Eran Zinman on monday.com’s Pivot, Marketing Engine and Move Upmarket

monday.com co-founder and co-CEO Eran Zinman says a founder should confront the hardest problems rather than avoid them. In this January 2025 conversation with Harry Stebbings, he recounts the company’s pivot, marketing engine, move upmarket and multi-product strategy. His assessments of monday.com and its competitors reflect his role at the company.

Zinman still enjoys strategy games, which he thinks exercise both big-picture thinking and rapid tactical decisions. He sees a parallel with building a business, though the conversation does not establish that playing games causes entrepreneurial success.

His first startup was a search engine for user reviews. He worked on it for 14 or 15 months without launching, exhausted his own money and energy, and shut it down. Looking back, he concluded that fear of negative feedback had stopped him learning early enough.

He resolved to test ideas, accept failure and get customer feedback sooner. A simple mockup could have surfaced some of the same objections much earlier. At monday.com, he says, experimentation and learning from users remain part of the culture.

As a developer who had done well at school, he found it difficult to discover that customers cared about whether the product solved a problem, not his credentials. Building a business required a different kind of feedback from passing an exam.

He and co-founder Roy Mann saw a crowded work-management market but believed there was room for a broadly useful platform. They did not assume they knew the best process for every company; they wanted to provide flexible tools that customers could adapt to their own needs.

The original product, then called daPulse, focused on communication and collaboration. After roughly a year and a half the founders concluded that many such tools were nice to have rather than central to work, and shifted toward flexible work management.

The decision was hard because the founders’ instinct as developers was to build another feature. After spending around 70–80% of the seed round, they instead interviewed potential customers about how they managed their businesses, rather than simply showing them the product.

The earlier version had only three or four paying customers, including Wix. After the pivot and payment launch, a new customer paid without a sales conversation. Zinman put a dashboard on a television and celebrated each new signup; the self-service behavior suggested a potentially repeatable model.

Early customers paid about $12 per seat, he recalls. What excited the founders was not the amount but that people could understand the product and onboard without being personally persuaded.

Facebook performance marketing reached audiences the founders had not initially expected, including churches, hotels, retailers and manufacturers. Zinman says about 70% of customers were non-technology companies at the time of the interview, a company-reported figure.

As the seed funding ran low, an existing investor provided a convertible financing bridge rather than sending the company straight into a new fundraising process. Zinman credits the additional runway with allowing the team to build on early momentum.

He recalls a $1.4 million initial raise at roughly a $2 million pre-money valuation and later an A round of around $7.5 million including the convertible. He says outside investors repeatedly declined to invest, partly because the company’s idea and low initial contract values were hard to communicate.

Stebbings suggests that investors may have seen a small-business product with low contract values rather than a scalable enterprise opportunity. Zinman says he always believed the company could move upmarket as its execution improved, though the founders may not have communicated that conviction well.

The company built an internal analytics tool called BigBrain to track campaigns, views, signups, conversion and expansion. Zinman says the team invested early because it expected marketing measurement to be central to scale.

Rather than optimizing only accounting-oriented SaaS metrics, the team focused on cash recovery. It tested annual payments, onboarding, payment forms and campaigns that brought customers to conversion sooner. Zinman says the company recycled customer cash into further marketing.

He gives an illustration in which a marketing investment returns 70–80% of its cash after a month, and says $5 million raised from investors supported $15 million of marketing spend through recycling. These are his recollections of the company’s approach, not a general payback benchmark.

The team also negotiated payment timing with advertising platforms where possible and chose campaigns based on how quickly they returned cash. He emphasizes that the result came from many steps, not simply annual billing.

Zinman recalls a $25 million Series B from Insight at roughly $7 million ARR, though he marks the numbers as approximate. He valued a new investor that understood the opportunity and could potentially support later rounds.

After rebranding from daPulse to monday.com, the founders reconsidered their belief that they would never need a sales team. As existing customers wanted to expand, product alone could not provide relationships, security guidance, governance and onboarding support.

The goal was not to abandon small and mid-sized customers for enterprises. Zinman describes a pyramid: continue serving the broad base while adding the capability to support larger organizations at the top.

He thinks being pulled upmarket by customers worked for monday.com. A skilled sales leader can sell an inadequate product, he warns, but that can hide product problems. The company’s self-service model had forced it to improve conversion and retention before adding enterprise sales.

He estimates that the company added sales around $40–60 million ARR. He recalls ARR growing from $6 million to $18 million, then $50 million and $120 million in successive years. These are his retrospective company figures, not independently audited results in the interview.

Zinman describes reading ambitious SaaS growth benchmarks and taking them literally as goals. Later, he learned that the benchmark described exceptional companies. He considers that early ignorance useful because it encouraged a higher level of ambition.

When the company approached $50–60 million ARR, it built a dashboard showing a path to $1 billion. The team calculated that performance marketing alone would require too much spending at that scale; sales and expansion within existing customers would also be necessary. He says the original timeline was missed by about a year.

Stebbings cites approximately $17 million a month in 2023 performance marketing spend; Zinman says it was somewhat less but in that range. He also cites free cash flow above 25%, without specifying a complete calculation in the conversation. These are separate measures, not evidence that every campaign had the same return.

The team measures campaigns and runs tests rather than spreading money without evaluation. Zinman credits the rebrand with making the name easier to remember during a short advertisement and says the company tracked both views and subsequent activity on YouTube.

He resists calling a channel inherently wasteful: a search query can capture an immediate need, while Facebook or YouTube may reach people who have not begun searching. The company evaluates different audiences and their economics.

The multi-product strategy emerged partly from observation. Zinman says many customers had built their own CRM workflows on monday.com, configuring boards, deals, dashboards and automations. They wanted control and were willing to invest effort to get it.

Customers told him that existing enterprise tools could be powerful but difficult or expensive to customize. monday.com packaged its platform as a CRM and added features such as call recording and analysis. His assessment of rivals and customer preferences is the view of a competing product provider.

He says CRM grew from nearly zero to $25 million in about a year, as reported at a prior investor day. The company did not disclose a current quarterly figure in this interview, and later growth should not be inferred from that earlier snapshot.

Zinman describes monday.com as a platform of building blocks, with work management, CRM, development and service as applications on top. He expects customers to consolidate some core workflows there, benefiting from connected data and automation. That is the company’s vision, not a claim that all software will be replaced.

He learned that each product needs its own go-to-market approach: buyers, decisions and marketing channels differ. monday.com therefore organizes dedicated teams, marketing and sales efforts around the product lines.

He says the company had recently reached $1 billion in ARR and expects CRM, development and service products to become more significant over time. These are annualized recurring revenue and future expectations, not current revenue from each product.

He views established competitors in CRM and service software as evidence of valuable customer needs and opportunities to improve on existing products. The company studies competitors, but he says its own execution is more important than anxiety about their moves.

Asked whether AI agents threaten horizontal SaaS, Zinman describes integrating AI into customers’ workflows rather than making a separate product. He believes users will still need systems of record, data visibility and human oversight even as some work is automated. This is his forecast as a software platform executive.

He also expects SaaS pricing to evolve beyond per-seat charges toward some combination of usage and seats as AI performs more work. The timing and effect on individual companies remain uncertain.

On the IPO, Zinman says the timing was more contingent than outsiders might assume. He wanted to build a large company, admired public software businesses and has found public investors more sophisticated than he expected.

He values the discipline of quarterly reporting. He recalls the IPO ceremony and an anticlimactic evening after a long period of investor meetings; seeing monday.com in his phone’s stock app the next morning made the event feel real.

Roy Mann was initially CEO and Zinman CTO, but the founders worked together across fundraising, technology and business decisions. They made the co-CEO arrangement official to match how they already operated and avoid repeatedly explaining overlapping roles.

Zinman attributes the arrangement to shared priorities and a willingness to put the company ahead of titles. He says they spend substantial time discussing decisions, including frequent walks home together. Their experience is one example, not proof that every co-CEO arrangement will work.

His first board-management rule is never to surprise the board. monday.com sent board members automated daily performance updates, he says, and discussed major decisions individually before meetings so the board could spend more time on future choices.

When setting goals, he starts with what he wants to achieve rather than extrapolating last year’s plan. He believes an ambitious desired outcome can force the team to reconsider what is possible, although it still needs a practical plan.

Zinman says he personally avoids email and outside investments to protect focus; other people at the company still use email for coordination. He uses monday.com, Slack and WhatsApp to communicate.

He tries to prioritize the painful problems founders may be tempted to avoid. Addressing the hardest issue, he says, can reduce stress and change the company’s trajectory.

Balancing work and family was difficult for years. Therapy helped him recognize that exhaustion and impatience affect the people he leads. He now tries to exercise, sleep and spend more time with family, treating his own energy as part of the job.

He admires Microsoft’s transformation and would like to learn from how it changed. Asked about Salesforce, he praises its role in SaaS and says he would ask Marc Benioff about building a sales machine at scale.

Zinman credits his father with teaching him to ask why and go deep, and his mother with compassion and ambition. With his own children, he hopes to leave room for different paths and support what matters to them.

He says family is where he feels happiest, while the company remains deeply meaningful. Every stage of leadership has felt new, and he wants to keep learning through the journey.

Asked why he became an entrepreneur, he says he is still working out the answer. He suspects it combines a desire to prove something to himself with a wish to do meaningful work that affects other people.