Latest / Content, Briefly / ClickUp: Amrita Mathur on turning freemium users into paying customers.

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ClickUp: Amrita Mathur on turning freemium users into paying customers. · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  A great example of that is just, like, we chanced upon this idea of sort of poking fun and making fun of any type of project manager 'cause what we realized is, like, almost every company, there's a bunch of different project managers.
• 0:16
  Either they s- are centralized or they sit on these, like, various teams, and almost everybody hates them because they're the [chuckles] ones who are kinda like holding your feet to the fire or, like, you know, asking for a status update.
• 0:28
  Sometimes they run, like, a standup or what have you. Uh, and to some degree, everybody hates them, so we were like, "Okay, let's, let's create a ton of content.
• 0:37
  As a means to reach other people, other ICPs, let's actually target this particular hated project manager." [upbeat music] Hey, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly.
• 0:52
  Today, very excited to be chatting with Amrita Mathur. She's the VP of Marketing at ClickUp.
• 0:57
  If you're not familiar with ClickUp, it's worth doing a quick Google search to see what's been going on there for the past couple of years. They've raised over $500 million. They're on their way to an IPO.
• 1:06
  One thing that Amrita shared is that they get about 70,000 signups for their freemium version of the product every month, and that's really where her work begins. How do you get 70,000 people to pay?
• 1:19
  How do you get them to invite their teammates? How do you make inroads at large companies? Really interesting conversation about how content fits into all that.
• 1:28
  One thing that I took away from this that Amrita said is that the numbers are big, but the yardstick changes for companies who are operating at a scale like this.
• 1:36
  So while 70,000 signups a month might be like, "Oh my gosh, all your problems are solved," actually, there's a...
• 1:43
  creates all kinds of other challenges and opportunities, of course, for growth, and that's where she spends her time. So a lot of cool stuff here. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do too.
• 1:53
  This episode is brought to you by our friends at Animalz, the content agency that delivers growth outcomes for B2B SaaS companies.
• 1:59
  They've been in the game for a long time and have helped build household names like Amplitude, Airtable, and UiPath.
• 2:05
  What I've always loved about Animalz is their constant push to redefine what original and effective content marketing looks like, both in their client work and on their own blog.
• 2:13
  A great recent example of this is the Fraud Fighter's Manual they created with Unit 21. It's a beautifully designed printed book packed with thought leadership from all the top experts in the fraud prevention industry.
• 2:24
  But it's not just an amazing piece of content.
• 2:26
  Animalz and Unit 21 designed a sophisticated distribution strategy that turned the manual into a sought-after asset in the fintech industry and helped generate millions in pipeline for Unit 21.
• 2:35
  I highly recommend reading the full case study that they just published on their blog.
• 2:38
  It's a great read, and while you're there, you can check out lots of other valuable resources on thought leadership, enterprise content marketing, and much more.
• 2:44
  So just head over to animalz.co/jimmy and you'll find everything there. That's Animalz with a Z.co/jimmy. Content Briefly is produced by our friends at Minutia.
• 2:54
  To learn more about their podcast production service, as well as their other adaptive content marketing services, check out minutia.com in the show notes. Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here today.
• 3:06
  Another episode of Content Briefly for you.
• 3:09
  We're back with Amrita Mathur, and I say back because we just did this Q&A about the content role you're hiring for, which I'm assuming is filled by the time this podcast goes up. So anyways, go check that out.
• 3:20
  The video is actually very informative whether you're looking for a role or not. Anyways, Amrita, thank you so much for doing this.
• 3:26
  That conversation made me wanna know so much more about you, about ClickUp, so we'll do that today.
• 3:31
  Would you mind introducing yourself for folks who don't already know you, just a little bit about your background and some of the work you've been up to at ClickUp? Yeah, for sure. So I'm Amrita.
• 3:39
  I support the B2B side of the marketing and go-to-market engine at ClickUp. I've been here about nine months, and it's been a wild ride because ClickUp is a classic PLG company.
• 3:51
  If you're not familiar with PLG, it's like a product-led growth company. We have, like, a very robust, awesome freemium product that a ton of people sign up for every single month.
• 4:00
  I believe it's up to 70,000 signups a month at this point in time. Whoa. Whoa. Yeah. That's, that's insane. It's, it's pretty, it's pretty nuts.
• 4:08
  It's a very robust product, so that's one of the ways that we compete with our competitors is just, like, as soon as you come in, and I think this happened to you, Jimmy, you're just like, "Holy shit, there's so much functionality here- [chuckles]...
• 4:17
  that I can consolidate my current tool stack into ClickUp." And so we win over a lot of people that way. And then, of course, you know, we target individuals.
• 4:25
  Our hope is that them and their team start using it, and then we kind of try to infiltrate the company that they might be working at.
• 4:32
  And so my job, it's like a new function, relatively new function at ClickUp, and my job is to figure out, quote-unquote, the buyer funnel, which is the parallel funnel to the classic PLG funnel.
• 4:44
  So how do we identify who's a buyer, who's perhaps already using us, who's already got a workspace set up? How do we get into their hearts and minds? How do we get them to hand raise?
• 4:54
  And then most importantly, how do we expand within our existing customer accounts where maybe 100, 200 people use us, but hey, maybe there's like 5,000 employees at that company? Yeah. And how do we get...
• 5:03
  How do we go, as my boss describes it, like, wall to wall inside that company?
• 5:08
  So big, big part of why our team was stood up was, okay, we have this great PLG machine here, but we actually need, like, the B2B marketing machine as well in order for us to go sort of upmarket and win horizontal deals across the board.
• 5:22
  Really cool. Really cool. And actually, it's, it is funny, after we talked about the content roles, like, you know, I've heard about ClickUp, but I've never tried it.
• 5:28
  The tagline, "One app to rule them all," it actually really spoke to me because, like, that was the exact problem I had been having, which is that I have five or six tools and I...
• 5:38
  You know, the biggest thing is like, "Okay, where did I put that thing? I can't... There's nowhere to search to find it." Yeah. So anyways, I'm a paying customer now. I really like it. Nice.
• 5:46
  And that's, like, just my honest, unfiltered opinion. I think it's a really cool product.
• 5:50
  So I guess to dive into your role a little bit, you're thinking less or maybe not at all about those 70K signups a month, but more about like- Yeah... okay, now what? You know- Now what? Now that we have this- Yeah...
• 6:01
  massive inbound, how do we start converting those folks? Is that oversimplifying it- Yeah... or is that accurate?It's accurate to a degree.
• 6:09
  So I also don't worry about, 'cause there's a whole team doing this, I don't have to thankfully worry about taking those freemium users and converting them to paying users.
• 6:17
  So you came in as a freemium user, Jimmy, and then you decided at some point to like purchase it and upgrade and be on a paid plan. I don't have to worry about that.
• 6:25
  But what I do have to worry about is, is Jimmy part of a larger entity? Oh, wait a second, he is. How do I infiltrate that entity? Are other people inside Jimmy's org using it? Are, are they- Yeah... contractors?
• 6:35
  Are they freelancers? Who are they? Are they other team members? Oh, wait a second, there's like an actual like larger play here. That's sort of the funnel and the slide wheel that I'm trying to build.
• 6:45
  And it's tough because, you know, even with all the data enrichment we have in the back end, it's hard to identify who's exactly like who are they really, where do they work really, what are their use cases, what are the jobs to be done.
• 6:59
  Yeah. All of that stuff is hard to uncover. Sometimes it's apparent, sometimes it's not.
• 7:03
  And as you can imagine in like really large enterprise companies, like one of our big companies, one of our big customers is Nvidia or VMware, like they're some of the largest ones we have, and even there it's hard to kind of go beyond the first few thousand users.
• 7:17
  So if you're like a Salesforce, you have 20,000 people, 30,000 people working there, how do you consolidate all of that? And so that's sort of the marketing and sales assisted motion that we're trying to build.
• 7:29
  That's so interesting. I'm just like imagining you're like in your control center, you know, and like you see- [laughs]... opportunities for growth everywhere But you have to prioritize. And then you have... Yeah.
• 7:39
  Then you have like your content lever, you know, you have- Yeah... your paid lever. Like how do you- Totaly... think about... I imagine you probably spend a lot of time thinking about like what is...
• 7:47
  How do we prioritize where we put our resources? It's kind of a large question, I guess, but how do you think about that?
• 7:53
  Are there like a couple big things you're always chipping away at, or is it kind of changing based on like where you see the most opportunity?
• 8:00
  Yeah, a little bit of both, but there is like a flywheel or, or a machine to be built here, right? And we're further along than when I started, but it's obviously still not all fully built.
• 8:09
  So the way I've thought about it is like there's sort of like roughly three buckets, okay? One bucket is this like just, I just think of it as like mass marketing. You gotta go big. It's like top.
• 8:19
  Some people call it top of funnel. I just think of it as like mass marketing. So whatever those channels are, often quite content power channels, right?
• 8:27
  Let, let's say as an example, we wanted to crack TikTok and Instagram, and the only way to do that is to have like an insane, ambitious impressions goal.
• 8:36
  So we said to ourselves, "Hey, can we crack 10 million impressions on TikTok?" Roughly, I mean, obviously, TikTok is like a whole bunch of people. You don't know who works where.
• 8:44
  But in order for it to like have any legs, it had to be insane. So 10 million impressions is really hard, and particularly hard to do every single month in a repeatable fashion. But we have cracked that, right?
• 8:56
  And now there's been like two months in a row that we've actually gotten up to close to 20 million impressions. Wow. How many of those people are actually gonna be buyers and users of ClickUp? Hard to say.
• 9:06
  There's ways to measure that.
• 9:07
  One of the things we're gonna try to do is run some contests, get people from offsite to onsite, get them to share their email addresses, which we'll enrich in the back end, blah, blah, blah.
• 9:15
  So we'll know, oh, okay, of these 10 million impressions, maybe 5K are actual potential buyers, or 10K or whatever, right? So we just want a sense of that to continue investing in this channel.
• 9:25
  But there's that style of mass marketing, right? Like any content you produce, mass market, whatever. Then there's the next layer.
• 9:32
  Personally, I love that layer, which is really as targeted as you can, and pick off like a lot of the sardines, the tuna, and the whales. And by that I mean there's many...
• 9:43
  You know, we're a horizontal product, but I've also worked at companies where it's not a horizontal product and it's very specific to like a vertical or an industry or an ICP or whatever.
• 9:52
  ClickUp's a horizontal product, so what that means is we have five core ICPs. We are industry agnostic, but we're particularly strong in three or four different industries.
• 10:03
  So now I have to think about, oh, what are the marketing strategies? What are the content that I can create for all of these ICPs?
• 10:09
  By the way, do they have like common binding factors here that can just be like one piece of content? Oh yeah, there is. Great.
• 10:15
  So I'm gonna do a little bit of that, and then I'm gonna do a little bit of the extremely targeted ICP specific content.
• 10:21
  Maybe there are some jobs that are roughly the same across the board, and I might create content around that. So that's the layer where I feel like any company I've ever worked at, like I've almost always started there.
• 10:35
  And then from there you go further up, like mass market, or you go further down and go very deep and targeted. But you always start at this like medium layer. You know? It's like
• 10:43
  I just think of it as like point of view and ICP focused content. Like what do these people care about? Where do they hang out? How can we reach them? And just creating content around that.
• 10:54
  So that's the second bucket, if you will.
• 10:57
  And then the third bucket, I just loosely call it ABX or ABM, which is that sort of more like harpoon strategy where you go after a specific set of accounts and do some very specific things for those target accounts.
• 11:11
  That is hard to scale, but that's kinda the point. Like it's like you're doing something very bespoke. Yeah, you might have a playbook.
• 11:18
  Yeah, it might be roughly the same for each of those accounts, but you have a very bespoke playbook for that specific account and that specific strategy, and often you work with like the AE or the CSM on that account.
• 11:29
  So it's like, you know, at ClickUp, we've just come up with this like little trifecta of like, so there's like me or sometimes like an ABM marketing person, the account executive on that account who initially sold that account, and the sales engineer on it who intimately knows their implementation and how they use it and has all the metrics at the back of their head.
• 11:49
  And like we together strategize, like, okay, how are we gonna now blow the doors wide open at Nvidia or VMware or Nike or whoever that big customer is. So that's sort of the three buckets I operate in.
• 12:01
  As you can tell, one of them's very clearly expansion focused, and the other two are like both new logo and expansion.Got it. Uh, but- So- But there's probably better ways, I don't know.
• 12:11
  This is just, like, rudimentary and I had to start somewhere. My main takeaway from what you just said is scale. This is all happening at a large scale.
• 12:19
  And maybe for people who are not familiar with ClickUp, the company has raised five hundred plus million dollars on the path to IPO. You have seventy thousand people a month. This is just insane to me.
• 12:30
  It's, like, hard to even wrap my brain around that. And so everything you do happens at a huge scale. You can't just put out one blog post and, you know, see what happens.
• 12:40
  Like, once you identify those ICPs, I'm assuming you probably go hard at it in the same way that you've gone hard at TikTok or other channels. Yeah, we try. I will admit that it's hard to compete with the scale of PLG.
• 12:55
  Like, just to, like, reset for a second, think of this as I was saying in the other interview that we did, like, this is, like, the... Let's just call this the buyer funnel for a second.
• 13:04
  This buyer funnel is like a Lego block on top of the base label of PLG already. Right. Right?
• 13:10
  It's like, it's like it's- they're parallel machines, but it's like the Lego block on top, and it's very, very hard to compete with the volume that the PLG machine produces.
• 13:19
  Like, seventy thousand signups, you know, three percent of them convert within the same month to paying, and then so on and so forth. Like, all this stuff, right?
• 13:26
  Even though those numbers are, like, seem small, the percentages, it's actually, like, high volume, so it's really hard to compete with that in the same way.
• 13:34
  One of the biggest-- Just to give you a sense of, like, the difference in scale, one of the biggest things we did, call it like an online summit, if you will, like an event that had seven, eight different sessions.
• 13:46
  It was like an all-day thing. I pulled that together with the team almost, like, in the first few months that I joined. So I think we did this in November, and I joined in August. And it was, like, very ICP-focused.
• 13:56
  We focused on only two ICPs. Uh, one of them was, like, this, like, project management ICP, and the other one was, like, CXO ICP, but more, like, SKUs, like, slightly smaller, like an SMB CXO.
• 14:08
  The reason we chose those two, because their jobs to be done are actually, like, strangely similar. Mm-hmm.
• 14:12
  So all the content was, like, built around that, and it was a huge win to have eight thousand signups to that summit. It was a huge win, but eight thousand does not compete with seventy thousand every month.
• 14:23
  [chuckles] And it took a shit ton of effort to get that content right- I bet... and get it seen and get it viewed, even though, you know, we could milk it and cut it down and use it on all sorts of different channels.
• 14:34
  Like, it was a lot of effort. And, you know, I'll, I'll admit this freely, like, it was a win in my mind and in front of the team, obviously.
• 14:42
  Like, we were all, like, very happy with that outcome 'cause ClickUp had never done anything like that before, particularly for that ICP.
• 14:49
  But when you actually zoom out, it actually pales in comparison to this other machine that already exists, you know? Yeah. And then you start thinking, h- what are the trade-offs?
• 14:58
  How do we place, how do we place these bets? How much money are we willing to spend on these things? Et cetera, et cetera. That's so interesting- That's-...
• 15:04
  'cause eight thousand strikes me as a ton of people to sign up- I know... for an event. Yeah. I know. It's, it's only s- Yeah. I guess, yeah, it's only small compared to the seventy thousand. Yeah.
• 15:14
  And the quality, if you just think about everything as a lead, if you will, right, like, for a second, the lead quality or the persona that you're attracting is obviously different than the person that's just signing up to, like, do their wedding planning or whatever the heck it is- Right...
• 15:27
  that sometimes people sign up for. The intent is different. The lead quality is different. The demographics might be different.
• 15:33
  So you could argue that that eight thousand is worth something different than the seventy thousand sign-ups.
• 15:38
  But even with that, even with this mental exercise that I would do sometimes, where it's like, oh, each lead here is, let's say, just give it a value. It's worth a hundred bucks a pop.
• 15:47
  How much is the PLG funnel, like, sign-up worth? Okay, twenty-five bucks a pop. So it's like, like, it still pales in comparison, you know? So that's- Yeah. Yeah... that's the thing.
• 15:56
  I think my conclusion is content marketing, but really any kind of B2B marketing at a PLG company is really, really hard to get right because the unit economics just don't ladder up. I would love to dive...
• 16:08
  That's so interesting you said that. I would love to talk a little bit more about that.
• 16:12
  You know, in my years of content marketing, there is a sweet spot of a company with a certain type of product and a certain cost of acquisition, a certain lifetime value that's, like, perfect.
• 16:25
  Perfect candidate for content marketing. And usually, the more expensive the product is, the more sense it makes to do content marketing. Whereas, like- Correct...
• 16:33
  you know, back in my agency days, like, we actually tried to work with a few direct-to-consumer companies who sold, like, uh, they sold twenty dollar SKUs. We couldn't do it.
• 16:40
  Like, we just could not make those unit economics work.
• 16:44
  One thing I'm very interested in is, especially as you start thinking about, like, enterprise deals, kind of the land and expand mentality of, like, getting into some of these larger companies, the numbers I'm guessing probably start to make a little more sense, but then you're getting, really getting more into ABM and sales and...
• 17:01
  I mean, I'm sure content d- or does content still have a role in, in that type of work? You know, or do you-- are you looking more to, like, sales, product marketing, things like that to get those deals on board?
• 17:13
  I'm of the mindset that regardless of what you call it, product marketing or whatever, ABM, everything is powered by content. Like, everything.
• 17:22
  Like, there's nothing in marketing that's not powered by content or creative or, or a mix of both. So content's sort of, like, never gonna go away. It's just more like which game do you wanna play? Do you wanna play...
• 17:35
  Like, for example, we have this, like, internally use this term, the blog machine, and the blog machine is really just, like, something crazy. Like, it's like a hundred blog posts a month, sometimes more.
• 17:44
  Actually, like, the team that we handed off to the SEO team, I think their, their tar- their new target is two hundred blog posts a month.
• 17:51
  Produce two hundred blog posts a month across, like, a variety of these, like, themes that we've narrowed it down to, and the entire job of the blog post is just to suck people in, bring them on site, and get them to sign up.
• 18:03
  Mm-hmm. And you just make that sign up so friction free, you make it so easy that you just capture that email, you capture that sort of intent, even if it's, like, lo-fi intent, right?
• 18:13
  And so there's that style of content marketing, and then there's, like, the rest of content marketing, which is like-Point of view-led, you know, thematic is sort of like trying to take you from whatever this intent is and trying to convince you down the funnel that convince and convert content is really, really important.
• 18:29
  And however you deliver it, wherever you deliver it, whether it's just for ABM accounts or non-ABM accounts or mass, like it needs to be done. So that's never going away. It's really just what are the yardsticks?
• 18:40
  How do you measure that? Are you willing to... Let's just make it about the economics. Are you willing to spend more to, in theory, gain more? And are you able to draw like a line to that? So our ACB is tiny as well.
• 18:56
  So it's-- I've come from companies where one deal would be like 100K a year. Here, our land motion is like something like 10, and if it comes from marketing, it's usually a lot higher, but like 15K a year. You know?
• 19:09
  Mm-hmm. 15K and 100K, there's a world of a difference in that. So anything that we do has to...
• 19:15
  And any, quote-unquote, "opportunity" that comes of it, we have an internal target for what that number should be in terms of the unit economics. Yeah.
• 19:24
  And it is not high, and it's really hard to do good marketing when you're trying to like create efficiency in parallel. Yeah. And you also don't know what works.
• 19:36
  You also don't know yet what works, so it's like you're kinda like experimenting and moving stuff around constantly. Sometimes you bet more over here, sometimes you bet more over there.
• 19:46
  So that whole s- thing has been pretty tough, but at least I will say content marketing is not gonna go away. Everything is powered ultimately by some form of content.
• 19:54
  It's just about like where you choose to play and, and what game you choose to play. Yeah, yeah.
• 19:58
  We had John Collins on the podcast recently who did content at Intercom and then Ramp, and one of the things that we were discussing was a sort of a, a version of what you just said, which is that content happens across the entire company now.
• 20:11
  It's no longer like a content team that just writes blog posts to try to get traffic. I mean, that probably still happens too, but now content- Yeah... is happening in a lot of other places also. Yeah.
• 20:21
  Uh, which is fascinating. Since I've signed up for ClickUp, I probably get two or three emails a week which- Yeah. Product updates. Yeah, they're product updates.
• 20:29
  I'm like, dang, it's very impressive, and I read them because as a new user, I wanna understand what, you know, what am I missing? Like, I wanna try to get the most out of this.
• 20:38
  I mean, obviously that's a form of content that is- Mm-hmm... different from like the new user acquisition stuff that you might do. Is there like a- Yeah...
• 20:45
  centralized place that content happens at ClickUp, or do different teams- No... have content marketers? Yeah. So far it's been different teams. So there's roughly three teams.
• 20:55
  One is the search led team that I told you about, which is, which mainly like powers the blog machine. So that's just like, again, just like low-hanging fruit. We're just trying to capture as much intent as possible.
• 21:05
  That's a pure SEO play. The second content team is our team, which is, you could argue, a little bit more mid-market enterprise focused, but of course, we try to like capture all the SMB audience as well.
• 21:17
  And it's a little, you know, while we are playing like the TikTok, Instagram, like mass impressions game as well, we're, we're still trying to like...
• 21:24
  I'd say like we're pretty hyper-focused on, for the lack of a better word, like high quality lead gen and conversion. And then there's a product-oriented team, like a product...
• 21:36
  almost like part of the product launch team that creates content for like new features. Sometimes our team will help out depending on what it is, if we have a joint campaign going.
• 21:47
  For example, I'll, I'll give a great example of that. We launched our AI product earlier this year in February. My team launched it. Like, I launched it. I was the launch manager of that, right?
• 21:57
  So I designed the campaign, the messaging, the blah, blah, blah, all the content that came with it. We did like a launch party, like a virtual launch party that came with it.
• 22:03
  All of the other content, video content that got produced around that, our team did that. So there are situations where like it's such a big launch that it makes sense for like a central team to do it. Mm-hmm.
• 22:13
  But usually, like every little feature that we do or like some enhancements that we make, there's like a product marketing, product launch team that kind of like works on that, and that has its own life and its own process, and there's some intersections, but we keep it pretty MECE.
• 22:27
  And I would say there's actually a fourth team, so I, I lied earlier. There's a fourth team that is very centered around user education that almost picks up where the product launch team drops off.
• 22:38
  So we call that ClickUp University, and ClickUp University has tons of videos, tons of webinars around how to use a specific feature or this product.
• 22:49
  It can be super niche, or it can be like super broad, and there's tons and tons of ClickUp University style content that gets produced as well, and that's a actually pretty small crack team that does that.
• 22:59
  But they are the product experts.
• 23:01
  Like if you had any of those guys, like if you asked them, "Hey, can you teach me how to use this blah, blah, blah," like whiteboards or whatever, oh, they could do that in a jiffy, right?
• 23:10
  Whereas I wouldn't be able to, and nobody on our content marketing team would be able to because we're trying to get into the hearts and minds of the buyers, not necessarily explaining the feature to a certain level of depth.
• 23:20
  Right. Other tech companies, this is all part of product marketing. At our company, we've chosen to have a separate education arm because we're such a horizontal product.
• 23:29
  You need to know so much about so many things that it just makes sense to have it a, in a separate entity. Yeah. Yeah. I love that you used the phrase MECE. If, if people don't know what that means, go Google it.
• 23:39
  Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive. Very helpful framework, especially for content marketers.
• 23:44
  As a VP, you know, you're thinking about content a lot, I imagine, but you're not thinking about it in the same way that a content marketer thinks about it. You have a, you know, the 30,000-foot view.
• 23:56
  And I'm thinking of, you know, the content marketers who sort of aspire to, you know, work their way into VP roles one day.
• 24:04
  What's the perfect relationship between you, the VP, and whoever your primary point person is for content? Like, what types of conversations do you want to have with that person?
• 24:13
  How much do you want them thinking about, you know, overall business goals versus sort of focusing on the craft and making sure that it's efficient and the quality is high and, and things like that? Yeah.
• 24:25
  I would say that...I think that ClickUp and Stripe and a whole bunch of other companies are, like, super flat in that way. So there's no, like, real ivory tower. There's no, like...
• 24:39
  I mean, I appreciate the phrase 30,000-foot level. I, I know what you mean, but, you know, most of us are...
• 24:45
  Most of my peers and I are just, like, traversing the whole th- Like, there's, like, it's, it's 30,000, yes, on one day, but, like, the next day you're, like, in there editing copy and, like, making something better or at least having the conversation about, like, a pivot or whatever.
• 24:58
  Right. So, you know, the conversations are typically something to the effect of, "Hey, we have neglected this particular ICP or this particular job to be done. This is an important one for us.
• 25:12
  Our, you know, win-loss data shows it," or what have you. "We need to have, like, a campaign or content around it." And then we typically do a bit of ideation.
• 25:21
  You know, we have jumping-off points as to, to see, like, what has worked in the past, and some of it's like, "Oh, you know, we should just do something totally net new, and this audience is actually hard to capture."
• 25:30
  For example, developers and engineering managers are an ICP for us. But guess what? They're not hanging out on LinkedIn like the rest of us marketers. [chuckles] Right. So how are you gonna reach them?
• 25:40
  What content is gonna speak to them? It's a different game altogether, right? So that's kind of, like, where the ICP research, the talk track, the narrative that we care about needs to be, like, super, super clear.
• 25:51
  And then we, we might ideate and try a few things to see what sticks. And then when something sticks, then we latch onto that and then kind of blow that up further.
• 26:00
  A great example of that is just, like, we chanced upon this idea of sort of poking fun and making fun of any type of project manager, 'cause what we realized is, like, almost every company, there's a bunch of different project managers.
• 26:15
  Either they are centralized or they sit on these, like, various teams, and almost everybody hates them- [chuckles]... because they're the [chuckles]
• 26:22
  ones who are kinda, like, holding your feet to the fire or, like, you know, asking for a status update. Sometimes they run, like, a stand-up or what have you. And to some degree, everybody hates them.
• 26:32
  So we were like, "Okay, let's create a ton of content as a means to reach other people, other ICPs.
• 26:39
  Let's actually target this particular hated project manager," you know, because there'll be so many other people that will be like, "Oh, wait a second, they totally get me and my plight," and like, "Oh, wow, ClickUp's a better way to do things," right?
• 26:49
  So- Yeah, that's great... my point is that you won't necessarily know that upfront. You might.
• 26:55
  You might through, like, great research and talking to a ton of your customers, but you might not necessarily know that until you actually, like, have produced something that, like, hits a nerve.
• 27:06
  And, like, you have to be so watchful to know what hits a nerve and then just double down on it really, really fast, right? It's like, so we kinda chanced upon that, and now it's, like, a shtick that we just have.
• 27:16
  That's, like, a POV. That's a narrative that we've just doubled down on. And so similarly for devs and engineering managers or whatever, we're gonna have to find out, like, what is that nerve, you know?
• 27:25
  I have a hunch on what that is through some research, but I don't know for sure, and so we're gonna have to try different angles to figure that out. Really cool. Really cool. I love it.
• 27:34
  I could ask you questions for hours, honestly. I wanna be respectful of your time, though. I would encourage people, go to ClickUp. Like, go...
• 27:41
  Now that you've kind of heard a little bit of the behind the scenes, like, go to the site, click around the blog, check out some of the content, and just see what it looks like on the other side, you know?
• 27:51
  At this type of scale, it's really interesting. And the product, too, like I said, is really good. And I have no incentive to say that other than I think it's really good.
• 27:59
  Amrita, can we send folks to connect with you or s- you know, follow along with your work, LinkedIn or- Yeah... Twitter or anywhere else? Yeah, for sure. No, I'm on, I'm on LinkedIn a fair bit.
• 28:09
  I've been on Twitter for a long time, but less active there now. And then, of course, like, you can follow ClickUp on LinkedIn as well, 'cause we always post hilarious content that, uh, hopefully you guys like.
• 28:19
  And we're always looking for inspiration, too, so if you ever see anything cool that you think we could capitalize on, just, like, pop me a note, and we'll take it from there. But- Cool. Love it... you know, I just...
• 28:30
  I would love to end by saying we have not figured it out by any means. We're sort of flying blind like everybody else. All I know is different yardsticks cannot measure it the same way.
• 28:41
  It's absolutely two different yardsticks. Totally. Totally.
• 28:44
  Well, it's really cool to watch, and it's also really cool to get kind of a behind-the-scenes look of how a company like this operates, so thank you, and thank you for your time.
• 28:52
  And, uh, maybe we can check in again a year from now and see how all this has evolved since then. That would be a good check-in. Yeah. Cool. Thank you. I'll set a reminder- Thanks for having me...
• 29:01
  and I'll be back in touch about that. Amrita, thanks so much. Really appreciate it. [outro music]