ClickUp and the cost of serving everyone
ClickUp's breadth wins customers who want one product for everything, but it leaves each market open to a product built for that market alone.
ClickUp's decision to serve every kind of team in one product is the source of both its growth and its greatest risk, because each market it serves can eventually be won by a product built for that market alone. The company calls itself "the everything app for work" and promises "one app to replace them all", and the promise has worked: investors valued ClickUp at $4 billion in 2021 (TechCrunch). The value it offers is real, since one product means one subscription, one login and one place for a team's information, but that advantage lasts only as long as no better-suited product exists for the work a team does most.
A specialist in every category
ClickUp's documents compete with Notion and Confluence, its whiteboards with Miro, its chat with Slack, its screen recordings with Loom, its time tracking with Harvest and Toggl, and its sprint planning with Jira and Linear. Each of those products is designed around the habits of the people who use it all day, so a team for which one of these jobs matters most tends to choose the specialist, and ClickUp keeps the teams for which no single job matters enough to justify a separate tool.
Each feature adds complexity for every team
Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, divides what a product does into what should be obvious, what should be easy and what only needs to be possible, and argues that "obvious is all about always": what people always do should be obvious, what they do frequently should be easy, and what they do only sometimes needs merely to be possible (Jason Fried). The more a product does, the more of these decisions its designers have to make, and for ClickUp the decisions conflict, because what a software team does every day a marketing team does occasionally and a finance team may never do, so no single arrangement of the product can make the right things obvious for all of them.
Set-up before use
Because ClickUp is built for every workflow, each team has to decide on its spaces, folders and lists, its statuses, custom fields, views and automations before the product reflects how it works, and the work involved is substantial enough that ClickUp runs a partner programme of Verified Consultants and Solution Partners, many of whom sell implementation and onboarding as a service (ClickUp). A product built for a single market can be set up for that market's work from the start, so its value begins on the first day rather than once the set-up is complete.
How long customers will stay
Where ClickUp's customers accept its complexity, it is often because no product has yet been built for their particular work, and its flexibility lets them assemble something workable in the meantime. That loyalty is likely to last only until a product designed for their work arrives, and as the cost of building software falls, those products arrive sooner. ClickUp's competitors have already begun building for single markets: monday.com, one of the closest and itself built as a flexible platform for any kind of work, now sells separate products for sales teams and for product and development teams, and presented the launch of monday dev in 2023 as part of a strategy of multiple products (monday.com).
The implication
For any business commissioning or building software, the lesson is to define the market first, design for the way that market works and decline features that serve someone else, because focus is what allows a product to make the right things obvious and to be valuable from the first day to the people it is for.
