Movable Ink is a software company that helps consumer brands generate high-performance content. A business can take any data and easily activate it to create a personalized email experience at the moment of open. To learn more about Movable Ink, I interviewed CEO Vivek Sharma.
Sharma said that he dreamed of becoming an astronaut and loved tinkering with electronics as a kid. While studying at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), he initially started out as an aerospace engineer. But then he quickly realized as an engineer, he would be “up to his eyeballs in differential equations and worse yet – the laws of physics would constrain his creativity.” What Sharma loves best about computers is the boundless nature, meaning you can bring anything to life in the digital world that you can imagine.
The Internet was ramping up during Sharma’s freshman year in 1993. That year, he came across one of the first web browsers called NCSA Mosaic, which inspired him to change his major to computer science. After he graduated, he moved to Silicon Valley and worked for Cisco Systems. Less than a year later, Sharma landed a job at a startup called Blue Martini Software.
When Sharma joined Blue Martini Software, the company had 20 employees and all of them were “high caliber.” Most of the engineers had built Netscape Commerce Server and the top salespeople were from Oracle and Siebel. Three years later, Blue Martini was a $6 billion dollar public company with more than $100 million in annual revenue and 800 staffers around the globe. After that experience, Sharma knew he could never work for a big company again.
After a short stint in Japan, Sharma moved to New York in 2004 and launched his first startup — which was a mobile social network called MetroSpark. Sharma said that MetroSpark had a lot of innovative ideas around using location and proximity networks to predict who people would likely hang out with. These were “bleeding edge concepts,” Sharma acknowledged and were actually too far ahead of mobile capabilities at the time as the popular phones were Nokia handsets and Palm Treos. About nine months after shuttering MetroSpark, Sharma said that Apple introduced the iPhone and a lot of their ideas suddenly became possible.
In 2010, Sharma and Movable Ink co-founder / CTO Michael Nutt started exploring what they saw as uncharted territory for email. Even when Movable Ink launched eight years ago, email had been around for a long time and many people believed there was nothing innovative left to do in the space. One thing they noticed at the time was that email service providers (ESPs) were focused heavily on email marketing infrastructure such as list management, basic segmentation and delivery. But content — which is “the very heart of marketing experience” — was an afterthought.
“Turns out there was plenty of runway for innovation around content and customer experience, so Michael and I decided to focus squarely on that. We thought about the possibility of email content that could change based on the recipient’s context at the moment of opening: down to if they are on an iPhone in Ann Arbor where it’s snowy, 20 degrees and 7:00 PM,” Sharma told me. “We also thought it would be cool if the technology could capture content from a company’s website or social media and pull that right into an email. Michael dove in and started working on a prototype. I put on my sales hat and went to test and validate our idea with the market. And so Movable Ink was born.”
As Movable Ink was getting off the ground, Sharma said it felt like a blur. Sharma and his wife just had a newborn baby at the time and the company was only making a couple hundred dollars in revenue per month at the beginning. His wife told him that if things didn’t turn around quickly, then Sharma would have to find “a real job.”
Fortunately, the company received its first big break when a major video game company signed up for a pilot program at $6,000. That was followed by a deal with a broadcast satellite service provider. And then things started to snowball after that.
“Sales pushed the entire business forward, and we had to quickly hire client services people to support all the new accounts, engineers to build new features, a controller to ensure we properly tracked income and expenses, legal support, recruiting, and a whole lot more. It was all a whirlwind and stressful time, but in the end, we built a product and service that provides tangible value to marketers, and it’s been an amazing journey ever since,” Sharma recalled.
Movable Ink hit $12,000 in revenue the first year to $860,000 in the second year to $4.8 million in the third year. In 2016, Movable Ink hit $25.6 million in revenue. And then the Movable Ink team quickly realized that in order to scale up the business, they needed to invest in the future. So the company raised another $8 million in funding led by Intel Capital on top of the first million. “Our focus from the start has been to be as capital efficient as possible and super thoughtful on how we invest in the business. Doing this forced us to really understand our business and gives us a clear line of sight to what’s working and what’s not,” Sharma explained.
Before Movable Ink, the largest team Sharma managed was four people. As the company was growing, Sharma knew that they needed to bring in good managers as he could not continue to oversee every single person and task. They continued to grow strategically and, now Movable Ink has over 200 employees worldwide spread across 7 countries.
How Has Movable Ink’s Technology Evolved Over The Years?
The developer tools available to Movable Ink has changed dramatically over the last 7 years. Around 2012, Movable Ink’s apps enabled marketers to integrate tools like countdown clocks, local maps, social media feeds and website content via APIs into emails and target consumers based on locations and devices. In the years following, Movable Ink developed apps for marketers to build even more personalized content. Now its technology can target based on behavioral data and machine learning. In 2011, Movable Ink had 3 clients, 5 employees and had served 37 million content impressions.Last year, the company hit over 500 clients and surpassed 500 billion content impressions.
Today, Movable Ink’s technology allows marketers to pull content into email that is scattered across websites, CRM data, social media, CSV files, APIs, etc. “They can then repurpose and reformat that content to drive the best possible email experience. We’ve also taken big leaps in empowering our clients to leverage our technology themselves in an easy drag and drop interface without the need for coding or access to developer resources. We built our technology for marketers from the start and have been on a race to make innovation easier for marketers, not more complex,” Sharma pointed out.
Movable Ink has a number of clients in multiple verticals from travel and hospitality, sports, technology, media and entertainment, retail, non-profit and more. Some of Movable Ink’s clients include Betfair, Delta Airlines, Dunkin’ Brands, Finish Line, Hilton and Lenovo. But Sharma brought up a breakout success story in the sports vertical called Palace Sports and Entertainment, which is the parent company of the Detroit Pistons.
Palace Sports & Entertainment wanted to bring each Pistons game live to its audience in email with real-time scores and live stats before the game, during the game and after the game. “The email they developed with Movable Ink not only featured live scores and stats updated every time a fan opened the email, it provided useful game-day information with live traffic, onsite merchandise offerings, upcoming Pistons games, and targeted mobile messaging. The Pistons Interactive Gameday Guide was a tremendous success and generated such outstanding results Palace Sports and Entertainment expanded this strategy to pre-event emails for its other entertainment venues,” Sharma highlighted. That campaign won multiple marketing industry awards and was featured in AdWeek.
What distinguishes Movable Ink from its competition is that they have an intelligent content platform. Sharma said that Movable Ink goes far beyond simple widgets and they offer the only enterprise-class solution “that automatically activates content with data to generate personalized experiences in real-time.” The content that is generated on the Movable Ink platform can be layered on top of any ESP and its innovative platform grows with the needs of digital marketers. Sharma also pointed out that nearly 90% of all the intelligent content in the market is powered by Movable Ink.
What are some of Movable Ink’s future company goals? “We want to expand our AI capabilities near term and have goals to triple the size of our product team this year, including data scientists and engineers. While AI has become a marketing buzzword, it’s also the key for digital marketing teams (even the smallest ones) to generate and deliver personalized experiences at scale. Artificial intelligence will help creative teams make emails more persuasive and personalized, more responsive and more relevant,” Sharma concluded. “We intend to stay at the forefront of our industry and expand our series of Email Transformation Tours we host in cities all over the world where we showcase client case studies and discuss the future of email and digital marketing. There are lots of exciting things ahead, so be sure to keep an eye out!”
