From 0 to $25M ARR Bootstrapped: Adam Robinson’s Blueprint for SaaS Growth Without Funding

Desi (00:03.065) Hey Adam, welcome to Seekers. Tell us more about retention.com and RB2B. What are you building and why these products are important on the market today?

Adam (00:14.808) Sure, like, both companies do, the backbone of the technology is person level website visitor identity, and retention.com sells to e-commerce stores, and RB2B sells to B2B companies. look, it's, you know, they kind of solve two different big problems. The e-commerce stores have this problem where cart abandonment and product abandonment emails are like,

very lucrative and very effective, but you can't send those unless people are logged in to the retailer's website and like no one's logged in to these sites. So the identity graph allows you to basically through a bunch of different strategies figure out who people are so you can deploy more of those really effective communications. And then on the B2B side,

You know, it's just obvious why a website signal would be valuable in sales. It is a tremendous demonstration of intent. It is not the most demonstrative thing to show intent. would say filling out a demo form is that, but like it's much better than like, for instance, third party content consumption, which there's a whole industry around.

Outbound is getting harder for a lot of reasons, I believe. And as it gets harder, the value of signals like a website visit just gets higher. you know, it's, yeah, that's the idea.

Desi (01:55.083) Awesome. Perfect. So basically what RB2B does is it would feed LinkedIn profiles of people who visited your website, right? Essentially that is one of the main USPs of the product. Awesome. Like as someone based in the UK, the first thing that comes to mind is GDPR and the headache marketers have to deal with this here in Europe. Do you get much criticism about this and how do you respond to it?

Adam (02:05.358) Yes.

Adam (02:15.693) Yeah.

Desi (02:22.999) And is it just in the US where you operated?

Adam (02:23.758) So, yeah, so right now we're just doing that one thing, right? It's just this person level of identity and that is not GDPR compliant. So it's US only very soon. We're going to be adding what the market standard was before we showed up, which was company level. and you know, that's kind of not as exciting because it's there, but you can do it globally. and to be honest, like,

I still think there's probably on average almost as much value in that technology because I think the mistake that people make with the person level is that they stop doing sales. For instance, if I were talking to my VP of sales about software and I went and looked at the website as he was talking to me as the CEO, the assumption...

that a lot of these users of RB2B make is that they should just be able to not even think about it, send me an automated email and I'll just like come in and book a demo and buy it because I was on the site, right? Whereas like knowing two people at retention.com were on the site, if a salesperson then goes and figures out who the actual buyer would likely be from that company, I think that their result might even be better than just like the lazy automation that,

the promise of the technology sort of makes people want to do. And by the way, I got this wrong. As a lead gen strategy, it's not great because B2B traffic is kind of low and then people don't realize that the concentration of their traffic that is actually their ideal customer profile.

is actually, it's very low. It's like five to 10 % of the people that visit your site you actually wanna talk to. So it's not a great lead gen strategy. What it is excellent for is a signal to help salespeople move people down the funnel, right? It's like tremendously valuable to know that several people from a company over the course of a two month sales cycle have repeatedly come back to certain pages, right?

Adam (04:44.802) But that's kind of not what I was selling in the beginning. I was selling like, yeah, we'll tell you the person. It's like hit them up and they'll book a demo and they'll buy. Which is why we're experiencing the turn we're experiencing. it's undeniable that if used properly, that the signal is valuable. We started the company nine months ago and I really got that part of it wrong.

which is different than the e-commerce side. The use case is very straightforward. Whereas on the B2B side, the obvious use case doesn't work for most people. It works for some people if you have an enormous amount of traffic and you run them through clay and you send it out with Smart Leader instantly, that kind of works. But for most people, that workflow does not

Desi (05:25.955) Bye.

Desi (05:37.399) Why do you think it's not working? Do you think it's like a lead gen problem or it might be like a sales strategy problem, what you're saying? mean, okay. And maybe another thing. Yeah, go ahead.

Adam (05:44.718) I just think for most B2B companies, like spamming a website visitor will not yield a demo. You know, like there's just more that goes on than one person visiting the site and getting sent some AI driven copy or whatever. There's more to sales than that. There's more to outbound sales than that. You know what mean? So I think as outbound gets harder, more people are just spamming more and

Desi (05:53.687) Right.

Adam (06:14.626) really good outbound is like what will be the result of this at some point. yeah, it's just, like I said before, the technology is really valuable. Using it in that way is one use case that works for some people. My assumption in the beginning was like that use case would work for a lot of people. And like, I'm just observing that for the reasons that I highlighted, like,

Maybe they don't have a lot of traffic. Maybe just a lot of reasons. I just don't really believe in high volume automated email and LinkedIn prospecting anymore. just don't think it is the way it is. It's just not, there are a million things working against that on both sides. It's like the volume of it's going up, like the...

Desi (07:08.642) Right, wait.

Adam (07:12.206) The spam filters are cracking down on the receiving end. It's getting cheaper and easier to get data. The AI can write emails. Automation systems are everywhere. People are responding to lower response rates with higher volumes. Like there's just like a million reasons why that whole area of study is like going to be exponentially harder every year that goes by.

Desi (07:34.859) Absolutely. So it's one thing having the contacts and knowing the company's visiting your website. But the other another thing is what you're actually doing to leverage this data. Could you walk us through in your opinion, obviously, and it depends on the type of business, but I'm sure that from your experience, can share some best practices. Walk us through the blueprint or best case scenario for, let's say, a small SaaS company with just two salespeople.

Adam (07:44.823) Right.

Desi (08:03.629) If they are RB2B client, what should they do once they get the hands on the data you guys are feeding to them?

Adam (08:11.212) Yeah, so like I still think there's a lot of, you know, if you have salespeople and that's worth it for you, like.

Automating everything around them, I don't think helps them. I think actually alerting them over time that site visitors are on the site is actually much more helpful for moving high priority opportunities forward than creating some machine that just contacts people and the salesperson is oblivious of that. So we're working on this, but we think

Desi (08:24.728) Right.

Desi (08:43.874) Right.

Adam (08:50.668) We have a hypothesis that the correct use of this technology is to actually run all of the signal through the CRM, get the CRM to tag it with the appropriate rep for the named account, and then possibly send it to like Gmail or something where they're working all day and alert them that someone who they care about and like they are responsible for moving forward down the funnel or whatever.

is on the site right now, or for instance made a job change, we could give them a path to a warm intro or something like that. rather than just blindly automating, think that alerting and suggesting a what now is a much better use of this signal, which this is what we're working on. This is our vision for the future of this product.

Obviously, if you're working a deal, you want to know when people are looking at the site, right? Like, what I think AI is good at, rather than just like, spamming with copy, I think it's like, okay, this person's on these pages, they're in this stage in your funnel, and your prior communication is this. Here's what you might want to do right now, but like, look at it, edit it, and you hit send. You know? Does that make sense? So that's why...

Desi (10:18.617) Yeah, absolutely.

Adam (10:20.984) You know, that's like the hypothesis right now of what the real value of this might be, rather than like a lead gen thing. Because like the lead gen thing is hard because it's just not enough leads to make it worthwhile. know? Like I think it's part of it, like a net new person, opportunity, whatever, that's like part of it, but like the real ongoing value is just like, hey, you're paying attention to all of these people.

Desi (10:29.497) Mm-hmm.

Adam (10:50.05) these few hit the site. Based on everything that's going on, here's what you might want to say to them. Like that sounds like a great product. You know, it's like whether or not we can deliver that, we'll see.

Desi (10:55.384) Right.

Desi (11:01.783) You've been very open on social media how outbound sales doesn't work anymore. And what you're saying just now, this kind of spammy sales approach going for volume rather than for quality. I also watched a conversation with you and your co-founder, Diana Rose. think it happened just very recently. Yesterday. Yeah, yeah. It's fantastic. I recommend it to everyone. Go and check it out. It's on YouTube on Adam's channel.

Adam (11:22.958) Yeah, on Tuesday.

Desi (11:31.513) Can you share more about your mindset when it comes to sales and how it has evolved for you and for your team over the years? And maybe just share a common mistake that you think many B2B salespeople are making now, right?

Adam (11:48.654) Yeah, well, I think a really common mistake is thinking that, you know, there's this problem where, again, like, I keep coming back to this, like, I think this automated outbound thing works for some people, right? In a perfect, like, to some extent, it works for RB2B, but like, the reason that it works for RB2B, or it did, is we have this incredible free offer, right? And it was like very new and very hot.

Desi (12:15.246) Right, yeah.

Adam (12:18.022) and most of the people that we were emailing actually had been reading my LinkedIn content. like, I had built the trust already, right? But like, those aspects are not very easy to replicate. And like, I believe that the combination of all of them is the reason that it worked. So I think a huge mistake people are making is like,

It actually, these crazy automated workflows are great LinkedIn content. So you see Legion agencies, you know, walking people through how you like, do all this stuff with clay and this and that, and like it's automated this and that, and like we booked 400 demos or whatever. And I think trying to do that for an early stage startup, it's just going to waste your time and waste your money because if that's actually working for someone, there are like other reasons why than besides the workflow that it's working.

So the most common mistake that I observe in startups, if we're talking about like one million ARR something like that with like a couple salespeople is it's so easy to get ahead of yourself. What you need to be doing at the early stage is improving your product until you're like getting referrals without asking for them regularly. That's my opinion. early strong indicators of product market fit because then once you have that, you can accelerate it.

with other channels of outbound. But until you have that, nothing's gonna work. that's kind of mistake number one. And At a macro level, the observation that I have made with sales over the past five years or so is like maybe 10 years, is there was this book, The Predictable Revenue Model, or The Predictable Revenue, it was like the seminal book about tech sales. like basically it was,

advocating for SDRs, booking demos for AEs, and it was back in the day when you could just send 100 emails out and you would get 10 positive replies, right? If you sent 100 emails out today, you might get, like you would be lucky to get one. Like you might get a one, you might have one person open that email, right? so, like, but a whole industry was built around that.

Adam (14:42.35) premise because it was viable for a long time. And what I think about sales now is like...

On one hand, you had, like with retention.com, it's a sales led motion. We're going up market. It's like a 50 to like, I mean, our biggest deals are like 200K per year or whatever. Like they got a booth at a Taylor Swift era's concert and took a bunch of female CMOs to like the best night of their life, right? Like that is sales. It has always been sales and it will always be sales.

Desi (15:10.218) wow.

Desi (15:20.642) Right.

Adam (15:20.726) Right? Like on the other hand, I think that I'm very constructive on this like influencer led trust building machine that has like freemium offers attached to it because we're more connected than ever. And if you can create truly valuable free products, then with that megaphone, can distribute them very quickly in the middle. I'm not very positive on it, right?

Desi (15:34.521) Mm.

Adam (15:46.01) the middle, the tube of toothpaste just got squeezed. Like that whole middle ground that was like the inside sales force sitting, know, college grads, like sitting at keyboards and pressing buttons to like get demos back to them or whatever, get sales back. I'm not that constructive about that at all. yeah, you know, at a macro level,

Desi (15:49.177) Mm.

Adam (16:12.294) know, ways of like, real world sales, I think is more valuable than ever because like the middle part of it's gone. And I think the value of understanding how to generate demand through, you know, organic social media and like the, like, like that's just like way more of this marketing funnel, you know, the awareness consideration, like research or whatever. It's just, it's kind of like,

happening over months and years even. Yeah, exactly. And it's really, really, really, really hard to nail that, like to really get your angle and have everything aligned to where that's really working for you. But unfortunately, like, I'm not sure.

Desi (16:45.803) Yeah, you can't hack your way.

Desi (17:05.144) Yeah.

Adam (17:10.806) you have a choice.

Desi (17:12.843) Yeah, that's the thing. you think that personal branding is the future of B2B sales? Is there any other way from now on?

Adam (17:18.327) Uh-uh.

So I think we live in a world where there's many futures. That's kind of like one thing. It's like at the same time, Elon Musk has created a private space company that has satellites flying around the world, and he's trying to hurl people to Mars or whatever. And at the same time, you know.

Desi (17:25.165) Good.

Adam (17:47.764) like in Argentina, like one hour outside of Buenos Aires, people are still living like it's 1,500 years ago, which is so weird that like that, those two things can just, like some people are like racing so far ahead and like others are just kind of staying the same. So I don't think that personal brand will be the only way that companies can grow in the future, but I think more and more of them will get started how mine got started, just because.

Desi (17:57.337) Yeah.

Adam (18:17.312) In the beginning it's so hard and everyone is on social media, all of your prospects.

what do you do? I'm not sure I could have spent money to generate the awareness that I did over the last 12 months. So it's just like, it's not gonna be every company, but certainly we will hear about more next year than this year, and every year afterwards, more startups will be driven by that as a marketing mechanism because it's just so efficient.

Desi (18:56.949) Especially now with the child GPT and all the crap to see. Everybody is producing content, but what is the content, right? And who is posting this content?

Adam (19:05.122) Yeah, but I'm just skeptical. It's like, yeah, I'm skeptical. I think that actually makes people who are, so like my view on this content stuff is like it's art and the best art is not generated from AI. The best art is almost entirely generated from a person still. Maybe AI helps in some small ways, but like I'm talking the best.

I'm not talking about 90 % art. 90 % art is not good enough on social media, which I don't think people really understand. And the benefit of being the best is so much greater. It's like 10 times better to be the top one than the top 10%. It's like 100 times better to be the best.

on social media because that's just the way, the nature of the distribution of the content. So I think AI, the current iteration of AI can do many things, but like looking to it to add meaningful, you know, if that is your goal to like, which I think it should be your goal because like several people can be the best even within a fairly, you know, like just because Gary V is so big, it doesn't.

preclude Joe Rogan from being so big, right? Like, they can both be big in their different ways, right? But they both have to be excellent. You know, they both really have to have created this perfect persona in the minds of their audience, right? So, yeah, I just don't think that AI yet plays a meaningful role in that. You know, and I think there's also this kind of condition where

with so much AI, that's been one of my core tenets of content creation from day one. I'm trying to maximize my humanity in every way possible because we're not even realizing it's happening, but as we get waterboarded with AI-generated content, when someone is maximizing their humanity, that is what you're going to be drawn to. And I'm not even sure you'll know why.

Adam (21:29.004) It's just these slight non-AI things that will kind of pop out and draw people to that. So yeah, that's my view of that.

Desi (21:42.457) I want to unpack a little bit more on kind of your LinkedIn strategy and your personal brand, how you manage to do that. But we're going to do this later. Before that, I want to go through your journey so far with your businesses. So let's shift gears and talk about you as a founder and marketeer. You've bootstrapped three companies to 1 million ARR, each time faster than the last.

And it's clear that you're doing this right. I want to start with Robly, your first business. It was an email marketing tool that you co-founded in 2014. So what was the story there? What did you learn from this experience? us a little bit more about the journey.

Adam (22:21.09) Mm-hmm.

Adam (22:28.824) Yeah.

Ahem.

The story there was we got it to three million ARR and then it stalled. And the reason why was because there was this big vendor called Constant Contact and we were kind of just poaching from them. We were kind of doing what they were doing but like cheaper and you know, whatever. And I think when you do that, you can get around one or 2 % of someone's market share if you're just like copying, which is what we were doing. And...

And then it stopped and I was a very inexperienced entrepreneur and I didn't really understand why and I didn't really understand why nothing else that I did in marketing worked and it's because we didn't have product market fit. Constant contact did and copying constant contact didn't. So yeah.

Get emails solved a problem that had not been solved in email yet. And that problem was we can get you emails of people who visit your website but do not fill out a form, which was incredibly novel in 2019 when we launched it. And that was a much faster journey to one million because it had this product market fit that the email space did not. Now the problem is you're effectively selling people leads.

Desi (23:41.209) Mm-hmm.

Adam (23:55.276) if you're doing that. then selling people leads is a very high churn space. Selling leads and selling intent data, it's incredibly high churn. Whereas like the email newsletter system is not. That's like a pretty, because businesses store their data in there. So it becomes this CRM for them almost, which is like the lowest churn space. And so that's annoying and I'm still in that space. And then, you know, with RB2B,

Yeah, I mean, I was able to harness this organic social media thing in a way that I think surprised everybody, me included. And the promise of the product, which we've talked through some of the details, which is like a little different than reality, was so large and I made the offer so compelling. It was like a freemium thing that it really took off. We won zero to four million ARR in...

nine months, which is pretty fast by most SaaS standards. you know, now it's at the point where we have to reinvent ourselves because that original promise is not, expectations are set much higher than the reality that people experience with the product. You know, and we're just like selling to the wrong people and like we need a slightly different delivery method.

of this signal and like a bunch of other stuff. But I'm still really optimistic about it because it's obvious why you need these signals and like no one has won the space yet. like there's not, yeah, there's just, it's not clear to me that there's like a very easy way to get these signals involved in your workflow that the signals everyone would want. So yeah, I think as

I go farther in my career, like the importance of having a great and differentiated product just, you know, it becomes more and more of a priority. And then, you know, equally having a unique distribution path, which I would consider this founder brand LinkedIn stuff, is, you know, massively important as well.

Desi (26:19.521) think if somebody is listening to you and they don't know about your journey and what you've achieved, they might think you're a little bit pessimistic, a little bit harsh on yourself in terms of what you have achieved. Just for the listeners who are not familiar, so first company, you reach one million ARR in how many?

Adam (26:32.0) Yeah.

Adam (26:42.23) I don't know. was a couple of years and we sold that business for 10 million bucks. And then the second business.

Desi (26:45.145) Yeah. Yeah. And then with retention come 27 weeks, if I'm right. Yeah.

Adam (26:51.564) Yeah, 27 weeks. And that business is now above $20 million ARR and generates over $10 million of profit every year, which is fantastic. And then, RB2B was super fast. It was like, I don't even know, nine weeks or something. And now in nine months, it's at $4 million ARR. But yeah, it's got a huge churn problem, which is like the most annoying thing for any SaaS entrepreneur.

Desi (26:57.303) Right, let's put this in perspective, everyone. Yeah.

Adam (27:21.59) And I just never, yeah, that's great. Everyone wants companies that total 25 million ARR and make $12 million every year that have no investors. We just take that home and put it in the bank. And my team's great, and I'm very fortunate to be in this position. But I think one of the reasons

I'm able to do what I do is because I have very high standards for what is worthy of being marketed as a product, right? And that's what's being reflected through here. Our product does what it says, for sure. just, you know, people can't make it solve other problems in their business, which they get frustrated by.

You know, like really that's like kind of one of the problems with selling to early stage SaaS. It's like nothing will work for them and then tools show up and then they interpret what the tool does as something that will help them when the only thing that can help them is making their customers happier and you know, sort of getting closer to product market fit. I've talked to a lot of early stage founders. have a whole community of

Desi (28:19.223) Right.

Adam (28:48.942) these people now and that is the universal mistake. It's like somebody with 200,000 ARR is spending $15,000 a month on meta ads to generate leads. It's just the wrong way to do it, right? You need to work on your one liner, you need to work on a quick pitch, and you need to go into...

Create a dream 100 list of people to use this thing and then go find them, get in front of them, convince them to use your product and give you feedback. That's the only thing almost every early stage founding team should be doing. And the world makes you believe that there's all of this other stuff that will work for you because it's working for people like me. And I'm just way far ahead. But I'm the one making content.

So like, you know.

Desi (29:43.105) What

What do you think has been like the factors that have impacted retention.com growth? And by the way, amazing domain as part of our job, we have quite a lot of naming, domain name research and stuff. I bet you invested quite good money in this domain name. So congratulations on actually owning it.

Adam (30:02.998) Yeah. Yeah. It was $800,000.

Desi (30:08.791) Well, yeah, great investment, but.

Adam (30:09.774) Unsurprised, mean, that's kind of like what, that's kind of like what a real, and it's not even perfect for what we do, but it was like the biggest domain name I could get that was kind of related to what we do. But yeah, that's, know, like if you want like a word that has, you know, that like, it's like, yeah, 750 million bucks. that's like what those costs. I would not recommend buying a big domain.

Desi (30:23.757) Yes.

Adam (30:39.072) until you are like a long way along. This kind of stuff can hurt you. It's like, it's much better to fight with your product and get it good enough with a bad name. And then once you have product market fit, make an investment in a rebrand and a big name. another, you know, it's like, like.

Desi (30:46.041) Right.

Adam (31:07.084) all the brand that I have, like you don't really have a brand in the beginning. So yeah. What have I learned from attention.co.

Desi (31:11.029) You

Desi (31:16.889) For Retention.com, the early days, you were called get emails, right? That's direct, straight to the point. Going back to your point, there is no brand there. There is a very, very good superior product. Do you think that was the factor that actually drove attention and growth in the beginning because you had a very good product? Was there more to that in terms of strategy, marketing?

Adam (31:22.114) Yeah.

Desi (31:42.327) With Robly you had this email list that you were using. What about with RetentionComm? What was the driving factor there?

Adam (31:47.692) Yeah. With getting get emails off the ground, we did a, the product was very novel and differentiated. And then I did this like Facebook ad campaign, which was really, really good. It was just like, I didn't even know I had it in me, but like my wife and I once a week did these like amusing talking head videos, kind of answering the sales questions and like,

agitating this like angry community of privacy people that hated me because I was doing this. I was enabling this and it just worked really, really well. It only worked for about six months because the nature of the ad campaign was like, we had this PLG product that like there was a $9 a month plan and there was like a $5,000 a month plan. like every couple of weeks we would have someone, we have someone just click through to a $5,000 a month plan and like pay back the ads from the prior weeks. And then

Desi (32:21.517) Okay.

Adam (32:46.69) you know, as you spend more, the ads get less efficient. And then like, you know, I spent 50 grand on ads a couple of months in a row and like didn't get a single big sign up. like, you know, it was just a, it was like, we can't do this anymore. We got to focus on these valuable customers and build a better product. But that was, that was the launch strategy and it was incredible for, so like attribution so hard, I think in like the e-commerce world,

Some companies can run a paid ad and have a negative cash conversion cycle, meaning they can be profitable on the first order or whatever. This was like, I'll never regret running those ads, because I think it just, we were hitting everybody in this TAM, and we were also cold emailing them, and everyone who got on a demo, and there was this word of mouth, because the product did what we said it did, and it was good. But almost everyone who got on a demo had said they saw the ad.

So, similar to RB2B, it just created this massive amount of awareness right in the beginning, but no one's gonna give a shit unless your product is good and differentiated. It's just going to be a total waste of money. So yeah, the awareness was created with RB2B through Organic Social, through that one it was through paid, but.

The reason it was working is because we had strong word of

Desi (34:16.215) Right, so you weren't actually relying only on the pay dot. There were quite a lot of...

Adam (34:16.494) You

Adam (34:20.494) Yeah, like it wasn't like a profit, you know, a profitable ad. I mean.

Yeah, there wasn't like a, yeah, yeah. It was just sort of speeding everything up. It was really doing a great job at the awareness thing.

Desi (34:35.979) Right, yeah. It's the awareness you create.

Desi (34:42.755) Yeah. Because I suppose those are the leads you would get from the actual describing were not your perfect leads in terms of who you want to sell the product to.

Adam (34:51.982) Yeah, like Facebook Facebook b2b customers are like 20 % monthly churn customers You know like disaster like it's a lot of wannabes like it's it's a really really hard and bad Yeah, so so yeah, that's then that's ultimately why we stopped it's like this is not Like it got us here, that's great, but it's like not a strategy for

Desi (35:02.357) Right.

Yeah.

Adam (35:21.304) go forward. We just needed to be much more targeted after that.

Desi (35:25.305) With RB2B, so you hit 1 million ARR in just 16 weeks and then from 1 to 2 million in six weeks. Again, mind-blowing numbers. What was it? Was it your personal brand there, like the social media activities you have that you think was the main factor behind the growth or was it like because again, the freemium offer was really compelling?

Adam (35:35.884) Mm-hmm.

Adam (35:54.67) It was a combination of all of that. You know, it was like, I had done a really, really good job at Founder Brand. And, you know, I had really broken through. The product was really different than, I mean, nine months later we have like, I don't know, 10, 15 people kind of doing the same thing or whatever. But like at the time there was no one. So it was like really different. And,

Desi (35:57.29) Mm.

Desi (36:03.321) Mm-hmm.

Adam (36:24.224) We, yeah, we had a really compelling offer too, like that free thing. Yeah, it was all three of those things. The best content, instead of company level, it's person level, and by the way, it's free. All three of those things were like, stop you then, you're tracks. mean, now it's just a very different world. I think my content's still probably...

Desi (36:41.411) Yeah.

Adam (36:50.094) you know, for certain audiences, like better than the rest of the stuff people put out because nobody else seems to be able to say negative things about their business. Like I think I'm literally, I'm definitely the only person above 5 million ARR who can say a single negative thing about their business or themselves. There may be some people at one in 2 million ARR who can say it. I still don't see it that often. I still mostly see like, hurrah, hurrah, like we're crushing it, like whatever. So.

Desi (37:17.337) Everybody's crushing it. They have investors though, right?

Adam (37:20.342) Yeah, yeah, everybody's crossing it. like, think that that's, it's this weird, unique moat. Like I'm able to say it's not working and no one else can. And like, everyone's feeling that they're just not riding it. Right. So, so yeah, I'm excited about that for the future. I think there's a lot of reasons why people at my stage can't, know, investors like no way they're worried about their teams and what they think. I'm just like,

I think it helps my team to live in the reality that I'm living in. To be brutally honest about the circumstances we're in is helpful for everybody because it helps make better decisions, which is not, that's not a very common view. People say that they believe things like that, but it's not. It doesn't play out in reality, in my experience.

Desi (38:15.257) On the challenges you have now with Chern, with RB2B, do you think that the freemium offer is a bit too generous? Do you think that has been the reason? Or I'm sure that you're trying to identify this internally is not an easy answer to that. But what's your hypothesis there?

Adam (38:32.814) Yeah. So look, the churn, the monthly churn on our $99 plan is 20 % per month. The monthly churn on our $1,500 a month plan is two and a half percent per month. So that kind of tells you everything you need to know. Like little guys can't get this to work for a lot of reasons. They want it to be something that it is not. So maybe the freemium thing is too generous.

Desi (38:42.489) Mm.

Desi (38:47.479) There we go. Yeah.

Desi (38:54.498) Right.

Mm-hmm.

Adam (39:01.518) But at the same time, part of me wants to just make it a massive free plan and only sell to people who are like series Bs, C, just larger companies who, the way that I describe that I believe that the signal's useful, to help their reps move deals down the funnel, like, you know.

Desi (39:11.673) proper product-like growth, right?

Desi (39:22.169) Mm.

Adam (39:30.582) It's almost like I want to just give it to everybody else and then only deal with people who can do that with the product. The service addressable market is small. In terms of numbers of accounts, it's just smaller than I would have thought. But yeah, you live and you learn. who knows what the future holds?

Desi (39:40.355) Yeah.

Adam (40:00.106) I love the freemium thing because I do believe that it creates this fantastic awareness. think like I'm in this weird spot where like we withhold some stuff from our free account and then people compare our free account to other paid accounts, you know, and not the paid account to paid accounts. So it's, it's, it's in, yeah, there's a bunch of really weird stuff I'm trying to work through.

You know, like this problem with people saying we give them a bunch of shit leads when that's like the people who are on their website is just like, you know what I mean? It's like, it's like a weird thing. And like, don't give, yeah. And like, we don't give repeat visitors to free accounts. So over time, the percentage of noise traffic gets higher and higher, which I'm also struggling with. It's like, you know, it's like, all the ICP people came in like the first week or.

Desi (40:30.599) Yeah.

Desi (40:34.015) It's not like you bring the traffic, right?

Adam (40:54.862) It's like, well, they're coming back. We're just not telling you because you're not paying us. But that's like a weird negative brand effect. So there's like ton of excitement right in the beginning of this thing. the free product, sort of, yeah. With every startup, it ends up being something very different than you originally imagined. At least that's been my experience. And this is no different. It's just way different and way less straightforward than.

I thought it was going to be nine months ago when I launched it, but I'm not surprised.

Desi (41:26.329) Yeah, absolutely. It goes back to what we discussed earlier to the sales skills and the capabilities that the team has in-house to actually leverage the data and the contacts you give them. Do you think that some of those, obviously it's a completely different service, but some of those people who are complaining that you give them fraplets and they don't know what to do with them, they would benefit from some kind of coaching and advice and blueprint what they should do?

after they get this data or that's not in your domain.

Adam (41:56.758) Yeah, like to me, this is the perfect use case of the current version of AI. Look at all of this information and tell me what to say, right? Like synthesize all of this down to something that is contextually relevant to this person, right? Like that's my understanding of what this version of AI does better than anyone or anything, right? Like it's not gonna like kill humanity. It's not gonna like.

Desi (42:05.592) Right.

Desi (42:09.401) Yeah.

Adam (42:26.968) whatever, it's just like, that's what it does. It like is really, really good at research. It's really, really good at synthesis. so I'm hoping that we can use it that way. You know, it's like, okay, here's a great, you know, person that you are focused on because the CRM says so, you know, it's the fifth time they visited during this three months sale cycle, you know, given this, this, and this, and what they're looking at, like contemplate sending them this.

Desi (42:40.067) Mm-hmm.

Adam (42:56.492) Like that to me shouldn't be that hard to deliver given the technology that's out there that kind of does that. We're not there yet, but like I think that's a good product, you know. Whereas like running these leads through clay for a low traffic B2B website, enriching them and like sending out emails on a bunch of spammer domains. Like that's just never gonna work for most people. But like the UGC in the market.

Desi (42:56.793) Right.

Desi (43:09.27) Yeah.

Desi (43:23.321) Right, it depends what you sell, right? If it's a cheap sale, okay, but yeah.

Adam (43:26.614) Yeah, the UGC in the market would lead you to believe that that's the way to use RV2B. So there's this big disconnect of what we have sold and what our UGC partners have sold and the reality of how we believe this is actually valuable. And again, we're at 4Million ARR, I'm not complaining and yeah, I'm in a better spot than almost everyone, but I think it's probably helpful to know how...

Desi (43:31.971) Mm.

Desi (43:42.745) Mm-hmm.

Adam (43:56.622) not satisfied I am with the situation for other early stage people. Unless you are growing exponentially every month, you should feel how I do, until you are.

Desi (44:06.283) Right, I think.

I think it's amazing how kind of reflective and how you really critical you are about everything that is happening because that's the way to actually identify problems and go back and fix them. And one thing I'm noticing about your approach from what you've been just telling us so far is how you're offering and growth strategies seems to evolve with each company and with each stage of the company.

You have this ability to adapt and pivot based on what the market needs, what's the best channel for the particular moment. How quickly do you those decisions internally when you identify your spot? There is an opportunity or there is a problem. You're a small team, right? So are you really nimble and quick and decisive when you make those changes?

Adam (44:55.618) Yeah, look, I think with anything, mean, organic social isn't like this, but I was a year into my experimenting with my other much larger business that I thought that I was gonna have a huge edge from it there. it's just all about running a ton of, throwing spaghetti against the wall, running many cheap, quick experiments and seeing.

Desi (45:14.745) You

Adam (45:22.766) what signal you get back from those experiments. I didn't know I was gonna be running ads for six months, but the first ad that I ran worked really well, and then five ads later it worked really, really well. And I was like, holy shit. And then after doing it for two months and getting nothing back, I was like, well, this is done. I'm not spending another $50,000 of my own money to get a bunch of.

people who don't even know what their business does, right? Like to use this product and churn immediately. So yeah, that would be my advice for any, like, know, two things really matter. It's like making a better product for your customers and making them happier, and then like how are you going to create.

an enormous amount of awareness at some point when you're ready. And that last part of that sentence is mission critical. It's not even really worth investing a lot in until there is a tight group of people that are very happy with your product and you know why they should use it rather than anything else. So yeah.

That's kind of where I'm at with that.

Desi (46:40.493) What do you think you are really good at as a founder? What's your superpower? Is that adaptability perhaps? You know, I'm a big believer that every founder has something unique in their background or past experiences that makes them especially suited to succeed with the company they're building at the moment. So what's that for you? What do you think when you kind of reflect on who you have become?

Adam (47:04.856) I mean, I think I've become a very, very savvy marketer. You know, of course, right? Like no one would be, I wouldn't be on this podcast unless I was. In the current iteration of That's His Founder Brand content. And then, you know, I think I'm pretty good at product, meaning like taking in a lot of information from users and prioritizing what we should make.

Desi (47:09.625) Mm.

Adam (47:34.402) based on who the important users are, right? It's not easy. The human instinct is to want to boil oceans, meaning like you want to do everything. Another thing that I would tell any early stage founder is like, it's about focus. It's like, at the same time you're like running several cheap, cost, low effort experiments, like.

Desi (47:39.651) Right.

Desi (47:55.545) Thank

Adam (48:03.786) Man, the more of your organizational energy and your own energy you can put on one thing, however you can get clarity on what that one thing should be, which is the hard part, the better you're gonna do. So yeah, I think that those things are kind of who I've become over time. Yeah, I'm like product and marketing, sorry.

Desi (48:35.352) was.

Adam (48:35.468) I just keep getting called by someone. Yeah, and she'll be fine. It's Diana, my co-founder.

Desi (48:40.055) I hope it's not urgent.

Desi (48:44.473) Do you still have another 10-15 minutes to finish the chart or do you have a hard stop now?

Adam (48:50.174) got to, I got to bounce at, at 10. have another call. unfortunately.

Desi (48:54.809) Okay, all right. okay. And before you founded Robly, you worked in banking, you were a trader. Do you think this influenced your mindset as a founder? I know you never raised funding, right? So how do you think this impacted everything?

Adam (49:04.119) Uh-huh.

Adam (49:09.206) Yeah, well that was helpful. Really the most helpful was that I had saved a lot of money and it enabled me to bootstrap my first company, which then enabled me to fund all of the rest of the ventures from money that I had made on the last one. Which by the way is an amazing way to do it if people can. Which is a different topic entirely. Nothing else was transferable, which is like why it's so hard to...

It's just really hard to like completely rewire your brain from one thing to another. and you know, I was lucky enough to basically not run out of money before that happened, you know? yeah, yeah, that's been my thing. It's, it's, not, not very many people are focused on it in, in, in tech for just the whole system is set up to make you think that the opposite.

Desi (49:52.405) Right, always focused on profit, And is that a viable business?

Adam (50:08.43) that it's not about profit, like, I always just thought that, look, my experience has been, I get stuck, I get unstuck, I get stuck, I get unstuck, I'm stuck again right now, like I'm gonna get unstuck again. If you're very profitable through all of that, getting stuck literally doesn't matter. So if you are dependent on venture capital, getting stuck is a major problem, major problem. And it forces you to do a whole bunch of things that

are not in the best interest of the company. And I haven't met anyone that doesn't just get stuck just like I do. You know what mean? So from that perspective, I think running profitable businesses is incredibly valuable. You know that the journey's going to be very bumpy and a long and winding road. And it doesn't work out for most people who raise money. I mean, there's a few people.

Like I know some incredibly prolific serial entrepreneurs who should be using VC. No one else should be really. There's other types of money you can raise. Like people start restaurants all the time. The same people who would give you money for a restaurant. If they gave you money instead of a venture capital investor, you could run businesses how I run them and you would be much happier.

Desi (51:29.685) Awesome. Thank you very much for your time. Adam, it's been like an absolute pleasure meeting you. And before I let you go, just looking back on everything you've built from Robly, Retention.com, RB2B, if you could give yourself one piece of advice when you're starting your journey, what that would be.

Adam (51:47.918) I mean, when I was starting, would be like, just, I just had no idea how important having a differentiated product and offering was until I had one. know? Like, there's some intuitive things about entrepreneurship that are not immediately obvious to someone who was a credit default swap trader for the prior 10 years. And that was like a big one. And the importance of having a great team.

is also, is also it.

Desi (52:22.041) Thank you very much for your time. Have a great day ahead and I will keep you posted. I'll keep you posted to 20sgo's life and tagging you and stuff. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Bye bye.

Adam (52:22.786) Thanks, Jesse.

I will. All right. Perfect. Have a good one. Bye.