Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. Joining me is I’m an entrepreneur. Who’s been in the news quite a bit because he raised, raised a bunch of money. How much did you raise total? Be bake.
Vivek: We haven’t raised that much for where we’ve gotten the business here. So a little over $40 million in the company’s history.
Andrew: the latest raise I think was in August. I saw a bunch of articles. Am I right?
Vivek: Yeah, we did it in a mid-summer last year, which was an interesting time to do it, to wrap something up, but it was $30 million last summer. So prior we only raised a little over $12 million,
Andrew: And overall sales there. What? What’s revenue?
Vivek: We’re not sharing revenue number, but I can share that we are on an IPO track. So the company is a little over 10 years old and we’ve got a really healthy business.
Andrew: All right. I got a revenue number here, but you know what? You might’ve told Ari, our producer in private. So I’m not going to reveal it. Instead. What I will reveal is who you are that Vic Sharma is the founder of movable ink. If you’re listening to me, you probably have been interacted with his company and didn’t even know it.
You’ll get an email, nice little image in the center or big image in the center. And you think that that’s the same image that everyone else is getting, but behind the scenes, his company movable ink is actually customizing that image. And that business, that concept has really taken off for him, which I feel really happy for you about, because I had no idea how much trouble you went through to get here.
How many businesses you either did the wrong thing on, or you did everything right. Everything was told to do, and it still failed. And I use failure because you use the word failure. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are uptight about it, but yeah, smiling as I say this, because look at where it got you. All right.
We’re going to find out how he got here. Thanks to two phenomenal sponsors. The first, if you want your hosting done right. If you’re starting a new company or transitioning your current company, your current. Website to a new company and get a host of, I go to hostgator.com/mixergy. And the second I used to hate my inbox, but I’ve got sanity in there.
SaneBox is doing it for me. If you want some organization, if you want to make it easier to respond to your email, go to sane box.com/mixergy. They’ll let you use it for free, but they come and talk about those later. First, I got to find out about you. Good to have you here, man.
Vivek: Your podcast in the early days, this is like late 2010, 2011. So, I don’t know when
Andrew: see what you were working on back then, 2010. Oh, so this is movable ink days.
Vivek: early moved, blink, you know, we we’d gotten our start back then
Andrew: How long do you think it’s going to be before you go public?
Vivek: where we’re we’re on a
Andrew: You want to
Vivek: a track. Yeah. So.
Andrew: think, do you think COVID will clear up enough that you will, if you think you’ll get to go to the to the exchange and stand up and get your whole experience?
Vivek: Yeah, the process apparently looks very different. It’s amazing to hear about these virtual road shows and people, it still goes on, you know, many companies went public last year during COVID SAS companies have done quite well. When you, when you look out there, there’s been. And acknowledgement that digital transformation, you know, it’s, it’s hitting every business and they’ve got to come, come to terms with it.
And SAS companies, predictable revenue, recurring revenue, that’s all great stuff. And the, the multiples are eye-popping these days.
Andrew: Let’s give people a use case and then talk about what you’re doing right now, and then go back in time. And maybe we can start off with what happened at Metro spark and continue your story from there. But you were telling me before we got started about how Barnes and noble. Mobile uses you. What is Barnes and noble doing?
Vivek: Yeah, sure. So people don’t experience data, they experience content. So move blink, basically activates any data into real-time personalized content at the moment of customer engagement. So we we’ve been working with Barnes and noble for a number of years. In fact we do an annual conference and we rethought it last year.
So it was called rethink summit rather than our regular thanks summit. And Josh Selman, who’s a director there. Barnes and noble has a very successful bricks and mortar business they’ve been doing e-commerce for a number of years, but all of that accelerated with the pandemic COVID-19 hits and suddenly there’s a surgeon online traffic but there’s a lot of people who still want to buy things in the store.
And so what we enable them to do was to power real-time content inside their email marketing. So you get an email. You open it up and the email can Tell you about a Barnes and noble close to you. It can share a changing store hours. There’s also a strategy they were able to employ with great effect called Opus.
This an acronym that’s well known in the retail world and BOPA stands for buy online pickup in store. And you can imagine the changing conditions stores are closing opening in inventories out, supply chains disrupted. So all this fast, real time moving data it’s hard for a marketing program to keep up with, especially when it’s been planned weeks in advance.
So we’ve been able to help them pivot on a dime and be able to engage their customers and give them some great reading as they, as they shelter up.
Andrew: If I wanted to get a book from Barnes and noble, I I’d open up their email and they would show me a book that is, I guess, relevant to me, but more importantly is available at the local Barnes and noble. So if I decided to add it to my cart, I could drive over to Barnes and noble and pick it up. And that’s the difference.
Vivek: That’s right. And that the fact that focus is available if the store hours are shifting for these fast reasons, you get that updated information. So if you open that email after, or three hours after it’s always current it’s up-to-date and you know, that availability will be there when you
Andrew: And, and that’s with an image. I can see the cover of the book. I get it. I see how you are. Let’s talk about a painful experience. It all started. I feel like, well, it all started with a paper out, but if we were to fast forward a little bit, it started with Metro spark. What was Metro spark?
Vivek: Yeah. So back uh, I, I I’d been in Silicon Valley right out for school. I grew up in Massachusetts, went out there, got the bug, saw how startups were built. And this was around 2003. I spent a little bit of time in Japan and a little bit in England for the, for the company blue martini software that I worked with years ago.
And the, this sounds ancient, but people in the U S weren’t using mobile phones and really you had all these feature phones and people were text messaging, and we figured mobile was going to be this big thing. And a Friendster had happened. And I think this was pre MySpace. So basically we were trying to build a mobile social network back in 2003.
It sounds like. This was before everyone had exactly the same idea. So there were a very small number of companies doing this and we rushed into it. I was an engineer and we tried to engineer a solution and, uh, you can very few phones supported the kinds of things we want to do. So if you had a Palm trail, Or a Nokia phone, uh, as a 60, that was like the dream phone.
You could have this experience of having a Bluetooth personal network and identification if your friends were nearby. And it was an MIT media lab pro project that we were trying to commercialize.
Andrew: Well, you could tell me if my friends are nearby through Bluetooth, Bluetooth can barely go from one room to the other. How can you tell me if my friends are outside of the coffee shop? I’m in.
Vivek: You’d actually be surprised. Bluetooth can have a range of up to two miles depending on the antenna and the signal that you’re sending out. Yeah. So you can scan for Mac addresses from a phone like that. And if that’s associated with your account, you can have serendipitous encounters. In fact, in, at MIT media lab, this project that it was called serendipity.
It was about Bluetooth scans and creating proximity networks and predictions about who you hang out with and that sort of thing. So we massively, over-engineered a thing, uh, failed to get customers and spent three and a half very painful years, trying to make a thing happen like this. And, uh, eventually threw in the towel, you know, four years in.
Andrew: I’m on the site right now. And I like how I could receive text messages, telling me where I guess mobile notifications tell me where my friends were. So really this was way ahead of its time. When you say, when you say over engineered, Tom, talk about some of the mistakes that you’ve made there and what you could have done differently.
Vivek: Yeah, no number one thing. I mean, this is kind of common knowledge for anyone starting a company today. There was no one had ever heard of lean startup or get out of the building or Steve blank. Wasn’t no, no one knew him unless, I guess you worked at apifany. But yeah, all the classic mistakes we thought we had the right answers.
We thought we. We had a beautiful solution looking for a problem. Right. And so we had, we had engineered something that was Based on our own behavior and, uh, people we knew that would find these connections make connections, but we never really thought about how to acquire an audience. How do you get someone to sign up?
What’s that new user experience look like? We didn’t get out of the building. We didn’t validate, and we didn’t solve one critical problem for our customers. And.
Andrew: It seems like you did it don’t they have the problem of, I want to know where my friends are. Maybe I could pop mom. Maybe they don’t actually, you know what? It’s a nice to know, but now that I say it out loud, I realized, no, I never had the problem of where my friends right now. And how do I hang out
Vivek: Yeah, there’s nuances like Foursquare. I got some stuff right about the single user utility of checking, tracking places, you know, Tinder’s got a dating angle, so you, you can’t just have a general utility. You’ve got to really think about the problem. What is this enabling for people? And more importantly, the technology back then.
Just, if you want it to set this up, we had. I think 80 different J two Emmy builds that you would, you would have to install and go through your settings screen and open up a
Andrew: Uh, yeah.
Vivek: So the user experience was poor and we just didn’t quit. And we kept going and banned. It was painful, painful,
Andrew: When you finally gave it up, did it feel like a relief or did you feel like a failure for having failed at this?
Vivek: both. When you’re, when you’re, when you’re, I kind of describe it as an entrepreneur. You don’t know if you are even spending years on something and you’re just really close to cracking it and you solved it. Or if you’re if you play poker, if you’re on tilt, right. You’ve completely lost sense of reality.
And you’re chasing this thing that isn’t really there. and so it’s, it’s hard to know sometimes. And, uh, I think the indicator for us was just years and years of like lack of traction. And I was. Disappointed in myself for failing to, you know, me and my co-founders that to turn this into something.
And, uh, I think a lot of failed entrepreneurs go through this. If you’ve gone through this the first time of like, uh, soul searching and purgatory and what did I do wrong? And am I really cut out to be starting a company? Is this for other people, have some special quality that do this and I don’t have that it factor maybe.
Andrew: How did you get past it?
Vivek: Uh, well, after some of the soul searching, I, uh, I introspected, I said, look, I think I want to start something again in the future and what went wrong. I didn’t know how to get customers. So let me focus on that. Let me do the scariest thing I can think of. Let me get a sales job at a company. And, you know, this is from someone who I’d been writing code and deep code backend code server, side code, you name it didn’t know what a lead was.
Didn’t know what an opportunity was. What is a prospect? What is all this language didn’t? And, uh, luckily I found a company, uh, talked to the founders who was a managed hosting provider for Ruby on rails applications, convinced the founders to hire me. And I was like, wow, I can’t believe I got the job. And then I was second salesperson.
I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m going to be found out in month, one month, two, and. You are completely swimming in the deep end of the pool. You never, and before, and you start the little pieces come together, but even month, four month, five, I’m like, this is just, I’ve been faking it for this long. It’s all gonna come fall apart and you never really have certainty at some point.
You’re like, statistically, Hey, this is then five months. I’ve done this. Okay. And I’m closing deals and I’m bringing in business. And, uh, basically over the two years that I was there, I brought in $4.2 million in annual recurring revenue for the company.
Andrew: What’d you learn? How did you, how were you able to do that?
Vivek: One, it was a good product. You know, people needed this thing, Ruby on rails applications through rails was taking off. So I found this company interesting because they, you know, they weren’t 37 signals. They weren’t working on rails, but I thought that being around that ecosystem would be good. Uh, so it was a good product.
People had a real need and I was technical enough to be able to talk about the attributes of our service and what was good about it. And, uh, and so I could. Lean and pull from a strength that I had, that an average sales person who wasn’t technical probably couldn’t have. Uh, so that was the big and you know, that was my, I didn’t know it coming in, but I ended up learning a lot about sales and, uh, you know, getting things right.
Getting things wrong and just the pace. And eventually I learned that wasn’t doing a full-time sales gig. Wasn’t for me, I learned enough from when I
Andrew: But what you went in there for was to learn how to talk to customers. And it seems like just having that structure in place that forced you to go to talk to customers, brought that out of you. I wonder if you were also able to, I mentioned earlier the paper route, I wonder if you were able to draw on what you learned.
Vivek: yeah, I mean a paper. I don’t even know if people have this job anymore. Yeah. So I, you know, as a kid in Massachusetts, uh, and this is like the job you get when you’re, uh, when you’re, when you’re a kid. And, uh, it was funny. I think it was, had both the Boston globe and the Lowell sun I delivered and, uh, one of them, and this is such a.
Now I think back what a clever, or maybe slightly evil cashflow management, uh, thing, where you had to buy the newspapers from the company and you go deliver them and you have to do your collections at the end of the week. And if someone’s not there, you gotta catch them on Saturday. So you’re floating the company.
They’ve already got their money and you’ve got to go collect it back and hopefully get some tips. So I learned about, uh, you know, you have to. You have to do the job. It doesn’t mean matter if there’s two feet of snow on the ground. It doesn’t matter if it’s icy. If it’s hot, uh, there’s a job that needs to get done.
And, um, this is what it
Andrew: And that involves, it seems like the hardest part of that job is throwing the newspaper, getting up early and throwing the newspaper is hard, but the more I find out about it, the more I realized, no it’s going and knocking on people’s doors and saying you have to pay for the paper, people who. Yeah. I mean, it’s, I don’t know who set this up, but it seems like the most unfair way to do things.
The newspaper has the ability to charge a credit card. They should just charge it and, you know, do it month after month. But instead they’re sending these kids around to be their collection agents,
Vivek: Yeah. I mean, until the throwing thing, I think that’s just like the movies where they do that. So, you know, you either get it in the newspaper box or pet, some people want it, they preference, they want it in the door between the glass door. And I still remember collecting $2 and 90 cents and it really ticked me off when someone would.
Exactly. The $2, 8 cents, you know, at $3 is a pretty cheap tip, but to those people who don’t tip at all,
Andrew: I’m reading the book, a man for all markets about Edward Thorp, the guy who figured out how to beat the casino at a few games, he’s best known for beating it for blackjack. And then he became this hedge fund manager did incredibly well for himself. I think he started out the same way, and that’s how I discovered the details of what it’s like to go get up early and collect and get up early, get the newspaper delivered and then collect money.
Boy, that was agony, but all right,
Vivek: Has been operational, you know, you’re balancing your book, all that stuff.
Andrew: Do you do it for money or did you do it because why? Why did you do it as a kid?
Vivek: I I’m, uh, I’m an immigrant. I moved to the U S when I was eight. And so my Indian parents, they just didn’t get the idea of an allowance. So like, Hey, you’re a member of the family. You have to rake the leaves. You have to. Uh, drop the wood. You have to shovel the snow, do all this stuff. It’s like get a job if you want to make some money to be able to buy stuff.
So I wanted to Nintendo games. My, my brother did too, and we, we kind of pooled our money together and that was probably the big purchase. We’d save up for Nintendo games.
Andrew: Do you have kids now? Do you make them work?
Vivek: Uh, one is nine and one is almost seven. Uh, they don’t have the, or in New York city. So I don’t think there’s a lot of paper routes. Sitting here. And they’re probably a little bit young, uh, but the, but they earn money. They earn allowances for things, for things they
Andrew: Mine are even younger than yours. And I think I’ve got to get them in the habit of first of all, doing stuff around the house and second, go out and get a job of some kind. My dad had his friends, he, he manufacturers women’s clothing. He would tell his friends whose store who ran stores. Hire, my kid I’ll even pay you, but I want him to be in a place where he’s safe, have them, I don’t know, take alarms off of clothes or put them on clothes in the basement or whatever, but do it.
I need to do that. I need friends with stores. I can hire my kids.
Vivek: Yeah, you learn so much by doing a real job. Even when I was in college, there’s the classes you go to. But when I first did my first internship, it gave me a real taste of what working in the real world was like. And it’s quite different than what you’re learning in the classroom.
Andrew: we’ll also put up with a lot of bold, but your boss at a store where they count on every sale, they’re not going to put up with any of that nonsense. You gotta like look right. You gotta handle yourself. Well, all right. So close up the company. Get a job. You’ll learn a lot from the job time to go out there and start something new.
One of the things that you learned for the new company was Shaq testing. You got to tell people what Shaq testing is. I never heard of it before you.
Vivek: Yeah. So I got clued into this. I hope I’m not giving away some great secret. Uh, but it was a, it was an executive at meetup about the early days of how they would validate ideas. And, uh, back then, I think this is like, 2008, 2009, I was kind of hanging out in the New York city startup scene. There was only one shake shack in the world, and that was in Madison square park and it was delicious and it was the longest line you can ever imagine.
And, uh, there were, there was a shack camp. You can go to their website and see how long the line is. Uh, so people would wait in line waiting to order their burger. And he clued me into this, uh, UX UI validation method, where you go up to someone in line, you have a partner and you say, Hey, my partner will stand in line for you and we’ll order it.
We’ll pay for your food. And if you’ll sit with us for 10, 15 minutes and give us some feedback on some of these, uh, some of these mock-ups and these UI screens, and pretty much everyone would take him up on that. So he’s like, yeah, we call it Shaq testing. And I thought that was brilliant. Who’s going to say no to that.
Andrew: What a great idea I would do that. Just give me something to do. All right. And so you start to understand lean startup methodology. You read four steps to the epiphany. You are really ready to get feedback. What’s the idea that you used all of these lean startup techniques on.
Vivek: Yeah, I’ll say you can learn all that stuff and still fail. So the precursor to move blank, we worked on this company called market IO, reading, lean startup, reading, Steve blank, knowing all this stuff. And, uh, long story short, it was a syndicated e-commerce idea. So if you’re an online merchant selling t-shirts, maybe someone could sell cross sell merchandise, like belts and shoes on one site and have a seamless checkout.
Uh, spent eight intense grueling months on it. The idea failed. I’m glad we learned within eight months and we didn’t string this out for like three or four years. But, uh, Michael who joined about halfway through
Andrew: Wait before we take, before we take that you he’s somebody who you ended up continuing with, but I’m on an early version of the site. I like how I could list on Shopify. You were ahead with them on Magento, on Yahoo stores. It makes a lot of sense. Why didn’t it work out? What’s the feedback that you got and then why didn’t it work out?
Vivek: Yeah, this is the, uh, marketplace dynamic. There’s two things. One, it is very technically challenging to make a seamless order. Uh, and I should have known this had built e-commerce software in the past, but, uh, doing joint orders from different merchants, different shipment lies, shipping costs, recurrent policies.
There’s all of that craziness. And then frankly, if you are an online retailer, That can attract an audience and you’re selling shirts and shirts and trousers and things like that. Uh, you’re not as motivated to cross sell and build an audience for someone else to, to lose that dollar, share that wallet share during the merchant.
And let’s say you were successful and that was working out for you. You’re quite, you’re going to take that information and source your own and start to introduce your own product lines. So there were lots of.
Andrew: I’m sorry. So the idea was I, as a consumer go to a t-shirt store, I buy a shirt from them. And then at some point they’re cross selling me pants that I might want to buy too,
Vivek: From another merchant.
Andrew: another merchant. And you were thinking, Hey, let’s do that.
Vivek: Yep. And we would try to connect these worksheets. And I remember going way deep into Brooklyn and, uh, it was like a BNH online equivalent that had every single product because we needed big product catalogs to be able to. Feed into these cross sell algorithms. Uh, so we did that. Uh, we did it. We finally said, this is not working.
Maybe we run it as a display ad, make it kind of shoppable commerce. We ran a unit on Squidoo. I think Seth Godin’s thing. And we were like, Oh my God, this is awesome. There’s like hundreds of thousand millions of impressions. We’re going to be rolling in it. And it is. So this heartening to see how few people click and even fewer converted out of that.
And that was the death. Now, I still remember seeing all the data come in. We have this real-time visualization of the very few orders, and we’re like, this is not going to work this, you know, eight months in this business is dead and that’s the night we came up with a movable ink idea.
Andrew: What was it about your feedback process that led you to believe this would work? And was it wrong?
Vivek: Yep or something that was really interesting to us and, uh, seeing e-commerce take off. I think we underestimated the technical complexity of making the stuff work seamlessly. Um, Multiple merchants, shipment lines. You know, that was probably the single biggest challenge around this idea. And it’s funny because in the years, since I’ve run into a company or two, that is tackling that same idea in a, and you know, I.
If they can shift something, if they can make some of this, uh, change, maybe the same logistical backend API integrations, uh, potentially that could work. But, uh, it was about finding the balance between buyer and seller marketplace. And maybe we could have been more tailored somewhere and, uh, it just, there could have been something there.
We just didn’t feel the level of effort it would take would be worth the, uh, the return we’d get on that idea.
Andrew: Okay. All right. And now, instead of three years working on a project, it was eight months. You learned, you didn’t sacrifice the other two plus years. So some progress before we get into move bullying. Let me just tell you about my first sponsor. And then I want to come back into the store. My first sponsor is SaneBox.
Who does your email do you sit down still and go through all your email? Vivec
Vivek: Yeah, I use superhuman for my email client. So.
Andrew: do too, but then don’t you end up with like every freaking thing you buy triggers, a sequence of messages from the company that you buy from. I get my kids into school. They have apps that now send me messages. It was just overwhelming. Do you have that? No.
Vivek: No. I mean, I guess I’m thinking about my business account, my business email. I try to keep myself out of the flow. I try not to own the things that I don’t need to own. So if you do that, you know, the emails are going to go to someone else and, uh, for work for internal communications, we’re using Slack for business communications email, but I think I’ve just been, um, really organized in who and how.
I communicate on the business side and then, you know, there’s me as a consumer. Uh, and, and the, the, the, the websites, I like the services I like, and I, uh, look for them. Right. They’re they’re they’re emails. I look forward to it.
Andrew: So problem was that I was, uh, because I’m a podcaster and I’ve been doing this now for 10 years. I get a lot of email from people that it’s just overwhelming. And I was missing things because I was getting spam messages from people, anyone who wants to be on a podcast for some reason has to email me.
And so then it’s their messages. And then I try out a lot of my guests software. And so there’s that message. And then it’s years of being on all my audiences. I just got one from someone who I talked to years ago, 10 years ago, I interviewed him. He just reacted, activated his mailing list and he said, sorry, but I’m going to reach out to you again.
And I was happy. I was happy to hear from him. Anyway, what I did was I signed up for SaneBox, SaneBox learns how I want my messages handled and then it does it. So for example, anything that comes from my kids’ school, I want to get into my inbox. But if it comes from the message board of my kids’ school, that these people are, there are two different schools.
Some of them it’s a little nutty here in San Francisco, the schools are getting renamed. So there are all these messages going back and forth about like, should Alvarado be renamed or not? Which Alvarado was it named after the mean guy or the non-meat guy was, I mean, got really mean. So there’s like all this anger, it just gets filed away.
Vivek: Is Brooklyn, probably the same way.
Andrew: Are you guys doing it there too?
Vivek: We’re not doing that, but like all the school messages and, uh, parents and, uh, forums. Luckily my wife runs interference on that a little bit, but
Andrew: Yeah. One of the other schools is private school. These people are, I know what they’re paying for school. They still will have this whole sequence of messages that goes out about how we have rain pants available for anyone who wants it. Cause our kid outgrow rain pants like 20 bucks reuse rain packs.
They’re like five bucks, but we got a whole message. Anyway, I don’t want to lose this stuff. I just want to follow the way nicely. What sane box does is it just organizes it? When I have patients to go in and look at the school stuff. It’s all categorized and I can go and look at the school stuff. When I have patients look at all my, my chest.com stuff, cause I’m obsessed with chess.com.
Right now. That’s organized for me there too. That’s the idea behind SaneBox makes your email that much more usable. If you’re out there listening to me and you want to experience this for yourself, I’m gonna let you try it for free. Just go with whatever software use we both use, um, superhuman, anything that you use.
Except for, Hey, hey.com is a whole other world. I use them too, and I love them, but for everything else, they will organize you. Right. Go to sane box.com/mixer, G S a N E B O x.com/mixergy. Hey, I talk too fast cause I’m a new Yorker. You’re you’re from Brooklyn or you’re in Brooklyn. How do you not talk so fast?
Vivek: I think you’re catching me at five 34 on a board. So it’s been, uh, it’s been, uh, quite a few six weeks. This, the kickoff here.
Andrew: All right. Um, let’s see.
Vivek: End of the day.
Andrew: I feel like you also there’s stuff going on that you, you are excited to talk about. You want to talk to me about, but I understand that we can’t talk about it in, so I’m not going to pry it, but, but it seems like good things are happening right now for movable ink. All right. So movable ink, where did the idea come from?
Vivek: Yeah. So out of the ashes of that failed idea with market IO, uh, we, we ha I had the co-founder Paul Paul brought in, uh, we, we needed to do more engineering work. So Michael nut, Mike move, blink co-founder joined. And so that evening complete failure, the display unit fails. Doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.
So I was interested in email. Funny, you mentioned sandbox, but, uh, after having been burned by doing a mobile startup too early in 2003, I’m like, screw this. I don’t want to spend all this effort on some new bleeding edge thing that isn’t quite there. So I said email, email’s kind of interesting, right?
It’s been around forever from like the seventies, it’s at a protocol level. And I bet you, there’s some opportunities here to do more meaningful things. And you know, Michael and I got to talking and, uh, there’s some technical insights. Michael brought to the table about being able to dynamically change an image in an email.
After the moment it’s open. So we’re like, wow, that’s interesting. I didn’t think that was even possible. And we start digging into it and, you know, kind of the engineering light bulbs in my head pop and Mike and I talk and, you know, he realized, wow, with the, uh, you know, with IP address, you could probably geo locate someone in the user agent.
You might be able to hold on an iPhone or an Android phone. And, uh, what if you change the, you know, what, what images behind the scenes. Uh, after the fact, it looks like magic, you know, um, early on, uh, one of the, one of the other start-ups at general assembly called us the Harry Potter for email. So w w we were like, this is kind of interesting.
And I stayed up until three, 4:00 AM that night excited, writing down all the different industries and the use cases and the kinds of things. And I validate with Michael know, we did it the right way. We went out there with a PowerPoint. Instead of a fully baked product and a duct tape, like Michael built the first version over a weekend.
And I had built a PowerPoint over the weekend and that’s what we started going out there and testing.
Andrew: What’d you talk to.
Vivek: So back then our. Theory was that the big companies would be really hard to get into, you know, I I’d sold to startups before and fast moving tech companies who said, you know, let’s try to get, uh, Techstar startups. It was a company called star street sports. There was an early user. Uh, there was an, that was the time.
If you remember way back early to 2010s, the email newsletter companies. So daily candy was an early client. There were the daily deal sites. There was a, the Russia’s biggest. Daily DS deal, cycled kooky coupon, uh, somehow found us and ended up using us. And it was just this random collection scoop street.
I think he used us for awhile. It’s random collection of companies. We pitched this to, and, you know, there was a flash sale example of, you know, a countdown timer is ticking down and swapping out the, the product that you’re seeing or a daily deal thing, showing you a social proofing. 55 people have bought this product and there’s like two hours left.
And so we came up with.
Andrew: like that’s magic. I know I’ve seen that, but not enough to feel jaded about it. It’s still feels like, wow, I will still sometimes like right. Click on the image or go in and try to figure how they did it. It’s it’s still, it’s still increasing credibly, if not uncommon than just not something that I notice enough to say, Oh, there’s another one of those.
It feels like, wow, this is pretty impressive that they did it. But your original, your original set of. Potential customers that you talk to, or who, who did you talk to and show the PowerPoint to
Vivek: It was, it was companies like this and we would hit up anyone in our network. We would talk to VCs that had passed on us on the original idea and get them to introduce us to, uh, to companies. We were shameless about anyone who would. Take a meeting. We were so happy to. Uh, and if we eating, we would prep like crazy to not, uh, fall on our face.
And, uh, in fact, I remember weeks where I’d have like 12, 15 meetings and I’d come out of a meeting. I’d have some feedback on the deck. I’d change it on the fly, tweak it, go into the next meeting and literally iterate. And one meeting, I remember with daily candy, but Michael joined me on this one, uh, had a good conversation.
And the, uh, the marketing manager said, Hey, this is kind of cool. Could the product do X and I forget what the feature and Michael and I both look at each other and we have literally a 32nd conversation. We’re like, yeah, that makes sense. We can do that in the product. And, and I could literally see her head spinning.
She’s like, did you just decide to change product within? And we didn’t think it was a big deal. It was like, that’s how startups do it. And now with a 330 person company with a very organized product management practices for good reasons, we realize how crazy. That sounds to be able to on, on, on a whim, uh, decide what new features a product should have.
Andrew: So if I would, if I’m understanding you, right, you decided I’m not going for SMBs. I’m going to the professional marketers. I wonder why, why didn’t you say we’re going to be like, um, like MailChimp, but with this extra feature, why did you go after higher end customers?
Vivek: We tried everything, but we, we realized the pricing model would probably. The larger, slightly larger companies would value this more. So mid-market, might’ve been the sweet spot for us. So if there’s some decent email volume, we wanted a team that could buy us be flexible. And the Byzantine things you might have to do with an enterprise and InfoSec and legal work and everything that is far more streamlined, but there’s a meaningful email volume on the other side that it, uh, you know, early on.
It was like we had a pricing page, uh, you know, free $5 a month, $10 a month, $30 a month, that sort of thing. And we were hoping this would be so brilliant. A marketer would see it adopted, it’d be a touchless sale and boom isn’t takes off that did not happen. And for 18 months we got some clients to come in, use it, kick the tires, get in the product and they all turn out.
And a couple of big things we realized, uh, we were selling to the wrong audience. Uh, that was the first thing. And the second thing was, people didn’t quite know how to use this, right? Nobody could, they were sending their emails out, doing their segmentation, uh, and, and thinking about their list and time of sand.
But. It’s kind of a weird new thing that, Hey, I’m going to build dynamic content inside an email. That’s going to change on the fly and it would just, wasn’t a priority. And we had to, we had to share our ideas and coach them on how to use this effectively. So the big switch happened. Uh, this is I think the end of 2011.
We’re grinding it away. I think our monthly recurring revenue at that point was about $300. Uh, we had not raised any capital and my wife was like, this is like startup number two, three, maybe looking like it might fail. She’s like, you gotta, you gotta like raise some money or something by the end of the year or get a real job.
And so that kind of lit, um, lit a fire under me. And basically we were on a, on a. Cheap vacation at the end of the year. And I got our first angel investor on the phone closed literally would like, you know, a couple of days left in the year.
Andrew: Who was the first angel.
Vivek: Uh, th uh, AMR and AMR, AMR, Ramana, and Amara Abdullah were two angel investors here in New York. And I sold remember them way back. And I’m so grateful for them that they, uh, they, they, they liked the idea and put 50 K in. And I thought that was, Oh my God, the mind blowing that we got the first money in and it’s one piece at a time.
And it was the first piece of validation.
Andrew: One of the things that I saw that you did in the beginning was you had. A signature for email that would plug in people’s latest tweet or something and send it out on the bottom of their Gmail email. I’m guessing what you were thinking was let’s get some virality, let’s get people to know who we are.
Did that work.
Vivek: Yeah, it’s funny. You, you did your homework. Um, the, the business could have gone in two different directions. So we said, look, we’ve got an interesting product here. W we can change emails after they’re sent. Do we build a B2B product with this? And sell it to sales departments. And there’s a centralized marketing control that the sales person can say, here are the events we’re going to be at.
The engineering team can update it on the fly and say, here’s the open source related contribution that we’ve made. And so we were testing that out and we, we, we said, let’s give away this free Twitter signature. Anyone can, anyone can download. Uh, and so we had some people set it up and we thought that would go viral.
Right. Kind of the Hotmail style thing. People are sending emails to each other with a live Twitter signature. And, you know, we had some people use it and try it, but it never really went viral. And as it turns out that B2B idea, we didn’t think it would be as we, we, we netted out that it wouldn’t be as big as the.
Selling to the brands marketing to lots of consumers, but Brian Wade, who was at exact target years later started, uh, or came in as CEO of a company that did exactly that called SIG sister. So it’s funny how ideas come around multiple times. Okay.
Hey Andrew, I can’t hear you. I think he might be on mute.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s the phrase of 2021 and 2020. I’m looking at the first version or one of the early versions of your site. You had a free version. As long as people are willing to put the movable ink, watermark the logo on their site, they could use, they could use it. For free for a few emails, right?
Vivek: Yeah, we thought that was like a marketing strategy. If we can create some awareness and other people who could build a network, you know, a little bit of the engineer in me, like you’re, you’re trying to be lazy and if you can create something awesome and then it magically takes off and it’s through the roof that’s wonderful, but it didn’t turn out to be like that.
And I’m, I’m kind of grateful because we’ve gone on to do more meaningful things because of the road we went down.
Andrew: And the road is instead of going SMB. Uh self-serve. It became this enterprise tool and enterprise or enterprise is better because
Vivek: Enterprise is better because they have scale. They have an existing email marketing program and maybe they’ve. Kind of created all the value they can with the things that they’re already doing. So it’s, that’s a surprising thing. My advice to startups be don’t be afraid of the enterprise. I know the InfoSec and everything has gotten tougher in the last several years, but, uh, you get the right audience and they’re really into it.
And they were like, they, they want to stand out from their peers and the, and if they’re sending out 20, 30 million emails, if there’s something that you’re bringing to them, that’s a lot of scale that could create more value and stand out from the competition. So Enterprises ended up being absolutely the place we should focus and we completely stopped doing small and mid-market small business and mid-market, and it changes the model.
It changes the. Tenor of the company and who you hire and how you’re able to service larger accounts like that be more hands-on that’s the other thing we have to be hands-on and bring them our ideas, which you can’t do constantly with a $20 a month account. Someone’s got their credit card down. It’s very personal for them money, but an enterprise can invest in often they have innovative Tim.
Andrew: Right. That’s something I’ve discovered that they actually have a budget to go and try some random stuff. And in many ways, from what I understand from friends, who’ve been selling to enterprise through that innovation budget. They, they don’t need data to show that it works. In fact, they prefer no data so that they don’t go back to their boss and say, this is a failure.
Instead they want to say, this is an exciting thing that we’re trying out. Did you find that too?
Vivek: Yeah, w we didn’t know about budgets and which budget and what budget and how, how this all works. I think it’s brilliant that enterprise enterprise included, I don’t know when it started, but, uh, way back when I was at blue martini, that didn’t seem like a thing, but I think it’s this observation that they’re the known problems that they have.
The technology is moving so fast and there’s such great tools that are coming up. That they need some room to be able to experiment in a budget, created to freedom to, for departments to do just that. And, um, you know, I think that kind of opened the door and I, I still remember, uh, I can’t name the client, but we have a large financial services client in Southern Manhattan.
And the first meeting we went in there, uh, our sales guy goes into the movable ink t-shirt that said, and at least I had a sport coat. I’m like, what are you, what are you doing? And 12 people showed up to our first meeting and we were walked in by and large email service provider. And it completely changed our perspective, the interest that they had and what we were doing and, and, and, uh, what we could potentially do for them.
And, you know, that was, uh, that was eyeopening. And we, when you see a couple pieces of evidence like that as an entrepreneur, Yeah. I always liken it to a circuit. Uh, if there’s 10 switches in a circuit, one of those switches is flipped the other way, the whole thing doesn’t work and you don’t know why. So your job is to identify all those switches and solve for each one of them.
And at some point it’s beautiful when it can, and the whole thing just works and then you squeeze the heck out of it. And you do a lot more of the thing that, that works.
Andrew: And that took you at least 18 months daily candy. Didn’t survive. I’m going to come back in a moment and ask you up questions about those two situations. First, real quick. If you’re listening to me, you already know my site is hosted on HostGator. If you are not hosted on HostGator, I urge you to switch over to them because I’ll give you a great low price service that just works, and you’ll be able to move on with your business.
That’s what I did. I went to host gator.com/. Mixer hostgator.com/mixergy daily candy. Why did they stop working with you? What happened? Okay.
Vivek: There’s so many companies that there, the memory I can tell you about, uh, another company Fandango that we worked with, uh, this was really on us. We got a really good shot Fandango for those who aren’t familiar, it basically allowed you to buy movie tickets, to theaters all over the place. And so we thought this was brilliant.
What a great way to, uh, you know, information is changing. What movies are showing showtimes, uh, concessions, et cetera, et cetera. So great idea. We ran the campaign and our technology fell over. Uh, we were sitting there all grouped up into a room and it was the worst feeling in the world. When basically we made their email campaign not work and broken images inside.
Andrew: Oh, wow. They used you for a BR a big collection of their subscribers.
Vivek: Big sand. And people were really, and she was not happy are our marketing contact rightly right? We were, we were the scrappy startup in something. We had made a mistake in the code and it broke. And so basically I went back hat in the hand and begged for a chance for another apologize profusely.
Identify the root cause wrote up an email, uh, and, and fought. And we got a shot, a second shot, and the movie was puss in boots. I, I remember it’s funny how you remember all these crazy things from like nine, 10 years ago. And, and this time it worked, unfortunately, they were looking for a lift. They were doing a holdout and it didn’t yield a greater lift in performance.
So. We got lots of shots. And that was the exp experimentation that happened. What use cases are valuable, which industry wants to do, what kind of thing? What’s the strategic initiative. And we tried lots of different things. Some of them worked some didn’t and you know, a little piece by little piece, it starts to shape together.
Uh, at some point you end up with a playbook of like really good ideas
Andrew: What was working and what wasn’t in that 18 months, what did you learn?
Vivek: I will say there’s one idea without fail. Every company sees and they’re like, this is amazing. We got to do this in our emails. And that is the countdown timer. In fact w when we were at general assembly, Diddy the, the, the, the, the rapper or the impresario he had an agency and, uh, the, the person who is running his agency did, he loves countdown, timers.
He loves counting down to new year’s and sort of like crate. And so every single company wanted to do this idea, but it almost never yielded. Um, Lyft, right? There’s the things that have the sizzle and the there’s the things that will perform. And that was the idea that somehow, visually everyone gravitated to, they could understand, but we have to appeal them away from that and say, let’s do more meaningful things.
Um, and today a lot of it is about taking the API APIs and the data that you have in your platforms, and then enabling them with your key strategic ideas.
Andrew: And so they wanted the timer. Did you create the countdown? Because that’s what they wanted and sell them the sizzle that they want, but give them the stake that you knew that they needed to justify it. You did.
Vivek: we would try to do that, which is, uh, the more trivial ideas we’d say, okay, we’ll do this. We don’t think it’s going to drive what you want, but will you commit to doing some of these other things with us as well? It’s without fail you, you run into that
Andrew: And then what evolved those other ideas did actually get them to lift that got them to return.
Vivek: Yeah, the big change happened maybe six, seven years ago was us realizing companies have invested in tons of other technologies. They are, they’ve got loyalty systems like crowd Twiz. They’ve got inventory management systems. They’ve got recommendation engines. Uh, you name it. They’ve got data for marketers.
CSV files are passing out our Excel sheets everywhere. So we built a platform that could ingest any of this data. In fact, a couple of years ago, we launched something called a moveable like exchange. We’ve got a really robust partner program with 160 companies, every tech vendor you can think of. And it was about taking those meaningful pieces of data that in the past had only been used for segmentation or something else like that to actually drive personalized content inside their emails.
So. They’ve already bought these systems they’re bought in. There’s a big strategic initiative. There’s a loyalty program that we’re running for them. And these types of things ended up being transformative and driving lots of revenue and, and real value to the business.
Andrew: Can you give me an example of how someone might use that?
Vivek: Yep. So there’s three types of data. You open an email, uh, there’s contextual factors that an email could change. So it’s snowing outside or it’s sunny over here or you’re in Alaska versus Florida. So we, we can, we can change. Content based on that, that’s, that’s interesting, but maybe not the world changing thing, there’s behavioral content.
We can also power. So we understand what’s happening on the website. So if you’ve abandoned a search or a basket, a banner could pop up in your emails saying, continue to pick up where you left off, or a, here are the items you were searching for. That’s proven really effective, but the last piece, uh, loyalty point balance, right?
We’re calling it an API, a first party API or a crowd post system. And it’s got their loyalty tier status. How many points that they have, how many they will have to earn to be at the next level and to completely personalized email. And they never would have been able to pull something like this off. Before I moved blank, right.
Where millions of people are getting millions of unique emails.
Andrew: We talked earlier about how email is an open protocol. And then one day you discovered that Gmail made this big change. What was the change that they made and what happened?
Vivek: Yeah. I think we were always aware that it’s, it can be dangerous to play a sharecrop on somebody else’s technology. So all the, all the compliance that been built on Twitter learned that the hard way. So we’re like, Oh, we’re smart. We built on email. Email is a protocol it’s never going away. There’s tons of different ISP, like Gmail or Yahoo mail.
However, one day we woke up and this is, I think a few, maybe a week after black Friday. And suddenly our emails stopped working. Uh, the content wasn’t learning or, or it was stuck. There’d be one version and wouldn’t change after the fact. And there was nothing, no indicator from Google. And we do a ton of detective work.
And it turns out that Google had, um, finally published, published a blog post and they started caching content. So every single. Every single Gmail client for that one piece of content would see the one cashed version and they were doing this for privacy and security. That, that was the argument. So this was bad.
This is really bad for our business. And this happened like six years ago and every ESP we talked to cheetah digital, exact target. Everyone’s like, you can’t convince the ISP, especially Google to change anything. So. Months, you know, we’re like, we’re going to be fine. Our business is going to be fine, but no, this was an existential threat and our head of client today’s head of client strategy.
Somehow she knows every single person on the planet. She networked her way, found a product manager at Google. Who’s willing to take a 15 minute meeting with me and Michael. So Michael and I built the ugliest sales deck that you’ve ever seen.
Andrew: Intentionally ugly.
Vivek: Intentionally ugly. Cause we’re like this, hopefully this will be shared with the engineers where we put forth our Casey offer a technical solution that lets them protect privacy and security while allowing a better end user experience.
And we made it ugly because we said, if we make this look too pretty feels salesy, it feels it’ll turn them off. And little did we know, you know, some radio silence. So we talked to this product manager a couple months later, he’s going to be at this conference called MOG the messaging anti-abuse working group.
I get a membership to MOG. I fly out to San Francisco, also line up a meeting with Yahoo mail, no intent, just because he was going to be there. And within two minutes of our conversation, he’s like, Hey, that change, you mentioned, uh, it was a good idea and our engineering team is doing it. It should probably be rolling out in the next few days.
And.
Andrew: what was the change that you suggested? So I’m looking at, I think this is the blog post from December 16, 2013, back to the future. Gmail turns on images and email, and it was about how they don’t want images to be hand, to be turned on by default. But they’re going to anyway at the top of it, they have an update that says that they basically reverse themselves.
Vivek: Yeah, so the change still exists, but we had the ability to pass a no cash header. To uh, to Google. So when, when Gmail sees that, it says don’t cash, this thing they still mask IP address. Uh, and I believe Yahoo mail does as well. So the geolocation may not work. Um, but essentially we were able to force the content not to be
Andrew: To some, you just said, look, make exceptions for some images. Here’s how we use this. If anyone abuses it, you can always go back and shut that center off.
Vivek: And no one going to abuse it, they were doing it for performance reasons, right? The caching was for a performance reason. And so we said, look, I get, that’s a performance reason. Here’s a legitimate use case. If it’s a better experience, we’re not an E we’re not an ESP, we’re not spamming people. We’re making the content better.
And you know, they, they, they understood the argument and they said, this makes sense. Can we give them a technical solution, which was easy? Well, we thought easy to implement. We never thought it was a real surprise that they, that they did the thing that we asked, but you know, it taught me and Michael and our whole company.
The lesson that you, you never quit fighting. There’s always a way, even if the odds seem astronomically small,
Andrew: Uh, yeah, I see it here. It’s cash control. Colon, no cash max age equals zero. That’s like you, you specifically did a blog post explaining how this, well, Michael did explaining how this work and the person who helped make this happen was Alison Lindland. Am I right?
Vivek: Allison’s wonderful. She was like employee 13 or 14 still with the company. She just crossed eight years of the company and, uh, Basically anytime I bumped into some random person, they’re like, Oh, I know movable ink. They know they bumped into Alison her network is enormous
Andrew: is VP of strategy. That’s a title.
Vivek: at senior VP of client strategy.
Andrew: Okay. So what does that mean?
Vivek: When she started, we we thought we needed a business development person. I w she’d sort of accepted another job. I walked around the block with her and made the case for movable ink, and I’m grateful. She, she accepted. So she joined there. She, she spent a lot of time. She ran our client experience team for awhile and today does the client strategy role, which is.
Uh, about engaging with our clients at the highest level at a senior ex C-level exact level and helping them achieve their strategic initiatives. So we do these three to six month engagements with clients, understand their data and make sense of their business. It’s almost like a management consultant or McKinsey engagement with some of the biggest brands and all
Andrew: okay. All right. You were able to go for a walk with her today. You have 300. How many people at your company.
Vivek: 330 people.
Andrew: 330 people. You told our producer, look, now it’s a lot tougher people don’t remember that. I was the guy who took out the garbage to change the coffee. What’s what’s changed now for you as a leader of the company and how are, how are you changing because of it?
Vivek: Yeah. I mean the early days. Yeah, I’m I’m, I’m just another guy. There’s tons of startups. There’s tons of people who have the CEO title, but it doesn’t mean a whole lot and no one had a choice. No one had a problem arguing with me. Right. I was begging Fandango to let us do another send. So I, in some ways I miss that because there’s an honesty in that conversation.
You’re trying to fix something you’re trying to, and today it’s unintentional, but the people who haven’t been there for the full journey don’t know me that same way. The guys sitting around the table with 10 other people and taking out the garbage or working on that sales deck or. You know, putting the sign up, painting the walls.
And so you know, sometimes they, there, there can be some being deferential and I’m, that’s the worst thing that can happen to you as a leader. If one, you don’t get the, the reality. So one of the biggest things I encourage everyone to do is just be totally direct with me and let’s have real conversations.
Cause we’re all trying to solve real things. And if we don’t do that, we don’t get better. So that’s a weird change that happens at some
Andrew: How are you, how can you encourage people to be direct and tell you wrong when they hardly know you? What do you do?
Vivek: one, one thing he can share is some of your own failures things that you screw up, things that you don’t get. Right. And so showing that vulnerability that you’re, you’re not infallible. You make mistakes and here’s some things we got, right? Here’s some things we got wrong. I also do a weekly email to the company called top of mind.
And so I, this ha I think this helps them understand where I’m coming from. And my hope is that they get to know me a little bit better. So it’s easier to pick up a conversation or talk about something and not feel like, uh, I’m this other guy who’s completely different in, should be talked to in a different way. We weren’t. We were, we started out in general assembly when, uh, first group at nine Oh two Broadway.
Andrew: And so now that you’ve gone remote, how are you more, how can you be this kind of accessible person who tells people to call me out? Tell me when I’ve done something wrong. Hit me
Vivek: the writing, the writing, I started two years ago. That’s been helpful. So once we moved into this new world, Writing words have a really powerful way of communicating ideas. Right? Sometimes we’re talking to one another and there’s a lot of. A lot of information coming at you, someone’s body language, other things you can read or not read, but you have this ability to be very precise with writing.
And, uh, I’ve tried to hone this craft in the last couple of years. So that’s one thing. And then zoom meetings, you know, one of the cool things is I get to have a mix of lots of different types of people that it’s very easy to pop into a meeting. you don’t have the water cooler conversation, but it also means the people that were in the field.
you know, I might, I might be in a meeting with them and it’s like, we’re all just boxes on a screen. There’s no, no one with a higher status box in a, in a zoom screen.
Andrew: I do feel like my friend Shane Mac has been saying for a while, we need a clubhouse for businesses, you know, clubhouse the social network so that it could just be running in the background and let people in a company just go in and chat. Maybe have somebody lead it. He’s I see that he’s been experimenting with it by creating these little clubhouses, inviting some of his friends to come in.
The founder of geek squad. Um, Robert Stevens sent me a message saying they’re doing it one day. I don’t think they nailed it. But what do you think of that? Do you think. Do you think that’s the kind of thing that would be helpful?
Vivek: I think it’s a great idea. I’ve been thinking about just that. So I’ve been on clubhouse, not that long couple of months, but this ambient. You know, video is exhausted, right? It calls all day. So all started. We were encouraging everyone to be on video and at some point, yeah, or like, you know what it, that takes a toll.
everyone should be free if you want to be on a walking meeting. If you just want to have your AirPods, you want to have your video off, your kids screaming, the next room, whatever it happens to be, having that office. Great. And what I like about clubhouse, it’s just the, the ambient way, kind of the passive conversation you can.
You can follow along. It’s like the first air pod, social network or community, uh, and you can pop in, pop out and it isn’t as much like the spotlight is on you every single second, which you can’t keep up all day. So I, I really like that. And just being able to pop in, pop out, maybe someone’s saying something interesting.
Maybe not. Maybe you just want to hear it in the background.
Andrew: It’s that leave quietly button. When they renamed the button to leave quietly, it made the whole experience feel less like an obligation and more like a serendipitous experience. You just pop in, pop out. Kind of interesting. I’m curious to see how this stuff works. The one thing that I would like for them to add, and I guess even if we have it internally, it would be helpful is to have some chat.
I don’t sometimes I just want to chat one-on-one with someone and acknowledge something. They said, all right, dude, how excited are you? What’s the best part of having gotten here? Like I see how tough it was, how hard you worked and how far you’ve come. What’s the best part for you?
Vivek: You know, there’s ups and downs. It doesn’t. , there’s always something out of left field that might surprise you. But the rewarding thing now is to see this thing. It’s, uh, you know, I’ve got a nine year old and a seven year old, and this is kind of like my third kid to see it growing, changing the culture, becoming something really unique to see the wonderful people that we bring in that are able to.
Solve problems be there for each other, especially this last year, really be there for each other and support each other. It’s, it’s a pretty amazing thing to spark this to life, but it’s not ours. You know, we, we were the caretaker really early on and everyone’s got this collective responsibility for the culture and the impact we’re having for, you know, 700 plus clients.
These just who’s who list of clients that we get to work with. So you got to step back sometimes and go, wow, how, how did this happen?
Andrew: I saw that. So I’ve been going through the internet archives to see what the site used to look like. I see things like agile. There was one year where I had to just took over everything on the homepage. Agile.
Vivek: Email marketing.
Andrew: Yeah.
Vivek: It’s like we trying to make that happen.
Andrew: you were trying to create that as a, as a movement. But the thing that seems to be consistent throughout is the brands that you’re associated with.
That they’re just constantly there. It’s the companies that we all know and respect that are not going to put their, their trust in some fly by night email operator. And that you’ve created that for them. All right. Congratulations. I cannot wait to see what happens with. When someone says an IPO is coming up, then I start to just get, like, what is it gonna happen?
I don’t know how I could sit still for if I were you, but I can’t wait for that for that day. And, congratulations on getting here.
Vivek: Thank you, Andrew. And thank you for doing what you do, you know, love your show. And I think I’ve got, I got a lot of insights in those early years from, from watching.
Andrew: Right on. Thank you so much. The website for everyone who’s listening is movable ink, ink, movable, ink.com. And I want to thanks to sponsors to make this interview happen the first, if you want your email sorted, right? So that you could get to the stuff that you need when you need it. Do what I did just test them out.
Go to sane box.com/mixergy. And the second one, you need your website hosted. Go to hostgator.com/mixergy. Alright, thanks. Thanks so much for doing this. All right. Goodnight. I see it getting darker and darker as we’re continuing here. All right, bye.
