The Crazy Story of Monday.com

[didyousaysomething]

Monday.com is one of the craziest stories in the software world.

Founded in 2012, they raise $384m through 8 rounds of fundraising.

Flash forward to 2019….

They are spending $100m/year on ads. 116% of their revenue at the peak.

From 2019-2021 it seemed like every time I touched my Facebook or went to YouTube I saw several Monday.com ads. Their ad frequency must have been off the charts.

Now not only did they get billions of impressions, but if someone skips a YouTube ad within the first few seconds, you don’t get charged. So in reality they likely got 3-5 billion additional brand impressions for free.

I remember thinking “you can’t brute force your way into relevancy, that’s crazy”.

But if you have a solid product to back it up (which clearly they did), then it looks like their gamble paid off.

The company IPOs and goes public in 2021 and has solid fundamentals and growth come 2023.

A recent SaaStr analysis shows they are up 91% YoY doing $400m ARR today. They followed the SaaS scaling blueprint of going both upmarket and multi product as they grew.

And their ad spending is way down as they shift tack to a more sales oriented motion.

This is a huge takeaway.

What gets you from A -> B, doesn’t have to be what gets you from B -> C.

 

[przemek]

@didyousaysomething Could you help summarize what lessons new SaaS founders can learn from the case of Monday.com?

They went through a lot of fundraising to afford doing advertisement.

It was basically a gamble that paid off.

I don't see the necessity of such gamble and mental pressure when a SaaS can be grown in a more stable and fun way!

 

[saralynn1]

@przemek It’s a great story, but one that would look quite different for a new founder bootstrapping.

In that case I wouldn’t recommend trying paid ads - you don’t have the critical mass for it be effective like big platforms.

Instead you have to get more personal with your audience like using niche communities and emails etc.

You can’t expect to launch a new work management platform to compete with Monday, Asana etc.

Instead go about it differently like work management for a niche industry or customer segment.

But what we can take away from this is the product-led development that all great tech companies of this era are putting into practice.

Anyone can do that.

Being constantly driven by your customer, building MVPs and releasing and testing often.

There’s loads of info on this for people just starting out.

 

[przemek]

@saralynn1 Is there a way we could connect on LinkedIn? Would love to stay connected and exchange knowledge from time to time .

 

[saralynn1]

@przemek I’ll send you a dm

 

[lvi50]

@didyousaysomething I remember clearly, it was everywhere!

What we can learn valuable from this story are the following things in my opinion:

- Success takes time. Work on the product and even more on your marketing, content and strategy.

- Be patient, raise money when you need to;

- There is not only one way of doing things. Markets change, companies change, times change - and most of the time in circles. Be aware of your surroundings.

 

[matheushorta]

@didyousaysomething I literally saw twenty of their ads a day. I remember that shit.

 

[didyousaysomething]

@matheushorta Yup. We all did.

 

[joyfulspirit68]

@didyousaysomething Note to self:

Raise $384M on my next project.

 

[didyousaysomething]

@joyfulspirit68 Ha totally unrealistic for 99.999% of SaaS. But I am still amazed it worked.

 

[joyfulspirit68]

@didyousaysomething Kind of the same thing for the Ring doorbell.