Roy Mann – Transcript

Q&A Session with Roy Mann​ @ Monday.com

October 22nd, 2019

Hey Everyone
I’m excited to be here and connect with this awesome community.

What prompted you to get into the space you did?

Eran my co-founder and I managed many teams and also build a few startups.the tools we used never really helped us scale – they were rigid and we had to adapt to them. so we ended up feeing there could be a better way to manage people and have a tool that really helped with that.turned our we were right. everyone always had their secret spreadsheet they used to manage and communicate on progress and that’s not really powerful.

What is the #1 feature you attribute your growth to?

hey. great questions about our growth and on-line marketing..key reasons for our success:
1. good product – most important.
2. getting people to know about it – that means on-line & offline marketing.
3. good product that people love 

Which channels and types of content have you found to be the most effective for promoting your product?

We actually try and do something on many channels. as long as we can have a meaningful message across, in my eyes it’s a good channel to have.we are also fortunate enough to have a massing target audience so we can always adjust our message to the audience and be relevant.

Does your company do design sprints? and if so, how much do you value it

We have Vision videos that are helping us envision the next year or few months – something that is not real but only designers and motion designers can create – this is super powerful and helps us push our design and aspirations from the product way faster.

How much have YouTube ads fueled your Business’s growth?

it’s defiantly one of our bigger efforts so i’d say 15%-20% of our on-line effort.also word-of-mouth plays a critical role in our ability to grow in new areas.

Hi! Were your YouTube ads produced internally, or did you get an agency?

All our ads are made internally.
we are always looking for outside talent to work with.generally we found that internal production allows us to move faster and control the tone of voice and what we want to convey.As we grow I imagine we’ll add many other ways for us to create content and ads.

Hi, your product is in a very crowded and competitive space. How did you go about differentiating yourselves and communication those USPs to the world?

I know it may feel as a competitive space, in my eyes it isn’t so much. When I ask “are you happy with how you work, do you think you can improve how you do things” no one ever told me – no – i’m happy.and from monday users we get a lot of “perfect we nailed it”. I think we still have a lot to improve and create, but generally I feel we are on to something big.  The product itself is the difference and everyone is willing to try something new that will solve such a big problem in their team work.

Hey, the productivity tool space is getting crowded so where do you see it in 5 years time?

I think this is a massive market and a huge part of it is growing. The world is digitising and I think in 5 years it will still just grow massively as internet and mobile penetrate every part of our work.So 1. I don’t think it’s crowded compared to the opportunity. 2. I think in 5 years there will still be a lot of room.

What insight do you have around how to best determine the blend of paid vs organic budgets when launching a new brand?

It’s easy for us
Paid is measured really really well. so it has no budget – we can pay as much as we can as long as we get to a certain level of performance. We always keep a positive ROI over a defined period that may change from time to time – now it’s about 8-9 months to reach 100% money back on the $.With “brand” budget we have to experiment, see what works and what makes an impact – it’s also measurable  but not on an ROI basis – so we have to budget it and scale with a strategy – no short term expectations.

Why did you change the name of the company from dapulse to Monday.com?

It’s easy
dapulse is a really really really really bad name.and the opposite is true for monday.
memorable and relates to what we do.I feel monday is our vision in one word
there are those who hate mondays and about 50 actually love it from research we’ve done – they feel it’s a positive way to start a new week, ” a fresh start”so our job is to tackle all those problems people feel they have in their work, the reason they dredd mondays. It’s many big and small problems and we’re here to face all of them 

First we love the product – we use it at my company. . How do you guys break out marketing to hit different niches?

thank you – that’s awesome.what company are you from?it’s a hard question to answer because we are still struggling with niches.my best answer is that we always try and tackle a high problem in your list as a customer. example: managing your team is probably in number 7-8 on your list.
maybe number 1 is finding new customers and number 2 is making them happy. So managing customers is a much better value we can bring to people and miraculously its also much broader allowing us to not deal with niches. two birds with one stone.I think exact targeting and many many messages can get you thus far.. at some point you need to go deeper to be able to expand wider.

Do you feel customer service plays a large role in your success as an organization?

for us it’s huge!from day one we’ve placed this in the top priority and set our answering standard to 10 min.we wanted people to know there are other people behind the tool – that we’re there for them and that we care – because we really do.so today it’s a lot about being there on all platform and ways – from personalised instruction videos – to quick answer time, to being diligent and thought-full in how we answer.we still think this is one of the most important assets we have and we’re going to make huge efforts to maintain that level going forward.

How much did you guys have to pay for Monday.com domain?

$125k +$25k in equity which by now the equity part is worth way more then the cash 

Your marketing rocks because I have been pummelled with ads from you guys 

We actually don’t control how much exposure each person gets on Youtube. It’s an issue we work with Google on.I don’t think blasting people with ads does anyone any good, we are working hard to avoid it.

Where did you focus your offline marketing efforts?

We found that subway ads work for us, because we have enough space to convey a more complex message.I think for things that are more clear to customers I’d go for billboards.We are now starting to get into many other areas such as conferences and events. probably our biggest way of deciding is if we can have a meaningful space to convey a more complicated message.

Which team in your organization is driving and managing customer retention? And what value drivers are they using to access retention?

We have several teams. for the largest customers we have dedicated people and for the smaller ones we have more automated things that will be more reactive then pro-active.the top line metric of the company is WAPP weekly active paying people – we want customer to actually use the platform and everyone in the company is measured not on revenue but on actually delivering value.it’s clear that if you’re not using you’re not happy and we found that this uncovers all the things that are for us to improve. It’s either on a specific level they we just help or on a broader level then we learn and improve the product.

How do you differentiate yourself from the very much established Trello.

I think this is a thing for us to work on in our marketing messaging.trello is amazing for super small things. once you have a large project or work with more then a few people – trello becomes hard to navigate. I think everyone should use trello and then when they hit a wall move to us

With so many similar products that are meant to make our lives easier, they all seem to promise the same thing it is very hard to know which one will deliver on their promises. Do you ever envision a day when you will rely less on paid ads and more and a stable customer base because you’ve delivered on the promises made?

We are now entering that transition period, we have such a huge group of people that says how we actually solved their problems – how they found the holly grail of tools the’ve been looking for for years.

We are going to lean in on that – and I think we will keep doing on-line paid marketing .- just that the messaging and content will change

What percentage of your customers have less than 10 users?

I don’t have the number on the top of my head – but it’s a biased number because most business on the planet are small. I think that if you compared it to the population of companies – we tend to more to the “higher than 10” category as we solve big fundamental issues but if you look at absolutes so obviously massing number of under 10 accounts.

What do you use to track important company KPI’s?
Is it all manual and spreadsheets? automated? tools/software?

We have our own internal BI tool we call “BigBrain” everything is in there.

What the main focus for startup on early stage?

Product market fit – obviously – you have to find a product that people are willing to pay for otherwise there is no real grow – that’s true for SAAS at least on some other consumer products obviously FREE was a good strategy, but still Product Market Fit with a harder to measure metric 

What was the best thing you purchased to improve your marketing team’s skills?

Just hard work – nothing we bought.

we do almost everything internally – so the most important thing is the believe we can make quality good things – like youtube videos – even when no one in the team ever made them.Try and improve.

Hey Roy. What Unit economic metrics are you looking at for ROI per channel? LTV:CAC?

We don’t measure internal effort by LTV to CAC – that’s wrong because it can drain your cashflow – we have a harder to keep metric – cash payback period – that helps us be very cashflow efficient and have tighter control.

1.when did you decided that Monday.comshould be a global-like company? And what is the main difficult to create a globally well-known company?
2. PR has a relevant contribution to your marketing strategy?

1.Since we started the company in Israel and Israel is a very small market we had to adopt a global strategy from day one. Also the internet is really easy – we just got a lot of customers from everyone – today over 145 different countries.
2. Yes it does – but I can’t say that it has a massive impact on people adopting the tool – it’s a brand effort that people get to know us more and understand what we are all about rather than drive to actual adoption.

1) What Growth Hacking tools would you recommend that are relatively unknown to most marketers?
2) What’s the number 1 Growth Hack thats worked for Monday.com?
3) Whats your Average Customer LTV(Life Time Value)?
4) Whats your average acquisition cost?
5) Which channel has given you the highest ROI?

I’ve answered some of these already.. so
1. we do the hard work on analysing data – not magic formulas – read the forums – and look at what the masters do.
2. making really good ads that really get people excited to give us a try. then have a good product that people recommend others – this allowed us to cover the spend quickly enough. sorry no magic tricks here either.

Hey guys, thank you for all the great questions, I see most attention goes to our marketing efforts – that’s awesome. I will try to answer the rest later today.
Feel free to reach out on our channel #partner_monday_com, my team and I will be happy to continue and help with any other question or requests.This is a funny short clip you should see to understand some of our marketing / BI / measurement tactics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-YbHMCUycw&t=3s
This is a short clip to give anyone an understanding how deep monday product is – https://youtu.be/z-lhO9I3BLs (it’s 5 min that you’ll be our of breath in)

Loved being here​