How Nue.io Reached $1M ARR in 2023 and 100 Customers with a Consultant-Led Go-to-Market (Interview with CEO Mark Walker)

Intro and What Nue.io Sells

Nathan Latka

00:00You're about to learn from a founder that broke $10,000,000 of revenue here in 2025. His name is Mark Walker, and he's the CEO at n u e dot I o, a revenue life cycle management platform. In the next fifteen minutes, he's gonna teach you three specific things that will give you a massive unfair advantage. Number one, how he used consultants as his sales force to hit $10,000,000 of revenue. Number two, how he got his

00:24first 20 customers, including the sales process he used to close OpenAI, a mega contract. And lastly, number three, the genius way he expanded his average customer value from just $20,000 per year in 2023 to 80,000 in 2024 to now well over $200,000. When you watch into the end of this episode, you will have an unfair advantage in terms of how to go to market in the new age of AI. Let's jump in and learn from

00:51Mark Walker of Nue. This is one of our pet peeves at Founderpath. You know, we've deployed about $200,000,000 to 500 software companies, and the hardest part about deploying the money is always, wait. You're telling me you're still on cash? You're a SaaS company. You need to move to accrual, or how are you doing rev rec, or how are you doing forecasting? So tell us what Nue is selling today and who some of your customers are.

Customer Base and Pricing Overview

Mark Walker

01:10>> Great. So the fun thing about Nue is even though we're only, like, series a company, we have these amazing multibillion dollar companies using us and little tiny startups also using us. And the whole idea behind Nue was was created by a bunch of people who'd worked at Zuora, worked at Salesforce, and basically understood that trying to grow really fast while trying to connect multiple systems together to do this is really complicated. So what we did is

01:37>> we said, okay. Well, let's make a single system that can be be your quoting system, your self-service system, your billing system. And then it turns out if you do that and you make each of those pieces really, really good, you're actually able to not only sell the entire thing, but you have to sell parts of it. So about 40% of our customers just buy CPQ, but 60% of our customers replace their entire infrastructure or start their

02:00>> infrastructure with new.

Nathan Latka

02:01Interesting. Try to just to focus our conversation today, can you give me a sort of sweet spot in terms of what the average customer might pay you per month or per year to use your technology?

Mark Walker

02:12>> They can be as little as $20,000 a year. But the more normal one is, like, 50 to $60,000 a year, which is, you know Mhmm. Definitely less than a human being. And Yep. At the upper end, it can be, you know, hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

Land and Expand Model

Nathan Latka

02:28Okay. Do you obviously, one of the things I love doing when I'm reading s ones or at 10 q's is to look at which publicly traded SaaS companies are divulging how many million dollar plus customers they have. Have you hit your first million dollar per year contract date or still working on it?

Mark Walker

02:41>> Not yet. Yeah. We're we're getting getting very close.

Nathan Latka

02:43But but That's awesome.

Mark Walker

02:44>> We actually I think we have our first customer who will be a million dollar customer, but not they're not a million dollars for us with this yet. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

02:52That's great. Okay. So just to summarize again, you've got smaller customers in the 20 to $50,000 a year range, and then you also have a nice land and expand model selling additional modules, etcetera, and you have customers approaching that million dollar contract value. Is that accurate?

Mark Walker

03:05>> Yeah. That's that's exactly right.

Top-Down vs. Bottoms-Up Pricing Strategy

Nathan Latka

03:07That's great. One of the things you guys are seeing here on my screen that folks always ask me, especially when they're getting going, is Nathan, we don't know whether to go enterprise, right, and top down, sell directly to the CRO, or go bottoms up. Right? Sell to the accounts first, and eventually, we find our way to the CRO. You don't make your pricing public on the website. Yeah. From what I can tell, usually, that's a sign

03:25that you're going top down, not sort of no touch bottoms up. Is that accurate? And if so, why'd you make that decision?

Mark Walker

03:31>> Yeah. I think there's two reasons driving it. One is we have such completely different these two ICPs that are very, very different. So OpenAI is a customer. And so are, you know, $10,000,000, $20,000,000 startups. The pricing model that makes sense for OpenAI doesn't make sense if you're a little tiny company. And and so so one of the things we do at Nue is we we price things in a way that's really tied to the value for

03:58>> the customer. So say you're a startup. You can buy everything we do. Everything OpenAI has access to for, like, $20. Right? And and then but if you're OpenAI, you don't actually want the level of self-service capability that that they that they enjoy. You want, you know, the high touch relationship that we have with them, and there's a different price point. So that's why we don't do it. It could just be confusing. They're completely they're the same

04:25>> product. Exactly the same product.

Nathan Latka

04:26But they are Yep.

Mark Walker

04:27>> Priced in different ways to meet different people's needs.

Upsell Axes and Pricing Flexibility

Nathan Latka

04:31What when your sales reps tell you, Mark, I love how you've structured our our pricing because it allows me to drive expansion revenue. Do they celebrate things like you've enabled seat based upselling, or is it more about selling price builder and then and then usage accelerator, and then everything billing? In other words, it's product based upselling, or or is there usage based upselling you're doing? What what are sort of the axes that are giving your sales

04:55reps the most leverage to upsell?

Mark Walker

04:57>> Yeah. I think the first thing that we do is we recognize people have different value of our product, So we will go into them and and have a conversation that's something like this. Like, how do you price your product? And we sort of say to them, how would you like to buy it? And this they'll they'll sort of go, what? They'll go, well, we have customers that have low volume, high value invoices that go out through

05:19>> the system. They're quoting enterprise, and they don't wanna pay a percentage of revenue. They wanna pay certain dollars per seat, certain dollars per invoice. Right? Then we have customers who are have no reps. It's just it's just system to system, and they don't wanna pay there's no there's no seats. They're just paying percentage of revenue, and we let people buy in different ways. So some customers choose their own ventures. Some people are on a low commit

05:42>> to usage type model or a percentage of revenue model. Some people are on a seat based model.

Customer Count and Company Launch Story

Nathan Latka

05:47Okay. I love that. Let's pivot away from sort of pricing strategy. And those of you tuning in, we wanna go back and get the launch story of the business, when Mark joined, why Mark joined, the growth channels they use to add customers, and how they're growing in the future. Mark, before we go and get to sort of all the back story here in terms of why this product's important, how you get those those customers, can you

06:05give us I don't wanna bury a lead here. How many customers? You've mentioned some great logos already, but how many total customers are using the platform today?

Mark Walker

06:11>> Yeah. We're just coming up on a 100. Right.

Nathan Latka

06:13So that's great. Okay. Cool. Tell me when the company launched. When was the first line of code written, and then when you joined?

Mark Walker

06:18>> Yeah. The founding story is super interesting. So the company was originally founded by Tina Kung, who's still our CTO and founder. She's ex Zora, ex Oracle, ex Salesforce. You know, not your typical founder. Like she's a very, very, very experienced first time first time founder. Right? And but she was backed up by Cheng Xu, who was the original CTO of Zora. And they were funded by Next World Capital and a few other people to just explore

06:45>> an idea. They were then backed up by some other investors and one of those investors came to me and said, hey Mark, you just sold a company to TA. Do you want to come over and run another company? I went, no. I want to go kiteboarding. I want to go and do some fun stuff for a while. And then I met Tina, who's just amazing. And and I was like, okay. Well, I will come and help

07:06>> you. And then basically, they asked me to take the dog home for the evening, and the and the rest is history. Right? So company's super exciting. Really clear vision about how to go to market in a marketplace where there already are. Like everything that we sell, everybody worth getting already has one. Right? It's and more than And they're owned by different people. So think I it was a really fascinating problem to attack, a really fascinating go

07:31>> to market problem, and and I was excited to to work with an incredibly smart person to go do that.

Nathan Latka

07:37I love that. Okay. So that's a great story. And then help us understand, this is not a boot strap story. It doesn't sound like how much total has the company raised life to date?

Mark Walker

07:46>> Yeah. We raised 15,000,000 seed. Right? So Okay. We got a $6,000,000 initial bid. And the next thing I did, I just showed up and said, that's not enough. That's not enough to do what we need to do. We we got very supportive investors, managed to raise another 9 fairly quickly. K. So and now it's about $40,000,000 at the company. So Okay. So it's, you know, definitely not a my last company was bootstrapped. Small target market. This

08:13>> is like billion dollar immediately addressable ARR in the wind marketplace. It's pretty fascinating.

Nathan Latka

08:23Yeah. No. That makes a lot of sense. So just to repeat that back to you, early backing 2022 time frame, and before that was something like a 6,000,000 seed plus a 9,000,000 extension. So call it a 15,000,000 seed plus seed plus. And then I think you guys you did the series a with Innovia leading for for 20,000,000, I believe. Right? Yep.

Mark Walker

08:41>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

08:42Okay. Yep.

Mark Walker

08:42>> They're so so Innovia is great.

Nathan Latka

08:44Yeah. Was that the last round, or was there more money after that?

Mark Walker

08:47>> Nope. That's that takes us that takes us 20. There's a little bit of other dollars drifting around in there somewhere, but Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:53Okay. Well, tell us, Mark, since you I'm gonna share your LinkedIn while I ask you this question too, because I always love a founder that I get on that has done both things. Right? You've done the growth at all costs VC model. You've also done the bootstrap model. Which one here in your background here was the Bootstrap model?

Mark Walker

09:08>> Strongpoint. Strongpoint is the Bootstrap model.

09:13>> You know, Skytech was was different, completely different. We made a lot of money, but it was more of a of a services play. But Strongpoint was very, very focused on automated compliance for publicly traded companies running NetSuite or Salesforce. And really in that explosion of a p IPOs between about 2015 and, you know, the pandemic, we made bank. Right? And so it was like it was a great great business to be in. Really, really innovative product.

09:44>> And it was so much fun to be able to drive around and go, they're a customer. They're a customer. They're a customer. They're a customer. As a bootstrap company, super fun.

Nathan Latka

09:53That is fun. Okay. Teach us more. Other founders that are trying to get their first million or the next million, next 3,000,000, next 4,000,000 of revenue, everyone has a different go to market motion, slightly tweaked a little bit. When you joined in 2022, what was the go to market motion? And and what are you guys leveraging today to get your next, you know, ten, twenty, 30 customers?

Mark Walker

10:09>> Yeah. So when I joined, we were like zero revenue. Like, Right?

Nathan Latka

10:12In 2022, no revenue.

Go-to-Market in Year One: Buy the First Customers

Mark Walker

10:14>> No revenue. Right? So science project. Right? And like brilliant science project, but it was time to go get some revenue. And I think one of the things I would encourage people to do is recognize in your first year, if you're getting your first million, go buy the customer. Buy it with pricing, buy it with service, Buy it with commitment. Buy it with partnership. Do everything possible. Don't worry about maximizing the return. Watch it. God bless the

10:39>> first 20 companies that buy an enterprise software product. It's like, you know, and they're doing you a favor, and you just basically treat them like that. And and accept that, frankly, you're gonna get a fair amount of churn in that first customer base because you'll be buying people who maybe aren't making the most thought out decisions. And also, you will also be maybe thinking of some companies that are maybe more marginal than you will pick up

11:05>> later. So you gotta just deal. Then after that, you can after that, you need to become professional really fast. Right. So Mhmm. If you but the the first part was, you know, customers ranging from, you know, three, five, 10,000, 50,000 at the top end.

Nathan Latka

11:23Per year.

Mark Walker

11:24>> And but out of those out of those experiences, the product gets better and better, and that's what we did.

How Early Customers Were Acquired

Nathan Latka

11:30So just because those first, you know, ten, twenty customers you onboarded between 2022 and 2023 when you went you know, you got your first revenue, they were doing you know, you would sell between 10 and $50,000 year year packages, but you're really relying on your network, Tina's network, the XZOR network to sort of go sell these deals or partners that you would, I guess, pay referral fees? Or what what were you how did you actually get

11:49like, you remember the first five customers, the actual channel?

Mark Walker

11:51>> Most of our first customers were actually either relationships of people on the team or relationships of VCs, but not necessarily the VCs already invested in us. It was kind of unusual that people would go, hey, could you take a look at this portfolio company for us? And we went in and solved a bunch of those bunch of those problems. So that was great because it meant that once we won, we got another win right afterwards. Like,

12:15>> so we That's interesting. Get something, and then we get the next customer.

Nathan Latka

12:18Could you tell us if you're able to share the the the attribution channel of how you guys closed OpenAI?

Mark Walker

12:25>> The connection to OpenAI was that we had actually pitched Keith Jones who runs part of the business systems at the go to market systems. He runs go to market systems at OpenAI when he was actually a Gartner. And we'd actually been talking to him. He's a really interesting cat. They reached out to us. They were doing an RFP, and Keith was like, I was really interested in you guys. I'd like to catch up. And then they

12:48>> ran an RFP process, and I can talk about this because Keith's talked about it. That was the most fascinating, weird RFP process in the history, and it was what everybody should do. It was crazy interesting.

Nathan Latka

12:59I mean, can you tell me more? That's a big cliffhanger there. What do mean by that? I mean, so everyone listening right now, they're thinking RFP process. Okay. There's a big customer that I wanna get. They finally announced they're going to look at six vendors to do this one task, submit your RFPs. They then negotiate with all of them to pick one and they then someone wins and then you move on. What did open what was

13:15the OpenAI process like?

Closing OpenAI: The AI-Powered RFP Process

Mark Walker

13:16>> What they did was they basically asked everybody in the company to come up with their top 10 things. The first interesting part was how they came up with what the requirements were. And they asked all these different departments to articulate what they needed from a go to market system. And then they and it can be 10 need you know, five absolute non negotiable things and 10 things you'd like to have. Right? Then they got those people

13:42>> to actually talk to Zoom and and to describe why the five things were the most important things and the 10 things were less important. And then they ran that, not just the the transcript, but the video through an AI. And and it came up with the requirements first, the requirements with reasons why these were the most important things for OpenAI, which is super fascinating to begin with. Then what they did is they asked us to give

14:10>> us give all the vendors to give access to their documentation, And they got the AI to rate how well the products actually fit

14:20>> their their requirements. And because part of what they were looking for is how well documented is this thing. So if you didn't if you could do it, but you could didn't have it documented, who cares? Because it's gonna be hard to use, hard to implement.

Nathan Latka

14:31You mean API documentation, webhooks, things like that?

Mark Walker

14:34>> Not just that. The user documentation, the the help guides, everything we could give them. Because just give us as much stuff as you can possibly give us. And okay. Then they then they got us to do it do basic demos. And then they got the the AI and the people then focused for the questions. It was a recursive using the AI to continually refine the focus. And, you know, in the end, it was basically us up

15:05>> against Salesforce, and we won.

Nathan Latka

15:07That's awesome. What a cool story. Okay. That makes a ton of sense. What I assume a lot of your go to market motion is is an AE playbook. Right? An SDR, AE, BDR, etcetera, because your price point justifies it. Right? It's big enough where you can put touch on the sale. Can you tell me more? Because of that, can you tell me more about your team size today and how many folks are sort of quota carrying

15:27AEs? How are they, you know, getting leads, taking demos, closing sales?

Mark Walker

15:31>> So actually, the interesting thing is it's not outbound.

Nathan Latka

15:34Okay.

Mark Walker

15:34>> Very little outbound, actually. It's almost entirely still, even at our stage, inbound. And so so, you know, essentially, the the neat thing that happened as well and part of the thesis of the company was that there was that Salesforce, CPQ, was going to die. Right? You know, and that's because at the pace of change of business today, it just couldn't adapt. And, of course, in February of this year, they more or less formally announced that it

Capitalizing on Salesforce CPQ Discontinuation

Mark Walker

16:00>> was no longer available to be bought. But even before then, people knew it was no longer it was wasn't gonna be around. So there's an off there's a whole stream of people who are looking for a further solution. So actually, we initially focused mostly on awareness. Awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness that if you're on Salesforce, there's two different things you can choose. You could choose to stay or three, I guess. You stay with CPQ. You can move

16:24>> to their new product, RCA. It's just, you know, difficult childbirth. And Yeah. Or you can pick new. Right?

Nathan Latka

16:31And How did you but, Mark,

16:33how did you actually get how did you how did you actually the that tactic is a good one. Right? A competitor is dying. You wanna drive awareness as you the as the alternative. But but how did you actually get that exposure? Because, like, when I do, a quick search Salesforce CPP alternative, I see some of maybe your competitors here paying for ads, which is one way to do it. I see some Reddit threads. I see Gartner

16:51recommending some things, but I don't see you guys anywhere. So how did you drive that awareness?

Mark Walker

16:55>> Yeah. We drove the awareness of the people who actually advise them, not worrying about the people. Like, if you're actually buying software this way, at an at a the target customers we want, like, nobody who buy who are the target customers we want buy software that way. What they do is they go to their advisers, their VCs, their, you know, their existing consultants and they ask them. So all of our marketing is actually focused on those

17:19>> people.

Consultant and VC Channel Strategy

Nathan Latka

17:20The consultant and the VC.

Mark Walker

17:21>> On the consultants and the and their VCs and and the p firms and not on on this. So people would say, hey. Look. By the way, I know you need to do this. I know that OpenAI got live in eight weeks, which is freaking crazy. And this is a lot more about OpenAI than it it does by new. But but we want you to look at them because we want that kind of speed of execution and

17:46>> that kind of flexibility. And so so very few of our inbound deals have not already talked to somebody who's used the product or VCs who have a portfolio company has the product or a consultant who's implemented or has introduced the product with one of their customers. It's actually pretty rare that people come in and and are considering, like, us and DealHub. Like, because, like, DealHub's

Nathan Latka

18:08like You're not getting deals through SEO. Yeah. Yeah. Can you give me When we do just put a face to the name, like, when say consult yeah. Sorry to cut you off there. But when you say consultants, can you give a real example, like, a website of a consultant that just to put a face to the name?

Mark Walker

18:22>> Yeah. Like, so OpenAI was implemented by GoNimbly. And GoNimbly had already worked on multiple projects with us before. They've worked on projects since then. You know, they're also working with us at AppBay. Yep. You know, we can we can think of, you know, there's a lot of, like, there's a now it's a lot of different people. So, you know, SaaS Consulting, you know, Secco, you know, Coastal Cloud. And so, you know, there's a we work in

18:55>> an ecosystem where we may be only part of the answer or we may be the entire answer. So often, we're running into other consulting firms all over the place. And so Yeah. And frankly, we actually also get referrals from Salesforce. Not not deliberately, but the AEs will just come over and go, can you help my customer? They're having a very bad time. And Yeah. And they'll informally introduce us.

Nathan Latka

19:18Okay. I love that. So just to sum up before we move into the later part and wrap up the episode. So you you joined in 2022, zero revenue. You've just taught us sort of how you went to go to market early. Primarily, it's still the same today. VCs, consultants like GoNimbly, Coastal Cloud dot US, etcetera. With these tactics, are you comfortable sharing which year you guys broke a million bucks of revenue? Was that 2023 or later?

Revenue Milestones and ACV Growth

Mark Walker

19:39>> It's 2023. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

19:41It was 2023. Okay. So you went from zero pretty quickly there. So you took those folks that were taking a chance on you at 10 to 50 k a year. You you delivered. Right? They were doing you a favor. You delivered in that first year, and they stuck around in 2024 and onwards.

Mark Walker

19:54>> Yeah. Absolutely. It was it was a great it was a great crazy sprint. But what happened was the the product went up market, like, pretty steadily. It's continually gone up. So it went from average saying 20,000 to 50,000 to 70,000, and that makes it easier to hit a million. Right?

Nathan Latka

20:13Mhmm. Like, 20 k, 2023, 50 k, 2024, now going forward, 70 kind of average. That sort of expansion.

Mark Walker

20:21>> Yeah. Now no. Way above that now. Like Yeah. Now it's like now it's hundreds of thousands.

Nathan Latka

20:26Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Can I can I multiply the numbers you told me earlier in the show where you've got a lot of those sort of legacy folks that might be the smaller companies? I understand you have the big ones that are, like, 4 or $5,600 k per year, but averaging it all out, if I take 50 k per year on average times a 100 customers, we can obviously back into, you know, a range of

20:44your of your MRR. Would that math be appropriate, or is it not accurate?

Mark Walker

20:48>> It's a low

Nathan Latka

20:49That puts you at about 5,000,000. That puts you at about

Mark Walker

20:50>> 5,000,000 ARR. Yeah. It's it's by the end of the year, we'll be in 8 figures. Yeah. So

Nathan Latka

20:56Okay. Okay. Great. Yeah. And does that does that represent sort of a stretch goal for you guys, or no, you've done the math or, you know, we're already almost done with the year. You know, we're nine months in. You're definitely gonna hit that.

Mark Walker

21:06>> Yeah. No. It's it's pretty straightforward. The you know, basically, when you now as we do the even bigger end to end deals and people are swapping out Salesforce CPQ and their billing system all onto one single thing, it's not hard to justify hundreds of thousands of dollars. But what I'm super excited also about is we have a new quick start program where companies, smaller companies are coming in, and they're just basically needing no consulting at all

21:31>> to spin Nue up. We don't make a lot of money off them right away, but later on.

Nathan Latka

21:35Tell me more about that.

21:37Where can I where can I go on your website to see more about that?

Mark Walker

21:40>> So if if somebody just comes through the front door and there's no actual there's a there was a big launch on it because we just finished testing it. But if somebody comes through the front door and they and they reach out to us and say you're in the 20 to $50,000,000 or even lower end, we have we've demonstrated that those people can stand up new by themselves. They don't really need a consulting organization at all. And

22:02>> they just get they run through a class. In fact, funny story was one of our larger customers wanted to send their their staff through that class. And at the end of the class, they announced that they were done. And we said, so did I what? And they go, this is like a $200,000,000 company. And then I yeah. We're done. I actually think we finished our implementation. So now we're starting to roll that out to larger companies.

Nathan Latka

22:25So That's great. Okay. Super super see that? Like, can I share screen here anywhere? Is that class or is it is it basically in the product videos they go through once they get

Mark Walker

22:32>> in our enablement in our resources, but we can we can I'm not even sure where to find it because I don't go in there. But it's in the knowledge center somewhere. But yeah.

Nathan Latka

22:41But Okay.

Mark Walker

22:42>> Okay. Great. But the but it's a it's a we're taking the idea of go to market engineering that, you know, Clay has made so clear, and we are then using that to to implement revenue enterprise software. And it's working really, really well. And the interesting thing is it's creeping up in our customer base. So more and more larger companies are going, hey, we wanna send our teams to this enablement program. And they're kind of those those

23:12>> those projects are going really, really quickly, and that's a big competitive advantage.

Nathan Latka

23:16So I mean, can I ask you a question? What's the largest deal you've closed that did not require, you know, an hour long demo within AE because you put these people through your prerecorded enablement program?

Mark Walker

23:30>> I think everybody look. I look. I think everybody who's doing this, it's a serious conversation. So I don't think anybody has actually not talked to anyone. I think it's more that they didn't need a consulting firm or our consulting organization to implement them. I think that's and what that's giving us the power to say to people is, like, why don't you just start using the software? And that's the what we're the switch we're about to make.

23:55>> It's like, look, honestly, if you're if you answer this question, this question, this question, you can we'll just give you an account, and let's just start doing it. And then Yeah. And that's so foreign for this space, because this space is very consultant heavy. And it still needs consultants, by the way, upmarket. Because like if you're ripping out your old system, that's a completely different thing. Right. But for Greenfield, that new go to market is something

24:19>> we're really excited about, and it's gonna be an important part of our late twenty twenty five, 2026 market motion. But I suspect what we'll see, Nathan, is we'll see some companies that are way bigger than you might think doing it that way. Right.

Team Size, Engineering, and Hiring

Nathan Latka

24:33Yep. That makes sense. As we wrap up here, what's team size today? How many folks full time?

Mark Walker

24:38>> A 102.

Nathan Latka

24:39Okay. How many would

24:41you say are dedicated to sort of BDR, AE marketing sales?

Mark Walker

24:45>> Actually, a relatively small part. About about 26 people Oh, okay. On the on the revenue side of the company. Changing because we're hiring people right now. So if you're, you know, from the ecosystem and you're looking for a role, we have basically, you know, wrecks in every possible place.

Nathan Latka

25:03How many engineers on one zero two?

Mark Walker

25:06>> Yeah. A big footprint. I mean, it's a huge product. So approximately 40% of the team is engineering QA, and then, of course, there's a big delivery team. Delivery team is small relative to the size of projects we're doing, but it's still, we wanna make sure that, you know, if some anybody's getting implemented, no matter who they get implemented by, that they have a we have a core group of people who are able to answer your, you

25:26>> know, your tenth question, not the the detail you know, these really important questions. Right?

Nathan Latka

25:31Mark, you've had a lot of growth since your last venture round. I don't know how much cash you have left in the bank, but the growth seems to be able to support potentially an up round. Are you considering raising capital in '25 or 2026?

M&A Strategy and Acquisitions in 2025

Mark Walker

25:42>> Yeah. We get offers all the time. I think there's some things changing in the marketplace that might cause us to do that, but we're just sort of going through right now. We have no we don't need to raise capital right now, but we are but there's some opportunities that are in front of us, and I think we might might take them, so I wouldn't be surprised.

Nathan Latka

26:00Is that inorganic growth opportunities, m and a opportunities for you? You buying other companies?

Mark Walker

26:05>> Yeah. Absolutely. They said there's we already we bought two companies so far this year. We'll buy we'll we're taking a look at two others right now. And and then

26:20>> and those are all basically market positioning plays. The last two were technology plays, but the next two are are just basically is basically taking out some other some market pass to market that we can we can use.

Nathan Latka

26:33And are you typically I mean, when you say, sort of hires, are these these aqua hires, you know, one of them was, I think, Approvals Pro in March 2025. I mean, are you paying crazy revenue multipliers or multiples for these, or you just look at team, it's a small team, small customer base, you say, I want the team?

Mark Walker

26:46>> Oh, look. Approvals Pro is an amazing product, built by an amazing team. And if we could have gotten the team, we would have definitely taken them. They were actually heading off to do another exciting project. Guy and the team over there are great friends of the company. We actually had the ability to completely grok their technology and basically bought it and brought it into our engineering infrastructure with some help from them. And it was a great

27:10>> it was a great hire. So it was it was pure technology, not people. Yep. And that's kind of unusual. I've never done that before. It required a really, really great team on the other side. Anghi was a great leader over there and helped us get that done. Other technologies like

27:28>> Durachec, which is gonna be a core part of our AI based contract management system. That was we acquired both people and the and the product. And the product's amazing. It's like, basically, like a like a pragmatic business lawyer on steroids. It's like it's somebody who looks at it and looks at it from a CRO's point of view, goes, yeah. I don't care about that. I don't care about that. I do not want my contract in Missouri.

27:51>> Like, that kind of redlining a redline review, that's completely automatic and makes things just fly. So we're using it internally now. It'll be out in the product, you know, late fall. Maybe early next year.

Famous Five and Closing Thoughts

Nathan Latka

28:05Great. Mark, we're out of time here. Let's wrap up with a famous five. Number one CEO you're following or studying.

Mark Walker

28:11>> I think the CEO that I am paying most attention to actually, the person I think most about is Benioff. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's the person I spend most time thinking about. I think he's a really it's a really interesting time for, you know, a venerable company, and I'm paying a lot of attention to what he's saying, what he's doing. I have great respect for what he has done and and great interest in what he's going

28:34>> to do.

Nathan Latka

28:35Number two, is there a tool your favorite online tool you use to build a business?

Mark Walker

28:40>> Actually, frankly, I'm just we're just completely obsessed with the differences and the different ways that we're leveraging both OpenAI and Anthropic and all the other tools that sit on top of it. For me, personally, I'm actually back and forth between Claude and and ChatGPT using them for completely different things, you know, every single day. It's just allows me to maximize my day at a level I've always hoped to do. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

29:06So Number three, is there a business book that you've read recently you wanna recommend?

Mark Walker

29:10>> Yeah. Not recently, but it's a book that I recommend to everybody. Multipliers by, I think, Liz Wiseman about how to lead people to be more effective at what they do rather than rather than telling people what to do. Try to enable them to tell you what they're gonna do. And and it was given to me by my my cofounder, my last company when I was kind of losing my crap. He's basically I was becoming a

29:38>> bit of a demagogue inside my company. And he said, you need to read this book or at least the first two chapters. It was so important that I kept on my bedside to remind myself

29:48>> about how much I valued my teams and how much I my job is really to nurture them. And I would recommend that everybody read it, at least the first two chapters. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

29:56Alright. And Mark, what's your situation? Married, single, kiddos?

Mark Walker

30:00>> I am actually married. It's and it's super exciting. My eldest daughter is about to have a baby. So that's that's super fun.

Nathan Latka

30:09Many kids do you have?

Mark Walker

30:10>> I have two. I have two.

Nathan Latka

30:11Okay.

Mark Walker

30:12>> One wife, two kids, way too many pets. Way too many pets.

Nathan Latka

30:16There you go.

30:17And how old are you, Mark?

Mark Walker

30:19>> It's my birthday. I'm 60 years old.

Nathan Latka

30:22Oh, today's your birthday, your sixtieth birthday.

Mark Walker

30:24>> Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

30:25So Oh, amazing. Happy birthday. That's exciting.

Mark Walker

30:28>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

30:28Take us home here then.

30:29Take us home here strong. Take us back forty years. What's something you wish you knew back when you were 20?

Mark Walker

30:35>> Oh, actually, the thing I wish I knew when I was when I was 20 was that flexibility in what I was gonna do was the most important thing. That everything that the decisions I was gonna make in the next five years were probably completely irrelevant, and therefore, I can do whatever the hell I wanted. And because I think at that time, I was in law school, and I was really thinking about my path to being a

30:59>> great lawyer. And it turns out none of that happened, and I'm super successful. Like, maybe I become a lawyer, and I I didn't get this barred or anything. But but it was like, my actual real life was so much different than I thought it was gonna be that you can that that's what I wanna know.

Nathan Latka

31:15Guys, there you have it. Mark Walker, n u e dot I o is the company revenue recognition tool and much more with customers like OpenAI and Anthropic launched back in 2019. First lines of code, scale, know, 2022, lot of investment, $15,000,000 seed round to get the, you know, the product where it need to be. Still $0 of revenue in 2022, but then things started to take off. Broke a million dollars of revenue in 2023. They'll

31:38break eight figures. That's, that's, you know, over $10,000,000 this year as they continue scale as they've drastically increased their ARPU as they've added more value to the product over the past three years from, call it, 20 to 50 to in the, quote, hundreds of thousands now today. Their go to market motion, not a lot of direct SEO or bottoms up stuff. It's really going through actually consultants, NVC. So heavy inbound and word-of-mouth. They have an enablement

31:59program that enables their sales reps to be more effective and enables their new customers to get onboarded faster. 102 folks on the team today, 26 marketing and sales, 40 engineering, and then a big delivery team. His most important thing, he wants all of guys to know flexibility is the most important thing. Keep up the optionality. This is coming from a guy that bootstrapped his last company. Now he's all in on the VC side of things. We'll

32:17see what happens next. Mark, thanks for taking us to the top.