Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
00:01:59 · Gaurav Agarwal, Cameron Herold
[00:01:59] S0: Thanks, Cameron. Thanks for having me. [00:02:01] S2: Yeah. Very much looking forward to this. I have been a fan of your business, of ClickUp. You and I are both... Or I used to live in the city that you're living in right now, which is a a big tech hub, in The United States, Seattle. I wanna chat a little bit about that. Also love to know how a kid from India came to get over to The United States and and is now the second command for one of the great brands in the in the tech space in The United States. And I also wanna know a little bit about, you know, what it's like being a COO of a of a tech company. So why don't you start us off with, let's start with ClickUp, and then we'll kinda go back into some of your backstory. So tell us, for anybody who doesn't know what ClickUp is, what the business is, why it exists, and then we'll kinda dive in from there.
00:02:42 · Gaurav Agarwal
[00:02:42] S0: Even if you may not recall ClickUp ClickUp, there was a time where we bought billboards all across the country. And our pitch was all your work in one place or one app to rule them all. So from the genesis, we have been focused on businesses and teams don't need to be working across a dozen tools, but we should be consolidating work more and more. So ClickUp is your everything app for all your work. We bring together docs, tasks, projects, clips, all the different tools that you use, whiteboards. You bring all of these tools together in one place. So instead of you having to toggle multiple different tools, all your work stays in one place. And the gains of that is more productivity and more efficiency because you don't lose time you don't lose time in switching context. And we have a lot of good stuff coming around, but we are building to that vision where we want to build the model work stack, which is really one tool or one app to rule them all.
00:03:34 · Cameron Herold
[00:03:34] S2: So one of the things I that I love about this tool is that it is kind of everything that you need in one space. It's also very clean, very easy to understand, very intuitive. But at the same time, it's complicated if you've never used a tool like this or you're switching from another. How... And and a friend of mine said one time that a a shovel does not dig a hole. Right? If you give somebody a shovel, it can just stand there unless you know how to use that tool. Right? Like, this iPhone would make a great hammer if I wanted to smash stuff in. But how do how do you teach companies how to adopt a tool like this when they're not using anything in this space?
00:04:13 · Gaurav Agarwal
[00:04:13] S0: ClickUp score... You you may question, like, there are other products like ClickUp. How is ClickUp unique and differentiated? Not only do we have the best platform vision, but we are also the most flexible platform. So that means now this shovel can be shovels in different sizes and different tools that further adds that layer of complexity that not only do I not know how to use the shovel, but what you're giving me is this Lego block type shovel that I can use and and assimilate whatever I want to. So that further compounds the complexity that you're talking about. Ultimately, it comes down to because the platform is so flexible, I would say there are two groups of users who want to use ClickUp. There are the power users, and these are the operation nerds. They care a lot about process and they care about how does one thing here impacts the other thing somewhere else. And for them, they love the tool because for them, they can build whatever they wanna build out of it. And that's what they appreciate. They they... We we have a lot of resources. We have ClickUp University. We give them all the information that they need, but then we get out of their way and they set up things the way they want to set up. But then for the other people who would rather... Who who who need a hole more than they want to dig a hole themselves. Yeah. Because the platform is so powerful, we package solutions on top of it. So for example, this is... We we we found it so amusing. The number one CRM for small businesses on g two is not HubSpot, it's ClickUp. And we can do it for, like, why? How... Why are people doing it? And it turns out that they are using our our CRM template. So so what we do is on one side, we want to preserve the flexibility of the platform and give it to the power users. On the other side, we are constantly packaging more and more solutions on top of the platform so that any business can go and start using it. And then we have a... I I take a lot of pride in our support team that we have built and in our services team. So all the way from free help to paid help. And then there's a rich community of consultants. These are small business owners that make their living off of consulting for ClickUp or providing ClickUp services. So there's a whole ecosystem that people can also engage to build more stuff on ClickUp.
00:06:18 · Cameron Herold, Gaurav Agarwal
[00:06:18] S2: Are the consultants the ones who are kind of leading into companies that maybe don't even know ClickUp exists? They don't know it's a tool that they could be using for the whole that they know they want. Are the consultants saying, hey. Here's what you... Is that kind of your sales team in a way? [00:06:34] S0: Not as much as I would like. So a lot of what our sales team does is because we have a product that people sign up, we have thousands of people signing up every day. They would play with it. And at some point, they'll raise their hand and then say, I need help. I want to explore a bigger use case. That's when our sales team gets involved. But because, there's almost a parallel ecosystem running that our consultants... Our vetted consultants have created for themselves where you will come across a lot of these promotion materials that they have on their marketing, which is... So I came across this two weeks ago that I'm a realist... I work, and build software for real estate brokers. You double click on it and what she's doing... What that broker... What that consultant is doing is she has set up her old business using ClickUp as the back end. But what she is doing is she's building workflow software for real estate brokers. [00:07:21] S2: Interesting. Is that similar to what Go High Level is doing right now where they're almost creating these, like, apps that you can almost white label and use? Is that a similar model?
00:07:21 · Cameron Herold, Gaurav Agarwal
[00:07:21] S2: Interesting. Is that similar to what Go High Level is doing right now where they're almost creating these, like, apps that you can almost white label and use? Is that a similar model? [00:07:32] S0: No. I would say this is closer to what, say, an Airtable would look like if it was for SMB where Okay. It's still very much a ClickUp tool. So we're not allow... We're not white labeling it, but the consultant is the person who captures majority of the value that is built. Because, ultimately, the client, the customer still pays only the license cost to ClickUp, but a lot of the dollars is generated in the service fees, which is then captured by the consultant. [00:07:59] S2: Have you... I don't know whether HighLevel is any kind of a competitor in any way to ClickUp in in terms of, like, one or two of the little potential parts of the of the software. But what do you like and not like about that GoHighLevel almost multilevel marketing on top of a multilevel marketing model? Do you know much about that, or can you speak to that?