monday.com Ltd. (MNDY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

First of all, I want to give a warm welcome to our guests who traveled all the way, I think, a very long distance from Israel. A real pleasure to have you guys, and this is truly a special company, a truly special company. And we are excited to host you guys here. Ran Zinman co-founder and co-CEO. And we've not met before, Daniel, you're the chief product officer of the company. I've seen you on Zoom meetings, et cetera, so good to meet you in person. And of course, my co-moderator, Gili, who is actually probably the only person here in the audience who has actually visited the company in their headquarters. What was it like? What was...

Oh, another person.

You've been too? Okay, sorry about that. Yes.

Maybe I'll speak to it this time, but next time you can.

He spoke the local language.

Yes, I know. The energy was unparalleled really. It was really exciting to see. So thank you for having me.

So the exciting past year or so, you guys have done amazingly well, performed all the expectations -- performed even better than people's expectations. I am still intrigued. This is such a young company, small company, so much potential. I want to ask you, where do you see the company 5 years from -- what are your and Roy's aspirations for where you want this company to be 5 years from now?

Yes. So I think you've all seen the story of Monday. For us, it's been an evolution since day 1. We built a very robust platform from day 1. The secret sauce and what makes Monday very unique is that from day 1, we want to build a software that's 100% flexible. Nothing was pre-built, nothing was rigid. Customers from day 1 customize the software, build their own tools. And the evolution of that was packaging that into products. And those were not born out of thin air. We actually saw our customers using Monday for CRM. We saw our customers using that to manage their teams. So we really took this a step further and packaged those into separate products. So when we look into the future, I see a future where we have more of these products and eventually customers will buy the Monday suite. So basically a bunch of products built on top of a very powerful platform. And what we want to be is that customer will manage the core of their work on Monday across different departments. And by doing that, the benefit of having all that information on one platform is unparalleled because I think what happened with software today is that eventually it creates silos within an organization. So much data is lost in the sales management software, in the dev management software, in the customer success team, in projects management. And we want to make this data accessible. We want works to be streamlined, not be focused on one product, but streamlined across multiple products. And by that, giving true value to our customers.

And for that vision to come to fruition, Daniel What needs to be done on the product side?

Yes, I think first of all, like the most important part is to continue and elaborate the platform. I think that the platform and all the building blocks that we have are basically what drives everything that we do forward, so things like Monday DB for instance, which is a new data layer that we've just released the first version. Workflows, which is a new building block that we just announced. I think these are the most important parts. And also aside from the platform, we also want to invest a lot in not only having the best and most robust platform that is, but also opening it up to external developers because they feel that, with all the products that we are going to do, managing core aspects of work, we also want to reach the long tail needs of so many different business verticals that are using Monday for basically everything. So I think that also opening the platform together with a stronger ecosystem is a key.

So between what you guys said, you talked about packaged applications kind of thing. And then Daniel, you talked about the platform itself. So this is not ERP because it's not back office stuff. So what is this then? Project management, CRM, HR, finance? And how do you do it in such a way that you're not replicating what others have done for decades? What kind of white spaces do you see in the market still?

So I think it's a combination of both unique abilities the platform offers. The whole idea behind Monday and -- even seeing the momentum we've seen with the new products, which was even surprising for us to some extent to see that growth and that momentum, the feedback we get from users is that they always wanted to control their software. They felt that by using existing software, no matter which vertical it is, it always felt limited to some extent. And I really envisioned a future of software to be more flexible. This whole idea that everybody is working in the same way, I think, it's an old way to think about and build software. And to give that to people, I think that's the future of software and how it will evolve over time across many verticals. So I think every customer that uses Monday is getting used to controlling their own software, customize it for their own needs. And it's really hard to go back from having that ability. So all those products benefit from that. And also the fact that we can package it on the same platform gives so much compounding value because every improvement we add to the platform affects all products. Every improvement we have with one product affects another one. So it just makes the company very efficient over time, in building new products, in and improving the platform. It's compounding value across the board.

Got it. Any customer you can talk to who has deployed the most amount of the Monday.com product suite also across big scale?

Yes. So I don't have like one name in mind, but we've seen customers deploying all products and we just turned the last earnings call. Over 1,700 accounts that were using the work management tool actually bought sales CRM or dev afterwards. And we haven't done any promotion. The sales team didn't give them a call. All that happened organically. Was surprising to see that. They're just thirsty to try new things and basically have more features within their company.

And if I can just ask a question here around pulling on the thread that you just mentioned, which is that customization, but also not necessarily the technological debt or investments that are needed. And so you guys have been building out a lot -- or Monday has been building out a lot of their app store and app ecosystem. And so if either of you can kind of talk through that balance between the investments and the expertise needed around building apps around in Monday and also the core platform, which is much more easy to use and very low code, no code.

Yes. So basically, are you referring to our marketplace or just the ability to package products into...

I guess a little bit of both, right? So like you're going to have that core platform that has those abilities and those Lego blocks that you just mentioned, and there's the app marketplace that you're also expanding into.

Yes. So the way we think about it is that eventually we'll never be able to give solutions to all verticals, the long tail verticals also the long tail of use cases that our customers use. And for that, we want to leverage our developer ecosystem. We built our marketplace to just allow because the way Monday is built, everything you can extend it, every building block can be extended and more components can be added to it. So basically we have a whole community of developers, they're building apps on top of the Monday marketplace. We actually added the ability to monetize those apps in the last year. So we're seeing growth over there. It still is not significant in terms of the company revenue, but growing like super fast and just people come up with very creative apps and ideas. And even now, when we started working on AI as well, we also added the ability for third party developers to extend the platform using different AI applications across the board. So even here, we're kind of leveraging the knowledge and expertise of the community in order to kind of increase the innovation of the company.

Yes, I'll pass it back to you, Gilly, in a second. But you put up a really good performance, very strong quarters. What has been the reason that Monday has stood out in an ocean of calamity where people have had to lower guidance and cut down the growth rate, et cetera? Not only did you put up a good growth rate, but how dare you turn so profitable? Come on. How did you do it? What's the secret sauce?

I think it's a combination of a couple of things. One, I think one of the reasons Monday has been resilient in the economy right now is that we're not heavily tech-focused. Only 30% of our customers are tech companies, 70% are non-tech. And we see a greater headwind in tech companies, and non-tech were less affected by the economy. So for me, it's a lesson of diversity is very good. It creates stability within the business. And the fact we were serving both tech and non-tech is very helpful. Also many verticals. So it's very stable, the customer base. Number two, and I think that really stood out in this economy is our data-driven approach. We have big brand, which is our BI tool almost since day 1, and we always know what the ROI of every campaign. I think a lot of companies, during '21, '22 were just throwing money at performance marketing at, billboards, subway ads. And they know exactly what's the effect of everything they've been doing and how it's contributing to revenue. And we always measure that. And that gave us a lot of confidence even now to keep spending, be aggressive because we saw the returns. I think the easiest thing to do once you want to become profitable is to cut performance marketing 100% because it's an immediate effect. But we always felt it was a big mistake because you kind of sacrifice the future for that. And we kept being aggressive. We acquire customers now faster than ever before because we track everything.

Daniel, are you telling the management, don't spend any money on marketing, put all the money in research and development, right? Because we build great products. People will just come and buy. No, that's just -- it's a joke. So I'm curious to get your thoughts on what is on customers' minds as they look at next year -- they're all preparing for next year's budgeting? Jan Hatzius, our chief economist, has been calling for a soft landing. Gili, what do we call that?

Software landing.

Software landing, yes, we call it software landing.

You can't take credit for it. It has been around.

Yes, we just stole it from Jan. He said soft and we said software? No, it's soft -- software. Okay, we like it. So rates have gone up quite a bit. The last 18 months have been very tumultuous. And you landed your software company really well. If we look to a period where rates are not going to be that volatile, see some stability, what do you think happens to Monday's business next year if things are more stable?

Yes. So already we saw a decrease in [NDR] companies were -- because they're pricing-based, companies were slowing down hiring and that had an effect on their ability to expand. What we saw in the last quarter and continued as a trend is stabilization across that. So it's not more companies cutting jobs, but actually a little bit of a recovery optimism in a sense. So I don't know exactly how much it will be going forward, but I feel not only that things look more optimistic now, the company is different. Just our ability to sell across multiple products creates much more opportunity. If you compare Monday today to what it was 2 years ago, the options you have right now if a salesperson, for example, within the company will upsell to existing customers is much greater. So we kind of created our own opportunity within that environment to upsell more, so more options to give value to customers. And also we feel this recovery -- initial recovery, I would say, in the economy and companies kind of a little bit back to hiring.

Yes. Do you see more pronounced in certain verticals or geographies or certain kind of size of customers? How do you -- what's your data telling you?

I think it's pretty much across the board. But I think, like I've said, tech segment took the biggest hit, so I expect that to recover maybe a little bit better.

Yes, got it. And are you starting to see signs of -- not that you would notice in your business, but your customers, are they coming back and saying, hey, looking to start to hire back again? Are you seeing any early signs of that -- those kinds of discussions?

We don't have those kind of discussions. But judging from the numbers, it seems like it's starting to change a little bit.

Got it. And does that change your views on hiring at all? You've been hiring at a pretty decent clip, but do you feel the need to get a head start and accelerate hiring at some point?

Yes, definitely. What we've done in the last year was to slow down hiring and we're now re-accelerating that. Definitely next year, it's going to be significant. And broadly, we're going to do like 50% of the new workforce is going to be focused on R&D and product, and the remaining 50% is going to be part of the sales team. And what gave us a lot of confidence is we see increased demand.

Daniel, you're getting a big budget.

Yes, but we have a lot to do.

We have a lot to do, yes.

I mean I think going back to the different offerings, project management, CRM, dev, how -- who are you selling to in those, right? You talked about you're seeing like organic growth and momentum in that platform sales. So what kind of IT buyer are you interacting with? And also what's your pricing and bundling strategy in really selling these, especially in the early stages where there aren't those promotions and you're not necessarily going actively towards that?

Yes. I think, so for -- if we take, for example, the Monday sales CRM, so I would say that people that buys it comes from I think 2 main segments like above 50% are people that didn't use any CRM software before. So they are part of like digitalizing things. And the other half is ones that are coming from the competition. So it can be like Zoho it can be like SugarCRM, it can be HubSpot in some cases. And we see that these people are like ones that used some kind of other solutions and then they want to change things. They want the flexibility. And the obvious option for them would be Salesforce. But in a way, Salesforce is -- can give them a very much robust solution. But with that, they need to pay a lot of money. And the customization is usually not de facto as is because you need implementers, you need IT budget and things like that. So I think that in terms of like the audience that comes to the Monday sales CRM, it's a bit like that. And in general, I think that we see both bottom up adoption, but also with the products, we have the opportunity to go to specific personas now because we know who are we approaching. So we can see people like VP sales of organizations, directors of sales, VP R&D for the Monday dev. So I think this is also something that the product has given us, which is a huge opportunity in how we go to market as well.

Yes, and something you said made me think about workflow automation and the recent release there, and I'm curious to know what made that be the next kind of leg of Monday's growth? And then also, how have you seen Monday really stacking up against some of the other competitors in that kind of space?

Yes. So I think as for the workflows, we -- a few years ago, we released the automations and our users took it to very elaborated ways, very elaborated use case. It was adopted very widely and both in tech and non-tech, which is I think it's very special. And as we go up market, we got a lot of requests about taking this to the next level, allowing more elaborated use case to be formed, more maintenance capabilities because suddenly you have such complex workflows that are being built. And this is the reason why we came up with the workflows. In terms of pricing of it, we do see it as something that we price separately. And I think that in that sense, it's also something that would be more of consumption-based, rather users based like seats based. Maybe it would be the actions, the triggers, we don't know yet, but we do see it as something that as being priced separately. And currently we think that with the high acquaintance of the workflows with Monday, it would benefit first the Monday ecosystem, automating things between products between different departments within organizations that use Monday. And maybe in the future we'll also think about it as a separate product that compete on its own.

Yes. No, I mean, that's a big topic of discussion during the conference so far has been whether Generative AI is going to be something that's going to be standalone or integrated into the platform. And so can you both maybe just talk through Monday's strategy with Generative AI and how that's unlocking some opportunities in either the markets that you see today and also potentially accelerating other opportunities that you were thinking about more longer term?

Yes. Look, I think it's a very interesting topic. And I talk a lot about this. We had a bunch of one on one meetings and I feel like in the last 10 years we've seen so many technologies come and go, anywhere from where free to crypto. And some of them were real, some of them the world was not ready for. And I feel AI is a real technology. Definitely, it feels like a real technology, but I don't -- I'm not sure we cracked like the best use case for that. What's the best way to use it, to leverage that. So we all been using ChatGPT, but is that the right usage? Is that the killer use case that people will use? I'm not sure. But what we've seen so far from our users is that, they want to automate some of the things. They want more capability. They want some of their work to be done potentially by AI. And I think that we have a great opportunity here because to drive users into a third party website to do things, I think that's really hard to do. But to integrate AI capabilities into where users spend most of their day, most of their work, I think that's going to be a great opportunity. So I think kind of similar to what Daniel said about automation, we introduced that and people just took it to the next level. We're now introducing a bunch of AI capabilities and I feel that if it's integrated into where they actually do their day to day work, it can really kind of leverage those capabilities into helping them accelerate what they're doing and make them more efficient.

Yes. And I think that together with that, we also like -- we had an hackathon of external developers like building AI features on top of the platform and we saw such a great diversity of things that people came up with starting from like board analytics and things that help you build a better setup of Monday for your own and also like many things around productivity. So we really believe that this is also something that is very important for us being open and allowing others to build as well. And I think that, as Ran mentioned, like many times, because of the special customer composition of Monday that we have also the non-tech sector, many times we are in the place to make technology accessible to people and to drive real work. Like with automations, for instance, there were automation tools beforehand. But once we introduced it in a very simple manner that people can connect in the place they spend their work time in, I think it can have a huge effect. So we are excited about AI to do the same thing for us.

I had a question. If we step back for a second, what Monday is basically, a workflow automation platform that allows you to build applications? How different is it from ServiceNow which also has a workflow automation platform but different set of use cases, ITSM, HR, CSM? Should we think about you guys as being complementary because they are heavy duty, big enterprise workflow and you're more simpler workflow. Is that a good analogy?

Yes, I think to some extent it is because I think what ServiceNow has done -- and you're right, I mean they're very enterprise-focused, very top down sales. So in terms of go to market, we're very different. We're very product-led growth. But in terms of the fact that what they've done well is they've built a very powerful platform engine. And on top of that they packaged products and it just went after many verticals. And I think to a large extent Monday, we've done the same thing. We built a very powerful engine and built products on top of that. There's the main difference, which is with ServiceNow, in order to customize it, you still need that professional IT to do it for you. Monday user interface is very accessible, very intuitive and you can do it yourself. So I think for us I see our opportunity to build a business that's very efficient, very scalable. And when I kind of look at what I feel is our competition and the companies we look after are company that built true platform and products on top of it, which I think falls under the category of Atlassian, ServiceNow, Salesforce to some extent. I think a lot of investor talks still kind of connects us to Asana and Smartsheet, but that changed. Over the last 6 months, the more I talk with investors, they are thinking about, like you said, ServiceNow, the Atlassians, the Salesforce and this is how we see ourselves. And I feel this is our potential. And if we can scale that to the enterprise and capture that and the SMB market and go after more product verticals, I think it's one of the biggest opportunities in the software market today. And we're built like this from day 1. So that's part of the reason why we're so excited and so focused on execution because we feel like there's so much opportunity we can capture.

How's Monday dev doing and what do you see missing in the market that you could go after? Daniel?

So actually, like Monday dev also surprised us. It's going very well and what we hear from customers are two main things. The first thing is about the flexibility. I think that many teams in the development world are working in a variety of ways and they want the freedom to work as they want. And once they adopt Monday dev, they feel that they can do changes by themselves. They don't need anyone else. No IT, no admin, and this is something that is repeating itself a lot. And the second thing is about connecting other departments to the work. Many times with other products, it's only for developers. It creates a silo. No other functions like product, like design, like even customer success and others can collaborate together. And I think that in that sense, we see many, many cases where, aside from the developers, you have other teams that are working in the Monday dev. And I think this is like a lot to do with the fact that it's built on top of the platform. So great feedback so far, yes.

And are you displacing any of the existing legacy solutions when you do that?

So in some cases, yes. And in some cases we integrate. And I think that we think it will take time to do -- to displace all the competition. We don't necessarily think we should do it. Okay, we are not going to be the only software in the world. But just to say, top 2 integrations are Salesforce and Jira. So we really believe in being open, allowing customers to choose and also to integrate work, whether it's adjacent to Jira, but also to other competitors. And eventually, we feel that for the teams that it fits more, they will displace as well.

You mentioned Salesforce, Salesforce and Zoom are investors in the company, right? I mean, do you have any -- do they have any input with you guys or is it just completely passive? Do they come in and say, why are you competing with us, things like that?

I don't think Salesforce is our competition yet.And they're an amazing company and we're not there yet at all in terms of enterprise. And again, like Daniel said, like our best like most common integration is with Salesforce. Both Zoom and Salesforce were investors as part of the IPO, but it's more of a passive investment. But we work with both teams and we collaborate with them and deepening their integration. So I don't think they see it as a competition. It's more of working together. And I think there's other segments of the market where we are competing right now. Maybe in the future, but right now, it's more complementary.

So when you integrate with Salesforce, is it the project management application or the CRM application that integrates with Salesforce?

The CRM application.

CRM application. Yes, that's interesting. So you have functionality that they don't have and vice versa?

Yes. Well, sometimes a sales process is usually the beginning of a project or a process. So you want all that process to be streamlined and you want other people to be part of that. So that's a great way to do it. Even if you have your sales team on Salesforce.

How hard is it to integrate or easy to integrate with Salesforce? I've heard it's pretty complicated.

It's a good question. We worked on it for quite a while. I think now the integration that we have is an integration that allows you to sync data. And in that way we are approaching the most like lowest denominator and allow people to build whatever they want on top of this data. So we see many cases of like integrating the data into Monday and then from there, creating visualizations, creating reports, creating flows and workflows that are connecting to the sales process, as Ran mentioned. But it took a while and it's something that we invest in because our customers really enjoy it.

Is there any opportunities in HR space, payroll, HR, human capital management?

Yes. So as I mentioned, the way that Monday CRM and dev gave birth was that we saw customers using that. So other use cases we see are HR. Definitely, our customers are doing that anywhere from onboarding, recruitment, salary processes, feedback talks. So that's one segment we see. Another one is ITSM, very interesting. IT managing...

Really? You are the next ServiceNow.

Well, we have a lot of things we need to prove before -- but you can crown us, yes.

We're not going to say that.

Well, one thing that you're doing that is very similar to ServiceNow too is you are thinking through like the direct sales motion and really building that out. And you mentioned 50% of your hiring will be going into sales and marketing. And so that's also coming at a time when you've been mentioning that -- well, Monday in general has been mentioning that competitors have been pulling back on performance marketing and you guys have -- continuing to invest. So maybe just give us a little bit of an update around where the market stands on that and how you're thinking about that enterprise and more direct sales motion.

Yes. So in terms of performance marketing, we don't see any change. Maybe some competitors are trying to kind of get back. But in terms of bids or cost of doing performance marketing, we don't see any significant change. So for us, it's very efficient. We capture a large portion of the demand out there and demand has been very strong throughout the last 2 years. It went out a little bit and recovered. So demand is still very strong. So on that front, we still very effectively acquiring new customers and those cohorts will mature going forward. And the second part of the question, sorry?

Both on the direct sales and expanding on...

So I think in terms of expanding our sales, we do need -- we do understand that also we need to evolve there because we had a lot of features that are towards the enterprise companies. We launched Monday DB, which allows customers to scale, but we need to reach more decision makers. I think product-led growth is great and allows you to create great momentum, but also we need to do a top down sales more and more. I think those new products just open up new opportunities for us because up until now it was like a broad platform, but now we know who the persona is. We know what the business need is when you buy a sales CRM, when you buy Monday dev. It opens up new ways to do marketing, outbound, B2B sales and we target specific persona within the organization. And something we saw across the board is that it doesn't matter if we start with dev or sales or work management, eventually customers will be exposed to other products and it will be a full deployment or at least almost a full deployment.

So you are seeing customers kind of be leading with a variety of different Monday workflows or modules, not necessarily just project management or CRM?

Definitely, yes.

Wow, Amazing. And so then how does how do you think about your TAM when it's so abstract and it's also so direct and tangible? How are you thinking about your TAM? And also, does M&A play a role in here at all?

Yes. So obviously our TAM is huge. It's really hard to quantify it because how do you measure it? Is it the entire sales CRM market? Is it the project management market? I think it's a combination of both and obviously dev as well. And we're going to open up new markets. So I think our TAM is not something we're going to step out in the near future. So definitely there's a lot of opportunity there, but a lot of -- it's up to our execution. So it's really a huge market we're up chasing.

M&A or...

Yes. So M&A-wise, obviously the company has a lot of cash on hand, over 1 billion in cash. We actually celebrated a nice milestone. So we now have more cash in the bank than we ever raised from VCs or the public markets. So yes, it is. Yes, we offered to give the investors their money back, but they didn't agree. So definitely we have a lot of cash, a lot of opportunity. So we are busy like in the process of building a process and a team around that. There's definitely opportunity in the market. But on the same note, I would say we're very focused on execution and building -- it's just so much opportunity out there that we're very focused on building, but definitely something that is an option going forward.

Great. We have a few more minutes left and I wanted to see if anybody from the audience had any questions or we can keep going.

Go ahead.

I remember last year around this time when we had the conversation, one of the topics was that, for certain sizes of customers, there were still limitations. And I know you promised to work on fixing that, and I would love to hear basically where you are now on that.

Yes. So I think just a few months ago we released Monday DB 1.0. I think this is the most meaningful thing that we did ever around scale, around performance. Basically, it means that with Monday DB 1.0, things with the current limits are working much faster, the system are much more reliable. And with Monday DB 2.0, which is planned for the beginning of next year, we are also going to raise limits. So I can share feedback from customers that after releasing Monday DB, especially large customers with large boards and large use cases, elaborated ones, they say it opens up so many new possibilities and we get so much great feedback with up to 5 weeks improvement in loading. And like I think that for us, Monday DB is really a new ballpark. So we just completed phase 1 and in November we are going to release also the next phase about faster dashboards. But we really feel this is a new ballpark for us.

Any other questions? Or maybe I'll close out by asking each of you, what's the most exciting thing that you're working on or thinking about when it comes to Monday whether we've talked about it or not.

Want to start?

Yes, it's hard. It's a difficult question. But I think like for me, the transition into multi-product. I think it's very exciting and it's something that -- it's a huge change. We are working with all functions within the company, with all the departments. It's not only the product. It's how we think it's changing our market. So definitely this is something that puts us in a totally different place. But for me it's super exciting and also the fact that we are able to execute on it in such great efficiency with such great pace. As Ron mentioned, we see the progress and it's above our expectations. So it's both the strategy and the execution. So for me, it's very exciting.

Yes, for me. I think it's also the multi-product, but from a different aspect. I think that the product we're working on, but also we want to open the ability for third party to build their own products. And for me, it's very exciting because one analogy that one of the investors here today in the meetings was -- I don't know if you're all familiar with, but there's a game called Minecraft where you have like this open world, like those building blocks and you can build whatever you want. But the beauty behind it is that the community really took it to the next level. The people are building insane things on top of Minecraft and it's like a wheel that generates more traffic, more interest. And I think that to some extent, Monday has the potential to create a huge community of builders around it, people that are experts in their own domain that can build other products that people can use and leverage. So I think the power of the community is huge, both in terms of the marketplace and extending the platform, but also packaging it for additional use cases.

Yes, we're excited to see what people build and where it goes.

Thank you so much. On that note, we ended perfectly on the dot.

Thank you.

Thank you.