Monday: Sticky sweet or easily forgotten?

Friends,

At the moment many of our jolly crew here have MNDY as a top holding. But many others are on the sidelines, still, because of its domain, which has lots of competition and becaue it “isn’t irreplaceable.”

With the numbers being so preposterously indicative of a successful product only getting better, whom among you has direct experience working with Monday.com in an enterprise setting?

And if you do, imagine the boss said “we’re going to replace Monday with a cheaper low-hanging fruit.”

What would be your reaction? Does Monday have enough of a Zoom-ish moat that’s not really a moat but that kinda sorta is because of habit and network effect and ease of use and general likeability?

How scared should we be when one of the IT guys says “oh yeah, Monday is not essential to our world and can easily be replaced”? How deeply ingrained does Monday possibly become? Initially on start-up? After a few additional modules?

Our great error, for now, was “forgetting” UPST was not SaaS. If Monday as a top position likewise has a “replaceability” problem, then we might be in for a huge disappointment. But if it’s more sticky than we might realize, today’s prices appear to be truly gobsmackingly tasty.

Monkey runs a tight ship of 1, alas, so his use of Monday is not indicative of tiddlywinks.

Hugs to all,

Monkey (long MNDY)
@cxddesign on twitters

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Hi Monkey: We don’t use MNDY in our company, but as an IT guy I can point to one aspect of Monday’s product that makes it very sticky – the data you feed it (that it needs to do all the things you want it to do), cannot be downloaded. We can assume that an enthusiastic user of Monday will build more and more things in it, of likely increasing complexity. Once others in the company begin to rely on those things, the customer will find it increasingly difficult to turn them off – likely it will be able to ‘sell’ internally the decision to move to Affirm (just an example) ONLY after it has re-built in Affirm all the things it has in Monday… There has to be a really good reason to go through all that pain.

Moderate position in MNDY.

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As another IT guy, you can’t really compare the moat of Zoom & Monday. Bottom line, if you were to switch from Zoom to something like Teams, your employees might grumble, but the switch company wide can occur in a very short period of time. You can still have calls with customers who use the other platform. I do calls using Teams, Zoom, Google Meetings, & occasionally other platforms interchangeably and only ‘pay’ via my employer for Teams.

For Monday, a switch company wide will take time. On top of the data angle mentioned by ColdMountain, there is also the impact to a project to switch. An In-flight project most likely won’t switch unless there is a transition between phases of the project and you are at a clean breaking point. The impact to switch in middle of a phase could be significant to the project timeline. Depending on your project sizes, this could take upwards of 12-24 months before everything transitions to a new platform. During this time, you would see a ramp down of licensing revenue to Monday for that customer that would probably span quarters. This isn’t really any different to how the expansion in new customers is gradually growing over time.

Ironically, the more ‘plug & play’ our SaaS companies are on the uptake side, that means they are just as easy to ‘replace’.

OldNovice
Long on both UPST & MNDY

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Hey Monkey,
My company started to use MONDAY two years ago, before it was a public company, we started with a few seats(7-8) and on one division within the company as a test. At the beginning it took a while to people to used to the platform, but fast forward today we currently have 40-50 seats and increasing. I can tell you the following:

1- We’re increasing usage/seats rolling it out to different divisions within the company. We started with one division, and now we have the Marketing, HR, and Commercial divisions on board. We currently have plans to add the Logistics and Accounting div.

2- Platform is very sticky. Once your teams learn and build more sophisticated dashboards, automations, and integrate more and more divisions within the company it’s very hard to look back even to check what the competition has to offer. For me it’s a classic example of high switching costs.

3- Personally I don’t know well Asana but for some reason Monday caught the eye of our IT div, maybe both are on the project management category but IMHO I think the platforms architecturally are different, each one has it’s MOAT and has it’s way of doing things. Monday besides project management, helps us automate and manage day to day workflows and processes in a more structured way.

Hope this review helps!
Long MNDY

Isaac

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Isaac,

Your post above is extremely useful and exemplary: short, sweet, insightful (probably yellow too). It gives us an on-the-ground view of some encouraging numbers. Monkey’s only fear is that out of the hundreds of bald apes reading this board you were the only one to come forth with a “here are the numbers” view. Are all the other enterprise Monday users on this board taking a nap until Wednesday?

Can someone else take Isaac’s good work and template and post a few extra peels of data regarding their experience with Monday’s stickiness, since that’s a genuine concern for many on the sidelines?

Likewise, is there someone out there who does know Asana well but has likewise swung into Monday’s ecosystem? If so, wherefore?

Hugs,

Monkey (long MNDY)

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In my experience in choosing enterprise software, stickyness is often a negative. The ability to easily switch away from a product, especially if the product fails to satisfy requirements, is crucial.

I wonder if that is or will impact MNDY’s acquisition of new clients in the long run.

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muji had a great take on MNDY vs ASAN products not too long ago. So look it up.

I also suggest downloading and trying software for yourself as end user.

As the ultimate non-techie, here is how it went for me:

Elastic: forget about it (for me)

AI Ex-machina: very useful, no-code, if it works with your type of files

PATH: absolutely dreadful for ME. My work is research so I don’t have repetitive, tedious tasks to automate but was just trying to automate email for the heck of it and it drove me nuts. Click here, click there: NOPE and no explanation/help/whatever. A sequence of minial tasks to automate minial tasks. Felt like an “annoying packaging opener” packed in the same kind of annoying plastic packaging that you fight.I am being a little facetious but there is no denying the tediousness of the product for ME.

TEAMS: kids had to use Teams for school in 2020 and it worked but never felt like a true alternative to in-person anything. Google sheets for me goes with Teams. Works but it is not “it.”

MNDY: elegant, fresh software that I could see myself starting to use immediately. It blew me away as a modern product that a non-techie like me can enjoy. My work is mostly solo work but if I worked in a team in more than short, one-off settings, MNDY+ZM would do away with nearly all but the most delicate/important meetings.

My 2c. My personal experience with MNDY pushed me over the fence to buy (and I doubled down yesterday).

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