Monday is poised to surpass Asana

[MovedOn]

So, I am keeping track of Asana and Monday. Asana just released earning and it appears Monday continues to close in and will surpass Asana. I estimate Monday will surpass Asana in both revenue and large customers count between end of 2022 and early 2023.

Last quarter QoQ growth comparison:
Monday:
Revenue:17.53%
Customer over 50k ARR: 30.4%

Asana:
Revenue: 12.07%
Customer over 50k ARR: 23.58%

Monday has been growing revenue EVERY QUARTER faster than Asana for the past 9 quarters! and growing large customer EVERY QUARTER faster for the past 5 quarters(I only found 5 quarters of data for Asana for large customers.)

And yet Asana stock sky rocketed because their CEO bought their stocks? or they have famous CEO?
Asana is a good example of not chasing the stock price.
It’s growing both revenue and customer at a slower rate than Monday every quarter for the past 2 years. How can its stock went up so much faster than Monday?

My thought on why Monday is poised to surpass Asana.

Let’s look at the board view. I think the board view is the basic building block for both platform.

Simply, MNDY offers a better product: it’s a work OS.
Asana is more like sticky notes.
MNDY also has low code/no code and better automation

http://Monday.com board: it looks sophisticated, well organized, has lots of data field. That’s like an OS should be.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yh1FQJlOXF4

Asana board: It’s just some fancy sticky notes! They admited it’s sticky notes.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pd9q1chYp0Y

Some notes:

Monday was founded as daPulse in 2012; 9 years ago. It changed the brand from daPulse to Monday in 2017 because people had no idea what it meant. and they were making fun of it. Monday calls each task list line as a pulse.

Asana was founded in 2008. 13 years ago.

So Asana has 4 years head start to Monday.

I think the rebranding to Monday has a positive effect in Monday’s rapid growth in recent years.
Look at how fast Monday is catching up to Asana.

“One thing that may differentiate Monday from other companies in the space is that Mann says 70% of their customer base exists outside the tech world.”

• This can be one of the reason why Monday is growing so rapidly. It’s not limited to Tech companies!

“When we were first starting out, our priority was on building the best product we could, and less so on the name,” said Roy Mann, CEO and founder of the company. “Based off what we felt was the essence of our tool, a platform to help you keep your finger on the pulse of your team, we identified with the concept of a pulse. After searching for domain options, the only website available was dapulse!”

[mostlylong]

Hi CloudL (and fellow boardmates). Please take the below as constructive, not personally. I really like your posts and monthly summaries.

But I’m concerned about posts that are not rigorous in the data and logic that is used to support the conclusions that are stated. I don’t see much objective data and/or strong logic to support the statements in this post. Instead, I see almost pure speculation and opinion which is not what this board is supposed to be about, as I understand it.

For example,

(1)So, I am keeping track of Asana and Monday. Asana just released earning and it appears Monday continues to close in and will surpass Asana. I estimate Monday will surpass Asana in both revenue and large customers count between end of 2022 and early 2023.
The company CFOs, whose job is to know all the inside information of the firm and its operating and financial performance are challenged to forecast a full year ahead and these forecasts change constantly. Are you really claiming that you can forecast a full year out on the financials for both Monday and Asana by just extrapolating recent results (at least show some calculations and assumptions)? Or do you have some additional data to justify this forecast - if yes, please share.

My view is, as outsiders, we should be very careful in attempting to forecast as far as one year ahead.

(2)And yet Asana stock sky rocketed because their CEO bought their stocks? or they have famous CEO?
Asana is a good example of not chasing the stock price.
This is a statement about market sentiment rather than business performance. This board focuses on business performance. Regardless, if you think this statement is board-appropriate, are you claiming that Asana stock sky rocketed because their CEO bought shares? Or they have a famous CEO? If yes, please provide data explaining how these factors, versus other factors (overall market exuberance, growth-value sector rotation, interest rate outlook, earnings results, etc), determined Asana’s stock price movements.

My view is I know of no data to rigorously assign cause-effect to market sentiment and stock price movements and this isn’t even appropriate for this board.

(3)Monday versus Asana product: Board views.
My thought on why Monday is poised to surpass Asana. Let’s look at the board view. I think the board view is the basic building block for both platform.
There are many views in Asana, including Board views (https://asana.com/guide/help/views/basics). There are many, many other features in these products beyond views. Are you claiming that looking at one of many, many features in these products, Board views, means we should conclude that Monday has a superior product?

My view is that is not nearly enough information to draw this conclusion.

(4)Monday versus Asana product: overall.
Simply, MNDY offers a better product: it’s a work OS.
Asana is more like sticky notes.
MNDY also has low code/no code and better automation
http://Monday.com board: it looks sophisticated, well organized, has lots of data field. That’s like an OS should be.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yh1FQJlOXF4
Asana board: It’s just some fancy sticky notes! They admited it’s sticky notes.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pd9q1chYp0Y
It appears that you browsed the Monday website and two YouTube videos to draw the conclusion that Monday has a superior product. Again, in my view, this is not nearly enough information to draw this conclusion.

Do you realize that the Monday video is from Jun 29, 2020 and the Asana video is from Nov 15, 2016 - nearly 4 years older!!! Hardly an equivalent comparison!!! We should take more care as to the data we bring to this board to draw our conclusions.

Do you have additional experience with these products to justify your conclusion?

My view is that unless someone has used both products in a multi-user setting across a reasonable number of use cases, I don’t see how anyone can possibly make a strong statement about which product is superior.

(5)I think the rebranding to Monday has a positive effect in Monday’s rapid growth in recent years. Look at how fast Monday is catching up to Asana.
Any data to support this? At face value this looks like pure speculation. Regardless, on this board and at this point in Monday’s brand life cycle, do we really think this is among even the top 10 factors we should care about on a go-forward basis?

(6)“One thing that may differentiate Monday from other companies in the space is that Mann says 70% of their customer base exists outside the tech world.”
- This can be one of the reason why Monday is growing so rapidly. It’s not limited to Tech companies!
Again, any data to support this and did you take a balanced view of both companies? Looks like just pure speculation. Did you also look at data for Asana to provide an equivalent comparison? I see many, many different kinds of customers using Asana (https://asana.com/customers).

If I am off base on any of the above, please let me know, my goal is to identify the best ideas with the best supporting data. I think this board is strongest when we stay on topic and support our conclusions with evidence. Also, I own both Asana and Monday. This is absolutely not personal, I love CloudL.

[MovedOn]

Hi mostlylong ,

Thank you for spending the time to write the thoughtful reply.

First, let me say I am just a small investor living on the growth stocks with no other source of income and have no time to speculate. This is not investment advice and it’s just my opinion. I have no obligation to be 100% correct on what I wrote on this board. In fact, I can be wrong some times.

However, I try to use un-emotional, subjective thinking. People got VERY emotional when I wrote something bearish about their stocks. I sold out LSPD on September 30. Hundreds of people got very upset and against my selling of LSPD. Guess what happened next?
Not investing thesis surrounds around hard cold data. I take a holistic approach to investing. Of course, this post is not rocket science. It’s a bit of combining observations and data.

Point 1:
I did the forecast for fun because many people are bullish on Asana instead of Monday or bullish on both. I want to point out the reality. They are either bullish on wrong stock or being indecisive.
I used growth rates of past 2 years of both companies by simply taking the growth average of both companies. Then extrapolated for next 2 years. This is not to predict there exact revenue numbers. It’s not saying which company will make $Xyz number of revenue. It’s to judge toe relative growth of both companies.
On the other hand, I did use similar method to forecast CRWD Q3-2022 revenue for fun by extrapolate from past few quarter growth rates. I didn’t even use company guidance. I arrived at $377m, QoQ of 11.8%. The company reported $380.1m, QoQ of 12.55%. I was surprised how close I got. Note that I didn’t share this on the board and do not have a position in CRWD. . How can we do this? Because SaaS growth rate is VERY predictable!

Point 2:
Again, not all investing thesis is about hard cold data. This is my observations on how many Asana investors view their investment in Asana.

Point 3:
Soft wares have DNAs.
For example, MS Windows changed version for many time. Its basic building block or DNA hasn’t change: the rectangular window.
I think Board view is the basic building block or DNA of both platform. It’s just one of example feature. I am not saying I looked at all features of both Software.
But the boardview is the important feature because it’s the main view! When you started Monday.com, the first thing you see is the board view! It’s basically a task list for other things.
We don’t need to have all the information to draw conclusion. If that’s the case, we’ll never make conclusion like being indecisive by owning Monday and Asana. It doesn’t make sense to me to own both in a concentrated portfolio.

Point 4:
Similar to point 3.
Asana’s boardview is still a fancy looking sticky notes: https://asana.com/guide/help/views/boards

Point 5:
Again, not all investing thesis is about hard cold data.

Point 6:
Again, not all investing thesis is about hard cold data.

[MovedOn]

Sorry I have to correct this sentence because it’s exact opposite of what I meant.

“However, I try to use un-emotional, subjective thinking.”

It should be:
However, I try to use un-emotional, objective thinking.

[anthonyms]

Hi mostlylong ,

Without wanting to drag this out, I actually fully agree with Cloudl on the first point regarding the business performance comparison.

This has been a point that the board has concluded (you can add Saul to the list) over and over again with all the data laid out that Monday is superior on almost every metric to Asana and that was before this quarter. This quarter showed the difference to be night and day on every metric and the forecast closes the book on this. (Revenue growth, billings growth, customer growth, profitability - take your pick). (FWIW, Asana are ever so slightly ahead in DBNER and RPO growth).

Cloudl didn’t necessarily post every data point but chose a couple. This is so irrefutable, you can see from Wall Street’s reaction yesterday to Asana what the difference is.

On the points regarding the product/solution comparison, I’m not sure that the point is between who has the better product. In fact I actually think that Asana has a more technically superior product. To me the point is that Monday’s product is simpler, so its market for potential adoption is much larger than technical teams, its so simple that comparatively dumb marketing teams even (I count myself in that category) could use this. To me that’s the difference not the technical performance of the product which to a degree I find immaterial. Possibly the only aspect of performance comparison I think is of note is the number of attachments each solution has built to make integration possible.

I made my choice and switched from Asana to Monday months ago, (which for a while was one of the worst trades I had made since selling Tesla in 2019 but I couldn’t be happier with the switch now).

The point of reaching a conclusion with data as early as possible before it becomes irrefutable which is when Wall Street decides is what Saul does over and over again and I don’t think it was remiss of Cloudl to reach that even with a limited data picture. This is what saves Saul from still being in a Zoom or a Docusign situation every single time.

Ant

[Texmex]

Have you compared Monday.com’s product and customer metrics with Smartsheet (SMAR) in which many of us were invested a couple of years ago? Smartsheet put up 9 consecutive Qs of 50%+ rev growth in 2018-19. Growth dipped to 40% during Covid but has since increased to 46% in the last 2 Qs. It has a much higher TTM rev (roughly double) that of Monday.com but a much lower marketcap.
This whole field of collaboration software does not appear as mission-critical but good to have software. This was one reason given for the drop in SMAR’s growth during Covid.
Another issue that seems to be a concern in this field of software is the very high SGA. SMAR’s TTM SGA has come down to a more manageable 80% (of rev). I say more manageable - because Datadog’s TTM SGA is just 40% of rev and even at the same revenue base it was only 50%. Monday’s TTM SGA is still a very ugly 122%. Asana also has a very SGA. Another thing of note is that in terms of R&D Monday spends the least of the 3 companies. These are some of the issues that prevent me from investing in this space.