Startup Dreams Can Come True - How Terminus Hustled to Grow 5X in 2016

In July of 2015, more than 18 months ago, I was debating if I should go to SaaStr. If you’ve never been, SaaStr is one of the best conferences for startup founders and early-stage entrepreneurs to learn, raise money, and meet other like-minded individuals.

At the time, my startup Terminus was a fledgling company. We were barely a year old, had just launched our account-based marketing (ABM) platform, and only had a handful of customers. We had fewer than 10 employees, a bit of seed funding in the bank, and were in our startup community at the Atlanta Tech Village. I’d just published the #FlipMyFunnel model for ABM, and we were in the early stages of planning the first #FlipMyFunnel conference.

Long story short, while I wanted to go to SaaStr, there was way too much going on for me to make the trip. I tweeted at Jason Lemkin, Founder of SaaStr, that I would not be able to make it this time — and to my surprise, he asked why.

I had never been part of a startup this early in its inception, but the only thing I could think of was “This is it!” I could just feel it. As a marketer at heart, I identify with the problem on how to target best-fit prospects and opportunities to increase revenue for sales. My co-founders and our incredible team of “Terminators” all realized, even back then, that Terminus has a huge opportunity to solve a big problem for the marketing technology (#MarTech) industry.

In 2015, our focus and efforts paid off.

In December 2015, Terminus achieved $1 million in ARR! The Terminus account-based marketing platform had only been live for nine months. It’s important to note here how few startups ever hit $1M in ARR. A best-in-class SaaS company gets to $1M in Year 1, grows from $1M to $3M in ARR in Year 2, and then grows from $3M to $9M in Year 3.

With $1M in ARR, it was time to raise our Series A. As we started meeting with investors, we garnered lots of positivity and praise for our accomplishments so far, but there were some doubts. “Can Terminus really get to $3M in ARR in the next year?”

So with 2016 in the rearview mirror, how did we do at Terminus?

If you’ve followed our story on social media, or my posts here on LinkedIn, you already know that 2016 was freakin’ incredible. A few of the highlights include:

• Raising our Series A of $7.5M
• Getting close to 100 employees
• Winning  Best Place to Work from The Atlanta Business Chronicle
• Hosting four major #FlipMyFunnel conferences in Atlanta, Austin, Boston and San Francisco to build the ABM category
• Hosting our first customer conference, Terminus Untapped, for 100 of our ABM Superheros and the first-ever account-based marketing awards: The ABMies
• Graduating from the Atlanta Tech Village and moving to our own 23,000 sq. ft. office (in the Terminus building no less!)
• Launching the Terminus Cloud for ABM with 35+ partners
• Creating the first ABM Stack builder for B2B marketers with nearly 200 MarTech software vendors
• Writing the first-ever book on ABM: Account-Based Marketing for Dummies debuted in April from Wiley Publishing (a.k.a. the For Dummies books!)

Check out our year-in-review montage!

In December of 2015, we were celebrating hitting that $1M in ARR. Now, in December of 2016, we are thrilled to announce that we went beyond what best-in-class startups do:

Terminus has grown more than 5x in revenue and employees in last 12 months!

This is clear proof that we have created a platform, Terminus, and a community, #FlipMyFunnel, that is driving real value and empowering B2B marketers to become ABM Superheroes in their organizations.

Companies like InsightSquared, Invoca, Influitive, Vidyard, Chart Industries, and nearly 300 other organizations are challenging the status quo of B2B marketing and sales with account-based marketing. If you are one of our customers reading this, thank you for believing in Terminus! I also want to thank so many people so here you go!

Our investors and advisors: Atlanta Ventures, Edison Partners, Hyde Park Venture Partners, Arthur Ventures and Knoll Ventures. Big shoutout to David Cummings, Ryan Ziegler, Kelly Ford, and Tim Kopp.

The leadership team at Terminus: my co-founders Eric Spett (CEO) and Eric Vass (CTO), our newest addition Bryan Brown (Chief Product Officer), our “Chief Benjamin Officer” Ben Warren, plus our function heads: Sydney Smith (Customer Success), Tonni Bennett (Sales), Lucas Ulloque (Sales Development), Daniel Hellerman (Advertising Operations), our my Marketing Team Leaders, Stephanie Kelly, Lauren Patrick, and Thomas Shields, and finally, last (but certainly not least) Nikki Nixon, Director of #FlipMyFunnel. The biggest reason we have been able to grow this fast is because of the people we hire, so huge shoutout to our HR champion, Kipp Ramsey, for recruiting the best team in Atlanta.

All the Terminators: our entire team of 80+ employees hustled so hard this year. Huge shoutouts to everyone in Sales, Sales Development, Customer Success, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Advertising Operations, plus all our interns and freelancers! We couldn’t have done it without y’all!

Our friends at The Atlanta Tech Village: the 1,000+ members who make the ATV such an awesome community!

The City of Atlanta: thank you for letting Terminus represent the intersection of marketing and technology!

With so much negativity in the world, I believe we all desperately seek positive stories. Here at Terminus, our dreams are becoming reality because of this incredible team and our “Keys to the Ferrari” startup culture.

Zero to $1 million was 2015. Growing at the rate of 5x was 2016. And now, our mission is to become the best-in-class ABM company in the world.

My flipping point: Dream it, but then do not wait for someone to make it happen. Put yourself out there in the world in whatever way works for you. There is power in dreaming big, but I have come to believe that there is tremendous power in putting yourself out there so you can achieve your dreams.

Your passion will help you make those dream come true.

Now as we embark on our journey in 2017, and I’m sure we all have great plans and dreams. Don’t let them die. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can't do it. Believe in yourself, the people your hire, and most importantly, the problem you want to solve. Always love to get your comments and thoughts so please share them here or on Twitter @SangramVajre Happy new year and may all your dreams come true in 2017!