Mariano Suarez-Battan. He’s the founder and CEO of MURAL, a digital whiteboard for exploring complex challenges visually. Global 2000 companies like IBM, Intuit, Steelcase, and Autodesk have deployed MURAL at scale to enhance collaboration in their digital workplace. A former startup in residence at IDEO, Mariano also founded Three Melons, a game studio that designed and published online games like Bola, which was acquired by Playdom and Disney in 2010.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Purple Cow
What CEO do you follow? – Aaron Lewis
Favorite online tool? — LinkedIn
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – To trust in your gut always

Time Stamped Show Notes:

02:12 – Bola has created games for large brands like Lego
02:23 – Back then, the social games industry was moving fast with Zynga, Playfirst and Playdom
- 02:31 – Mariano thought that, strategically, it made sense to grow bigger with those companies
- 02:45 – It was also a great decision, financially and professionally
03:00 – Mariano started Bola in Argentina
03:24 – Acquisition price was with stock and equity
- 04:12 – The cash was $4-5M
- 04:26 – $600K was the payback for the investors
04:44 – MURAL was a startup in residence in IDEO
- 05:03 – IDEO brought in Collaborative Fund as a funder for MURAL
- 05:10 – MURAL’s vision is to make every designer share their design thinking globally
- 05:36 – IDEO was like an incubator
- 05:49 – Prior to IDEO, MURAL has raised closed to $1M
- 05:59 – Collaborative Fund invested money on MURAL while IDEO made MURAL known to big companies like IBM
- 06:33 – Some of IDEO’s DNA are in MURAL
07:00 – MURAL’s pricing
- 07:02 – $12 per member per month and billed annually, $16 billed monthly
- 07:10 – The pricing on the website is for online customers
07:23 – A quarter of their customers are online and the rest are enterprise costumers
07:46 – MURAL is a SaaS business
08:22 – MURAL has over 40K active users monthly
08:58 – MURAL has no free plan but has introduced a free education plan to help kids
11:00 – MRR is around $280K
11:11 – Average ARR
12:06 – Currently, MURAL has raised a total of $2.4M
12:16 – Team size is 35
- 12:45 – Most are in product development and engineering
- 12:55 – Office is located in San Francisco
13:30 – Gross monthly churn
14:17 – Some of the customers are entrepreneurs selling to multiple departments
15:23 – MURAL churn on online customers is quite high
15:38 – Average cost per new customer
- 15:55 – One of MURAL’s new customer is from an event they’ve sponsored
- 16:04 – The cost of the sponsorship with other expenses was $3K
- 16:29 – What Mariano does is split up general cost with the number of new customers
16:50 – Gross margin is around 85%
18:45 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

The investment in your company doesn’t always need to be cash.
Before going into an acquisition or partnership, go on a vacation and think about it with a clear head.
Having different revenue sources leads to different churn sources—focus on where churn is the least.

Resources Mentioned:

The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

738: Is He The Future of Design Collaboartion? 1200 Customers and $3m in Revenues Say Yes!

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders