Omer Khan [00:00:09]:
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omer Khan and this is a 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 Adam Robinson, the co founder and CEO of Retention.com a platform that helps e commerce brands identify and engage with website visitors. He's also the founder of RB2B, a tool that matches anonymous website visitors to LinkedIn profiles to help SaaS businesses.
Omer Khan [00:00:42]:
In 2014, Adam and his co founders started their first SaaS company, Robli, an email marketing platform. They bootstrapped the company to the first million in ARR in 17 months by using a call center to target a list of constant contact customers. But the success didn't last long. The product wasn't competitive outside of the niche target list and growth stalled around 3 million in ARR. In 2019, Adam Co founded Getemails, which was later renamed Retention.com. this time they reached the first million in ARR in just 27 weeks using some provocative Facebook ads and cold email outreach.
Omer Khan [00:01:20]:
But the rapid growth also brought new challenges. High churn rates and market saturation meant the team had to constantly find new ways to keep the business growing. And as cold email became less effective, Adam turned to building his personal brand on LinkedIn. After some initial struggles, he found his voice by sharing vulnerable, authentic content about his business experiences. As a founder, he grew from basically zero to over 92,000 followers in less than two years. This LinkedIn presence became the launchpad for Adam's latest venture, RB2B, which he launched in March 2023.
Omer Khan [00:01:53]:
This time, the product hit the first million in ARR in just 16 weeks. Today, Retention.com generates over 20 million in ARR, while RB2B recently crossed the 2 million ARR mark. In this episode, you'll learn how Adam bootstrapped three companies to a million ARR, doing it faster each time and the key strategies he used why building a personal brand on LinkedIn became Adam's most powerful customer acquisition channel and how you can replicate his success. How Adam pivoted their growth strategies when traditional methods like cold emails stopped working effectively.
Omer Khan [00:02:24]:
We talk about why Adam believes in the edutainment approach to B2B marketing. In other words, educating and entertaining and how it's transforming their customer acquisition efforts. And how Adam's experience across multiple SaaS ventures has shaped his approach to product, market fit and customer acquisition. So I hope you enjoy it. Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam Robinson [00:02:46]:
Thank you, Omer thank you so much for having me. I'm pumped to be here.
Omer Khan [00:02:49]:
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote? Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Adam Robinson [00:02:54]:
Here's a really good one. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
Omer Khan [00:03:01]:
I love that. Love that.
Adam Robinson [00:03:05]:
I always think about that with respect to creating organic social media content. It's like, you gotta find your voice. It's gonna take a lot of time. Yes, you wish you would have started 10 years ago, but you didn't. So you gotta start today. And the second you do, your whole life's gonna change.
Omer Khan [00:03:19]:
Yeah, I love that. And I think you're actually a great example of doing that. And you're building your personal brand on LinkedIn. I think you've done a phenomenal job with that. And the funny thing is, you seemed like such a natural at it. And then I came across a post where you explained, like, you were really reluctant to even start publishing on LinkedIn.
Adam Robinson [00:03:39]:
Yes, I fought it for a very long time, but I started trying to sort of. I've been captivated by the idea of video and the ability to do human to human connection at scale for a very long time, but I had not come across opportunity to really dove in. And even when it presented itself to me, I was so scared of jumping into an area of study that I knew nothing about.
Adam Robinson [00:04:11]:
Because, like, you know, I think about, like, like the entrepreneur I was 10 years ago when I started my first company, and the types of decisions that I made. Like, I just remember how I was thinking about the world. I would have looked at what I'm doing right now, like, founder, brand, free. Spending all my time doing stuff that I can't measure, right? Like, I consider these big brand investments. Didn't understand that at all, right? Like, not worried about revenue, right? Like, all of these, I would look at that and be like, well, that's stupid.
Adam Robinson [00:04:42]:
Like, you know, like, like I saw a LinkedIn post from one of our competitors the other day that represented how I thought 10 years ago. He's like, we've been emailing a bunch of RB2B users. Almost no one pays for RB2B, but the people who get value out of it, you know, they'd be better. They're paying and they'd be better on our product. I'm like, you guys just like, don't get this at all. You know, like, those free users are like, so important to me. They might even be more important than the paid ones.
Omer Khan [00:05:09]:
Yeah, awesome. Okay, so we're going to do a slightly different format to what I usually do in terms of telling the founder story. And the reason for that is like I just, my head was exploding trying to prepare for this interview and it was like there was like literally like a thousand things that I thought we could talk about. Largely because you're such an open book and you publish about so much stuff on LinkedIn, which actually gave me too much information to kind of process.
Omer Khan [00:05:37]:
And also the fact that you have now built three SaaS companies and we'll talk about those in a minute. So what I thought would be really good is for us to focus specifically on how you've bootstrapped three SaaS companies from zero to a million in ARR. And interestingly enough, you've done it faster every time with each company.
Omer Khan [00:06:06]:
And so today I want to pick your brain, unpack all of this stuff and hopefully give other founders who are exactly in that position right now some insight, some inspiration, something actionable that they can go away and try with their business. Before we get into that, let's just talk about those three businesses. Why don't we start by the first business that you co founded back in, what was it? 2013, I think?
Adam Robinson [00:06:43]:
Yeah, 14. We launched the product January 1, 2014
Omer Khan [00:06:47]:
and that was Robli. Email marketing.
Adam Robinson [00:06:49]:
Email marketing, right. So like it's like mailchimp, but I only got it to like a mid single digit ARR and then it just stalled out and started shrinking. Because of how we got it to that level, you know, we, we basically created this product and it was around a strategy where we were basically sweeping the breadcrumbs off of the table of this company called Constant Contact. Who was the pioneer. Mailchimp was the disruptor. They had this different product with a different go to market.
Adam Robinson [00:07:23]:
But Constant Contact, you know, before software like built with which like you know you can download customer lists of people using certain tech, we actually built a crawler like that and scraped all of the websites that had there were Constant Contact customers. The only reason they would have a signup widget on the site is if they were paying for constant contact. And then we were able to enrich that data, build a call center and we got 5,000 people to switch over from Constant Contact with this value proposition.
Adam Robinson [00:07:56]:
And then it stopped once we burned through that list. It was not a competitive product in the real world. Mailchimp had a better product, a free offer. We weren't even cheaper than them. And it was just, yeah, it was this horrible situation to find yourself it was such a double edged sword. Right. It got us to this like cash flow positive business that was shrinking, but cash flow positive. And then it was, man, it's hard space. It's like the second oldest SaaS space. There's hundreds of vendors. Two of them have a dominant share.
Adam Robinson [00:08:33]:
Mailchimp has this free offer that's so free that everyone thinks that the email marketing should just be free for everybody. And yeah, that was company number one. And it was like literally a call center smile and dial strategy to like get that first.
Omer Khan [00:08:49]:
So we're going to, we'll dive into that. And then you ended up selling that to private equity for it was an eight figure exit. The next company you started was retention.com?
Adam Robinson [00:09:00]:
yep. And it was called Get Emails when we started it.
Omer Khan [00:09:04]:
Oh right. That's right.
Adam Robinson [00:09:05]:
Yeah.
Omer Khan [00:09:06]:
So just give us kind of an explanation of what that business was all about or is about now.
Adam Robinson [00:09:12]:
Yeah. In trying to solve a problem that mailchimp wasn't solving in email, I tried a bunch of stuff over several years. Robli was stuck for like four years. One of the things. So the first two things we attempted were just big whiffs. Then I came across this idea with no idea how to do it. Someone told me that you could, if someone hit your website, they didn't have to fill out a form and there was a way to figure out their email address. I was like, what?
Adam Robinson [00:09:40]:
Like if I could do that, I could sell that to anyone with a website for sure. Like no questions asked. I knew because I owned an email company and list growth and list, you know, compression or list attrition is like a huge problem in email. So I heard about that and just dug for like a year and a half. Finally figured out how to do it. Originally made it a feature in the email marketing app.
Adam Robinson [00:10:02]:
People were signing up for the email marketing app using the identity feature, downloading the file, putting it in their email marketing app and telling us the product was awesome. So it became very clear that we needed to get rid of the email app, spin this out, connect it to everything and make it its own product. And that was Get Emails, which is
Omer Khan [00:10:21]:
now retention.com and so that retention.com or get emails, founded in 2019.
Adam Robinson [00:10:29]:
November 2019. Yeah. So almost five years ago.
Omer Khan [00:10:32]:
Yeah, so almost five years. And today you're doing, I think you recently you've crossed the 20 million ARR mark with that business, right?
Adam Robinson [00:10:40]:
Yeah, that one's 21.8 million ARR currently.
Omer Khan [00:10:44]:
And then you kind of took that same idea and kind of had this spin off which was RB2B. And so that's kind of solving a similar problem. Right. But retention.com is focused on e commerce brands, whereas I guess anybody can use RB2B.
Adam Robinson [00:11:03]:
RB2B is mainly focused on SaaS, businesses that have sales teams. So put a script on your site. We will match the anonymous visitor to a LinkedIn profile and we'll push that LinkedIn profile into Slack with a business email for free.
Omer Khan [00:11:21]:
And that's it. I mean I noticed on your site it was like you can get a pretty good deal by just with the free plan. And then if you want to do more, it's like what, 99 bucks a month?
Adam Robinson [00:11:30]:
Yeah, it's like up to 200 leads is free and that's 85% of the people who sign up for it. So it's very low friction. So the idea was take pricing off the table. So a mid market SaaS would only be paying 750 bucks a month monthly or something like that. Price is not a blocker for this one. It's like zero touch plg. Just like that's the model.
Omer Khan [00:11:58]:
And so you founded that in 2022?
Adam Robinson [00:12:02]:
No, this one's. I started that one in March of this year.
Omer Khan [00:12:05]:
What? Yeah, yeah, March, April, May.
Adam Robinson [00:12:10]:
Like five, five months started in March of. Yeah, we went 1 to 2 million ARR in six weeks.
Omer Khan [00:12:16]:
Freaking hell. Okay, all right, so okay, hold that thought there because I think that gives people a very good reason to keep listening to this. Okay, great. So those are the three businesses and what I'd love to do now is like basically let's kind of just deep dive into each one and focus specifically on like zero to the first million.
Omer Khan [00:12:45]:
What I'm hoping we can do is like just you know, pick your brain, figure out what were the key strategies you used to grow that each of those businesses, what were some of the challenges or the struggles or the missteps that you had along the way and ultimately what are some of the key lessons that we can take away from that? So again, let's go back to Robley. So this was a bootstrap business.
Omer Khan [00:13:10]:
You said you set out in 2014 and I think it was like 17 months to get to first million with a bootstrap business. It's like, it's pretty good going. So how did you do that?
Adam Robinson [00:13:26]:
I was a trader. Before that I worked at this bank called Lehman Brothers for 10 years. So I actually had kind of money to live off of and sort of ramen noodle lifestyle. And then slowly I was Able to. My CTO did not take a salary or whatever, but we hired a couple salespeople and then revenue caught up or whatever. So anyway, you do actually need some money from somewhere to start.
Adam Robinson [00:13:57]:
And you know, some people do it selling info products, some people run an agency, some people go raise money from friends and family, you know, like a restaurant who would give you money if you start a restaurant or something like that. But like tiny pool of capital, like 50 to 100k like you do actually need. So but how I did that first one was I kind of mentioned it before.
Adam Robinson [00:14:21]:
Like we had this list of a monster public companies paying customers that like they were not aware that we had and no one else in the space kind of was aware of this strategy yet. And the reason that I bring that up is because, you know, I think that what this is just a belief I have, what makes acquiring customers expensive is competition. And if you have a channel that you don't have any competition in and you have a good offer, it's going to be incredibly inexpensive for you to acquire those customers.
Adam Robinson [00:14:59]:
So nobody else was calling. This list we had, which was beautiful because it allowed us to run a call center like, you know, 15, 30, 40, 50 bucks a month monthly subscriptions, whereas we could have never done that. You know, it's just, you can't do that. You can't run, run human sales on 15, 30 bucks a month. But we were able to do that there and then.
Adam Robinson [00:15:23]:
The problem with that, which I alluded to before, was our product wasn't actually competitive outside of that channel where mailchimp was or where constant contact was like running ads against eye contact or something else. Right. We were, we. The only reason that worked was because we had access to this list that was so targeted and no one else was calling giving a similar offer to this. But yeah, that was the whole strategy. It was like a little boiler room that I was running out of my apartment.
Omer Khan [00:15:57]:
So you had this list of constant contact customers and the call center was just like cold calling these people and pitching.
Adam Robinson [00:16:10]:
Yeah, I mean we would just take the domain and these are constant contacts. Very small business. Right. So it's like coffee shops and like, whatever. So like we would literally just take their domain. And then we had this team in Pakistan that was just like. It was like 250,000 companies. We had them enriching manually by Google search these domains and then they'd send us back lists of phone numbers and we just, you know, hey, so and so I'm calling about the constant contact account. Oh, cool, that's you.
Adam Robinson [00:16:46]:
We can give you 50% more opens for half the price. And like, they didn't know whether it was constant contact or something else or like, whatever. And then we get them on a demo and we tell them that we had this other offer and it was like half the price. And then we'd upsell them to three quarters of the price and we'd migrate them over and they'd be happy.
Omer Khan [00:16:59]:
So it was a clever growth hack and it worked pretty well.
Adam Robinson [00:17:05]:
Yeah, I mean, you could definitely, like, I don't know where I would be had it not been for that list. You know, that list made it not easy, but like, there's no other way that business could have gotten off the ground because the product wasn't competitive outside of that list. And then that list and that business getting off the ground paved the way for the entire rest of everything that I ever did. Because the free cash from that business led to the experimentation that led to the next.
Adam Robinson [00:17:38]:
It was ultimately a feature in that business which turned into another company. And then here I am. Right. So, yeah, I truly believe maybe I would have figured something out. But the only reason that business worked was because of that list. And look, those lists are still great. Problem is everybody has access to them because everybody knows about built with and data. Nice. Right? But they're still equally as effective as they were then. It's just nobody was using them in the same way.
Omer Khan [00:18:07]:
The other thing you did, I think was like you manually onboarded those customers, right? Or how many of them did you do that with?
Adam Robinson [00:18:16]:
It's crazy. Yeah, no, it's totally insane. Like what we did, we manually got. So we had the salespeople download the list and upload it into our system. But then at first we had three customer success people, quote unquote, actually building a template with this person getting their thing set up. After the sales call. Then we figured out we could do a one to many call. It had a better show rate than the one to one calls did.
Adam Robinson [00:18:48]:
I think people actually even liked being on it better because there was like kind of a community aspect to it. And all we had to do is give him like a $25 off incentive to show up. And it was like, even better. But yeah, believe me, relative to the business that I have now, which is like people paying, you know, it's not a huge amount, but 275 bucks a month. We're not even talking to them, right?
Adam Robinson [00:19:10]:
Like, you know, I've gotten more people to sign up for this in five Months than like the first, you know, year and a half of that company, which required like all of these bodies to do. Yeah, it's just exhausting thinking about it, isn't it?
Omer Khan [00:19:23]:
Yeah. So why did you do the manual onboarding? Like, I mean, I'm assuming you didn't just like say, oh, let's create all this work for ourselves and manual onboard these people. What was happening? Was there a problem? Like, people weren't kind of figuring out how to use the product or they were like churning.
Adam Robinson [00:19:38]:
We knew the magic moment was getting someone to hit send on their first campaign. If we could do that. They stuck 100% of the time from the sales call ending to them on their own downloading the template and getting it over and creating a new email. Like it just wasn't happening. These people are too busy. You know, it's like picture someone like, who runs a coffee shop and has one employee that you're trying to get to switch over on your like email marketing platform when theirs is working fine already. Right.
Adam Robinson [00:20:12]:
Like, it's just like, it just got to the point where like we had to, you know, and like we were so good at the sales part that it just didn't make sense to let it slip when, you know, because it's like every part of the funnel requires fewer people. You know, it's like there's more prospectors than there are people doing demos and there's way fewer people doing, you know, the. Cause it's what, the close rate's 30% or something, right. Or I don't know what it is.
Adam Robinson [00:20:41]:
Um, so yeah, way for your people doing the onboardings and the demos and, you know. Yeah, but man, I, yeah, I just, I just can't even imagine, like people are like, what would you have done differently? What would you do differently today with that business? I wouldn't start it. Right. You know what I mean? Like, like I would look at that opportunity, I'd be like, that is not worth my attention. Right. Like, but that's just knowing what I know now. Right. Like, and you know, we were copying UI back then.
Adam Robinson [00:21:13]:
Like, it's just all the first time founder stuff that I see now.
Omer Khan [00:21:19]:
Okay. So, yeah, I mean, I think you, I mean there was definitely a lot of creativity there. You kind of were like just, you know, I think it was just pretty smart how you kind of figured out how to reach those customers back then. And you know, sometimes it's having that bit of luck, right, that that sets kind of, you know, charts your way for wherever you end up in the future. Like, like you have also. You ended up exiting with the business in 2021.
Omer Khan [00:21:50]:
That was an eight figure exit, which is a nice way to, to wrap things up there. And, and by, by the time you did that, you, you, you, you guys own like 100% of the business, right?
Adam Robinson [00:22:02]:
Yeah. We never had external funding, so it was just the founders.
Omer Khan [00:22:07]:
Great. So let's talk about retention dot com. So you went from. How long did it take to go from zero to a million ARR with retention?
Adam Robinson [00:22:21]:
27 weeks on that one.
Omer Khan [00:22:23]:
Wow.
Adam Robinson [00:22:24]:
Totally different strategy by the way, but similar dynamic of there was like not a competitor doing it really. I mean there were some data companies that kind of had a product, but they were just. It was such a pathetic go to market and user experience that that's what excited me. It's like, I know this is valuable and there are people selling something like it, but like they don't. They're not SaaS people. So the strategy that time I did these, like, I didn't even know I had this in me. By the way.
Adam Robinson [00:23:01]:
I made a Facebook ad campaign that was like really funny and inflammatory. So like, you know, get emails. It's like I explained what the product does. There are. The first thing that comes to mind is like, how is that legal? That like you could and you should not be able to do that.
Omer Khan [00:23:21]:
There's a lot of people on LinkedIn have been getting very upset with you about that, right?
Adam Robinson [00:23:25]:
Yeah, yeah. But like this is just part of it, right? It's like it's legal in the US it's not legal in Europe and. But it makes you think that it is. And there's a bunch of people in the US who hate this. Right? And they hate it. They hate it a lot. So like I kind of.
Adam Robinson [00:23:41]:
And they weren't great in the very beginning, but like a couple months in, like my wife and I were making these weekly videos that were one minute long that were like inflammatory a bit to privacy people, but answered sales questions at the same time. And then my idea was if you got people anticipating the ad, then like you've won the game. You know, it's kind of like this community's building around it. My wife's cute and like, you know, the most searched term for get emails was Helen from get emails. It's just hilarious.
Adam Robinson [00:24:10]:
And like, you know, so the ads were very effective and basically the dynamic was they were paying back super quick, but the type of customer they were bringing in was atrocious. But when something pays back super quick, you just Plow more money back in and it makes your cold email work better. For instance.
Omer Khan [00:24:36]:
What do you mean they were atrocious? What was the problem with those types of customers?
Adam Robinson [00:24:40]:
I think for SaaS it very rarely works to do Facebook ads because you bring in these wannabes that, you know, it's like a 15% per month churn customer. Right? For the most part. But we had this click through PLG product where people could buy a $5,000 a month plan by clicking and that would happen like that would happen once every two weeks and they would just pay back the prior two weeks ads. And then finally, you know, you keep increasing spend. Ads stop working as well.
Adam Robinson [00:25:11]:
Like eight weeks went by, we didn't get a whale at that point. I dropped like 100 grand on these ads and it was just like, okay, these are not working anymore. They're bringing in absolutely terrible customers for us that are super high churn. Let's focus on building features for the high value users and just this like targeted cold email strategy. So that was, but, but the whole 0 to 1, you could really credit it to the, the awareness that came from those video ads.
Adam Robinson [00:25:41]:
And still today people walk up for me, to me, they're like, you know, I'm kind of like getting LinkedIn famous. But like before that, they'd walk up, they'd look at me, be like, I kind of know, wait, did you do those get emails ads with like that woman in 2019 or whatever? I was like, yeah, that's me.
Omer Khan [00:25:54]:
What were you targeting or who are you targeting on Facebook?
Adam Robinson [00:25:57]:
Yeah, so like back then, I don't, I don't know that I haven't been in Facebook ad interface in a long time. But like you could type in Shopify and they'd have like a million people interested in Shopify. It was a great audience for us. Like entrepreneur. That's a pretty good audience. You know, you could like put in individuals like there's an ecom influencer called Ezra Firestone. You could put his name in. It'd like run his audience, right? So it was things like that. You could put different companies in, you know, Klaviyo Rant Klaviyo mailchimp did.
Adam Robinson [00:26:38]:
Okay, so stuff like that.
Omer Khan [00:26:41]:
Okay, so that was kind of fairly broad, just based on general interests these people might have or hopefully being in some kind of business. And then when you realize that these were not the types of customers you wanted, what did you do? What did you change? I mean, you talked about the product and some of the things that you did there in terms of the features.
Adam Robinson [00:27:00]:
But.
Omer Khan [00:27:00]:
But how did you start reaching, I
Adam Robinson [00:27:02]:
guess better quality customers through cold email. So like we just stopped running ads, period. And by the way, this business retention.com, it's been pretty tumultuous. So we got to basically 200 something mrr in nine months. And nine months after that, we were barely higher. We like had went up and went down again because of this churn dynamic.
Adam Robinson [00:27:31]:
So like, if you think about that, if my first startup kind of shrunk and was, you know, stuck in the mud around 3 million ARR, my second startup got 3 million arrow very quickly and I was like, oh, this is it. And then nine months later, it's still at 3 million ARR. I was very burnt out and I was like, I had this mindset where like, well, maybe I'm just a 3 million ARR guy, you know.
Adam Robinson [00:27:55]:
And from the time that we stopped those ads till the time that we really figured out how to get it growing again, we were building more features and then sending cold email. And then when my Diana, my co founder, was the one doing the sales, when she really started prospecting to shopify Klaviyo lists on cold email, they were substantially lower churn and higher value than the broader audience we were going after. And it's really started taking off. It went from 200 mrr to 600k mrr over the next year.
Adam Robinson [00:28:36]:
And then it kind of got stuck there again. And then it's like this whole business has been kind of up and down. It's just been a high churn. It's a high churn product category. And whenever you're in a high churn product category with a high churn buyer Persona, I just think you're always trying to do things to outpace churn basically. And that's been the story. That business is stuck in another one right now.
Adam Robinson [00:29:00]:
It's like in order to get the next leg up, we have to start doing larger deals with lower churn buyer Persona customers, which are omnichannel retailers instead of because topped out our ARR on the Shopify audience because they're just too high a churn.
Omer Khan [00:29:16]:
I want to clarify one thing. You said you 1 million ARR was about 27 months, 27 weeks. It's like, okay, and so these cold emails that Diana was sending out. Okay, cold emails, great. But most founders listening to this will say I send out cold emails and nobody answers it.
Adam Robinson [00:29:38]:
Yeah, no, I mean that's today. This was. Keep in mind, this was like 2020. This was 2020 and 2021 all I talk about is how cold email doesn't work anymore, right? Like there is no way that we could have done what we did with get emails in the way that we did it today. It would be impossible. Like we literally had five people in the Philippines. Half the day they were doing list building. Half the day they were manually sending emails from Gmail inboxes.
Adam Robinson [00:30:04]:
And then Diana's sales assistant would respond to them, get them on a demo and that was the whole sales motion. It literally just would not work today.
Omer Khan [00:30:14]:
It's like you kind of. I'm seeing a trend here. Like you find things that you ride the wave and just at the right time.
Adam Robinson [00:30:23]:
Well, I think it's, you know, this is coming across as a somewhat linear story, but it's just not right. Like before get emails I took two to describe just basically what the attempts were. The first attempt that I took to grow Robli when it was stuck was constant contact had gotten acquired and they cut this authorized local expert part of their business because I mean I find out later that it's not unit economic profitable. It was like a branding effort for them.
Adam Robinson [00:30:57]:
The person who ran that business reached out to me because and he's like dude, this worked for us. See if you can take it over. They spent $50 million like putting together this group of people to distribute the product. And that was novel to me because mailchimp wasn't doing it. It's like boots on the ground. Selling software doesn't seem great but it's like different. So tried that complete failure, wasted a ton of money, ended up getting sued by constant contact because the guy was doing his non compete. It was just a disaster.
Adam Robinson [00:31:25]:
Then the next year, my current co founder Diana we thought that we had identified this opportunity to go just above mailchimp in terms of the buyer Persona. More sophisticated than them because her old company was doing it and they were going up even more. So she's like they're leaving this gap and hire her. Hire a bunch of engineers, spend a year building it. We go to launch it and just like no one, like no one cares because 10 other people are doing that already.
Adam Robinson [00:32:00]:
It's just, it was not a like how I advocate building for building companies now. Like sell before you buy. We just didn't do that at all. But we had this launch stunt that we did at traffic and conversion conference in 202018 and it was this big stunt that I did and it was like it got a lot of attention. But then the people that we were talking to, eyes glazed Over.
Adam Robinson [00:32:26]:
But when I asked them and I didn't even know how to do it, I was like, what if I could get you the email address of people on your website who don't fill out a form? Every single person was like, antenna up. How do I get that? Where can I buy that? Right? So I knew that I had to go figure out how to do it. And that started like this intense focus period of figuring out how to do that, right?
Adam Robinson [00:32:50]:
But like I spent two years, hundreds of thousands of million dollars building other stuff that did not work to get to get emails. And you know, yeah, it's very like there's so many parts to it, right? It's like how in the RB2B thing, right? It's kind of a wild go to market that I'm doing. It's like very founder brand. I'm doing 10 podcast spots a week. It's free. You know, the core value proposition is like identify website visitors, push their LinkedIn profiles to Slack, 100% free, you know, no set, whatever.
Adam Robinson [00:33:26]:
And my idea is like exactly what you said. There is no way that we could build get emails today because how we did it does not work for anyone anymore, right? That's probably going to get worse. That dynamic of like more people sending even more emails and spam filters ratcheting down even more, right? So what is the complete opposite of a future proofed go to market model for selling software when that simply does not work anymore. And I was like, okay, what's the opposite extreme? It's this like founder content led.
Adam Robinson [00:34:05]:
It's this hundred million dollar value proposition that just punches you in the face. That's literally free. And so it's like you could either sell your product and then take the money you're selling it for and pay for more sales and marketing people, or you could just smash that and make it free and it spreads on its own, right? So it's kind of just like that was a reaction to what's going on right now, right? And people are like, oh, it would never work for an enterprise software.
Adam Robinson [00:34:32]:
It's like, well then maybe enterprise software won't grow anymore, right? Like, you know, it's like product and distribution and what is available at the time, you know, that determines what grows, right? You know, so you know, you could say that this is the right place, right time, but it was like very, very contrived by us, right?
Adam Robinson [00:34:56]:
It's like the reason I'm doing it this way is because of my experience, quite frankly, trying to scale out a team of BDRs in 2023 and realizing that this notion that you could sit a bunch of people there and have them click mouse buttons and write emails and connect on LinkedIn, that's just not working anymore.
Omer Khan [00:35:15]:
Yeah, no, I think it's good. And I think probably if somebody's listening to this saying, great, but what do I do then? Maybe it's like I could try to do something similar to what Adam's doing on LinkedIn and try to build a personal brand or go and do it wherever my target customers hang out. But a lot of people aren't comfortable doing it or they're not good at doing something like that. And the other thing is, that's one alternative. But there's also other potential growth channels that could still work that they haven't explored yet.
Omer Khan [00:35:57]:
Maybe if they got a little bit more creative and didn't just try to do what they see everybody else doing. But I guess the million dollar question is always like, how do you find those opportunities? And I don't think it was just luck that every time you've been able to go through and just figure this stuff out.
Adam Robinson [00:36:15]:
I mean, I will say it again, this is just like so many failures have gone into this one success. So, like, the whole reason the LinkedIn thing is what it is is because for 12 months before it clicked, like, if you look at my content a year and a half ago, it does not even resemble what it is today. It was not good. I was not getting engagement. It was not doing what I wanted it to do.
Adam Robinson [00:36:49]:
I was trying to build a LinkedIn audience to sell retention.com to Shopify store owners, and that was not doing that. And like, I knew it was wrong, but I kept doing it. Right? Like, I don't even know why I kept doing it. I just, like, I believed so deeply that today just, you know, this is kind of taking it from Alex Hermosi or whatever. It's like there's a reason that the Kardashians are billionaires. It's not because of the great products they, they sell. Right?
Adam Robinson [00:37:20]:
Like, this social media machine is set up to do something that has a power that nothing else before it has. And then LinkedIn, our business to business platform, is more and more drifting towards what Instagram and Facebook are every single day.
Omer Khan [00:37:35]:
Yeah. So I mean, I was going to say, currently you have like over 92,000 followers on LinkedIn.
Adam Robinson [00:37:41]:
Yeah. And by the way, I had zero in September of 2022. Zero in September of 2022.
Omer Khan [00:37:46]:
Wow. Right? So, so all this time you were posting and you're not getting any, any, any engagement or whatever. And you know, it's not the right type of content. What, what was the kind of the pivotal moment where things change? What did you start doing differently?
Adam Robinson [00:38:01]:
So again, I will re emphasize over the course of that first year, it wasn't like I wasn't gaining skill, but it was almost like I was learning what not to do. And there were like small glimmers of hope in there. I'll give you an example, right? Like I was making a daily video and I did. I didn't know why, but I just felt like video was something that I wanted to do. I didn't have any sort of theme week to week of what I was doing. I was just giving general business thoughts, right?
Adam Robinson [00:38:33]:
But it was, but I was publishing, I was just producing, right? And then I was also doing work in public because I thought that that could apply to E commerce stores. One of the big conflicts that I had internally was like, why would an E commerce store listen to me? Why would they care about this content rather than some other content creator who is an E commerce guy?
Adam Robinson [00:38:56]:
I couldn't get my head around, like, what could I say that's like more valuable than what Nick Sharm is saying who is running these businesses for them as their agency, Right? Like, I struggle with that. But I was doing work in public because I thought that was interesting. I was willing to share my financials, which were very compelling, which everybody goes crazy for on social media, right? You gotta like, think about like, what are you will, how are you gonna stand out?
Adam Robinson [00:39:19]:
What can you say that other people are not willing to or won't for some reason or like, you know, what is your angle, right? So like one of my angles is working public. As I mentioned, we tried to scale up in 2023 to create Unicorn. It was a disaster. Our VP sales quit. We downsized the sales team by like 75% and I wrote a post about it and it exploded. So I was like, I didn't even think much about it. I was like, oh, just good work in public posts. You know, I showed vulnerability.
Adam Robinson [00:39:45]:
That's why, right? And then around Labor Day of last year, my E composts were actually getting very good. They just weren't doing, they weren't booking demos. But I could tell that each post was the best version of itself it could be. It's just the audience wasn't there on LinkedIn for me, right? And then my LinkedIn consultant, Alec, I was like, dude, we're thinking about making a B2B product. He's like, oh, if you're, if you pivot this content to B2B, it will absolutely crush. All my other customers are B2B.
Adam Robinson [00:40:16]:
They're just not willing to do what you're willing to do. They're not trying as hard as you're willing to try. So like, I mean, I'm not kidding you, a seven day period. I write one post about things about BDR that people were unwilling to say at the time. This, like the teams don't work anymore. Literally everybody. All these tech companies have these huge BDR teams. No one's getting productivity out of them for the reasons that you're talking about. Absolutely exploded.
Adam Robinson [00:40:44]:
Like, you know, my typical post, 30, 50 likes or whatever, it was like 3300 likes in 24 hours. And then I was like, wow, you know, and then I felt it was like, what's novel about that? It's like, well, I'm talking about my own problems now and my own failures to revenue leaders like me in SaaS, which is very different angle. And I'm also saying things that you kind of only tell your spouse behind closed doors that everybody's feeling in the market, which is like my first feel of what a hot take was, right?
Adam Robinson [00:41:15]:
And then I wrote three more and I'm like, I think these all have those elements and if they crush, I know what LinkedIn's all about. If they don't, I'm lost. Like I was a year ago, right? Dropped them bang, bang, bang. Two million impressions over three posts. And I was just like, now I know the game.
Adam Robinson [00:41:34]:
And like my follower account went from this slope to this slope and it's never turned back because I'm just doing exactly, you know, trying to do exactly what I was doing in those three posts over and over and over again. And for me it's just like, be as transparent, transparent as possible. Be as human as possible. You know, talk about how go to market is changing, talk about how to build SaaS in 2024. You know, I try to be a dealer of hope. I try to tell people you can bootstrap 10 million RR.
Adam Robinson [00:42:04]:
You know, there's a million things keeping you from doing that, mostly vc, because once you get traction, they're going to show up with this lie about how if you sign this piece of paper you're going to be worth $30 million or whatever, which is not true. But I think, yeah, I want to, I want to just show people that it's possible, right? So like that's kind of what my content's all about.
Omer Khan [00:42:22]:
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So a couple of questions on that. One is when you. When things start to click like that, and you get a lot of people who like your content or love your content, engage with it, all of that stuff, you also get a lot of haters. I'm sure you get your fair share of that. Does that, does that suck? Suck the energy out of what you're doing and how do you keep going?
Omer Khan [00:42:49]:
Or are you kind of naturally the kind of person who's like, it's just water off a Duck's back.
Adam Robinson [00:42:54]:
So LinkedIn is. People are much more polite on LinkedIn than they are on other platforms. So I think I have that going.
Omer Khan [00:43:04]:
Those are your bumper rails, right?
Adam Robinson [00:43:07]:
Yeah. And really the only time I get hard hate is when I'm like, outbound's dead. And the people who hate it are outbound agencies who are trying to sell outbound services. And then 90% of the comments are just like, yeah, I got torched. I mean, more and more people are coming around to this idea every day that what they thought was working, it's now just stopped. Right? Because I think just the response rate thing is going down. So whatever. It's working for less and less people all the time.
Adam Robinson [00:43:38]:
I felt a much more when I was doing those inflammatory Facebook ads. It was really not good for my soul because one of the strategies that I was doing, which is kind of bad, I was like making an inflammatory ad usually based on why somebody called me a scumbag in the ad before. Like, somebody, like, lay out this whole thesis and I make a video being like, it's not a legal loophole, you know, that's what entrepreneurs do or like, whatever.
Adam Robinson [00:44:05]:
And to make the ad work better, after they called me a scumbag, I would insult them from the brand account because it just blew their mind, you know, it blow their mind. And then they would write another paragraph just like, does your boss know about. You know, how could you ever. Your brand's gonna. You know, it's just like, I don't have a boss. You're the one with the boss. You know, like just ridiculous stuff. And being in that headspace was not good for me. Just personally, like, people would, you know, it was not good.
Omer Khan [00:44:36]:
I know you're. You've talked about Russell Brunson and I know you're a fan of what he did with click funnels. And it's a very different way that he built that business. And I think in one of his books, I can't remember which One it was, he had kind of this scale where he said, when you, when you create content and you talk about stuff, if you're like in the middle, like so neutral, no one's going to give a crap because, you know, you're not taking a point of view on it.
Omer Khan [00:45:06]:
And I remember he's saying, like, you need to go far enough that kind of polarizes people a bit, but not so far that they just think you're freaking crazy and just, you know, off the charts and it's kind of finding that balance. And you know, I think with me personally, like, you know, I never did anything on LinkedIn or rarely. And it was only like earlier this year I was like, I'm going to start publishing daily.
Omer Khan [00:45:28]:
And, and you know, you, you have these posts where, you know, you get, you know, hundreds of, you know, engagements and whatever and you're like, great. And then. But most of the time it'll be like, I'll do, write something and it's like I'll get like 10, 10 or 15 people engaging with it. And it's always the same people. And I'm going, thank God those people are on LinkedIn because if they weren't engaging with this, like, it would be nobody.
Adam Robinson [00:45:51]:
Right.
Omer Khan [00:45:51]:
And so if you're listening, I'm very grateful for that. But yeah, I think, but it's also because I know, like, especially when you're talking about it, I always naturally try to play it safe because you're always worried about offending people. Right. But there's kind of this kind of fine line between like just going off the charts and just being boring with your content and just figuring that out. And I think those are the people that do much better.
Adam Robinson [00:46:12]:
Can't be boring. You got, I mean, I really believe so, like, I believe now that I am in the currently. I didn't believe this in my last business, but I think that I'm in the edutainment business and I happen to have a SaaS at the end of the funnel, but my job is edutainment. My job is to make entertaining, educational and highly compelling content about how I am building my SaaS and about how you can do it too.
Adam Robinson [00:46:47]:
I think that's the business that I'm in and the better that I get at that and the wider of an audience that I attract to that, the more my SaaS will grow. It's, you know, and this is back to the social media thing with the way social media is set up that if done well, it is content that my target market there's more demand for that than anything else. Right. Because it's like helping them move along their startup journey.
Adam Robinson [00:47:16]:
And it's the most efficient way to build trust and then sell that there's ever been in the history of the world. And then there's this product called the LinkedIn Thought Leadership ad, where you can take a post that crushes and you can put ad spend behind it. And the clicks are super cheap because LinkedIn actually wants to show that to people. And you already know because they already rewarded you. Right. So it's. It's just this. It's the superpower.
Adam Robinson [00:47:40]:
If you can create great organic social content and your large competitors cannot, you have 100 times more efficient awareness generation potential than they do. And you can destroy them. You know, you can absolutely destroy them.
Omer Khan [00:47:54]:
I think whoever's listening to this, I think, you know, if you're not following Adam, you should. On LinkedIn, I think you post a bunch of really useful and it is entertaining stuff. I think you had this post recently about thought leadership ads and your experiment with it, and you kind of did a breakdown of that. And I think that's a great way.
Omer Khan [00:48:13]:
Like, you know, if you are a founder selling to, I don't know, scientific researchers or something like that, there's probably some way that you can get your thought leadership stuff, you know, leverage those ads and get some useful content in front of those people. Right. But it's like it doesn't, you know, it's kind of, again, evolving away from like this just cold email as being the default to. There's another way you can be reaching those people.
Adam Robinson [00:48:36]:
Yeah. The playbook's not as clear as the cold email playbook, but it is definitely much more powerful.
Omer Khan [00:48:41]:
Yeah, I agree. So let's talk about RB2B, because I want to make sure we cover that and we have time. So we went from Robli zero to a million ARR. 17 months retention.com was like 17 weeks.
Adam Robinson [00:48:58]:
27 weeks.
Omer Khan [00:48:58]:
27 weeks, right. And then RB2B was like 16 weeks. Is that right?
Adam Robinson [00:49:03]:
16 weeks, yeah.
Omer Khan [00:49:04]:
Okay, so what did you do there? How did you make that happen?
Adam Robinson [00:49:08]:
Well, I mean, that was kind of just the whole social media journey that I just explained to you. By the time we launched that product, we had created such awareness and affinity for basically me and my coo Santosh, that the day we launched it, it just took off. Like we had thousands of people on a waiting list.
Adam Robinson [00:49:30]:
We literally had like 300 discovery calls between October when we decided to build it, and March 1st when we launched it we had a bunch of beta testers on this really beat version of it that were giving us tons of feedback. And it's like every overnight success is 10 years in the making. That literally is the reason that is crushing is because of the year of blood, sweat and tears I put into LinkedIn. Audience building that was also aimed at a different audience that was warming up the market six months before we launched it.
Adam Robinson [00:50:06]:
That now is the entire vehicle behind this growth.
Omer Khan [00:50:13]:
So it was audience first and then that's where you saw this opportunity and it was like, hey, I've got these buyers.
Adam Robinson [00:50:19]:
And look, if you're asking me, there's this guy, Greg Eisenberg that is building a portfolio of companies this way. He's a good follower on Twitter. I don't know if I'm fully there yet, but he's fully in the. I am going to build an audience first and then I'm going to put a product on top of it. Right. And as the dynamic we're discussing cold email getting less and less effective, like that might be how people do it in the future.
Adam Robinson [00:50:45]:
It might turn like, you know, the DTC brands, they're all the influencers are first and then they're distributing product into their audience. I don't know why B2B would be any different. You know, of course, you know, for field sales, that's not going to change for you know, you take a guy to a Lakers game to sell him a million dollar deal, whatever, that is what it is. Right.
Adam Robinson [00:51:03]:
But like for, you know, point solution SaaS like starting a startup from zero, like, I don't know, like just the distribution part of it is so much harder and this way of distributing is so effective. I just can't imagine that more and more success stories that you hear about are led. You know, when you ask them what happened, they're like, well, I really nailed this distribution channel first and basically perfectly adapted my product for it. Kind of like the story that I'm
Omer Khan [00:51:30]:
telling you I want to get. We'll get on to the lightning round in a minute and just, just wrap up here, but can we talk about layoffs, whatever? You can talk about that because I, you know, I mean you've, you've, you've said repeatedly, look, there was a whole bunch of failures that I had to go through to be able to do xyz. And this is not just about all the successes, but I think this is another really kind of tough thing to go through. And you had to do it more than once.
Adam Robinson [00:51:57]:
Yeah, I've had to do it twice. We're actually doing another one tomorrow. Which is like the sort of last chapter of the last one that I did. But yeah, the first one was like with that first story that I told about the list, we thought we had another list of constant contact customers. It looked like it was working. We scaled the whole sales organization in to calling that list, got everybody on that list and no one was picking up the phone.
Adam Robinson [00:52:23]:
So we had to just like drop from 38 to six people and it was awful and it was my fault and like whatever. Then 2023 we like ramped up a sales org again because we were getting all of this false signal that we were overselling people about TAM and about deal size and about whatever. Then everyone was churning and contracting. It was very obvious that this strategy of outbound wasn't working. And our VP sales quit and instead of replacing him, we downsize the sales. Org from 20 to 4 people.
Adam Robinson [00:52:54]:
And it actually culturally cleaned it up so much that we started moving faster. And then tomorrow the reason for this is, you know, businesses can go in and out of product market fit. And that direct consumer e commerce business, it was just like. The product really worked. No one had ever heard of it. And our penetration in the market was. Was so low two years ago that it was just magical. And like none of that is necessarily the case now. And the TAM is much smaller than we thought, like the addressable market. Basically.
Adam Robinson [00:53:30]:
We thought we could make 50,000 stores successful in the Shopify ecosystem two years ago. Now we think it's 1,400 and there's a bunch of competitors. So we still have a company size that's set up for the environment of 18 months ago. And there's just much lower throughput in our organization yet we haven't changed the team size. So we basically have realized through implementing this framework called eos, which is like it helps you, you focus all your people that people focused on things that are really moving the, moving the needle for us.
Adam Robinson [00:54:05]:
It's like we can do it with half the team. And I think whenever you're in that position, no one has ever regretted a move like that. The day that you wake up and you realize you can do what you're doing with half the people as the founder, you just have to make that move and the weight of the world is off your shoulders when you do it. It's just the most liberating feeling. It's awful for the employees. My glass door reviews are terrible because again, they're going to get crapped on again.
Adam Robinson [00:54:34]:
Tomorrow because this is the third time I'm doing it and I don't have people manipulate them on the other side because I'm like all about authenticity. But yeah, that is the worst part of the job, period. Full stop. Even though there's such. It's like, you know. Yeah, ending a bad relationship is like the same way. So.
Omer Khan [00:54:52]:
So yeah, let's get onto the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. Just try to answer them as quickly as you can. Ready?
Adam Robinson [00:55:00]:
Yep. Let's go.
Omer Khan [00:55:01]:
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
Adam Robinson [00:55:05]:
Do not take institutional capital.
Omer Khan [00:55:08]:
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Adam Robinson [00:55:11]:
I would recommend reading Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson because it will explain to you a lot of the reason why I think organic social media content is so magical given all of the dynamics with cold email we talked about.
Omer Khan [00:55:25]:
Yeah, that's a great book. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Adam Robinson [00:55:31]:
Focus?
Omer Khan [00:55:32]:
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Adam Robinson [00:55:36]:
Man. This is a checklist. It's the most basic thing.
Omer Khan [00:55:41]:
If it works. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
Adam Robinson [00:55:48]:
So there's all these school. I read about a school for sports, like an elementary school where the focus is sports. They're teaching. I would like to create a school for maybe teenagers that instead of like the high school curriculum, it's all about how to use AI.
Omer Khan [00:56:04]:
Cool. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Adam Robinson [00:56:10]:
I like to wake surf in my spare time a lot. I live in Austin. There's like a lake and a boat.
Omer Khan [00:56:16]:
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Adam Robinson [00:56:20]:
Yeah, look for me it's just like work and family. I have a two year old and another kid on the way. So like I'm in this like honeymoon phase with the, this like new stage in life. So that's it.
Omer Khan [00:56:30]:
Well, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Been loving your content on LinkedIn. It was great to finally be able to chat with you and hopefully we, we provided some inspiration and some insights for people listening to go and apply in their own businesses. If folks want to check out retention.com guess what, go to retention.com and RB2 and RB2B is rbtob.com as well. And if folks want to get in touch with you, I assume LinkedIn is the best place.
Adam Robinson [00:56:59]:
Yes, Adam, Robinson search on LinkedIn. I'll be there.
Omer Khan [00:57:03]:
Cool. Thanks, man. It's been a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.
Adam Robinson [00:57:08]:
Yeah, thank you very much, Omar.
Omer Khan [00:57:10]:
Cheers.
