Monday.com Wants to Be Your Only Open Tab at Work – Built In

Earlier this summer, Monday.com released a new kind of app-building experience on its platform. The core insight is relatively simple: If you dont like your workflow, you can change it.

Though many workflow systems allow for user customization, few have achieved the level of configurability found in the Tel-Aviv-based companys new release. In a way, the app framework brings the modularity and broad functionality of an iOS, Androidor Windows operating system to a destination site for getting work done.

The Monday system itself is built around the concept that, as a work operating system, you can choose and build the workflow that you like, like putting Lego bricks in place to build something majestic, said Matt Burns, a startup ecosystem leader at the company.

One benefit of the new framework, according toDipro Bhowmik, a technical success lead on the appframework, is a low-code environment that allows users with virtually no software experience to curate their workspaces.

You can choose and build the workflow that you like, like putting Lego bricks in place to build something majestic.

Prior to the release of the appframework, Bhowmik said, users could choose from a selection of pre-installed apps and integrations, including embedded Zoom calls, a whiteboard, a pivot table, an online document viewerand a working status feature all released in March with the intention of creating a better experience for people working from home.

Now, Monday.com has gone one step further in its bid to be the workplace OS of choice, with building blocks for others to create apps hosted on itssite.

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For trained developers, the framework offers sophisticated app customizationoptions not only the APIs and tools to access Monday.com data ontheir platformsusers, Bhowmik said, but the capability to upload their own code to Mondays infrastructure, where it is hosted and maintained as part of a monthly service agreement. This allows companies to scratch-build customized board views, widgets and integrations that are presented to users as native features.

So, tomorrow, if you wanted to build a new board view, youd be able to build a web application and upload your code to our servers, Bhowmik said. We would serve it for you; you would use the software development kit to make your API calls. You wouldnt have to worry about any kind of authentication, because we handle that for you.

The real power of the system, though, lies in its interoperability. Just as an iPhone allows a user to employ the phones ecosystem to run a Spotify app,Monday.com ispositioning itself as an accessible host for a range of existing and yet-to-be-built external apps, including those of potential competitors,Burns explained.

The folks who are building these apps could be anyone from hobby developers who just have a cool idea and want to build something and show it off to the world,to folks who want to build an entire business.

One look at theintegrations on Monday.coms website and you get a sense of the scope of its ambitions. The list includesSlack, Zendesk, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Asana, Trello, GitHub, Dropbox and several common G-Suite apps, among many others.

The software is written in JavaScript, but it is compatible with virtually all coding programs and languages. As of June, more than 100 apps had been built by external partners and customers, 20 by Monday.com itself,and the app framework was in use by 8,900 weekly active users.

The folks who are building these apps could be anyone from hobby developers who just have a cool idea and want to build something and show it off to the world, to folks who want to build entire businesses, Bhowmik said.

As more companies move to remote work, the app framework can reasonably be seen as a strategic objective in a broader turf war between Monday.com and its near-market competitors to claim ownership of the digital workspace. The end game for Monday.com, as a recent press release indicates, is a world where software serves as a central hub and OS for any kind of work.

Or, as Burns puts it: Whereas Windows is an operating system that works for your computer, we want to be the brain of the business, where we can collect, digest, translate and transparently show you all that information.

Its hardly any secret that companies like Slack and MURAL are vying for similar territory. As of May,Slackreporteda record 12.5 millionsimultaneously connected users, including at least 65 of the Fortune 100 companies, with a total active use ofmore thanone billion minutes each weekday. MURAL just raised $118 millionin Series B funding,tripled annual revenue year over yearand added more than a million monthly active users.IBM, Intuit, Atlassianand Autodesk each have up to tens of thousands of MURAL members collaborating with the product each month,the briefing reported.

Many of these platforms focus on integrating applications and visualization tools to recreate the meetings, sprints and strategy sessions that commonly took place not so long ago in the physical office.

Whereas Windows is an operating system that works for your computer, we want to be the brain of the business.

In that sense, Monday.com is no different. Valued at nearly $2 billion with $130 million in annual recurring revenue, the company works with 100,000 teams around the globe, from cattle ranchers to digital agencies to enterprise clients like Walmart, Adobe and General Electric. Where some other software workplace tools specialized, Burns told me aiming to be the best plumbing software for plumbers Monday widened its lens, adopting a more universal design vernacular.

When he was first introduced to CEO Roy Mann at the corporate headquarters in Tel Aviv in 2016, Burns said, Mann told him the widespreadproblem companieswere facingwasthe breakdown of team collaboration through silos a view Burnsshared.

The solution offered by Mann, however, caught him off guard. It was not the traditional business school tract to find a niche and own it but, instead, to create a tool that could unify disparate teams, from employees at small- and medium-sized firms to enterprise teams that dont normally collaborate closely.

The market potential of that untapped space convinced Burns, a former independent marketing consultant for healthcare providers, that it was time to make the jump. One of his first clients, which he describedas a luxury hotel for breeding steers, strengthened his convictionthat the platform had far broader appeal than competing workplace tools.

Each item in their board was a different cow they were tracking as [the cows]moved to different farms, he said. His next thought was this: Oh my God, this can be used for absolutely anything.

Now, Monday must prove its solution is the best one for the job.

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Speedhas been key to Mondaysdevelopment approach. The company devised plans for the appframework in early 2020, but when COVID-19 arrived unexpectedly, Mondayaccelerated the release cycle. What was supposed to happen duringthe course of several weekshappened in a two-day hackathon over Zoom that resulted in 20 new apps.

Eighteen invited clients and partners participated. One of them was KPMG, a global tax advisory and auditing company headquartered in the Netherlands.

KPMGdevelopedan internal smart document reader that can scan and extract invoice numbers and other pertinent information from financial documents. But the company confronted a question faced by countless software firms: How could itmake the tool more accessible for users in the context of their actual workflows?

During the hackathon, KPMGhit on a solution: an integration that allows a customer to upload a document directly into Monday.com, where it is securely processed through the embedded smart document reader and, within seconds, sent to a Monday.com board.

This is really a new generation of tools that we're seeing, which are using a work operating system to empower what people are doing every day.

To the end user, the value of the integration is convenience. You dont have to go into another tool and upload that information. You dont have to be dealing with three or four different windows at once. Its all seamless, Bhowmik said.

Thats an obvious advantage to companies like KPMG, who want to create a more frictionless experience for their customers. Its also a strategic victory for Monday.com, which can keep people locked into its operating system.

We want to make it so you can spend all your time in the Monday.com work OS, Bhowmik said. Do all your work, or as much as you can, there, and have that information either fed in from other tools that your team uses, or sent from Monday.com to those other tools, so the rest of your team has visibility.

Companies in the United States and internationally are starting to experiment with the new app framework. The Paris-based open-source CRM and e-commerce company Synolia developed a visualization tool that monitors team members progress during a sprint, reporting results in a chart. The Dubai-based software consulting company Cloud Concept, meanwhile, built a document generator app that can take a basic invoicing template, populate it with a customer list harvested from Monday.com and produce invoices to distribute to customers.

It remains unclearwhat kindof workplace apps will emerge as more developers begin tinkering with the platform and whether the app frameworkwill make Monday.com the go-to command center in agrowing market for digital workplace tools.

But Burns, at least, is openly bullish about the frameworks prospects: Its not like were replacing technology that people are using and seeing out there. Were building something different.

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Monday.com Wants to Be Your Only Open Tab at Work - Built In