Hacker News Reader

Comment by tinyhouse | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com