How Movable Ink CEO Vivek Khan grew to $73.5M revenue and 700 customers in 2025.

hello everyone my guest today is Vivek Sharma he co-founded Mughal Inc in 2010 has led the company through rapid growth to a leading market position with 200 plus employees serving 500 of the most innovative consumer brands there is leadership the ruling is helping digital marketers embrace a visual world of intelligent creative that adapts at the moment of engagement the back are you ready to take us to the top let's do this Nathan all right cool just to be clear you say you're working with 500 of the most innovative consumer brands those are all customers right here there's no freemium product nothing like that those premium we got rid of that years ago so servers you like money you like green dollars will take euros will take you in you're my kind of guy okay so what's the company you do and is it a Pierre place ass model it is a pure place ass model so movable Inc exists in a world where we work with lots of big consumer brands and have harvested a huge amount of data they really understand their customers there's api's data CSV files they manage all of this what they struggle with is taking all this great data and translating that into compelling visual experiences that's where a moveable Inc comes in we have a SAS platform it is completely on the cloud there there's no on-premise and any marketer log into our system be able to configure a pieces of intelligent creative that they can embed into their email marketing and so when that email opens up our code fires and were able to generate the perfect visually compelling content at that moment evoke and I think I don't on every customer cohort but in general what would you say a consumer or brand or business or brand pays you on average per year for this kind of thing there's a pretty wide range so most of our customers are large enterprises so we've got brands like Starbucks Nike Hilton the Gap American Express using us we don't really start at less than about $30,000 a year for those enterprise brands we've a marketeer as well but we've got companies that paid north of a million dollars a year we've got lots of companies that pay several million dollars a year to movable Inc to power all of their visual experiences okay this is great so good 2010 founded if scaled today 500 customers now how do you drop this or you raise capital we have raised capital been very capital efficient we about several months ago we passed about 40 million dollars in the annual recurring revenue and most companies that have gotten to this point you know they've raised eighty ninety a hundred million dollars in capital we've only raised about fourteen million dollars in venture capital and it's been a long time since I've gone out there and and raised capital so in super capital efficient and our favorite source of capital our favorite investor are our customers who pay us on time yep no it's great I imagine you don't miss having to go out and raise capital so that's a good problem to have I want to break down and kind of get to some economics here you mentioned 40 million run rate today which puts you at about 3.3 million per month what does growth look like where you had a year ago we're growing really nicely I think the one area we're especially proud of is in the last 18 months we've been able to configure our sales teams and go to market with partners more effectively so especially on the net new side the new completely new logos we've had triple digit growth in permian new logos and revenue growth so I can't break out exact numbers about overall gap revenue in a our growth but we're still growing very strongly even past this forty million dollar RR so the future looks pretty exciting over the next couple years okay generally I love those growth metrics but I mean generally speaking if we tie that back to some kind of revenue it sounds like here I mean can we say you're doubling year where you're a still it's harder to do at larger numbers we are not doubling year-over-year but we're growing very high double digits we're doing well alright yeah you wouldn't you wouldn't confirm single digit so say somewhere between 50 and our hundred percent year-over-year which is right in line with a company's ear size obviously are growing at and I love the ratio between what you've raised and your ARR which is healthy right in terms of how far you've stretched a dollar which is great you won't be able to stretch those dollars far if churn was an issue so you figured out churn tell me about how do you think about turning the business and what it is today yeah I think it's important for every SAS company to look very honestly at both their gross retention as well as their net retention so gross is of course and there's many different ways is the fascinating thing you kind of find out there's very different ways people end up calculating their churn what we'd like to say is we are an AR AR business not an M our our business pretty much all of our contracts are on an annual basis in some cases multi-year contracts so you can't really look at churn on a month over a month basis because it's not being intellectually honest so what we end up doing is look at it at a cohort level of those accounts that landed that started last August happy are up for renewal right now and how are we doing retaining them so you've got the pure gross retention and then we've got a very strong land and expand model so when we upsell those existing accounts that route that leads to very strong negative churn so you've got to treat both of those independently otherwise you can mask a very leaky bucket and gross retention problems if you're only focused on an extra appeal to cover back though for me though I mean what is gross gross I mean a lot so a lot of people have very healthy expansion engines and it covers problems with gross churn underneath because they're great you know the expansion is so so rapid if I peel back the layer there and look at what your gross revenue churn is before you get to net negative when you add back expansion what is gross churn yeah as a private company we don't break out some of those so those smaller numbers but it is very much in line with what you'd expect from a company selling to and we look at do two different cohorts the enterprise segment of our customers and the mid-market segment of our customers okay a lot of customer satisfaction and you know the standard types of retention rates I would say only grows retention it's pretty average across will eat see with many other SAS companies serving somewhere at the customer on the net negative on the net side we have especially strong numbers because of that land expand what is especially strong like negative five percent or higher would you consider that exceptionally strong i'd say north of a hundred and ten percent I consider you know we're about now you're flipping it are you're talking to Evan your attention annually yeah the net revenue and by the way usually the same thing but sometimes people will calculate I don't know why they'll calculate net revenue retention differently than just being the inverse of negative revenue turns so healthy numbers they're a great expansion strategy talk to me very quickly around pricing so a lot of people straw who struggle the expansion haven't kind of clearly defined pricing AXI that are like utility-based to drive expansion around how did you figure out your axes and which one is most effective for you pricing is such a fascinating subject to think about and talk about and over the years of the company this is probably the thing that we debated the most and argued about the most and tried to figure out and in the early days I was a former engineer and I think that that was to the detriment of figuring out a pricing model because you end up trying to figure out something that is maybe rational right logically very correct and there was a you know we serve up visual content inside these emails so I had this crazy model early on that was looking at square pixels like hey if someone's using up more real estate inside email they should pay us more and it was ridiculously complex and it was just a dumb idea the best thing was what is the convention what are our customers used to paying for similar types of things and for us was looking at the email service providers who had already established a framework for CPM based upon email sins so we used a very similar model but of course we can't measure since we only show up when an email gets open so is CPM on email open card there's just some discounting that happens is going to higher volume usage but it is you know that lets us be very flexible with our customers we can start small we don't have to go take over their entire email program we can land come up with one or two compelling use cases in the first three months get them up and running really nail it and then start to scale that out into doing far more meaningful things okay so one axes are kind of number of opens around specific maybe to speaking to use cases quickly do you in most folks that are growing fast have multiple axes do you have a second strong one like number of seats on the marketing team are things like that you know it's based that one axis price upon as we are over the course the next few weeks we're actually coming out with some new products and so we've been able to adapt that model very successfully so there could be different rate cards in different conditions but the core concept still remains the same it's just the the pricing tiers kind of change when you go to a more premium version of our product yeah I want to talk a little bit about how you're finding new customers you're obviously in the enterprise space so I imagine some of some variation of accountant base but first from perspective based off how little you've raised I'm assuming your cash flow positive is that accurate we are not cashflow positive we could gain we're very close when did well maybe the last round is more recent than I thought when was the last round of funding we did a small note with some inside investors just to feel it not even spending it we just wanted a little more on our balance sheet given were a much larger business than where we were a long time ago but before that it was about five years Oh five years okay so that 14 million you brought in ignoring to know that 14 million I was all raised more than five years ago we raised about nine point three five years ago and we had about five million to it maybe six months on a no debt basically have a little bit on break that down there has to be some strategy there I don't I'm just saying to be comfortable I get that I get it but there's got to be something there driving that is it a bridge round a drive to a harder valuation as you're trying to scale an engineering team faster no it's purely we've been in a ten-year bull market and we feel really good about the business and where things are going but if there is a dip that happens we'd rather have the money or a balance sheet when we don't need it like sitting there but okay the economy should enter a recession after a very long bull market we just want to have enough of a war chest to be able to make the right decision to not have an overreaction yeah I know you're a data guy so I want to be you know I don't believe you know as they just be comfortable I'm sure there were excel sheets and rationalizing this somehow so I'm assuming you were taking you know taking the bull market by the horns you've got down to a six or seven percent super low interest rate and he said we might as well lock this and put it in the bank and hold it for a rainy day yes just just be clear it was a note you didn't work with a venture debt firm we've got some facilities with Silicon Valley Bank revolver in place and things like that but we you know not a venture capitalist and inside investors and you know we weren't with Silicon Valley Bank yeah they have you know those guys are great they have so many different vehicles though did you do a revenue based financing deal with them or was it more like an EM our term loan like interest free and you only pay as you draw down that kind of thing no yeah we've changed the type of facility in the course of last year okay yeah so we are we got a revenue based facility ok-ran but by that just make sure we talk about the same thing when I talk about revenue based I mean payback is typically a percentage of gross receipts per month is that what it that's what it is it's an MRO based facility okay yes how much were not not gap revenue god I got a cot yeah look the thing I've seen was some people that do that is if you end up paying it back fast like let's say you use the money to grow really quick and you've locked in a nine percent like of your gross receipts per month your payback can actually be way quicker and you hit the repayment cap way quicker than what you put in the pro forma and then the effective cost of capital is actually through the roof when you cut the IRR do you look at that at all we've done calculations on equity versus debt versus you know risk factors even you know if you if you get to a certain point and so there's a kind of a balanced view we take and there's a mix of a little bit of both yeah okay yeah very good before we wrap up again tell me how aggressive a ring with CAC right now you bow six months below 12 months below 24 months already try and target we we haven't had a hard target on CAC I will say our payback periods they are under 12 months oh great okay very efficient engine going there and our LTV to CAC is also extremely impressive I think you're doing really well right with a 5 if 5x Ltd cat we're surpassing that by quite a bit yeah very efficient sales and marketing machine going and our payback periods make a ton of sense and you know building that efficient engine was important to us I used to drive a Mustang Cobra years ago and you know it sounds great and it's got this big v8 but you know the big powerful engine what we built here is a BMW it's a more refined efficient engine that we can count upon and it forces you to really understand what's happening under the hood what's under what's happening in the business where's everybody based where's the team we've got about 250 people and say probably about 180 of those are here in New York City we've got about 30 in San Francisco probably 25 to 30 in London got a couple people in Japan we've got a person in Australia and the international expansion starting to happen pretty quickly also got about a dozen people in Costa Rica that's great now question before we wrap it with the famous five if I continue down your bull market thesis and if you really want to take advantage of a bull market you might say hey we could probably get some pretty good offers right now are you any acquisition talks right now we are not and it's not something you're pursuing yeah we you know we've we've certainly been approached in the past about interesting types of opportunities but every time we felt like the business is at an early stage and the potential hasn't really hasn't been realized and so we're very excited about especially in the next few weeks new product announcements really broadening what the company does and as we look at the next few years we don't see that growth no secondary bug for you and early founders or early shareholders no one here has ever done a secondary that's pretty good that's pretty good alright we'll see what happens let's wrap up with some much easier questions your number one favorite business book [Music] recently I read creativity Inc and there's a lot of business books around MQL is SQL is that kind of thing but around the creative process and how take started did it idea to remarkable book ed catmull it's a good one number two is there a CEO you're falling or studying right now this might be a little bit of a controversial one but I'm still an Elon Musk fan I did criticize him for certain actions and tweets and things like that but I think more CEOs should be thinking about making a big dent in the universe of that doing something very ambitious and for that you know I think our society will be in a bigger place if he succeeds number three with your favorite online tool for building your business besides your own it's a tie for me between asana and slack slack lets me get connected to every one of the company asana lets me get organized number four how many hours is lee breaking every night six and what's your situation that married single kids married to a wonderful woman Anya we've got two kids six and four so they are just a little bit younger than our company which is eight and how are you I'm 42 all right take us home what he was your 20 year old self Noah I have a computer science background I was an engineer right at school I wish I had learned and taken a job that had me selling much earlier in my career I think selling is such a valuable skill everyone should get some experience it's it's reality guys learn sales earlier it's funny all the engineers say learn sales and all the sales will say code earlier rats how it works we need each other it has to be both there you have it from the Vic again found in Louisville Inc back in 2010 they've now scaled over 500 customers about 40 million bucks in ARR they're up you know growing 50 to 100 percent year-over-year they've managed to drive this growth on just 14 million bucks raised so they managed to do a lot with a little bit of money 110 percent net revenue retention annually with a very healthy pricing axes that allows allows them to drive expansion revenue really tied to again open rates on those emails of these big enterprise customers using them they've got less than a 12-month payback period or tumid turn 50 people cranking out new products between New York City San Fran London and other remote locations vivec thank you for taking us to the top thanks see you mate