From 2 engineers who didn't enjoy selling..to $1bn ARR

Why monday.com is an anti-thesis to every SAAS startup advice

In the last few weeks, I have spoken to 38 SAAS founders (as part of my idea discovery call / more on that later) and if I have to sum up SAAS advice from all, it will be:

Sell to Enterprises.
Avoid SMB.
Mid-market? That's for losers.

Sell to Enterprises. DO NOT EVEN THINK OTHERWISE

This is the standard playbook followed by most (Indian) SAAS startups - they start with mid-market focus, get some traction (+funding) and then pivot to enterprise segment, i.e. sales-heavy and NOT AT ALL product-focused.

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What about monday.com?

For the starters, monday.com is a work productivity platform that allows organizations to customize their work management tools (be it project management or CRM etc).

What's interesting about Monday is that it is at $1Bn ARR with majority of customers coming from SMB space, which is a very different take on SAAS space (where everyone is selling to enterprises).

There are some points that need to be highlighted :

Customer growth

In the times we are in, most SAAS companies are struggling to grow their customer base. But not Monday - they are growing at 20% annually, even at 225K+ customer base.

SMB rocks

• 22% of monday's customers are still very small — less than 10 users.