How Movable Ink CEO Vivek Khan grew Movable Ink 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...