On evolving product market fit, global remote teams, and the future of talent networks with Evan Walden, co-founder and CEO of Monday.vc
I spoke with Evan Walden, CEO and co-founder of Monday.vc, which powers job boards and talent networks for the world’s top venture capital and private equity funds, accelerators, and membership organizations.
Evan shared his experiences and advice on team building, product market fit, sales, bootstrapping, leading remote teams, and building meaningful networks.
On team building, Evan shares the importance but also the fun of the task: one of the most underrated aspects of being a founder is being able to pick who you want to work with.
In his view, the hardest role to hire for is the one(s) for which the current team has the least amount of inherent empathy. Without empathy, it is challenging to write role descriptions, create meaningful projects, and share opportunities in the relevant communities. Involving people with prior experience in the departments you are building is incredibly useful in reaching, selecting, and engaging top talent in these areas.
On finding his co-founder, Evan met Raul after meeting in Boulder at a co-living house for entrepreneurs. They had worked together before and both brought distinct, complimentary skills (Evan in sales and growth and his co-founder in engineering and product) toward the big, long term vision of helping people find meaning in life through their work.
On product market fit, Evan underscores the ever evolving nature of the term. All people, companies, and industries change over time, so having product market fit at one point in time does not guarantee perpetual product market fit. By consistently listening to your customers, you can better understand how their needs develop. For Monday.vc, Evan realized that many funds, companies, and accelerators were looking for ways to maintain relationships with people through job boards, rather than solely hire for specific roles at particular points in time. Inspired by this piece of customer feedback, Monday is now building white labeled talent networks as a service.
Finding preliminary product market fit is crucial before you invest substantial resources into your idea. One measure of product market fit is the inbound versus outbound interest in your product offering, especially around ultimate conversion to paid purchase. Beyond the top of the funnel, it is also important to measure customer retention. Product market fit in marketing and product are distinct. Strong marketing can get you great lead generation but without a strong product, you will not be able to retain these customers in the long run. Both product and marketing fit are core components of ultimate product market fit.
On sales, Evan found his first paying customers through the Techstars network (Monday.vc was a Boulder 2017 Techstars alum) and by reaching out for warm intros to venture funds who could become customers.
Evan started his career selling pesticides at Dow, which, at first, appears quite different from his current work at Monday.vc. But interestingly, the experience taught him how to connect with people who were quite different from himself and how to build empathy, which has served him well when speaking with current and potential customers at Monday.vc.
On bootstrapping, Evan decided to bootstrap Monday.vc because ultimately, he was more confident in his ability to convert customers than his ability to pitch VCs specifically. Moreover, in the early days, they were still figuring out their product market fit and did not yet have a revenue engine to pour money into. They did later raise from VCs when they began to explore a new market (the aforementioned talent network as a service) that they had received more customer validation around.
On remote work, Monday.vc has always been a remote company even prior to COVID times. Evan saw that the future of work was remote and being able to hire people from anywhere gave them a competitive advantage in finding the best talent globally.
When leading a remote team, standard operating procedures are especially crucial to establish and streamline. Having a centralized knowledge center to reduce friction around information sharing has been immensely impactful for Monday.vc (the team uses GetGuru).
On network building, Evan highlights the power of connecting people. When you make introductions that create value, that value is ultimately associated with you. Have exploratory calls with people in your ecosystem to learn about their needs and interests and with this understanding, introduce them to helpful, relevant people in your network.
Whenever Evan thinks of someone, he will write to them. So often we briefly remember to reach out to people in our network with check ins, interesting articles, or helpful resources but quickly forget unless we execute immediately.
On his favorite daily habit, Evan recently adopted a dog; walking his dog each morning and night has been a fun way to get vitamin D and exercise during quarantine.
Looking ahead, Evan hopes Monday.vc will help solve the problem of diversity in recruiting by helping companies connect directly with communities of underrepresented people.
