SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
738: Is He The Future of Design Collaboartion? 1200 Customers and $3m in Revenues Say Yes!
01 Aug 2017
Chapter 1: What inspired Mariano Suarez-Battan to start MURAL?
one of the founders of Mural. They're now serving over 1,200 companies, of which 45,000 people at those companies use their tool. Last month, they did 280,000 bucks in monthly recurring revenue. They've got three specific cohorts of customer. Their online channel, which has the highest churn, is 5% per month, but their other two cohorts, they've churned nobody. So sticky product.
They've got a team of 35 between San Francisco and Buenos Aires. This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million.
He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit sold mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Today's episode is 738.
Chapter 2: How did the acquisition of Bola influence Mariano's career?
Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll hear from Matilda Collins. She has three extra revenue to $700,000 in monthly recurring revenue in just 11 months. How is she growing so fast?
hello everybody my guest is mariano suarez baton he is the co-founder and ceo of a company called mural modern teams are using murals design a digital whiteboard to explore complex challenges visually facilitate design thinking exercises and organize agile processes global 2000 global 2000 companies like ibm intuit steelcase and autodesk have deployed mural at scale to enhance their visual collaboration in their digital workplace
a former startup in residence at a company called IDEO. Many of you have probably heard of them. Muriel is funded by Intel Capital, Alta Ventures, and Collaborative Fund. In the past, he's founded Three Melons, a game studio that designed and published online games. Bolo was a hit product with more than 20 million players globally, and the company was acquired by Playdom and Disney in 2010.
Mariano is an active angel investor, a startup advisor, and an endeavor entrepreneur. Mariano, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes, long intro, thank you. Holy mackerel, that's a long intro, but you've done a lot, huh? Trying, trying, step by step. Why did you sell Bola to Playdom?
Chapter 3: What role did IDEO play in MURAL's development?
So, it was our first game. We created games for large brands before. Lego was a big client, first game there.
uh we we thought that the social games industry was going through consolidation with zinga play first and and play them growing pretty fast and we we thought that strategically made sense to build something bigger with them they had the distribution power and uh and we had like a very great creative team and really great games it means actually it was a great soccer game Very fun to play.
Financially, it also makes sense. Professionally, it makes sense. As a young entrepreneur, I was about to turn 30, so a good, nice turnaround.
What do you mean by that, a financially good and a good, nice turnaround?
Yeah, I mean, so again, we started the company in Argentina, first video games company there, first video game company to get acquired and to be part of something bigger.
Was the company, was the game doing revenue? Was Bola making you money or no?
We were in the cusp of launching it when we decided to join them. So you never know if that's the best decision, but it felt like the best decision at that time.
What was the acquisition price?
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Chapter 4: What is MURAL's pricing structure and customer segmentation?
It was a combination of stock and equity. So, I mean, it's blurry, but somewhere around like it ended up being $11 million.
Okay. You say somewhat blurry because you can't actually cash it out. It depends on the stock price of Disney at that point. Is that accurate?
Yeah.
More or less, our deal was a little different, but the thing is like, I mean, the cash and equity component, the cash grew, the equity grew, but then there were like contingencies and some other things that don't make an exact price, right? Got it, got it.
But there wasn't any cash up front, right? It was a payout over time.
Yes, there was a cash and we paid some investors with that. Oh, got it. There was an equity component, right? And of course, there was salary as a management team.
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Chapter 5: How does MURAL manage customer churn and retention?
Yeah. What was the cash component of the deal?
It was like four or five million, and then it was like four or five million on the other end. And then it was appreciated over in time.
The four million in cash, how much had you raised for investors at that point that you had to pay back?
I think it was $600,000, $700,000, something like that.
So it was a good exit for everyone.
Yeah, everybody was happy. Angel investors got around 10x. I mean, yeah. Awesome.
When did you join IDEO?
So IDEO, we decided to go in 2014. We didn't join IDEO. We are a startup in residence in IDEO.
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Chapter 6: What strategies does MURAL use for customer acquisition?
Oh, got it. We founded the company, and then we realized that... So a few teams at IDEO were using it with Steelcase, actually. And they were discussing this program and also like trying to bring in collaborative fund as a funder for the program. So we knew people there and we happen to be great because we are part of that vision that they have of like,
in making everybody a designer and then deploying design thinking across the world and again we are a very good platform for anywhere across the world to practice design thinking so so our missions are pretty well aligned and so what was what was the financial aspect of that so did did they get did does ideo get a portion of mural like five percent is it like an incubator
It is like an incubator. Our deal was a little less than that because we were already a bigger company and we were already funded and so on.
How much had you already raised before you went into IDEO?
I think it was like close to a million bucks by that time.
So they took less than 5%. When you joined, did IDEO put money in the company as well or no?
So IDEO, so again, collaborative fund put in some money, right? And then IDEO put some... in kind, again, time in the office, time with people, connections with large firms. I mean, they connected us with IBM, and IBM became our biggest client.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of MURAL's gross margin?
They also connected with some folks at Steelcase, as I said, some folks in Stanford, and into it as well. So it was a good experience. Yeah, good, I mean, connector, right? Also a good way to bring in some of their DNA into our product organization, how they work.
And in a way, we realized that instead of going after the IDOs of the world as our clients, we pivoted to who we were going to be aiming for, right? Large firms. Their clients, right? So clients of IDEO that wanted to work like IDEO ended up being the sweet spot for a go-to-market.
Yep. Your pricing is so simple. I love it. You go to the pricing page. It's $12 per member per month billed annually or $16 billed monthly. How much did you credit your success in terms of getting new customers to the simplicity of your pricing plan?
That's the pricing plan for the folks that want to buy online, which is, again, a huge number of people.
Chapter 8: What advice does Mariano have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
But in terms of our revenue, it's not, I mean, the big disproportion, I'd say probably one-fourth of our revenue comes from online. The rest come from enterprise deals, right? So the simplicity is nice because, again, we –
Most of our enterprise deals start with some sort of free trial, of course, and then people in a work group that start to use it, and then they like it, and then they expand it to other folks.
So your business model, though, it's a SaaS business model, right?
SaaS business model, I mean, the things like how we charge. So it's a subscription. Most of the people pay us annually, though, even though we have the monthly option, and pay us via contracts and via invoices and via large contracts. We also... integrate our systems to their systems and more, I mean, more enterprise ready level of service that is not available to buy online.
And so how many total companies are using you? And then in addition to that, how many total employees at those companies use you?
So right now, we have 45,000 monthly active users. and this is around 1,200 companies. So as you can imagine, there's a few, like 50 of them that have a lot of employees involved, especially IBM. With IBM, we have 26,000 monthly active users. So you can see the ratio of IBMers in there.
When you say monthly active user, Mariano, those are people, they're paying for those seats, right? Those aren't free users.
That's correct. We don't have a freemium model. We used to have it, then we switched to a free trial. And we can go and discuss that if you want to. But everybody that's using the product is using it paying. We have introduced, I mean, a couple of months ago, I mean, free for education.
So folks that are teaching innovation, design, creative problem solving, are happy to reach out to us in Miro.co slash education. And we provide that for free. Again, it's part of like a contribution, but also like preparing the future generation to not necessarily have to practice innovation altogether in the same location with sticky notes and whiteboard.
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