Business Breakdowns
· Ben Hensman
If you look at cross-team interactions in the platform today, there's 33 million monthly cross-team interactions on a daily basis, 73% of customers are collaborating across departments. And that's really what's driven this incredible expansion into the enterprise. Of course, there's also been significant investment in enterprise-grade features, permissions, security. This is all really critical and perhaps a nice segue into really what makes Monday different. And we can dig into this a bit more, is Monday DB. Scaling these sorts of horizontal use cases on a very broad product can be technically difficult, purely based on database limitations. And Monday has built an incredible underlying architecture which it continues to advance. That in fact is the product. It's very different to traditional software where you're using a defined user experience that is calling a database layer in the background. And the really interesting thing about Monday is it is the database. They've built a proprietary schema-less database architecture that allows users to instantly customize the workspace, dragging, dropping, adapting workflows at any scale and doing so in a way that's defined with software rather than the rigid schema of a fixed database underneath. But that's required real investment and innovation from inside the business to allow the database to scale for the enterprise. And so a couple of years ago, in 2019 or 2020, when they were predominantly an SMB-focused business, Monday DB wasn't yet built and it wasn't yet ready for the kind of scale that we see now. And that investment, we've seen incredible feedback from customers, incredible change in speed and the ability to run many hundreds of thousands of items and columns on boards that's changed significantly and facilitated that move up into the enterprise.
· Matt Reustle
[00:00:00] S0: Can you dive into that a bit more? I'm thinking about the best example, but in the most layman's terms possible in terms of the database differentiation versus a traditional software package. And let's pick a Salesforce or whoever it might be as a CRM, which might look different—and tell me if that's the wrong example to use—but how does that differ from the way that Monday.com approaches it in the ability to scale?
· Ben Hensman
[00:00:00] S1: Typically, in the first era of software, you would build a schema that you were going to use inside the application and you would build it in a relational data model. And that was very, very difficult to update without a significant upgrade. By doing it in a schema-less way and building it in a flexible way where data is put together not just on a rows and columns basis, but using separate databases in a columnar way and in a row-based way so that you can conduct queries in any way for the customer. And that way you can conduct them whatever best suits the data model. But if you think about Salesforce, they've built an entire ecosystem around a core product that is used in a very specific way and it has a very specific data model. And so if companies want to engage and feed data into that model, they have to do it a certain way. Monday.com is the opposite of that. And so by having an open database, a very flexible database with a flexible schema, and so many integrations and points where data can come in and then flow back out to execute work, they provide a very different experience for the customers that just enables a totally different level of flexibility. Hopefully that makes sense.
· Matt Reustle
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah. Is using the LEGO example a good comparison? If you're bringing around a completed LEGO set and you have to bring that completed LEGO set around everywhere you go, that's obviously taking up a lot of capacity versus bringing the individual blocks, putting together whatever you might want, but it's going to be smaller in size. You still have the ability to customize it, make it look different. Is that a decent way where it's chunking out the individual pieces that can then be put back together in whichever way you want? Is that a fair way to represent it?
· Ben Hensman
[00:00:00] S1: That is a good way to look at it. So if we define the platform as a set of services and capabilities and then however you want to use it is a set of building blocks. And that could be a specific column performing a defined task, that could be using one of their pre-built products like CRM, but then also building a whole lot of flexibility around it and connecting it into different data sources that you wouldn't otherwise be able to in a really fixed and defined CRM. And so a competitor of Monday in the CRM space, for example, is HubSpot. For both small businesses and mid-market in particular, HubSpot has a largely fixed data model. You have to use their CRM in a very specific way. Monday.com comes with all of the same functionality, but then you can build around it in the way that your business works and the way that your customers interact with you, bringing in any data that you want and linking it to any other tools that you want in an incredibly flexible way. And that's what we've seen with customers. Early on, they might start with more rudimentary use cases and then eventually build out the way that they work in a way that makes sense for them, for their customers.
· Matt Reustle
[00:00:00] S0: Talking again about the customer base and how that's evolved over time, working your way up into the larger enterprises, working across teams. Does the go-to-market function from a sales perspective have anything unique when they're thinking about targeting these larger businesses and then expanding within them? Is there anything that's specific to how they approach it, which is noteworthy?