Monday.com: How to build a global software giant

Monday.com is a cloud-based platform that lets companies build their own work and project management tools. This approach is often referred to as ‘low code, no code’. It allows teams to build their own apps and control workflows. Many SMEs and large businesses in the UK have adopted it.

In the latest episode of the Business Leader Podcast, we speak to the company's co-founder Eran Zinman about how the company has scaled so rapidly.  

Eran Zinman co-founded Monday.com with fellow software engineer Roy Mann in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2012.  It now has more than a quarter of a million customers in over 200 countries. Around 27 per cent of its global revenues come from Europe and the UK is its second-largest market globally. The firm employs more than 2,000 people. 

When Monday.com went public in the US on Nasdaq in 2021 it was valued at $6.8bn (£5.2bn). In October this year, that valuation rose above $14bn, cementing its reputation as another Israeli tech success story.

It’s not often you meet someone who has scaled a company from scratch to a $14bn market valuation. You can learn a lot more detail from the podcast, but a few key points stood out:

Tracking marketing performance

Monday.com found customers through ads on Google, YouTube and Facebook, in the early years in particular. But it found that it was hard to track which ads were effective and therefore how to spend money efficiently. 

To deal with this, it built its own software system, called ‘Big Brain’. It tracks every movement of data (and money) in the business from the purchase of an advert to the end of the funnel when a new customer makes a purchase decision.

Focusing on long-term relationships 

In August, Monday.com hit a key target it had been chasing for a long time: $1bn in annual recurring revenues from subscriptions. “You maximise the long-term relationship with the customer” in cloud subscriptions, says Zinman, rather than focusing on one individual point of sale experience. Much of Monday.com’s growth strategy is built around this insight. 

“It costs much less to retain a happy customer than to acquire a new one,” says Zinman. The company invested in customer success teams in key territories, devoted to maintaining client relationships.