company and ensuring company processes and protocols are followed accordingly.

Jayson also ensures team members fully utilize the platform, including the communication feature of ClickUp, especially the paid licenses, which the campaign managers and lead nurturing managers can use to the fullest extent.

With Jayson’s job revolving around process and productivity, it is no wonder he is actively using ClickUp, as most of his tasks are heavily based on the platform. He then became ClickUp Verified as a power user for being in the top 10% of active ClickUp users. 

Can you say that you have mastered ClickUp?

“The only thing I haven’t mastered is coding. I am not familiar with coding; I cannot code. The only ClickUp feature that I am not well-versed with.”

ClickUp is user-friendly, opening doors to more possibilities with API integration. Using triggers, actions, and searches, you can create custom ClickUp workflows.

Jayson also has to continue teaching himself to grow with his role. He benefits from ClickUp University to enhance our workspace productivity.

To ensure the company’s growth, he watches out for ClickUp webinar training if he has the time to keep up with the freshest features that ClickUp offers. We want to look for ways to improve how we work on the platform by using every feature, creating templates, and using the platform to its full extent.

How does ClickUp help your job to become more efficient and productive?

AI bees Team Members

After training, ClickUp was introduced to show where we could find all the things team members needed to join the existing synchronization that had already been set up.

AI bees then observed and reevaluated how the company used ClickUp for a year, restructured the process for streamlined workflow and company productivity, and eliminated redundancies such as never-ending subtasks that can be simplified in the comment sections.

One of AI bees’ initiatives for training new team members is to help them understand the platform and make ClickUp its living testament as the one app that saves time.

One productivity delay that our team made is that they often forget or skip specific processes and wait for the team leader’s response to their queries, delaying productive time that could have efficiently carried tasks out.

In the spirit of productivity, the company created an AI bees Library, a repository of our company’s processes with playbooks and videos inside.

Whenever team members have difficulties or are still unfamiliar with our company's process and system, our library can be compared to a user manual that eases new team members to streamline and master their workflow. AI bees Library is created to answer frequently asked questions every time some cases are not being done daily, skipping the inquiry waiting time for the team leaders and members.

Since we are in an evolving industry, our library can be updated from time to time with the latest resources our team can access.

AI bees Clients and Partners

As for the clients, they are invited as guests to their dashboard and use the platform for updates, campaigns, and project monitoring. Clients reluctant to engage with the platform are assured that it is a place for communication, a space for the presentation of ideas and growth tracking purposes, and transparency in the business partnership.

Because of ClickUp’s slogan, one app to replace them all, AI bees can update clients with different spread styles for each space.

AI bees created a pipeline, especially for campaigns, to help clients see that there is activity behind the scenes. Lists, timelines, mind maps, and more of ClickUp’s features have been used along with the pipeline.

The company uses ClickUp mainly to communicate and send updates on all tasks on a day-to-day basis. It is where we coordinate and update our daily tasks and the progress of each project. It is where we update our clients and show transparent initiatives to them as efficiently as possible in one go.

How does AI bees' productivity benefit from the platform?

Before ClickUp, team communications were done via email, and the thread was lengthy. There was also one thread per task. When it came to uploading, you would be sure to see around five daily updates per email thread and questions and progress inquiries.

Schedules to monitor progress are also in a separate sheet, and communications are in the email, so watching the job in tab switching can be bought out and done using ClickUp. Right there in the platform, communication threads are possible, monitoring due dates more clearly, and making the system more proactive. It eliminated the constant bouncing of inquiries between two parties. It stopped tasks that required asking about progress, sending updates, and explaining results.

With everything scheduled, there is more structure in work, and it is easier to align the tasks depending on the urgency, priority, or task.

Saved up one day of the week indeed!

Zeb Evans FAQs:

1. What is ClickUp?

ClickUp is an ideal cloud-based collaboration and project management application for all sizes and industries. Among the features are communication and collaboration tools, task assignments and statuses, alarms, and a task toolbar.

‍2. What are ClickUp core values?

ClickUp’s website listed seven core values that the company lives by:

• Deliver the best customer experience, period.
• Grow 1% every day.
• Work hard and be an owner.
• Normal f*cking sucks.
• Pay it forward with random acts of kindness.
• Have fun, find joy, and be you.
• Be transparent and direct, with optimism.

3. How does ClickUp make money?

ClickUp has a freemium SaaS business model, which implies the project management solution is free. ClickUp earns money by charging customers who desire extra features or more storage space for premium memberships.

4. What is a unicorn startup?

In the venture capital industry, a unicorn is a startup company with a valuation that exceeds $1 billion.

5. When does a startup become a unicorn?

Personal Life of Zeb Evans

Zeb Evans is single and has no children. He is currently living in San Diego, California.

Key Takeaway: Zeb Evans

Riddle: What flies without wings?

This riddle may be a real head-scratcher, but it is the ultimate essence of Zeb Evans’ life experience.

You may be young today…

But what if, a few years from now, you look back on your life and wonder what you did with the time you had?

Zeb Evans realized this early and made sure to live his life to the fullest. 

He is a real example of the saying, "What you can do tomorrow, you can do today."

You can imitate Zeb Evans by being mindful of productivity and not taking things for granted, always self-checking and making sure to beat your worst competition—yourself.

Now, what flies without wings?

Time.

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