B2B Community Building Grew a SaaS to 600 Customers

Omer (00:11.600)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I talked to Sangram Vajray, the co founder and CMO of Terminus, a SaaS platform that enables sales and marketing teams to run account based marketing or ABM at scale.
Before co founding Terminus, Sangram led the marketing team at Pardot through its acquisition by Exact Target and then by Salesforce.
He's also the author of Account Based Marketing for Dummies and the guy behind flipmyfunnel.com A community for B2B marketing, sales and customer success professionals.
So this is a story about three first time founders who set out to build an account based marketing platform.
In those days, most people didn't even know what ABM was.
They didn't have much money and realized how difficult it was going to be for them to get attention of their target customers.
In other words, B2B marketers.
So they asked themselves a simple question, how can we stand out?
They did that by building a community first and focusing on educating their prospective customers instead of pitching their products.
In this episode you'll learn how a blog post helped them get the attention of their target customers, how they organized their first conference and got 300 people to show up, how they turned a small conference into a community of thousands of people, how they drove sales by educating, not pitching, and how they dealt with high customer churn in the early days when their product really wasn't up to what the customers expected.
Today, Terminus has raised over $20 million in funding and has almost 200 employees.
And there are some great ideas in this interview, no matter what stage you're at that you might be able to use to help your product to stand out in the market by also focusing on community and educating your target customers.
And you don't need thousands of people to build that community.
Terminus started with just 300 people, so there's some good lessons here and I hope you get something out of it.
Sangram, welcome to the show.

Sangram Vajre (02:37.630)
Thanks man.
Excited to be here.

Omer (02:40.190)
Let's start by finding out a little bit more about what drives or motivates you.
Is there a favorite quote or, you know, something that you can share that just kind of gives us an idea of like what motivates you, what gets you out of bed every day to work on your business?

Sangram Vajre (02:53.890)
Absolutely, man.
This is in the early days at Terminus where we Came up with the phrase called keys to the Ferrari.
And mind you, nobody owns a Ferrari here at the company or probably haven't sat in it.
But the idea was that one idea can change the world.
And we would always say to each other, especially in the early days and now more than ever is like, man or whoever is on the team is like, you have the keys to the Ferrari.
We have hired you because we believe you can drive it as fast as you can take it to the curvious road.
More stretchers, things, and we think that you are in the driver's seat.
So it really became an internal value system.
So it is one of our two core values is keys to the Ferrari.

Omer (03:36.310)
Love it.
All right, so tell us a little bit about Terminus, like what does the product do and what's the problem you're trying to solve and for who?

Sangram Vajre (03:45.400)
Sure.
So I'll start with the problem which is less than 1% of the leads are turning to a customer.
And it's not something I say, which I've actually had this experience as I was running marketing at Pardot and went to the acquisition and was at Salesforce.
We just started getting really good at creating more and more leads.
And what happened over a period of time was that not all leads are equal.
So really Forrester did a research in 2015 that pulled this together and said that, hey, based on their research, it shows that less than 1% of the leads are turning to customers.
Now if you take a step back and think about that, that really means that really you're not driving revenue, we're not marketing and sales, 99% of their time, energy, money and resources is not getting spent on driving revenue.
So what the heck are they doing?
So, so that's the problem statement.
It's pretty big and bold that we try to tackle.
And as a result of that, we created Terminus.
Co founder Terminus three and a half years ago where our whole idea is around flipping funnels, where instead of focusing on the leads that may or may not be your target account, why not start with the best fit account that you want to sell to?
Especially if you're on B2B, why not engage them on their terms as opposed to just emails and calls and why not turn them into advocates?
So the product, what it does is today at its core is a account based advertising platform where you can literally tell us, Here are the 50 companies I want to get in front of and here are the roles of the people that I want to get in front of and we will be able to put your message in front of them across mobile, LinkedIn, web videos, any channels.
And all of that is proactive, which means they don't have to come to your website and see and then follow through the retargeting kind of message.
We would put proactive ads and messages of you on their website wherever they go, and then also track if they're engaging with those accounts.
So what it really does is for your marketing and sales team, it alerts them which accounts that you care about are engaging and which accounts that you care about are spending time with you on your website.

Omer (05:47.400)
So how do you guys do that on the back end?
Like, are you kind of hooked up to Facebook ad platform and AdWords and stuff like that?

Sangram Vajre (05:55.650)
So it's almost the opposite of AdWords, right?
Because AdWords is like we have to type in something to find and then an ad would appear.
So it's almost the competitor of AdWords, if you will.
But the way hooked up on the back end is through the IP targeting and cookie targeting through DMPs.
So what we have is once you tell us, hey, look, I want to go after, let's just say Salesforce as a company and I want to go after IT Function because that's who we're selling our product to.
And those are the roles that I care about.
Then all of them, these people at Salesforce and IT Function, for example, might be going to, let's say ESPN or some other websites.
And when they do, they're kind of giving permission to ESPN to have those cookies where they would have the information about, oh, we have somebody from Salesforce, we have somebody from IT Function here.
And then when somebody tells us like, hey, that's who they want to target to, we then have a very privacy oriented focus on advertising where we're able to work with ESPN and they would say, okay, anybody who comes from Salesforce, they should see this ad.
So it's almost like a bidding process that happens just like stock symbols and all the sticker, ticker, symbol goes up and down.
This is exactly how the advertising world works.
But the beauty is that it is all proactive and more importantly, it is all targeted.
So if, if that person does not fit the profile, you will never see the ad.
And that's why maybe the quote that I really started off with, you know, with the company was this big John Wanamaker quote which is half of the money that we spend on marketing and sales works.
We just don't know which half.
And that is the question that we're answering.
We're like, you know, what if you tell us the companies and the people you want to target, we're going to put your message in front of them so you know exactly how much money you're spending on those accounts and and also tell you if they're engaging or not.

Omer (07:43.750)
So you use the platform as a way to advertise to whatever these target companies are the platform tells you about.
As you said, you know how these people are responding or engaging and then how does it help with sort of next step like how do I use that platform to actually get to that customer?

Sangram Vajre (08:00.390)
That's a great question.
So now imagine your marketing team is selling.
Sales is like okay, sales here team.
You're working on these 50 accounts or a hundred accounts.
Let me tell you of these hundred accounts that you're working on.
Here are the 10 accounts that we are putting ads in front of, are engaging with those ads, we're engaging with your message.
And not only that, they're now coming to our website and spending time with us.
So from a priority perspective, instead of working on these other 90 accounts, focus on these 10 accounts because there is where you have the highest value and highest propensity to buy.
And what's even interesting is we all know, especially in B2B, it's not one person who's making the decision.
So typically there are 3, 4, 5, 7, 10 people part of the decision making process.
So imagine what we do is we are able to tell our sales team is that it's not just that these 10 accounts are spending time.
There are five people from each one of these accounts that are spending time, which means that there's clearly a discussion going on, there's clearly conversations happening and none of these guys are going to up the form, nobody likes to fill forms, but they will always check out the website and they will always look at who these people are to see if they have the right things or not.
So having that level of air cover for your sales team and giving them the insight who to prioritize and focus to get deals done is like a game changer for most sales organization.

Omer (09:21.730)
How did you guys come up with the idea for this?

Sangram Vajre (09:23.730)
Oh man.
So that goes to a lot of credit, goes to my co founders for building a lot of this tech.
And so both Eric Spett and Eric Vass, who are my co founders, who actually started the company and I joined about six months later as a co founder.
Later they built the technology around automated advertising and it was operating more like an agency where we'll get email addresses of people and we'll be able to run ads on it.
But then when I came in and I, because I ran marketing at Pardot and then through Salesforce, I'm the marketer at heart.
So I'm like, man, if you put these five pieces together, that's account based marketing.
And they were like, well, what is account based marketing?
And we googled it.
I still remember.
And there was not much written on it.
I'm like, well, that's why this is the next hottest trend.
And we all laughed about it because clearly everyone has a big idea, right?
But thanks to us, and lucky that we are, we are, we're able to really pull this together.
Ended up writing a book on this idea of account based marketing that Valley's published in 2016 that led to the whole category creation around ABM.

Omer (10:27.240)
So is that the account based marketing for Dummies book?

Sangram Vajre (10:31.080)
Yeah, that is the one.
And again, people can do this search.
I think Google Trends is really cool to do that.
Where you can literally see that until 2015 there is absolutely nothing on Google Trends.
But from 2015 to now, it's like skyrocketing and continuously going up and up and up for.
Or this phrase, account based marketing, which essentially just shows that it is no longer a buzzword.
It is actually a thing that people practice.

Omer (10:58.500)
Okay, so you've kind of got this idea, you guys, you've kind of educated, you know, your co founders on account based marketing.
Did you do anything to validate this idea?
And then how did you go and build the product?

Sangram Vajre (11:10.980)
That is the fun part.
The way we went about that was through the process of community first.
Now, if anybody's listening in B2B, they probably know that there are 7,000, if not 10,000 companies in martech alone that are targeting and selling to B2B marketers.
And our product is targeting and selling to B2B marketers.
So to stand out in a sea of so many companies for three co founders, first time co founders, if you will, most of us based here in Atlanta, not a lot of money in the early days raised trying to build an entirely new category.
That just sounds ludicrous, right?
Like that just doesn't sound a recipe for success.
And so that's why we had to go a very different route.
We said, you know what?
In order to make sure that we exist, we need to make sure that the category exists.
And in order to make sure that the category exists, we have to create enough noise around the problem that exists.
And at the same time, in 2015, this Forrester came out with the research That I shared earlier, which is less than 1% of the leads turning customers.
We grabbed that as a cornerstone problem and we talked to everybody and saying, do we all believe this is a problem?
And everybody's like, yeah, we do.
Great.
We ended up creating this flip my Funnel conference that brought in the best minds in B2B marketing and sales to talk about the problem.
No product pitch.
Terminus wasn't.
I wasn't doing it to keynote other than the state of the union of the B2B marketing and sales.
And today we still have done like nine conferences.
We still don't talk about Terminus, we talk about the problem.
And we brought a community together and that led to the resurgence of like, okay, well this is a problem and we all need to solve.
So the go to market strategy for us has been community first and has served us really, really well.

Omer (12:59.870)
And how long did it take you to build the product once you had figured out, okay, there's clearly a problem here, we need to go and build that product.
So how did you guys go about doing that?

Sangram Vajre (13:08.830)
So the product was getting built on the back end all the way.
And I think one of the biggest challenges for us when we saw this, but because we were doing these conferences and building and we just literally went on a road trip and did conference in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, all these places where we would literally take these influencers and sales and marketing practitioners and talk about this and bring people together.
And as we went through just taking the gospel of ABM everywhere we could, we realized that we are educating the market really fast because of the speed at which we are going.
At the same time, we were not building the product as fast.
So one of the things we were doing was alongside we started to build the product.
But you know, one of the greatest growth lessons that we learned is that we should have been investing in our product at the same rate as we were investing in marketing and sales.
And you know, that that's a lesson learned the hard way.
I wish we would have done it a little bit more on that before.

Omer (14:07.110)
So give me an example of why you regret that.
Like, what kind of problem did it cause?

Sangram Vajre (14:12.150)
Well, the problem it caused was because we are so good at telling the world what the problem is.
The community expected us to have the answer.
And it makes sense.
Right?
Okay.
Yeah.
These guys clearly know what they're talking about.
They're able to galvanize so many people.
They're able to bring 10001500 people at a conference and they're still a company.
So a lot of people didn't look at us as a startup company, right?
Like, which startup company in their first year is able to bring in like 600 or 1,000 people at a conference?
Typically you don't hear that.
So we were very successful to do that.
So people didn't look at it as a startup.
People looked at us as like, wow, this is an amazing company who is doing this thing.
So they expected us to have a lot more product available.
And the way we were marketing and talking about the problem made them feel even that, oh, wow, they got to have the entire package and everything figured out.
The reality was we didn't have it all figured out.
As a matter of fact, we're still figuring things out.
We are now three years into it and I think what it created was a Persona of it.
So some customers in the very early days were surprised that we don't have all the answers.
And we have been very honest about it.
Like, look, we don't.
So it causes a lot of people to get started with us.
But then we're not able to see the success.
And now as the product caught up is very close to the vision that we laid out as a market and product is catching up every day now those customers are coming back.
But in the early days that was painful to see some customers walk away because they didn't feel happy and satisfied with what we were giving, even though they fully were invested in the problem itself.
And now they came back.
So now it feels great.
But the two years when we were struggling through that, I think it was a really difficult times for us.

Omer (15:55.980)
But were those issues around the product not working as expected or was it because it lacked features that these customers expected?

Sangram Vajre (16:09.980)
It was the latter.
You know, people expected because you know, again, going back to like having thousands plus people at a conference and imagine doing a keynote that says, hey, look, the utopia of the world requires this, that.
And the other people expect us to like, oh great, they know exactly.
And they're like rattied up and they would run to one of our booths and we're like, well, all we really do is this one thing right now.
And you know, but slowly and surely we'll have all of it.
So I think there was this mismatched expectations and it's a lesson hard to learn.
And in many ways I've struggled and me and co founders we've talked about is like, would we have done it any other way?
I don't know.
Because at the same time I hear about from other co founders and founders of the companies that man, they have an incredibly amazing product, but they have no market to sell to.
And was it worse to not have a market, you know, have a great market and the product is kind of catching up versus, you know, have a great product but no market.
So I feel like the big lesson for us was it was great to build a community.
We would never do that.
We would do.
We would do the same thing every time.
Or what we would not hold on is investing in our product team at a much faster rate.
That's what we kind of did not anticipate and did not do it.
And that kind of hurt us in the first couple of years.

Omer (17:29.289)
And when you're in that situation where your prospective customers have very high expectations on what your product is going to deliver and how it's going to solve their problems and then they see the product and, and you know, it's kind of limited in functionality compared to what they expected.
I guess you have a couple of options at least.
Like one is you can start spending a lot more time adding those features into the product or I guess you can figure out, okay, how do we set better expectations with people before they use the product.
And you know, as kind of early stage founders, there's always, you always see the ugly parts of your baby and you're always thinking about all the things that you want to add and features you want to put in there.
And so I'm just curious, like what, what kind of path did you guys take at that point?

Sangram Vajre (18:25.230)
Yeah, that's a great question.
I think a lot of sleepless nights was one path that we definitely also tried to figuring things out.
So that was definitely part of it.
One of the things we did is like with the market because, and as I started saying earlier is we as first time more or less co founders and building something at this scale, we started to recognize that, look, there's not a lot of times when you get an opportunity to build an entirely new category.
And we stumbled on this whole category building process.
It wasn't a playbook.
We just started doing it.
One thing led to another book, led to a conference conference, led to multiple conference, multi city and led to a movement into a category and all that stuff.
But if you looked around and some of our investors later on reminded us like, guys, tell me the next other category.
You know, Salesforce did that with the SaaS category.
HubSpot did that with Inbound category, Pardot and Eloqua and Marketo did that with marketing automation and you guys are doing that with abm.
It's like there are only less than like five or ten companies in the world who are able to do that.
There is no secret sauce to this thing.
It is pure, sheer muscle love, passion for the problem.
And timing is a big part of it.
So you guys have struck gold from a timing perspective.
Now you gotta have to do the most hard problem.
You guys have done the impossible.
Now you need to do the hard problem of scaling a business and figuring things out.
In those days, that's the conversation that kept us alive.
That's the conversation because it was a time we were like, oh shit, like what did we do?
Kind of moments.
And we're like, no, we actually better off than most of the companies right now.
We have to tell that, convince ourselves of that.
The other part of this whole equation of when we think about like community first versus product first, we have seen so many examples where a community will give you multiple chances to succeed is another big lesson we learned.
So for example, when you think about Salesforce or HubSpot and these companies, well, the reason they've invested in community is because every time they do this mega conference, if you think about what they're doing, they're reintroducing a product and selling it to the community right to their face in front of them.
And people are happy about it.
People are buying tickets to buy a product of Salesforce and HubSpot at their community events.
And when you take a step back and think about it, that that's a really cool place to be where you can pivot on your product and solution and there will be community that be open for new feature functionality and stuff like that.
So we continuously look at saying that this is growing pain, this is something that we have to deal with for the next year or two.
And we are pretty getting close to it.
But the future, once we get caught up on it, is an incredible opportunity to be a community first organization.
And the part that makes us a reminder of it is if you don't have a community, then we are a commodity just like everybody else.
So our big lesson still remains the same, is keeping, you know, if we didn't do it this way, I don't know, how would we have been able to break through the noise and actually have a voice in the market.

Omer (21:30.080)
So what came first, the book or the, the events?

Sangram Vajre (21:33.840)
The book idea came earlier.
So it's like March 2015 is when the book idea came about.
But then I wrote a blog post that turned into a flipoffalo.com website and the conference happened in August 2015 and the book launched because Wiley is the whole publishing cycle and all that stuff.
The book was launched in early 2016, so we already were one or two conferences in by the time we had the book.
But we were talking about it all along, so we knew there was conversation.
And that's another leap of faith where, like, who writes a book when you're trying a company?
Right.
That's just crazy.
But we did those things because we felt that was the best way to break through the noise in the market.

Omer (22:16.690)
That's kind of a pretty long play, right, to write a book.
Book as a way to build a business.

Sangram Vajre (22:23.280)
Yeah, I mean, it absolutely is.
When I was Pardot, for example, I'll give share that, because that was a big lesson which led to a lot of the things we do here at Terminus.
When I was at Pardot, we were a $10 million company that got acquired for 100 million by exact target.
And within six months, we were reacquired by Salesforce for $2.5 billion.
So I went from running marketing for a $10 million company to running marketing as a business unit for a, like, hit $10 billion company within that as a business unit.
And I remember in the conversation was sang, remember the marketing at Pardot?
I'm like, yeah, that's awesome.
At the exact targeted 10x.
Like, got it.
That makes sense.
And then when the reacquisition happened to Salesforce, they said, hey, remember the conversation around 10x?
I'm like, yeah, I'm on it.
I'm thinking 10x.
I'm doing 10x.
They're like, no, no, no, think 100x.
That's what the scale at Salesforce looks like.
And the reason I shared that story is because it reminded me of the fact that it is not about what we think, who we are and what we do.
It is what our customers in the market thinks, who we are and what we do.
So the perception becomes reality.
So by writing a book, by having a big community focus, by doing these big conferences, that brings marketing sales influencers all together along with practitioners, and it elevated our brand to a level where other people would think twice to even enter the category.
Because they're like, well, who's going to build a community of 10,000 people, right, to begin with?

Omer (23:54.420)
So the events, I'm trying to figure out sort of the timing here with the events, like, you're kind of building the product and you're saying, let's start doing these events because it's a great way to reach prospective customers and get feedback.
Feedback and so on.
Or was it kind of like, no, this kind of event and community effort grew on its own.
And then it kind of helped to feed to figure out what this product business was going to be.

Sangram Vajre (24:24.010)
Yeah.
And nothing was planned.
Man, I'll be lying if I said, man, we got it all figured out.
We had this exact time frame mapping.
It literally was when I wrote a blog that kind of went like, oh, this is really interesting.
A lot of people responded to it.
I ended up just buying Flip my funnel domain in March or April of 2015.
And we said, okay, there's a lot of conversation happening.
And again, we're.
We're sitting here in Atlanta.
How do we take this conference to the next level?
So that led us to the first conference in August of 2015.
And we did in middle of summer in Atlanta.
In August, we did our first conference and 300 people showed up to that conference with people flying in from all over.
And that became the basis that led to like, well, if you can do this, we can go to other cities.
And so in the December of that year, we did two conferences, half day in Boston, Chicago, and that went really well.
So we said, okay, well, let's just do in San Francisco now we're big boys.
So In March of 2016, when we launched the book, we had a conference in San Francisco.
And then that was like close to a thousand people or so.
And the following year, about 1500.
So it literally wasn't a thoughtful process.
It was more of like, okay, we got this, where do we go?
We got this, where do we go?
And literally looking at two steps ahead.
No more than that.
And things how they transpired.
Now, at the same time, we are just aggressively trying to build a product to support the demand that it was creating.
Because what happened as a result, as we're doing the conferences, they're like LinkedIn, Marketo, Salesforce, HubSpot, all of them are sponsoring these conferences because they're seeing this new way growing.
So we are able to attract a lot of incredibly amazing people to sponsor this conference that elevated again our brand in the marketplace to do ABM as a strategic focus.
So all that to say, I wish there was a.
Here's a timeline for it.
But in more.
More or less, it just became.
We just looked at how we can break through the noise.
And that is the one thing we have written on inside of our office everywhere, Challenge the status quo.
So whatever was status quo at that time, we're like, we need to challenge that.
If Status quo is great event in Atlanta, let's go somewhere else.
Challenge Square is writing an ebook.
Let's write an actual book.
The challenge status quo is to do anything.
We're just trying to reinvent ourselves and see how we can break through the noise.

Omer (26:48.710)
Yeah, it kind of almost sounds a little similar to the.
The Salesforce playbook from the early days.

Sangram Vajre (26:53.940)
Yeah, as I said, I was at Salesforce, so I got inspired.
Definitely a lot of inspiration coming to Salesforce.
Now we are not, I'm not Mark Benioff and we do not have hundreds of billions of dollars of funding as they did even in 1999.
He had like 50 or 100 million, which would be like a billion dollar investment right now.
But comparatively, I feel like it's a much faster growth stage than what I had even at Pardoc.

Omer (27:20.130)
So one thing is that, you know, founders have a lot on their plate.
On kind of the one hand, you've got to be thinking about marketing, sales, acquiring customers, building that kind of machine in terms of that cycle of getting growth through the cycle.
And then on the other side, you've got the product think about and continually, you know, are we building the right product?
You've also got to think about financing and are you, you know, how you, are you funding the business?
Are we going to go and raise money?
So there's all these things going on and at the same time you guys are doing these events which you told me you're not selling Terminus there.
So these events aren't really resulting in sales for your product.

Sangram Vajre (28:12.340)
And so just to correct myself on that, if that's what it came across, we had a booth at the conference.
Just like HubSpot and Marketo and Salesforce and LinkedIn, all of these companies have booth at our conference.
We had a booth at our conference so it was totally helping us close more deals every single time.
But the playbook we used for a conference was not the playbook that most companies are using.
A lot of companies the when they do events, they only invite the people they want to sell to, and mostly by salespeople.
And they're like smaller events.
We kind of went with like, no, no.
Our job is to educate the market.
So which means we are going to have early adopters and we're going to have other people in the, in this, this conference that may not be our customers today, but they'll be our future customers if they're able to get along the ride with us.
So we up level the conversation.
So not 100% of the people who attended were all target accounts, but the people that were there were all challenging the status quo in some way by even being at this conference and trying to look at a new way to do it, which led to the rise of it.
So we closed deals like we're doing one in August right now in Boston.
We're expecting thousand plus people there, and we were totally expecting closed deals, as all these companies are.
But we had a booth.
We are not still going on the keynote stage and saying, here's our product roadmap and a platform.
That's not what we're doing.
We're not going into it.
If people want to know about it, they can talk to terminals, they can go to a product session and stuff like that.
But the whole conference, the whole message is around still community first.
Let's find best practices to do it.
Because tool is a tool that can only do certain things without a strategy.
It's just a tool.
So we never want to be a commodity.
We want to really be a community first.
Organization.

Omer (29:58.110)
Yeah.
Okay, great.
Thanks for clarifying.
That makes sense.
So Simonis is valued at around 100 million.
You have about 600 customers.
What percentage of those customers came through doing these events?

Sangram Vajre (30:14.410)
Oh, wow.
That's a very deep question.
Because we look at events, not just the physical events that we're doing.
There are also meetups.
We have Flip Master on meetups that happen all over North North America, even in Canada and in Europe, which we have never been to sell or anything.
But there are Flip Month meetups happening that people, because they believe in this idea quite a bit.
So there are tons of people in that and there's this online community of 10,000 plus people that are subscribing to the newsletter that is all about how do we change way.
And here are the best practices and how to do certain things that have nothing to do with product but just the way.
So cumulatively, I would say that almost every deal that we close has a touch of some sort from the conference from Flip My Funnel.
Right.
Because either they're getting a book, they're either attending a conference, or they're part of the online community or hearing from us around because we do the podcast that is Flip My Funnel.
The point is really being like, how do we touch as many customers and future customers through this idea?
And I would say that almost 100% of them have been influenced from some aspect of the community.
Either that might be a physical event or a webinar or a podcast.

Omer (31:28.060)
Got it.
Now, I think you guys have raised around $20 million in funding.

Sangram Vajre (31:34.220)
Yeah.
Later on, we started Raising money as this could cost quite a bit.

Omer (31:39.580)
Yeah.
And I think if I kind of look back, you did a seed round in somewhere around 2015 for one point something million there for the first year or so.
How were you guys?
Were you self funded?

Sangram Vajre (31:55.430)
Yeah, man.
Well, we had a little bit of money from the CEO of Pardot as he got, you know, got some money after selling Pardot.
So we have some seed money from him, David Cummings.
And then later on it was pretty much like, you know, founder debt and founder activity.
So thankfully we never had to like fully go into our debt in our pockets.
The growth was self sustaining in the first year.
That led us to like, okay, we can actually raise money now.

Omer (32:24.010)
Okay, cool.
It's kind of interesting here because when you kind of said flip my funnel, it was like, okay, what does that actually mean?
But kind of now what I'm hearing is it's like you're starting with events and kind of building community.
You're using that to educate people, whether it's at these events or online or through the book.
And then once people have kind of gone through all that, then at some point you'll get.
They're getting to the product.

Sangram Vajre (32:55.150)
Yeah.
And you know that what's interesting about that, I look at that as the new normal is how I feel.
I hope that founders and entrepreneurs who might be listening to this podcast might want to think about as a way is that I think we go from this idea of problem to product very quickly, maybe almost too quickly, where okay, I know the problem, so I'm just going to go build a product and we're going to close more deals and then we are going to get product market fit.
And I challenge everybody to think about instead of product market fit, think problem market fit.
And what I mean by that is instead of going from problem to product straight away, go and build a community.
And it has never been easier in some ways to build a community than now.
Like you can build an online community, you can build a Facebook community, you can build a LinkedIn community, you can build events oriented community.
It doesn't matter how you go about doing it.
But there is probably a way where people that you want to reach out to are aggregating or coming together and you want to be the one either leading that or be part of that.
And when you build a community, it is so easy to validate all the things that you're trying to build and getting people like almost get everybody thinking about that.
So when you have a product, you can essentially pitch it directly to the Community.
So it's almost like the community is your market that you're trying to create.
So my view is instead of going from problem to product and changing the world, go from problem to community to product, and then change the world in whatever way you want to do it.

Omer (34:26.120)
Yeah, yeah, that's a great approach.
And in many ways it's kind of very similar to, you know, what I've been doing here at SaaS Club, obviously on a much smaller scale.
But, you know, I'd been doing this podcast for three or four years and, you know, it was only in the last year that I ended up building an online community through what we call SAS Club plus, where we have educational based content, we have kind of online events and kind of masterminds and, you know, community forum and kind of a place for people to connect together.
And I'm really proud of that and the great people that we're building a community with.
But I don't think any of that would have happened if I had tried to do that years ago without really.
I mean, I had no idea or intention of doing this.
It really came from people who were following the podcast and getting involved, kind of telling me, hey, would love if you were doing something like this or a way for us to get more engaged.
And, you know, and that's kind of how it evolved.
So I think, in many ways, I think you're right that maybe that should become the kind of the norm.
And there are a lot of a number of founders that I can think of over the last kind of, you know, 180 odd interviews that I've done who have taken that approach of building a community first.
And many of them, like you guys, I mean, they didn't necessarily start out saying, oh, you know, let's spend the next few years building a community and then we'll build this product.
But it kind of just happened through this process of delivering value, educating people.
And then I guess what you talked about was sort of like, you know, problem market fit.
And that kind of eventually comes to the surface.

Sangram Vajre (36:04.640)
Absolutely, man.
I think we can't.
I mean, that's where I think a lot of the dead bodies around great products are, purely because they just went directly from problem to product.
And there's nothing wrong with it.
It's like some got lucky and some won't, but if you have a community approach and if you do it the right way, authentically, not not from like, yeah, okay, I'm going to build a community because I want to sell to them and not have a serving attitude, then people will smell it.
But if you do it the right way, where people are getting ton of value and they want to be part of it and it's on the problem and you're always on it, then you have an unprecedented advantage as a company, as a, as a founder, as whatever you're trying to put together where people would say, you know what that's worth spending time on and that's worth waiting for and that's worth putting that to a cause and that's worth supporting and that's when you actually start.
And I would really like the one thing that I would want people to really take away from anything that I'm sharing, if it's worth, at least for me as a big lesson is without a community, all of us are building commodities and you have to choose.
You want to be in a commodity war game where it's about feature and functionality, or do you want to be in a community where now you're creating tribes, now you're creating a passion, now you're creating consensus, now you're building something greater with a higher purpose and that changes the game.

Omer (37:29.280)
Do you talk about this kind of community based approach in the book?

Sangram Vajre (37:33.120)
No.
No.
I mean that's like 2015 when I wrote the book.
I'm actually working potentially on another book that will be.
That's a lesson that I've learned and I feel it's at the heart of it is it's Community first.
I think very few people are able to do it and the people who do it have seen tremendous.
And as a matter of fact, if you think about Community first companies like, especially in B2B, like Salesforce and Eloqua and let's just say HubSpot, like these are all category leaders.
They all got a chance to, to be category leaders because they build communities.
They wouldn't have got a chance to be a category leader if they didn't have community.
And the reality is none of them.
Salesforce doesn't call it Salesforce.
It's Dreamforce.
HubSpot calls it Inbound.
Right.
Like Drift Call said Hypergrow, Terminus calls, Flip my phone.
It's like being authentic around the community by saying that it is not about us, it is about you, I think is very powerful but really hard to do.

Omer (38:33.070)
Yeah, yeah.
Well, if you write that book, I'll be happy to read that.

Sangram Vajre (38:37.790)
All right, man.

Omer (38:38.510)
It's good stuff.
All right, we're have to wrap up in a minute, but before that I just want to ask you about like what's a tech Scene like in Atlanta.
I mean, this doesn't sound like, I mean, if we'd been having this conversation, I'd be like, oh yeah, you must be in San Francisco.
So number one, what's it like in Atlanta?
And kind of has that made that more difficult for you guys to be able to build a business like this?

Sangram Vajre (38:58.150)
Yeah, I think so.
Atlanta is definitely growing.
It's great for hiring.
We have great talent from a technology perspective like Georgia Tech and all and that like just diverse backgrounds.
So Atlanta is great from a hiring in that perspective, it's not so great yet from a funding perspective.
So all of our funding is from, thankfully from east coast.
Not as much on Silicon Valley.
It's just too much.
Like we had all.
We just didn't.
We felt more comfortable with having somebody on East Coast.
So all that to say is I think Atlanta still has incredible opportunity with great acquisitions like Pardot, with Salesforce, with Silver Pop, that was with IBM, Cloudshare, POS with Accenture.
There's been like great, great, great acquisitions and big hubs created, but the VC community still hasn't had enough money to pour into it.

Omer (39:46.510)
Cool.
Yeah, I would love to get down there sometime and kind of check out what's going on.
I think, now that I think about it, there are a number of other companies that come to mind down in SaaS, businesses in Atlanta.
So a place to watch.

Sangram Vajre (40:01.220)
Yeah, man, no doubt.
It's growing fast for sure.

Omer (40:04.260)
Cool.
Okay, now it's the tough part of the interview.
We're going to get to the lightning round.

Sangram Vajre (40:08.820)
Let's do it.

Omer (40:09.620)
All right.
Seven questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

Sangram Vajre (40:15.220)
Hard work.

Omer (40:16.260)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Sangram Vajre (40:19.220)
The book that that comes to mind is 22 immutable laws of Marketing.
It's by L. Rees and Jack Trout and just goes through what doesn't change as opposed to what's changing.

Omer (40:29.890)
I love that book.
I first kind of.
I think I put it on Audible a couple of years ago.
Great book.
It's just like timeless lessons that I think we should all know about.

Sangram Vajre (40:40.610)
It's beautiful.
And it's a quick read too.
It's like, like in a two hour read.
So it's perfect.

Omer (40:45.410)
It.

Sangram Vajre (40:45.820)
Yeah.

Omer (40:46.460)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?

Sangram Vajre (40:51.020)
Always be learning.

Omer (40:52.140)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Sangram Vajre (40:56.380)
I take Uber most days so I can clean up my emails and be not distracted by the traffic.
In Atlanta especially, there's a lot of traffic, almost take an hour to get home.
So I try to do both morning and evening.
That's my time to clean up emails, respond to all the things.
So when I go home, I'm actually present with my family.

Omer (41:15.500)
Nice.
What's the new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Sangram Vajre (41:21.580)
Write this book that you talked about.
Maybe

Omer (41:26.300)
write the book and then let's get you back on here to talk about it more.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Sangram Vajre (41:35.340)
I think most people don't know that I went to University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa to do my master's in computer science.
And most people look at me as more of a marketer, sales kind of person.
So it's always funny when I walk by the engineering team, I'm saying, what is the code that you're writing?
So that's a fun conversation.

Omer (41:54.380)
Nice.
And then finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Sangram Vajre (41:59.500)
Big believer in God and just following the word of God as much as possible in my life.

Omer (42:04.860)
Awesome.
Sangram, thanks for joining me, man.
It's been a pleasure.
I loved hearing the story of Terminus and I think there's definitely something here in terms of what we talked about, this kind of community based approach to building SaaS businesses or any business for that matter.
Now if people want to find out more about Terminus, they can go to terminus.com and the book is called Account Based Marketing for Dummies.
And if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Sangram Vajre (42:41.730)
I'm pretty active almost post daily on LinkedIn on something that we're learning, so LinkedIn is the best place to find me.

Omer (42:48.610)
Awesome.
And I'll include a link to your profile there in the, in the show notes as well.

Sangram Vajre (42:52.450)
Awesome, man.

Omer (42:53.490)
Cool, thanks for joining me.
Enjoy the conversation and I wish you guys all the best.

Sangram Vajre (42:58.130)
Thank you so much, man.
This was so much fun.

Omer (43:00.370)
Cheers.