If you are a Pardot user, you’re probably privy to the Par-DOT/Par-deux joke. We can pick up on whether a client is from the North very quickly, based upon how they pronounce the marketing automation service’s name (they tend to say Pardeux).

Fun fact: Pardot’s name isn’t random. According to Pardot’s co-founder, David Cummings:

Pardot is the Latvian (not Latin!) verb meaning “to market” or “to sell.” I liked that it was easy to pronounce and spell, so I headed over to BustAName to see if it was unregistered, and, much to my surprise, it was available. I registered it immediately for $8 and the rest is history.

(source: davidcummings.org)

Here are some other key events in Pardot history:

• December 2006: Bought the domain name Pardot.com for $8
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• March 2007 : Co-founders started working full-time on the business with the original model being a pay per click bid arbitrage platform to generate leads from potential technology buyers and then sell them to technology vendors (like LendingTree for technology leads)
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• May 2007: Pivoted into marketing automation software using most of the code already written for the original product (they were already 60% of the way to a minimum respectable product) and built the product focused on serving the needs of a 25 person software company
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• December 2007: Signed the first customer, via a partner introduction
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• April 2008: Raised prices from $65/user/month to $325/account/month to encourage more user adoption in the organization and to capture value based on other usage params (number and types of modules)
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• October 2008: Signed 100th customer and knew the business was going to be successful (roughly 1.5 years after starting)
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• January 2009: Added email marketing to the native product functionality after religiously staying away from it (previously would connect with third-party email marketing tools to do email but were too limited in functionality)
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• July 2009: Passed $1M in annual recurring revenue and decided it was time to raise venture capital to significantly accelerate growth (took 2.3 years to get to a $1M run rate)
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• March 2010: Raised prices to $1,000/account/month
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• April 2010: Atlanta Business Chronicle named Pardot the #1 fastest growing technology company in Metro Atlanta with a 42,000% growth rate
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• December 2010: Launched London office through a joint venture
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• December 2010: Passed $5M in annual recurring revenue
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• January 2012: Passed $10M in annual recurring revenue
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• August 2012: Inc. magazine named Pardot to the Inc. 500 as the 172nd fastest growing company in the United States
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• October 2012: ExactTarget acquired Pardot
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(source: davidcummings.org)

After ExactTarget acquired Pardot in 2012, Salesforce was quick to scoop up ExactTarget in June of 2013 for $2.5 billion, with Marc Benioff tweeting:

I am thrilled that @ExactTarget includes @Pardot the fastest growing marketing automation & lead nurturing company for Salesforce customers.

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) June 4, 2013

Since acquisition, Salesforce has continued to improve upon Pardot’s features and offerings, including making the Pardot/Salesforce sync the fastest sync available and launching Pardot’s new Engagement Studio.