How to Partner With Me: monday.com’s Elina Papernaya

“How to partner with me” is a series where we explore the inner workings of partner programs to help you better understand how to build your partner ecosystem. Read previous entrants Typeform, Zylo, and Zapier.

Monday.com likes to call itself a “work operating system.” And when you have ambitions to sit in the middle of a company’s workflow, you’ll need a robust partner ecosystem. That’s where you, dear reader, come in.

The Israel-based company has already found a home in more than 100,000 companies like Uber, Walmart, and others as it continues to grow its partnerships team to nearly two dozen. That means they hope to add more use cases, more industries, more customers, and … more partnerships.

We spoke with monday.com’s global tech partners lead Elina Papernaya about what the company is looking for in a partner, and how you can get in early on its upcoming app marketplace. 

This discussion was edited for length and clarity.

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We’re looking for… all types of partnerships— from channel to strategic, technology to academic, and even startup incubator partnerships. I am personally working on our technology partnerships, I really see huge potential in this area.

One type of technology partner we’re looking for is …it’s hard for us to pinpoint just one. Since monday.com is flexible and customizable, it can be and is used by organizations in any industry for a large number of use cases. That means partnerships can be extremely far-reaching as our user base extends to so many different verticals. 

We have two focus areas: partnerships with leading platforms in key use cases such as communication, marketing, and operations. On the other side, we are working on building out our app ecosystem.

For example, we work now with companies that specialize in hotel management software or event management software, we ourselves will not develop event management features, but would be happy to partner and add those to monday.com.

The benefit to our partners is… we have more than 100,000 companies from almost every industry and country using the platform and of those, a huge proportion are super engaged with the product. It’s something they use almost—if not every—day. 

One thing that we do that is unique is … we’re pretty open and flexible as a product and that means there are lots of possible integrations. You can be a CRM tool that will be great for monday.com. You can also be an ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] system that can be a perfect fit. And at the same time, there’s an unlimited number of use cases for what is managed with monday.com. It can literally can be used in so many different ways, which means that there are so many opportunities to partner and integrate. 

We give the most attention to partnerships that … add more use cases for monday.com or make the existing ones more compelling. We plan to tier partners based on the integration usage and then the ones that get the highest adoption. We’re strong in marketing and are willing to do a lot of go-to-market and co-marketing strategies with partners.

In the next year, our partner program will … launch our marketplace. It’s in the early days, but we move fast—especially for strategic initiatives like this one. We see an app marketplace as one of the growth engines for us as a company.  It will definitely be something we will invest in heavily, both the features themselves and the marketing we’ll do around the marketplace.

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If you’d like to partner with monday.com, learn more on its partner page.