Shaun Clark

Shaun Clark is the CEO and co-founder of HighLevel, the white-label marketing platform that's become the backbone of thousands of agencies worldwide. He co-founded the company on April 1, 2018 alongside Varun Vairavan and Robin Alex.

This article is based on a video. Watch the full video here.

I've had Zoom calls with Shaun. A lot of early adopters have. If something major goes wrong, you can DM him directly and he'll take care of you. He's in the weeds with us. He listens. He loves what he does and loves his team.

Background

Shaun is based in Eugene, Oregon. He studied Computer Science at Oregon State University but made the pivotal decision to drop out and pursue entrepreneurship — his mother told him he could always go back if things didn't work out. He started his first website and server business in high school.

Before HighLevel, Shaun built several companies:

• AnswerConnect (co-founded 2003) — Customer call services
• Solestruck — E-commerce, where he served as COO
• Blue Columbia Holdings (founded 2008) — Consulting services
• InvoiceSherpa (founded 2015) — Automated delinquent invoice collection

HighLevel is his third successful SaaS company.

How HighLevel Started

The story starts with InvoiceSherpa. Shaun hit the ceiling on what that product could do, so he surveyed his clients: "What's your biggest business need?" The overwhelming answer was customer acquisition.

He and his co-founders built a text marketing and reputation platform, but customers kept canceling after a few months. The problem wasn't the software — it was implementation. Business owners didn't want to learn marketing tools. They wanted someone to do it for them.

That insight changed everything. Instead of selling directly to businesses, they rebuilt the platform for marketing agencies with a white-label model. The agency and the software became inseparable — clients couldn't cut out their agency once they discovered the software was affordable on its own. That's the model that took off.

Leadership Style

Shaun puts out two or three Loom videos every single day — updates, releases, bug fixes, enhancements. You might think that's an exaggeration. It's not. The man records himself walking through new features and posts them directly to the community. Back in the early days, you might have thought Chase Buckner was the founder because Chase was making all the tutorial videos, but Shaun was always right there behind the scenes.

His philosophy on hiring: "Hire people who are way better than you are, and more importantly, hire them before you think you need to." He structures product managers as mini-CEOs who own their feature sets, engage directly with customers, and are accountable for KPIs.

The company was profitable from day one. When they brought in private equity (a $60M+ round), it wasn't for capital — it was for operational expertise and scaling guidance.

On The Marketing Show

Shaun has appeared on The Marketing Show multiple times:

• Testimonial for James Hurst
• Sneak Peek of Estimates, Proposals and E-Signatures
• How to Migrate Clients from Other CRMs

He also does the daily feature walkthrough videos on the official HighLevel channel — like the inbound webhooks demo that's part of the Premium Workflow Actions rollout.

See Also

• HighLevel Who's Who — The full list of 50 key players in the ecosystem
• HighLevel — The platform Shaun built