How Nue.io Went From $0 to $1M in 2023 Selling Through Consultants and VCs

You'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 and founder 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

first 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 $203,100,000 dollars. 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

Mark 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.

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

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 infrastructure with Nue.

Interesting. 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?

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.

Okay. 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?

Not yet. Yeah. We're we're getting getting very close. But but That's awesome. 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.

That'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?

Yeah. That's that's exactly right.

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

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

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

product. Exactly the same product. But they are Yep. Priced in different ways to meet different people's needs.

What... 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 reps the most leverage to upsell?

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

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

Okay. 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 give 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?

Yeah. We're just coming up on a 100. Right.

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

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

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

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

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

I 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?

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

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

Yeah. 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.

Yep.

Okay. Yep.

They're... So so Innovia is great.

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

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.

Okay. Well, tell us, Marmina, 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?

Strongpoint. Strongpoint is the Bootstrap model.

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. 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.

That 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, 10, 20, 30 customers?

Yeah. So when I joined, we were like zero revenue. Like, Right?

In 2022, no revenue.

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

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

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, 3, five, 10,000, 50,000 at the top end.

Per year.

And... But out of those out of those experiences, the product gets better and better, and that's what we did.

So just because those first, you know, 10, 20 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... Like, you remember the first five customers, the actual channel?

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

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

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

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.

I 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 the OpenAI process like?

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

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

us... Give all the vendors to give access to their documentation, And they got the AI to rate how well the products actually fit 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.

You mean API documentation, webhooks, things like that?

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 against Salesforce, and we won.

That'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 AEs? How are they, you know, getting leads, taking demos, closing sales?

So actually, the interesting thing is it's not outbound.

Okay.

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

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

to their new product, RCA. It's just, you know, difficult childbirth. And Yeah. Or you can pick Nue. Right? And How did you...

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

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 people.

The consultant and the VC.

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 Nue. But but we want you to look at them because we want that kind of speed of execution and

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 like... 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?

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 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.

Okay. 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?

It's 2023. Yeah.

It 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.

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?

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

Yeah. Now... No. Way above that now. Like Yeah. Now it's like... Now it's hundreds of thousands.

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

It's a low

That puts you at about 5,000,000. That puts you at about

5,000,000 ARR. Yeah. It's it's... By the end of the year, we'll be in 8 figures. Yeah. So...

Okay. 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.

Yeah. I know. 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 to spin Nue up. We don't make a lot of money off them right away, but later on. Tell me more about that.

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

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 Nue by themselves. They don't really need a consulting organization at all. And

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.

So 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 started?...

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. But...

Okay. 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 those projects

are going really, really quickly, and that's a big competitive advantage.

So 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?

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.

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

we're really excited about, and it's gonna be an important part of our late twenty twenty five, twenty twenty six 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.

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

A 102. Okay. How many would

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

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.

How many engineers on one zero two?

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 know, your tenth question, not the the detail... You know, these really important questions. Right?

Mark, 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?

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.

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

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... 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.

And 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?

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. And 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 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

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.

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.

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

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 to do.

Number two, is there a tool... Your favorite online tool you use to build a business?

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 Chateaubitea 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.

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

Yeah. Not recently, but it's a book that I recommend to everybody. Multiplies Multiplies by, I think, Liz Wakeman 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

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 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.

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

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.

Many kids do you have?

I have two. I have two. Okay. One wife, two kids, way too many pets. Way too many pets. There you go.

And how old are you, Mark?

It's my birthday. I'm 60 years old.

Oh, today's your birthday, your sixtieth birthday.

Yeah. Yeah.

So... Oh, amazing. Happy birthday. That's exciting. Yes. Here then. Take us home here strong. Take us back forty years. What's something you wish you knew back when you were 20?

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

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.

Guys, 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 OpenAI and Thropic 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

break 8 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

program 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 see what happens next. Mark, thanks for taking us to the top.