Monday.com Files IPO | Hacker News Reader

Monday.com Files IPO

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79 pointsk2xl93 comments

I have some horrible stories about monday.com. Here's one: Moving from Trello to monday.com was the biggest reason why we couldn't deliver in time a iOS project for a client. People were happy to use Trello and it worked fine and suddenly someone pulled the trigger and decided to move us all to monday.com ("We got a good deal y'all !!! ") - so we did and the people in the team HATED it. When 90% of the team decides to update tickets once a week instead of daily, simply because they HATE the tool that tracks tickets, then you know you're in for an unpleasant ride. We're back on Trello now.

That's our team with Jira. It doesn't make sense to update tickets when all the work is done in Github. You basically have to duplicate work. I've been trying to push Zenhub for years.

Zenhub is amazing, unfortunately some people don't use Github in our org - but I try to use Zenhub every time I can!

I work at Asana and we just published our open source GitHub integration. GitHub PRs and comments are mapped directly to Asana tasks. We use it internally and I love it.

If "Monday/Trello alternative with GitHub integration" is what you're looking for, it might work for you. But I admit it does take some setup, and it would be nice if it were built directly into the product.

https://github.com/asana/SGTM

I worked at one place where we tried to break out of Jira, at least for the internal team. We tried all sorts of things but it all went back to Jira in the end.

Jira is better when you have control over your workflow, it fucking sucks when you don't have permissions to tweak for your team.

I still hate using it but it is probably the only tool that isn't, in itself, opinionated. Chances are if you hate Jira at work, you're really hating the people who administrate it. As for other tools, the hatred is outsourced.

Where I work, Jira workflows are owned by a "scrum master" whose job appears to alternate between creating superfluous processes for every new problem encountered, and, optimizing the overwhelming large number of processes slowing everyone down.

Then they are a terrible scrum master. A good one would listen to these sorts of issues and remove as much nonsense as possible to create the bare minimum level of process that Gets The Job Done

I was mentored by a few scrum masters who put their whole career on this. They wanted us to succeed and the success would put them out of the job, or send them to another team.

To my mind, a good scrum master is a good leader.

> Then they are a terrible scrum master.

Ah, yes. The well-known moving of the goalpost only scrum fans are capable of. Where scrum is simultaneously the solution to everything, and also never "done correctly."

Not quite. I did go on to define the terrible.

I don't know if it's entirely Monday.com's fault for that. Changing project management tools mid-project is project suicide. Even if it works out, and is the right choice long term, it's still an enormous unnecessary stress to the project.

Moving project management tools is absurd in the middle of a project. I was on a team that did it three times in a year and each time features got lost and work was undone.

I bought YouTube premium because I was sick of seeing their stupid adverts.

That should be in their S-1.

"We are a growing lead-gen platform. We have a growing user base of people that are annoyed as hell from our advertisements, so they just pay for subscriptions at other sites to make them go away."

It's nice to see those Youtube ads paying off....

I get grammarly. It's been years and tens of thousands (probably) of grammarly ads. It's like they'll never work out that I will never, ever, ever need or want their product in a thousand lifetimes.

Sorry! This is the absolute best that the world’s highest-paid gaggle of engineers and researchers have been able to come up with in their work on so-called “ad tech.”

You are not the target audience. You are a collateral damage. Ad tech targeting is less like a sniper rifle and more like a shotgun: it mostly hits the target, and then some area around it.

I suspect that the sniper rifle-type ads, where possible due to deep profiling, would spend less of advertisers' money, but would feel incredibly creepy, lowering their efficacy.

Men between a certain age is a pretty none specific target audience.

YouTube ads are so ridiculously annoying these days. I get Peloton ads ALL the time. I will never, ever buy one. And I ALWAYS press skip. But still, the amazing AI keeps showing me f*ing Peloton ads.

On my end I'm bombarded by these "start an online business" ads that seems to grow like weed.

I feel like those online Shop things are the new "you can be a rockstar / Youtube star". Everyone feels like they can be rich or famous. And i think shopify is massively profiting from that.99 percent of rhe Shops there dont make any money..

I got a 40 minute ad yesterday, entirely in Korean (a language I don’t speak.)

coinbase ads have been getting more and more annoying.

It used to be just that melody, set to some screen animations. Then they've added sound effects - button pushes, machinery sounds, to the same ad, I assume in attempt to get my attention.

ublock = no youtube ads.

But please look for "uBlock Origin" (the one maintained by the original author), not "uBlock" (which was taken over by someone else and allows "acceptable" ads):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin

"if you manage a team you've got to try monday.com" FFS I don't manage a team! I use whatever management buys, now stop asking me every video!

That, grammerly and now hello fresh, making me greatly consider premium. Maybe that's Google secret plan, annoy us to death so we subscribe.

I never understood monday.com, since a ton of similar tools area already popular: Asana, all the ones from Atlassian.

Monday.com always seemed to re-label know practices with their own terminology. What am I missing?

I think Flexibility, UX and Marketing.

Especially Marketing

I got the impression that most existing tools in this space were quite targeting at software development, whereas was taking that model and bringing it to general project delivery. That's just from the their marketing though. I haven't actually used it.

They marketed the living heck out of it. For a while I couldn't turn around without seeing a Monday.com ad.

Monday has been stealing from Timelinr (https://timelinr.com) for years now. I saw their marketing efforts shoot up around the same time.

Looks like it's been paying off for them, but I prefer to support smaller startups, especially when all I need it for is roadmapping.

From comparing both homepages I get the impression that whatever influence Monday took from Timelinr initially they left them behind long ago.

The Timelinr landing page could also do with a lot of work but I think it's mostly the tone of voice that doesn't work well with me personally.

I find this weirdly hilarious, because of ad blocking, I'd never heard of this company before this.

Likewise. Based on this thread, I'm going to take it that my ad blocking setup is even more effective than I gave it credit for.

Yeah, I mean it's kind of sobering as well, thinking of all the collective hours spent watching ads when ad blockers are 1-click installs.

It was everywhere on the Tube in London after it rebranded from Dapulse, in the middle of the whole Brexit fiasco.

It reaffirmed something an old colleague of mine said: everyone in startup tech assumes you're politically on the left. And those ads were aimed at those people.

It's a project management tool, the most boring and inoffensive software possible. How were such ads shown to have a political bent?

You're not missing anything. What these people miss is any potential unseating of Jira. The executives want it, project management wants it, engineers be damned. Had to convince my team to stop using Github Issues so Directors had more insight into our work, since Jira's where they look. It's panned out well for the team. The visibility gets us better projects and helps when it comes to annual reviews.

My company started using Monday.com for all project tracking. Engineers were not happy. We're now on Jira for all engineering tickets and tasks. Never through I'd see engineers happy to use Jira.

My ex business partner (the ideas guy), loved it. I think he saw so many ads for it that he got brainwashed. Mostly what he liked was you could add time estimates and then it could sum them up, and you could group that in different ways. He would use that to create completely unrealistic timeline views which were never met.

Had me in the first half. Well done.

All these tools sometimes lead to more time spent organizing tasks then actually getting them done.

They’re not for you. They’re for your manager’s manager to get abstract stats reports

> They’re for your manager’s manager to get abstract stats reports

KPI , the backbone or corporates politics.

Which is why I like things like Trello; even that though i take issue with the fact that it has such limited keybindings (read: none useful)

Out of curiosity, what are some significant keybindings that you feel Trello is currently missing?

I can't immediately create a task on a particular list without using the mouse. I would like a keybinding that allows me to say "add to the second list from the left."

I would also really be benefited to allow for some default behavior that when i do (using keybindings) add a new item to the second list from the left, that it would just open up the detailed view and automatically allow me to enter the title and simply tab down to the description section to add everything.

I love trello, but the amount of clicking i have to do gets annoying.

This is one of the worst tools I've ever used and we tried hard for a year. Besides the interface being clunky and slow it lets you delete important things on accident with multiple people in our group having fallen victim to it's non intuitive UI. I've never wanted a company or people to fail but the amount of misery this product has brought coworkers and myself, I'm shocked it's in a position to file for IPO.

Very competitive market. So many solutions. ClickUP is the new kid on the block, like Monday they go crazy on marketing. Given they made $58M in Q1 revenue and losses are growing, I wouldn't touch the stock if their market cap is higher than $3B.

Monday.com spent $191 million in marketing to get $161 million in revenue in 2020. Granted they are only spending $1.2 in marketing per dollar in revenue now so they are doing better than the $1.5 per $1 they had last year in 2019. GnA bumped by $40 million and that brings them more in line with the 2019 marketing cost/revenue ratio though so maybe they creatively characterized GnA.

If their market cap is above 3 dollars I wouldn't touch the stock.

True. I agree with your sentiment and very unlikely touch the stock even if they go much lower than 3B. But sales and marketing expenses is something they can cut down once they reach a certain size. Cost of revenue and R&D expenses seem great.

Spending 190 million once for customers paying 160 million a year is maybe not a bad deal. Often large saas companies have positive net revenue retention.

"Additionally, our Net Dollar Retention rate for all of our customers was 100%, 105% and 107% for the three months ended December 31, 2019 and 2020 and March 31, 2021"

Above water, but low for SaaS: https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*M7c6_AvmAF0ehB7ebbpAeg.pn...

Via: https://medium.com/@alexfclayton/saas-ipo-net-dollar-retenti...

What type of vendor lock in does this have to keep those customers? As far as I can tell, there are lots of tools that do something similar.

Often, user preference and switching cost alone are enough.

They sold Series E shares at $41.

It's kinda crazy given that Asana and Notion both just went public. Atlassian owns JIRA and Trello and I'm guessing has the biggest chunk of the market. Microsoft are pushing their own tools to integrate natively with Visual Studio and Azure. And frankly, I haven't seen much of anything that resembles actual innovation from any of these. They're all just tuned to different levels of expertise in their user experience.

Yup and as recently as 24 months ago, $3B would still have been somewhat pricey at their revenue and growth rate. It'd be very hard for me personally to justify investing in a product that is in such a competitive market without product moats. It seems like with an absence of product differentiation Monday.com is aiming to differentiate via marketing, which is a very expensive way to grow.

The best task tracking system I've worked with is one that I created in about 30 minutes of thinking through the business domain and then wiring up a blank Airtable base to represent what I needed to know. With kanban, gantt, and table views, it's all I need. Plus, the API is easy to use so I can pull the data down when needed. All of the other systems seem to be 80% solutions and I end up getting really irritated by the 20% they don't cover.

So, your Airtable-based solution covers more than 80%? This is impressive, without any irony.

Sure, it covers whatever you want it to cover. The interface is fine. It’s the ability to build your own data model that is what makes it powerful, especially because you can iterate so quickly, even after you’ve started using it.

This is surprising. The company is still growing at a very fast rate, especially in their "whale" segment (customers with ARR over $50k). I'm curious about why they want to take the company public, as VC funding shouldn't be hard to come by with these numbers. The founders have not sold any stock so far in the two secondary sales ($50 million at Series D and $30 million at Series E). Intriguing.

Probably to cash out in the current market hysteria. Though high growth tech has been sliding for a few weeks after bubbling up...

If we do get high inflation numbers going forward, valuation multiples for tech will likely contract. A lot of price appreciation in the last few years has been due to expansion of valuation multiples, rather than growth. Though of course, all of these tech companies are growing incredibly fast too.

E.g. Apple had a PE of 8 just a few years ago, now it's around 30. Of course, a great business, but share price growth has outpaced real metrics

The Work OS category is confusing since I was more familiar with WorkOS[0] already. I didn't connect how these were related (which they really aren't).

[0] https://workos.com/

Not related to the IPO, but has anyone else found Monday.com's branding to be very similar to Slack's? Specifically the logo palette, shape, and typeface. They're so similar it looks like a related brand from the same company.

I think it looks even closer to ClickUp, which is in the same product category too: https://clickup.com/

The typeface is similar, but the ClickUp chevron logo has sharp edges and a gradient fill. Both Slack and Monday.com use solid, primary-ish colors and rounded "pill" rectangles.

I used to see their advert come up in certain places and I actually clicked through once to check the footer if they were owned by Slack. Loading the page didn't help because as it's in the similar market sector.

I always thought it looked like slack as well. probably because of the colors. But then again, all Monday seems to do is take ideas from smaller companies. Look at Timelinr. Monday copied their UI and everything.

Not to disparge Timlinr, but it's not like either tool was the first project management tool on the block. Everyone and their pet budge has had a crack at a project management tool.

I mostly contract and it's not uncommon to see an agency dogfooding their own project management app that they hope to sell as a SaaS.

We’d tried it for a little bit for a small 5-6 person team. It was slow as hell. Stopped using it.

I use it at my current company. I don’t like it. I don’t like Jira either, but Jira is still far superior and integration with other Atlassian products is really helpful. Linking tickets to one another in Monday is really bad, data gets lost all the time, it’s not good for retaining a record of work.

Jeff Horing via Insights Partners holds 42.7% of the company options... Wow

Free open source nested Kanban https://github.com/hpennington/kanception

Monday is just plain bad, it's slow, it's not really useful. Looks like a bunch of solutions looking for problems put together in a frenzy

Is there a market for another project management tool? I was considering it, but it seems like a bloated market with too many options if anything.

I worked at a company where Monday was the main interface between the back-office and the B2B clients we serviced.

That was about as bad as you can expect.

I tried using Monday.com for a building project I had and the interface become totally unusably slow... no idea if this is fixed but it seems like an issue for a billion dollar company.

slow UI is an issue for a billion dollar company? have you ever used Jira?

I'll do you one better. Have you used Workday?

Tried SAP?

Never fails to put me in a shitty mood.

I consistently have trouble figuring out how to login to Workday, much less "use" it.

Or Salesforce?

Fair comment. But when Jira is slow it’s getting stuff off the server that made it slow, the Monday slowness was more like a webpage with loads of ads - it slowed down my whole machine and everything was semi unresponsive.

Including .com in your company name is hip again.

I think it's less to do with hipness and more to do with business realities. For example, perhaps "Monday" is an unenforceable trademark, and/or "Monday" is already a registered business entity.

It also has some mild advantages in terms of auto-generating links to their homepage when referring to the company by name in places like Teams or Slack.

.com has always been valuable. The problem is that it is very very very hard to get a short, relevant .com domain with a reasonable price tag.

Of course, on a Monday.

TL;DR

$161M in 2020 revenue

$152M in loses.

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