A blank whiteboard sounds like freedom. In practice, it’s a trap.
That’s the lesson buried inside Mural’s rise from a founder’s side frustration to a platform valued at $2 billion. I’ve run marketing teams long enough to recognize the pattern: the products that win aren’t always the most open-ended ones. They’re the ones that tell people what to do next.
Mural’s story proves it twice — once in the product, once in the marketing engine behind it.
The Slide Deck Problem
Mariano Suarez-Battan didn’t set out to build a whiteboard company. He was a creative director at Disney, trying to share early game concepts with a team back in Buenos Aires.
Slide decks kept getting in the way. A polished deck signals a decision has already been made. It turns collaborators into judges instead of contributors.
What he actually wanted was simpler: the feeling of standing at a whiteboard with your team. Loose. Iterative. No hierarchy baked into the format itself.
That gap became Mural.
From Knowledge Work to Imagination Work
Most enterprise software of the past few decades was built to organize knowledge — store it, sort it, retrieve it. As automation took over the routine stuff, the valuable work shifted toward something harder to systematize: designing, strategizing, and inventing together.
At the same time, teams scattered. Offices emptied. The physical wall of sticky notes disappeared, and with it, a lot of the improvisational thinking that happened around it.
Whoever figured out how to digitize that energy had a real opening. Mural saw it early.
Why an Open Canvas Doesn’t Work
Here’s where the story gets interesting for anyone building a product.
Mural launched with maximum flexibility — an infinite canvas, minimal constraints, total creative freedom. On paper, that sounds like a feature.
In reality, it was the product’s biggest liability.
An empty canvas is intimidating without a facilitator in the room nudging people along. Users opened it, stared at the void, and did nothing. Freedom is great for trained designers. It’s paralyzing for everyone else.
If Mural wanted to grow past its early power users, flexibility alone wasn’t going to cut it. The product needed to teach.
Learning Guided Structure at IDEO
The turning point came when Mural joined IDEO as a startup-in-residence in the mid-2010s. Working with practitioners who’d spent years popularizing design thinking, the team landed on a conviction that reshaped the entire product roadmap.
People don’t want a blank space. They want guided structure.
That single insight moved Mural from a passive canvas to something closer to an active coach. Templates for customer journey maps, agile retrospectives, and design sprints. Built-in timers. A feature that snaps everyone’s view to the same spot. Even digital confetti for small wins.
None of that is decoration. It’s scaffolding that lowers the cost of starting, which is where most tools quietly lose users.
The residency also delivered Mural’s first marquee customer — IBM — which adopted the product to scale design thinking across its global teams.
Designing for the Facilitator, Not the Crowd
This is the move I find most underrated in the whole story.
In physical meetings, the loudest person usually wins, and group voting tends to reward status over quality. Mural introduced private, anonymous voting to strip that dynamic out entirely.
But the sharper insight was about who actually drives adoption. It’s not the average participant. It’s the facilitator — the person running the session, whose job depends on looking prepared in front of peers.
Build features that make that person effective, and they become your internal sales team. That’s exactly what happened. Facilitators carried Mural from team to team inside enterprises without a single ad dollar spent.
If you’re building anything collaborative, find the person who looks good when your product works. Design for them first.
Freeing the Marketing Engine
A well-guided product still has to be sold, and for years Mural’s marketing was stuck behind its own infrastructure.
The marketing site was hard-coded and owned by engineering. Every campaign, every new landing page, meant filing a ticket and waiting in line behind product priorities. Small changes took days. Bigger ones took months.
I’ve lived this exact bottleneck. It’s demoralizing, and it’s expensive in ways leadership often misses — every delayed campaign is a competitor’s open window.
Mural’s fix was decisive: rebuild the marketing site on Webflow, with an outside agency’s help, and cut the cord to engineering entirely. Marketing and design could ship pages and run experiments on their own clock.
The payoff was immediate — a 37% lift in revenue from self-serve visitors and a visitor-to-trial conversion rate that more than doubled.
That’s not a marketing win. That’s a structural one.
Aligning Product, Sales, and Marketing
Once marketing could move fast, Mural leaned hard into data-driven demand generation and account-based marketing.
This mattered because visual collaboration software doesn’t sell top-down. It spreads bottom-up — one team adopts it, then it expands across the company. Capturing that motion requires marketing, sales, and product to share the same read on the customer, not three different ones.
More recently, Mural has used AI to mine sales calls and support transcripts for the objections buyers never say out loud, then turn those findings into campaigns faster than a human team could manage alone. Hiring Christina Bottis as CMO in late 2024, specifically to lead the AI-focused marketing push, signals how seriously the company takes this shift.
The Pandemic Wasn’t Luck
When 2020 sent everyone home, Mural was ready — and readiness isn’t the same as luck.
It had a product built for distributed, structured collaboration, and a marketing engine finally capable of capturing a demand spike. That combination showed up directly in the numbers: a $118 million Series B that August, followed by a $50 million Series C less than a year later that pushed the valuation past $2 billion.
The pandemic created the moment. Years of product and marketing discipline are what let Mural actually seize it.
What This Means for Operators
A few things here travel well beyond visual collaboration software.
Flexibility has a cost. Founders love to pitch an open-ended product as a feature. For most users, it’s just a higher barrier to entry. Templates and guided structure shorten time-to-value and cut early churn.
Marketing speed is a growth lever on its own. A team that has to borrow engineering time will always lag the market. Give marketing ownership of its own surface area, and conversion metrics move without a single new campaign idea.
Find your facilitator. Every product has someone whose reputation depends on the tool working well in front of an audience. Build for that person, and they’ll do your distribution for you.
Silos kill momentum quietly. When product, sales, and marketing don’t share a picture of the customer, speed and personalization both become impossible.
Mural’s real bet was never just a better whiteboard. It was that structure — in the product and in the go-to-market machine — beats freedom almost every time. A decade in, that bet is still paying out.