According to the owner, Trainual, or arizonabased 27m series altos ventures, has received $27M in fresh funding from a remarkable group of investors. (To mention a few, Altos Ventures, Shark Group CEO Daymond John, and Indeed co-founder and Chairman Rony Kahan.)
I frequently notice notifications like these from businesses I use and purchase from. You can only imagine how bizarre this sensation is from the outside. I want to share with you why we decided to raise money. Additionally, it affects our clients, employees, and the millions of small companies that we are here to support.
Let’s dig into this ocean of success through the owner’s words.
We chose to raise money for
I’ve always needed to be more confident in fundraising. Perhaps you have as well.
I spent 18 years bootstrapping my first and second companies. Then, using the service fees I had saved up from years of advising business owners, I founded Trainual.
We had humble beginnings before this arizonabased 27m series altos ventures. A room that could hardly hold our entire staff of five at once. Additionally, two dozen clients confirmed my theory that small businesses require a mechanism to document and organise who they are, what they do, and how they do it.
What happens if you go out of business? This was a question I recall being asked after providing a demo in our early months.
I assured them, over-caffeinated and overconfident, “That won’t happen.”
However, the entrepreneur on the other end of the call began to tick off venture-backed businesses that had gone bankrupt via mismanagement. It was a lesson that should have been learned the hard way.
Therefore, we took a different approach than other SaaS providers. Just like our clients around the world, we prioritised profitability first. We also promised to lead by example, telling others about our experiences and teaching them from them.
We increased to approximately 1,000 enterprises globally in our first year. Our product consistently demonstrated its effectiveness for small enterprises.
However, to expand our small business clientele at the desired rate, we had to make investments in sales and marketing that my budget (and credit lines) could not support. Therefore, we decided to raise money in a Series A round in November 2019.
How we handled Series A
I knew we were adding shareholders and board members when we secured $6.75M in Series A, but I had no idea they’d also serve as partners and mentors.
Finding 4490 Ventures, MATH Venture Partners, and PHX Ventures was a major stroke of luck for us. They are a group of skilled operators and consultants who weren’t there to distort my vision but to enlarge it. Additionally, we couldn’t have timed their appearance any better.
A few months after raising funds, the pandemic struck, and we had a platform ready to support businesses in embracing remote work and onboarding new staff from anywhere. In addition, it kept procedures uniform across locations for a year and made implementing new regulations simpler.
Our investors recommended we take a position in this area. As a result, since Series A, we have increased our team size and sales by more than thrice, extended our Arizona headquarters, and hired new employees globally.
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To make this happen, we deliberately invested in the following four things:
- The primary item – You may now incorporate information from many sources in Trainual to obtain all your training in one spot. You can manage the learning process with role-based tasks, deadlines, and repeated training. You can automate the process of announcing updates to key procedures and rules. And you can complete it 200% more quickly thanks to our platform’s most recent infrastructure changes!
- Our culture: We have put much effort into creating an amazing workplace. And being acknowledged as one of Phoenix’s Best Places to Work (2019 and 2020) and Inc’s Best Workplaces (2021) is just a testament to the amazing work our people operations team does in the background. Surveys of corporate culture, physical and virtual company events, and a constant search for new team growth opportunities are covered.
- Your knowledge – You’ve experienced the enormous impact of our customer success team if you’ve ever spoken with our staff, gone to a training session, or contacted our phone number (yes, we answer). We have direct experience with how isolating it can be to create the systems and procedures for your company. We, therefore, make sure that you can do it with others.
- Your focus is on You may have seen our advertisements featuring flamethrowers, a stack of hats, the cast of The Office, or any of the numerous other methods we use to get you to stop scrolling. You may have listened to one of our podcasts, discovering something new on our YouTube channel, or read the popular weekly newsletter and blog. We want to be your go-to small business resource, which is fascinating, helpful, and fun, so we’ll try anything to capture your attention.
We’ve learnt a lot over the last 3.5 years, and it’s been a fantastic adventure.
The customers who left, however, taught us the most important lesson: as much as corporate leaders desire a business playbook, developing one appears to be insurmountable.
This fact illustrates the paradoxical burden that all small enterprises must bear. Most company executives wish to escape their routines. But instead of training someone else to run things their way, they dive right back into the daily operations at the first opportunity.
However, Michael E. Gerber, one of my mentors, asserts that if you want to quit working in your business, you must work on it. As a result, we began to wonder how we could make this crucial activity even simpler for those who already had a lot on their plates. And as a result, we raised Series B.
B Series (and beyond)
I’m right; we know your company’s playbook won’t write itself. However, I’d want to welcome you into a scenario in which it does. In the future, Trainual will assist you in achieving that.
Every company needs a playbook. One that outlines your company’s history, core principles, and culture in addition to your procedures, roles, and duties. You will have a single concrete collection of the things you and your team are creating in this way.
So, now that we have raised Series B, here are some of the ways we intend to do it:
For our clients: The assistance you’ve grown to count on will grow. Additionally, your product will better reflect your company’s operations. In addition, we are expanding our network of qualified consultants by hundreds to support you locally.
For our team, over 50 new positions will be added in each department over the next two years, and several new leaders will also be promoted. In addition, as we expand, we support our employees as they document and distribute their best practices.
This investment is a sign that times are changing for expanding enterprises for all small businesses. Additionally, the investment will enable us to develop tools and programmes that enable corporate executives to free up time for crucial but non-urgent work. This will enable today’s tiny enterprises to become the most dependable, developed companies of their kind ever seen. And hence, a stronger influence on the economy.
But for the time being, everything continues as normal. As I previously stated, we were fortunate to construct Trainual without the need for money to sustain an unending burn. So, with even more new partners, advisers, mentors, and a team as eager to assist you in expanding your business as they have been about our own, we’ll march into this next phase!
Well, hope you guys like this blog, arizonabased 27m series altos ventures story by the owner’s words.
