Monday.com is defining B2B marketing for start ups in a new way. They call it H2H, or human to human. I call it successful. As a spin off from the technology within wix.com, the company is now successful in its own right. Based in Tel Aviv, and marketing the product worldwide, they are a textbook case showing that deep understanding of both traditional advertising channels and measured digital marketing can make you a technology unicorn.

1. Monday.com
A DIGITAL MARKETING PLAYBOOK
MARCH 2019

2. This is an inspiration tale (and a cautionary one)
 Monday has $84.M raised
 most of it within the last 24 months
 Based in Tel Aviv. 30%of the business is US.
 You may have noticed them from the billboards up everywhere in SF & NY, youtube
ads, and a myriad of ad channels they lit up.
 Valued >$500M
 Do you have FOMO yet?

3. Three things
have defined
them:
Great ads with great storytelling
Large Ad Spends
Relentless measurement
Although the product is good, and intuitive, it’s probably no
better than Trello or Asana.

4. Background
 They started life in 2012 as “dapulse”.
 Was an internal communications tool at
website builder Wix.com.
 Rebranded in 2017
 Because nobody could pronounce the
name, or figure out what they did
because of the name
 In case you're wondering, “dapulse”
originated because that was an
available domain name.

5. But Monday.com was successful before the rebrand in 2017.
 They'd already raised a significant round on
the proven track record of being able to
scale paying clients.
 They had a good story, “Work-life is stressful,
take control of the chaos. Manage Anything”16
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Jan-15 Jan-16 Jan-17

6. They are great story tellers.
 They have a whole host of videos and online ads in which
they lay out the story, and show personality in doing it.
 Marketing Head, Joel Goldstein, does all the video voice
overs and stories.
 Even the Rebrand video from 2017, which Goldstein made,
showed they were having fun and they were not above
making mistakes. They had confidence of their product,
but more confidence in their personalities.
 And they are open to explaining their inner workings.

7. “Smart Advertising” has made the
difference for them.
 They spent half the marketing dollars on channels
that were measurable
 Facebook & Instagram, Adwords, Capterra,
Outbrain and Bing
 Half on channels that were not
 Youtube, Podcasts, Outdoor Billboards
 They prized traffic over clicks, and then measured
everything they could post signup with internally
developed predictive reporting tool called “Big
Brain”, more on that later.

8. Pricing is low, focus is on
scaling with teams
$5 TO $25 PER USER / PER MONTH, BILLED ANNUALLY.

9. Marketing
Spend
2018: December: $2M a month on ads,
grows traffic 7M unique to > 10M by March
2019.
2017: July: $750k / Month
2016: April: $200k / Month
2015: January: $30k/ Month

10. So this is how it
scales.
 From my calculations, their costs
are:
 per visitor ~ $0.60
 per trial ~$30
 per paying user ~$150
 Each user brings in an average
team of 9 people

11. Results
 2012: Spins out of Wix.com with seed funding
of $1.5M
 2014: Launch
 2015: Starts year with 200 paying clients, ends
with 2,000
 2016: April: Raises 7.6M on 4,500 clients. ARR
grows 350%, and the client base doubles
every 5 months.
 2017 April: Raises $25M on $230M pre-
money. 10,000 Clients. October:17,000 clients,
150K users. EOY ARR $20M.
 2018: June: Raises $50M on $500 pre-money,
35,000 clients

12. Monday Morning Marketing
 Drive with the messaging, and then determine
after the signup who is worth pursuing.
 “BigBrain” gives a quality score predicting if
they’re likely to be a paying customer.
 Predictive model includes variables like:
 type of email address
 time of week
 how long a user spends on site
 first actions they take, etc.

13. Marketing Spend
led from 2015-
2019
 “Every dollar that we earn was
reinvested back into marketing
spend.”
 “The biggest challenge is always to
meet all KPIs as marketing spend
ramps.”
 Marketing & Customer Success
Headcount >> Engineering
Headcount

14. Conversion rate is the key.
Even a small dip in the
conversion rate has a
dramatic impact on every
aspect of growth KPIs.

15. References to
for all the
numbers
 "monday.com | Crunchbase."
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dapulse.
 "dapulse is changing its name because people kept ... - Business Insider." 12
Nov. 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/dapulse-changing-company-
name-people-made-fun-of-it-2017-11. Accessed 25 Mar. 2019.
 "dapulse is now monday.com project management software."
https://monday.com/monday-project-management-renaming/. Accessed
25 Mar. 2019.
 https://monday.com/pricing/
 "monday.com - YouTube."
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA9UvBiKHly15rN8u_Km3BQ.
Accessed 25 Mar. 2019.
 "dapulse is now monday.com." https://monday.com/monday-project-
management-renaming/. Accessed 25 Mar. 2019.
 "Meet the Geniuses Behind Our BI Tool BigBrain - monday blog."
https://monday.com/blog/meet-the-geniuses-behind-our-bi-tool-
bigbrain/. Accessed 25 Mar. 2019.
 https://www.similarweb.com/website/monday.com
 https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/11/monday-com-raises-50m-at-a-500m-
valuation-led-by-stripes-for-its-workplace-collaboration-tools/