Any time you hit a major milestone in life, it is natural to reflect upon where you’ve been, where you are and what the future holds. In the case of Accelo, we're no different. Becoming a venture-backed company is a big change for a bootstrapped company and I wanted to take some time to share where we're at and where we're going with our thousands of clients and many more friends, supporters and fans.
A few months ago, I published the story of how we got to 3 Day to Live to a team of 30 in 3 years. Since that post was published we've been growing even faster, with the team now at 40 and client growth strong; for example, this month our revenue growth through expansion by existing clients alone is equal to our highest months of new sales revenue in all of last year.
Rather than reflecting on the past too much (since I did that only a few months ago in the 3 Days to Live post), I wanted to share a bit of insight into how we're approaching this next stage. Given how many people around the world depend on Accelo every day to run their businesses, it seems right to share a look into the future, together.
There's three key pieces of information to take away from our fundraising round: this round commits us to building a big company, but we're doing it on our own terms, and remaining focused more than ever on what you, our clients, need.
The Professional Service sector employs more than one in seven people in the developed world - it is second in employment only to the government sector - and it is growing strongly: in the US over the last year the sector has generated one in four new jobs.
And yet, the way most of these businesses are run is manual, painful and chaotic: the majority make do with spreadsheets, manual processes and a cocktail of different products to try and run the business.
Whether they're accountants, architects or agency folk to name just a few, the result is literally millions of small and medium business owners who don't get vacations, who spend their weekends doing administrative tasks like invoicing and forecasting, and who rarely get the chance to do what they do best - being the best accountant, architect, designer, consultant, engineer or other professional they can be.
That's why Accelo exists: our mission is to free professionals around the world to focus on doing what they love by giving them a system to run their business.
We're solving this problem for the millions of people who work long hours, don't get to hang out with their kids and whose businesses hit a wall, because they've been left behind by the technology revolution for too long. Solving a problem this big is going to require a massive effort, which is why we're building a big company for the long-term.
Building a company with such an ambitious mission is frankly pretty crazy - but we knew that going in, and the results speak for themselves. This new funding round - which we won't expect will be our last - ensures we can invest the necessary resources into developing the product that increasingly delights our users and transforms how they run their businesses.
The second key message is that we're running our own race on our own terms. It is much more common for a company of our stage to raise a bigger round of funding, selling more of the business to investors and giving up a lot more control. But we're doing things differently.
This desire to do what is right for the company, and not what blindly follows convention, influenced everything about this funding round, from choosing the round size to choosing our investors. We chose to raise a smaller round of funding on a fair but sustainable valuation, resisting the temptation to gain a short term sugar hit or some fleeting prestige. The fact this round is smaller means we've got a lot more rounds in the clip - by taking less money now, we've sold less equity now and we've got more "dry powder" to work with going forward. By choosing investors who believe in our mission we're more quarantined than most to the pressures faced by other startups - pressures to kill golden geese, squeezing the short term result and destroying the company in the process.
Finally, the way we've approached fundraising is to support strong, confident growth with aggressive and ambitious targets, which we can achieve by doing the right thing and which don't result in us needing to resort to recklessness.
The final message to take away is that this funding doesn't give us the space to get fat and lazy (which a much bigger round would allow). By raising enough to accelerate growth, but not enough to sit back and stare at our navels, we're ensuring that we stay laser-focused on the needs of our clients and the wider market: for it without the ongoing trust and revenue our clients and the market provide we know we're out of business.
This discipline ensures we don't getting distracted with diversification or chasing rainbows and we stay focused on the needs of the market going forward.
In summary, we're going to be investing heavily in continually improving and streamlining the Accelo product while also doubling down even more on growing the Accelo client family. Aside from improving ease of use and performance, our other major focus of product development is focused on reporting, forecasting and generally surfacing the incredible information Accelo holds for our clients into insights they can use to more easily and profitably run their business.
If you want to help out, feel free to Like or Retweet our announcement or share it through LinkedIn - the more people we can reach (with your help) the faster we can improve the Accelo product, for the betterment of all.
