Ask HN: How can a product like ClickUp grow so fast (or even grow at all)? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can a product like ClickUp grow so fast (or even grow at all)?

5 pointsoakenfloor4 comments

When ClickUp launched in 2017 there were dozens, if not hundreds of task management services already. How can a product like this, in a market so saturated, convince businesses to change where they do their work and start paying for it, to the point where it has become more coveted than all of its competitors? the product didn't seem particularly unique, so what's the deal with something like that? how did it make itself visible? is this still doable these days?

I'd compare it to launching yet another chat app for businesses and taking all of Slack customers, for example. Does that even make sense?

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Software fossilizes once it reaches a certain popularity. And while the companies will often add new features they will usually not touch the core functionality, as that is extremely risky. From the perspective of a company with a working software product it's always better to add incremental improvements than to refactor large core features, as most large changes will increase customer churn.

And that's how new incumbents get a chance to disrupt existing solutions: Their risk-reward calculation is vastly different so they can be much bolder when experimenting with core functionality, which sometimes leads to a product experience that is noticeably different (not always better) than existing products. Also, incumbents can use cutting edge technologies to build their products whereas existing solutions are burdened with their "legacy" tech. Newer is not always better but in certain areas (e.g. frontend development) technologies have progressed quite a bit and that gives incumbents an advantage.

Also, the market for software products is still growing very fast as more and more companies start using cloud-based software to organize work, so there's a large influx of customers that have never used any task management software before.

That is a really interesting perspective. How would the incumbent continue to be able to make risk-reward calculation fitting that of the challenger, even after it has "fossilized", so that it can continue to compete with the nonstop rise of challengers?

Raising $537M and throwing a significant portion of it towards customer acquisition probably helped a lot

I think Notion got small businesses / startups to look beyond Google Docs. I think Click Up got lucky with timing when people were looking out.

Besides that their 'All in One' campaign also appealed to Startups. My friend started using Clickup because of their 'All in One' promise.

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