What is ClickUp?
Running a successful startup can be an exciting, yet challenging experience. It is essential for founders to have efficient project management tools in place to ensure that tasks are completed on time and within budget. In Business Laid Bare’s humble opinion, ClickUp is one of the best project management software tools available for startups today, offering powerful features and customization options that allow startups to enable their teams to be productive as possible.
Benefits of Using ClickUp
As a startup, it is essential to have effective project management tools in place to ensure that your projects, deadlines, and areas of accountability are completed on time and with ease much ease as possible. After all, you and your team are already busy enough—ClickUp is one of the most popular project management tools for startups. A big reason it gets Business Laid Bare’s stamp of approval? ClickUp provides powerful features that honor the humanity and uniqueness in people…which enables them to plan, organize, and collaborate in a way that makes sense for everyone involved. Meaning, not everyone’s brains work the same way (duh); when you force someone to visualize information that doesn’t make sense with how they naturally sort and visualize information, it’s not going to feel ease-y for them. So, when you empower them to work in ways that align with how their brains work (and then do the same for other team members involved), everyone gets to visualize information that makes unique sense for them without changing the overall “master plan”.
Sometimes, two people may view information the same way, but Person A may not need as much extra context as Person B. Person A may only need to see the tasks that need to be completed, but Person B needs to see tasks AND time spent per task. Or, your project manager may need different views to make doing their work even easier. For example, creating client timelines with start dates, end dates, and dependencies are much better and faster accomplished in Gantt View. This view can also be helpful to showcase internal team members how much wiggle room there is in the project plan before deadlines get missed and scope creep happens. In other cases, utilizing Board View can be helpful to see what are all the tasks in Progress, Blocked, or queued up for next week.
Here’s a graphic below of an example from one of Business Laid Bare’s ClickUp projects:
Here’s how we utilize different ClickUp views for different needs:
- List View: Often used for listing out all the parent tasks and subtasks for a project…like a brain dump of sorts. Also often used by people who like to visualize their tasks as a series of checklists.
- Gantt View: Used to project planning by getting date-specific and creating dependencies— when X task ends, Y task will start. Or, maybe X and Y need to be actioned on simultaneously because task Z is dependent on them both being done.
- Board View: The famous kanban board! This is often the most visual way to see tasks as they move down the line of progress (ClickUp uses the term ‘Status‘). It’s especially helpful to notice when tasks get built up and stuck on a certain status as it’s a great way for a project manager to diagnose why those tasks could be piling up!
- Individual Needs: team members are free to utilize any view they need to help them do their work at any given time! We encourage them to play around with these views (and others in ClickUp that aren’t mentioned here) to see what works best with their brain.
Implementing ClickUp for Your Startup (aka How Business Laid Bare uses ClickUp)
Sure, we could write blog posts for days as to how you could implement ClickUp. But, we’d rather cut through the noise and show you what we’ve done. Watch the ClickUp walkthrough below of how Business Laid Bare uses this project management software:
The One ClickUp Feature That Elevates Your Project Management
As we started writing this section, we figured that we’d zero in on our favorite feature of ClickUp that no other project management software has: Folder Level Views.
ClickUp is the only app that let’s you have a “walk-in closet” style kind of view. If you’re a service provider with clients, for instance, you can have a ‘Clients’ Folder and then list each individual client as a separate List, ClickUp gives you the opportunity to see every single task inside the folder in a way that is helpful instead of overwhelming. Imagine wanting to see every single client-related deliverable that is due “this” week? Consider it done!
Other project management apps, like Asana, only allow you to see one client project at a time. They don’t give you the option to see things at a 10,000-ft view. Context matters, and this by far is such a unique feature that only ClickUp has. This is what makes it the best project management software for startups…because it gives you that “walk-in closet” view when you want it (and it also gives you that “one dresser drawer at a time” view when you want it, too). We love options.
Ready to Get Started (with us)?
Having an effective project management system in place is incredibly important for startups, as it can help their processes run more smoothly and efficiently. ClickUp is a powerful project management software that helps startups take control of their projects, tasks, and teams. It has been specifically designed for teams of any size and offers features such as goal tracking, task list organization, and real-time collaboration.
We get asked a lot of, “Who uses ClickUp?” questions. We’ve spent a great of time figuring out the ins and outs of ClickUp setting it up for ourselves and other fast-growing startups, non-profits, agencies, e-commerce, and brick & mortars to manage everything. If streamlining your ClickUp setup (or other project management software) is on your to-do or wishlist, schedule a call here to see how Business Laid Bare can help you implement a project management setup that gets everyone on your team excited to use and stick with it: www.businesslaidbare.com/consult/
