SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
This Developer Tool Doubled To $240k ARR And Raised at a $14m Post Money Valuation
08 Mar 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Now, can I back into your revenue, 350 customers, 20 bucks a month, you're doing about seven can MRR today? Yeah, something like that.
Okay.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Luke Feeney.
He's the co-founder of TerminusDB, the leading open source graph database. Before joining the business, Luke worked in the Irish foreign ministry for a number of years. He was Ireland's acting ambassador to Greece from 2016 to 2017. Luke, you ready to take us to the top? Born ready. Your cool factor went up a ton over the past decade. You went from politician to SaaS founder.
Well, that depends on your perspective, Matt.
That's an accurate statement. All right, tell us about Terminus. Where did you get the idea?
So Terminus has been out from university. My brother was a researcher, a PhD researcher in computer science in Trinity, and they had an idea around building a very collaborative sort of data structure database and spun out from there.
It kind of came from this very big project called the Global History Data Bank, which is trying to record all of the social and political data sets from all of human history and then provide them in a machine readable format so people can do kind of predictive analytics on history. And so trying to look at the past and then get long jury trends into the future.
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Chapter 2: What is TerminusDB and how did it originate?
We talk about our link to them. We run events on Trinity. They're a big center of innovation. They help us in some international business development as well, a little bit here and there. So I think it's a good deal all around.
Interesting. Okay. That sounds like a great mix. So the university is on the cap table on day one. You're on the cap table on day one, I think. Who else? Your brother?
Yeah, so there's three founders, my brother and another PhD researcher who spun out a guy called Gavin Mendel Gleeson. He's the CTO. We took a seed round directly out of university at a bridge from a bridge fund. So it's specifically designed for softer terms. What year was that? It's called the University Bridge Fund. No, what year was that? Oh, that year was 2018. Sorry. Yeah, 2018.
So yeah, it's like softer terms to try and get companies to spin out. So the Irish government backs it with a bunch of other institutions. It's professionally managed by a VC called Atlantic Bridge. And they look for companies mostly, I'd say, in the med tech world, but also- So how much did you raise in that round? We raised 1.25%.
Got it. Okay. And when you say like fluffy terms, so 1.25 seed in the US, usually you're going to sit at like a six to 10 million cap on a convertible note. Is that kind of what you got?
No, no, no. I mean, fluffy for Ireland. I'm afraid our VCs aren't as enlightened as yours. I see.
I see. Okay. So what were the just generic high level terms and 1.25 on what?
So it's about like, it's about evaluation by 3.5 of that, or maybe a little bit more than that.
Post money or pre?
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Chapter 3: How did the academic spinout process work for TerminusDB?
I see. Interesting.
Okay.
It's like a little bit of a Slack model there.
Yeah. Okay. So just to repeat, you said you've got 700,000 downloads of the open source platform, 700 folks using you actively, of which 350 are paying.
Yeah.
Okay.
Wow. How did you, this whole model, I mean, you look at SID at GitLab and there's a couple other companies right now that started on top of open source projects and commercialize, you know, they contribute back to the open source project to keep the community healthy and robust.
Do you have to spend a lot of time thinking about not pissing off the community as you commercialize and charge for stuff?
Not really. I mean, we're fully open source now. So basically, we sell a hosted version of the open source software. We don't have enterprise features that aren't available in the open source right now. So really, it's a matter of convenience for software developers. So it's usually like, hey, I'm already working for a big company. They're willing to pay for software.
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Chapter 4: What strategies does TerminusDB use to acquire customers?
Software.
Because I started to read about everybody's obsession with sleep and realized that I should be getting more.
That's hysterical.
I have four kids as well, Nathan. So eight hours is amazing.
Wow. Okay. That's what I was going to ask you. So you're married with four kids? Yeah. And how old are you? I'm 42. Wow. Okay. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
Something I wish I knew is 20. Jesus, so much to share price of Apple.
Guys, there you have it. Luke Feeney with TerminusDB. Politician turned SaaS founder. They launched back in call 2018 with a $1.25 million seed round of 3.5 pre-money valuation. They've since grown revenue from $10,000 a month about a year ago to $20,000 a month today. A combination of bottoms-up approach plus some enterprise deals. Over 700,000 downloads of their open source protocol.
700 actively using it. 350 are paying $20 a month on average. Just raised a 3.5 seed round at a 10.5 pre-money valuation. 13 on the team over there in Dublin as they look to continue to scale. Luke, thanks for taking us to the top. Cheers.
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