How We Reached $10M ARR And Closed A $27M Series B Funding Round [Update]
This is a follow up story for Trainual. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 5 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
I’m Chris Ronzio and I’m the founder and CEO of Trainual, a leading SaaS platform that transforms the way small businesses onboard, train, and scale their teams.
You can think of Trainual as a hybrid between a wiki, knowledgebase, intranet, and enterprise training tool. Trainual provides a way to capture every process, policy, and procedure in one consistent, teachable, and scalable knowledge base.
At the heart of this work is a desire to help business leaders find the time to do more of what they love by providing a way to document and delegate what they do. Our mission is for every business to have a playbook.
Since we last talked, Trainual has continued to experience significant growth. In addition to being over $10M ARR, we closed a $27M Series B funding round in May 2021.
Since starting the company in January 2018, we have over 100k users in over 183 countries around the world and over $10M ARR.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
Since we last talked, Trainual has continued to experience significant growth. In addition to being over $10M ARR, we closed a $27M Series B funding round in May 2021.
We now have 70 full-time team members, again over 50% hiring growth since we last touched base. We added awesome talent to the customer experience, engineering, marketing, and operations teams. We were honored to be named to Inc. magazine’s annual list of the Best Workplaces for 2021, as well as #1 in AZ Central’s Top Workplaces program.
Photo credit: Rick D'Elia
Our theme for most of our marketing this year was centered around how to define a new category — business playbooks. Not only did we place a big emphasis on SEO to carve out that space in search, but we also overhauled our product to highlight the key elements of building a playbook and we worked on huge campaigns to support it.
We just hosted our annual event, Playbook 2021 for the second consecutive year at the end of September. This year, we decided to make it a two-day event, with the first day geared toward customer sessions and the huge product update unveiling. We called that day the Insider Summit.
We drew in over 5,000 registrations to watch a variety of sessions including live Q&As with GaryVee and Shaquille O’Neal. We also had speakers from top companies like Strava, Loom, Health-Ade Kombucha, Cocokind, Bombas, and more. All in all, the event was a huge success and a great brand awareness play. Some attendees said it was the most informative and well-run virtual event they’ve attended!
To continue on the brand front, we launched a new podcast called Fastest-Growing Companies where I interview founders and executives from some of the biggest high-growth brands out there.
We also solidified a partnership with the Shark Group and filmed some awesome ads with Daymond John….and Montell Jordan who we co-wrote “This Is How You Do It” with — a spin-off song from his hit 90’s single. You can check out the music video, here.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
One of the hardest things for me personally in the last year was feeling blindsided by people moving on to different opportunities. When people leave the team, I have the tendency of taking it personally. I used to think they were leaving because of me or because this company wasn't good enough.
Start taking the vacations that you deserve and don’t be afraid that things are going to fall apart while you’re gone.
And what I've realized is that a lot of the time, good people are more motivated to chase their own goals. And so it's not that anything was necessarily wrong with the company, it's that for those people, some other opportunity was the next step that was right for them. As the company gets bigger, I’ve just had to learn to embrace that not every employee is going to be here forever and that's okay. Trainual is a great place to be from and we're excited that what people learn here has become a stepping stone into their next move.
I also learned how important it is to disconnect. My wife and I recently bought a cabin up in Flagstaff, Arizona and it’s been incredible because I can come up here away from any distractions and just be in a different environment - oftentimes just what I need to focus on heads-down work and brainstorming for big projects. Even just having a different place to go looking at pine trees out the window, puts me in a different mental space than when I’m in the city.
One more thing we learned here at Trainual is the power of great partnerships. We teamed up with Daymond John and Montell Jordan these past couple of quarters and it’s been a lot of fun working with them. While it was kind of a big bet, the opportunities it has opened and the conversations it started made it totally worth doing.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
My brother and I actually just gave a talk on this exact thing at our Insider Summit event last month. You can check out the replay, here.
To boil it down, we’re going to continue making it easier for every person to get their business out of their brain and truly get the playbook to write itself. We’re looking at how to make communicating every element of a person’s role in a business seamless. And all of the transitions and changes that come along with that.
Have you read any good books in the last year?
Completely biased here, but my book, The Business Playbook just launched on October 5th. I dig into everything you need to know about building your business playbook, and I give you step-by-step instructions on how to do it.
I also recently read and liked Who Not How by Dan Sullivan, Never Split the Difference by Christopher Voss and Tahl Raz, and Powerful by Patty McCord, those are some recent favorites.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
I have very similar advice as I gave last year. The first is to invest in building your playbook. Whether that’s using a free tool or using something like Trainual, the most important thing for you to do is start documenting what you do and create a more efficient way to run your business. Start taking the vacations that you deserve and don’t be afraid that things are going to fall apart while you’re gone.
If you don’t even know where to start, my book literally tells you exactly what to do.
At the beginning of my book, I say, “For all the people who say, ‘If you want something done right, do it yourself.’ I think you’re wrong.” And I truly believe that. You need to learn how to delegate in your business. It’s by far the most important thing.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We are always looking for great software engineering talent! And right now we’re also hiring for customer support manager and sales specialist positions. You can always check out our careers page for any openings, here.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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