monday.com partnerships playbook 📑 - how they grow revenue with partners and app marketplace

monday.com, a project management SaaS unicorn recently underscored that 💡 “our marketplace and partnership continues to be one of our larger #growth drivers across our company”. Let’s take a look at their #partnerships strategy.

📊 Monday started as a customizable project management SaaS to help teams manage and collaborate on project activities in one place. Over the last 10 years it’s grown into a publicly listed company with a $4.3bn market cap today.

Monday created their partnership team at 📌 ~ $50M ARR and 5 yrs after their product launch (7 yrs into company journey). Soon after they launched Automation and Integrations.

2 yrs after, at $161M ARR, they launched App #Marketplace

📈 Check changes of the revenue graph slope - their growth accelerated noticeably in those two points.

[NB: This 0 to 1 partnership journey would be noticeably shorter today, as integrations are more critical.]

🤝 Why and how do they partner?

Today Monday partner ecosystem consists of:

✔️ 177 active channel partners (26 channel partners added on Q2)

✔️ 417 new referral partners,

✔️ 150+ marketplace apps with 30 monetized apps that show meaningful traction.

✔️ 37 integrations with the likes of Salesforce, Slack, etc.

To put these numbers in perspective, their customer base consists of 152K customers in 200+ countries and 200+ different industries.

Eran Zinman - Co-founder & Co-CEO:

“we continue to see strong momentum with our partners channel. We now have, with regards to global expansion, we are covering new markets where we don't have reps directly.”

😎 Partnership group

Last year, when Monday had 1,062 employees (in Q2 2022, this number was ~1500), their Partnership group had 68 people.

About 2X of product (31) and slightly smaller than marketing (85)

🛠️ Road to becoming a #platform

Today Monday aspirationally calls itself Work OS - an “open platform that lets companies build work management tools and software applications to fit their needs”

They opened their product to external developers to expand its capabilities and deepening its products to more use cases.

Platform transition helps to support multiple products, accelerate innovation, and drive enterprise deals. Monday also added native payment capability to its marketplace, streamlining purchasing for all Monday users and helping developers monetize apps.

⚖️ Monday app marketplace today has ~150 apps.

Asana has 300+, Zoom 1000+ and Salesforce 3.5K.

[source - Monday investor materials]