In this episode of the GrowthTLDR, we talk to the founder and CEO of MURAL, Mariano Suarez Battan.
MURAL recently secured $23 million in a Series A round and is serving 40% of Fortune 100 companies.
We talk to Mariano about the origins of MURAL and how the idea for the company came from video games. As a product, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different things you can do with it, so we talk to Mariano about how he manages onboard users successfully.
We also ask Mariano why MURAL isn't freemium, and just what's he going to do with all that money :)
Happy Growing!
Time Stamped Notes:
[2:45] - We talk to Mariano about how their usage has increased because of the Coronavirus.
[4:08] - MURAL was founded over 9 years ago. The company is 134 employees, split across Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and fully remote. They serve 40% of the Fortune 100.
[5:50] - There are spectrums of remote work; it doesn't always mean a person is working full-time from their house. The problem Mariano set out to solve with MURAL is how distributed teams collaborate on ideas.
[7:55]- Mariano talks about the origins of MURAL. In 2010 Mariano had launched a game that had 20 million players. He started working on his next game with his team, who were based in Buenos Aires, Mariano was based in San Francisco. That experience showed him the experience of early-stage collaboration was very hard, and no tools existed to help solve that problem.
[13:30] - We talk to Mariano about how onboarding works for MURAL. Two categories of users require unique onboarding experiences. The first is users who know the process they want to replicate with MURAL. The goal is to get them onboarded to a template for that process. The second is for users who don't know what process or methods they need, and MURAL needs to help them discover the correct template for those needs.
[16:50] - Mariano wants to lean into his community more to help onboard users by getting them to share their processes and methods.
[19:30] - Mariano would like to automate more of their onboarding experience
[21:00] - We discuss how Mariano thinks about freemium for MURAL. He didn't see a need for a freemium tier because 85% of people who bought MURAL, bought in the first month. He is currently rethinking their approach to free.
[24:10] - One of the metrics Mariano pays attention to is weekly active teams. He wants to give teams a reason to use MURAL weekly, but wants that reason to be an activity they complete quickly.
[25:35] - We talk about how tools like MURAL and other visual collaboration tools help you to do deep work.
[28:30] - Another great use-case for MURAL is helping people to be great at facilitation and help others do great work via their platform.
[32:40] - Mariano goes through the different marketing channels MURAL uses to acquire customers.
[34:40] - MURAL has just raised a Series A round of 23 million. We talk to Mariano about how he plans to invest that money.
[37:25]- Other investments MURAL has made are hiring their CRO, CMO, and starting a growth team.
– Mariano on Twitter / LinkedIn
– Kieran on Twitter / LinkedIn / Medium
– Scott on Twitter / Linked / Medium
