He grew to $25M in ARR and $14M in annual profits—with no funding & no dilution. | Adam Robinson, Founder of Retention.com

Adam Robinson once struggled with a stagnant email SaaS stuck at $3M ARR, but he kept experimenting until he found how to solve a problem no one else was tackling—and everything changed. Suddenly, buyers were begging for his identity-based marketing tool—so he spun out Retention.com and grew it to $14M+ in annual profit with no outside funding.

In this episode, Adam reveals why he ignored “scalable hacks” until his product proved undeniable, the two keys that finally unleashed product-market fit, and how he uses no-friction brand marketing on LinkedIn to sign up thousands of new leads.

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Why You Should Listen

1. He chose profit over fundraising – Adam shows how ignoring “growth-hack hype” and focusing on real word-of-mouth built a wildly profitable SaaS.

2. Shocking pivot to product-market fit – A failed email tool spun out a game-changing identity product that users demanded.

3. The #1 trap killing early-stage founders – Why “growth hacking” tactics fail without genuine pull, and what to do instead.

4. Bootstrapping to $14M profit – His surprising path from 3M stalled ARR to unstoppable momentum (with a team of only six).

5. LinkedIn brand building done right – How to attract thousands of perfect-fit leads—no spammy sequences required.

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Keywords

Bootstrapped SaaS, Product Market Fit, Email Marketing Growth, Founder Lessons, B2B LinkedIn Strategy, High Profit Margins, Startup Pivot, Word-of-Mouth Marketing, Early-Stage Experimentation

Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:57) A Bootstrap Story
(00:06:33) Why Bootstrapping Often Means You Can't Lose
(00:10:36) The downside of raising VC
(00:19:53) A Case Study: Constant Contact
(00:22:45) Find an Unsolved Porblem
(00:32:06) PMF and Word of Mouth
(00:46:45) Piece of Advice

Chapters

• 1:57 A Bootstrap Story
• 6:33 Why Bootstrapping Often Means You Can't Lose
• 10:36 The downside of raising VC
• 19:53 A Case Study: Constant Contact
• 22:45 Find an Unsolved Porblem
• 32:06 PMF and Word of Mouth
• 46:45 Piece of Advice

Transcript

Adam Robinson (00:00):

You really have no idea how big the thing is you're working on until you throw it out there and see what the adoption is. If your startup is stuck at a couple million ARR, it's probably something radically different that's going to get you to a true product market fit rather than just incremental feature building trying to outdo your competitor or something like that.

 I think you need very strong word of mouth to make anything else work. I was trying everything and the conclusion that I came to is that the people who can afford to buy these Facebook ads are people who already have word of mouth and people are hearing about it everywhere and then the ad shows up and somebody clicks through.

The only thing you should be doing until you are getting referrals that you are not asking for ,many every week, is talking to prospects or customers or writing code. If anyone is doing anything else, you are wasting your fucking time and money. You heard it here first, so that is a public service announcement. Yeah, we're going to do 14 million of profit this year and if we plateau, I don't care. 

Previous Guests (1:00)

That's product market fit, product market fit, product market fit. I call that the product market fit question, product market fit, product market fit and product market fit. Product market fit. I mean the name of the show is product market fit. 

Pablo Srugo (1:12)

Do you think the product market fit show has product market fit? If you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take up your phone, you have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you.

Adam. Welcome to the show dude.

Adam Robinson (01:26):

Thank you Pablo. Happy to be here.

Pablo Srugo (01:28):

So I mean I found you on LinkedIn as I'm sure many people do these days and one of the posts I saw a few weeks ago, I think it's probably a perfect starting point because it just gets us into this idea. You're big into bootstrapping and I think this post does it justice. So maybe tell me that story, it's about some guy who's doing the big VC thing, trying to hire you 7-8  years ago. I'll stop there, but you can tell a story better than I can.

Adam Robinson (01:56):

My first startup, I was able to bootstrap it, but it got stuck at 3 million ARR and it was cash flow positive, but it wasn't growing and it was really, I mean it's just emotionally as an ambitious person, that's kind of a tough spot to be in. It was not growing, but it was like if you're not growing in tech, you're dying. So I was in this position where I knew I needed to do something bigger for myself and I've kind of always been very transparent about everything that's going on to me and my friends and I had a buddy who he started to start up around the same time as me. He raised round after round after round.

(02:43):

After a few years I realised it was because he had never really had product market fit and he was just selling a new seed stage dream to a different investor. He’d went to Stanford, super smart, he could talk to anybody. And then finally it stopped working, right? 12 years in, 35 million. Their families put in a million dollars each of their own dough and finally he couldn't do another round, so they just wound it down. In the middle, there was a point when I was just lost in my entire life, not just my business life, and he was like, dude, you're a former trader. We want that skillset to run this employment marketplace we're doing or whatever. They just did a big round. He's like, that's what Uber did, come do it for us. And I was like, no, I have my own startup.

(03:33):

And then there was this back and forth, over email, that I pulled up before I wrote that post and the dude sitting there accusing me of not being ambitious enough because he's like, “what do you want from your life?” I'm like, honestly man, my dream is: I'd heard about this guy and my co-founder used to work for him named Ross Paquette from Maropost, it's like an email marketing automation platform. And he got his business. He was a sole founder, owned all the equity, got his business to 30 million ARR and was banking 20 million bucks every year and it was stuck. But who gives a shit? I mean he was miserable because he wanted to be Salesforce or something like that. But relative to my situation, I was looking at that going, I don't see anyone else doing that with software businesses. And I had a hard time envisioning at that time the unicorn thing for myself, but I could totally see getting to a few tens of millions of revenue and running it super lean and having one of these best lifestyles. When you say lifestyle business, you think of something like my first business, 3 million ARR. A million and a half bucks gets split between two or three founders and everybody's happy. But on the other end of the spectrum, if you have 20 million of profit and you're splitting it between two founders, that's a really different thing.

(05:00):

That's a bigger secondary round than most founders ever get to take. That's happening to you every single year. So I got pretty obsessed with this idea and I had no idea how I was going to get there, but I literally wrote it down that that was what I wanted. And it was crazy to think that it was still years away from even being, it all spawned from this retention.com, which used to be called GetEmails, and when I wrote it down it would still be 24 months before I even started that company. So I was just in the middle of this totally stuck place. This is why this guy's calling me out for not being ambitious enough and not wanting to, he's like, that's not a big enough vision. By the way, I was also an angel investor in his company. So I got the disillusion papers, I got the disillusion papers the first month that we actually made a million dollars of profit in a month and we're still friends. I went for a run with him yesterday. Point of the story is he is definitely not- he’s got a wife and two kids, he's starting over right now. He is not saying that I am not ambitious enough anymore. You know what I mean? Those are not words that are leaving his mouth. in the long run, stacking profitable businesses on top of profitable businesses versus his path. It's just night and day how much better it is for me. I mean it's just really clear when you look at those-

Pablo Srugo (06:32):

So I would say, I remember when I was a founder, the thing I paid attention to, and maybe I was just dumb, but I was young, I was early twenties, but the thing that's hot is you see some company raise $10 million, especially when you see obviously the company's raising way more, but that's kind of where your mind is. Those people that are raising that are getting that $10 million series A and what I've come to realise is you're jealous of the person who raised a 10 million series A until you're the person who bootstrapped the 10 million in revenue and then you're just laughing because you kind of can't lose if you get there, it's a lot more pain upfront because you raise 2-3 million, you pay yourself close to a market salary or at least you can if you choose to. Whereas when you're bootstrap, you eat what you kill sort of thing.

(07:21):

But if you get there, you can't lose because you don't have this huge breath stack. You don't have this go big or go home. You must go big or go home. You actually, the big risk in venture, and by the way, I'm a VC, so for me, I only work with the ones that are trying to build these massive businesses, but I still recognise that the risk in venture is, you plateau, you're always priced so far ahead of where you are. So plateauing is death. Whereas if you're bootstrap and you don't want to plateau, nobody wants to, but if you plateau with 10 million, you're bootstrap. Okay, you're running at 20-30% net margins. I don't think anybody's with, I figure your next thing out, no big deal.

Adam Robinson (07:57):

Yeah, we're going to do 14 million of profit this year.

Pablo Srugo (8:03)

Wow

Adam Robinson8:03)

and if we plateau, I don't care.

Pablo Srugo (08:06):

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Adam Robinson (08:08):

You know what I mean? If we plateau, I'm just trying to keep that plateau for five more years.

Pablo Srugo (08:12):

That's right. Yeah.

Adam Robinson (08:13):

And that's my billion dollar exit or whatever. It's not a billion dollars, but it's like if you do the math or whatever, it's like the 5% of the billion dollar exit got to me that way. And there's a whole generation of go-to-market companies that are just in this position right now. So it's like 6sense is a perfect example. They raised it 50 times revenue in 2021 or early 2022, and then they did not grow last year. You can't not grow after you raised at 50 times your revenue. What's going to happen to them is the same thing that happened to Infusionsoft. They will eventually sell for less than they preferred because that's the only path unless they can reinvent the wheel, what are they trying to do? They're trying to build every single tool under the sun, just like every single other person in their position and they're telling the narrative of we are going to be the all one go to market suite and no one's going to buy it.

Pablo Srugo (09:09):

And you're talking about Clay recently? No. As well in this kind of light?

Adam Robinson (09:12):

Yeah, look, Clay's in a different- so 6Sense raised that round when they were in the hundreds of millions of ARR and Clay raised at 1.25 when they were at 30. So again, these guys are the most ambitious- I had them on my show and he's like, we are trying to be synonymous with growing a company. We are trying to be, when you get your LLC, the next thing you're going to do is go get Clay. You know what I mean? That's a massive ambition that I struggle to think even how I could think that big related to what I do-

Pablo Srugo (09:54):

Right.

Adam Robinson (09:55):

you know what I mean? But it's just crazy how big they're thinking and they've got unbelievable traction and they've got a lot of other really good stuff, good things going for them. Yeah, man. I'm just not them. I would do it like MailChimp. MailChimp had that level of brand, heat, traction, all that shit, and they didn't do- Well, Clay was always Venture. Clay had raised $12 million before they had a dollar of revenue, which is I think why they stay on this path because you can't get off of that if you did that. But let's say they had bootstrapped, it's really easy to- Well it’s not easy. It's easy to raise at a billion dollars. It's not easy to get sold for a billion dollars.

Pablo Srugo (10:34):

That's right. Yeah. It's much harder.

Adam Robinson (10:35):

Clay could get sold for a billion dollars in a year or two and that to me is just like, and probably more if they just keep leaving the chips on the table, you have if you raise at 1.25, that is not even close to an option. And clearly if you talk to those guys, that's not what they're playing for anyway. They think that this is going to be some-

Pablo Srugo (10:54):

Yeah, it's got to be 10 billion plus. Yeah, for sure. Minimum.

Adam Robinson (10:57):

Yeah. Or it's going to be Shopify but for B2B, a hundred billion thing or something like that, I don't even know. The thing that I would tell the zero to one guys listening to this, right? It's like, God, I hope you get product market fit. The thing that's going to happen to you when you do is you're going to have a hundred investors come to you and try to give you that $10 million, like you said, the second you take that check, you've taken paying yourself dividends like I do, off of the table. There are a lot of businesses that would be great businesses, like the characteristics of mine, we are growing like 20 to 30%, which is not great by a venture business standard. They want 50 or something like that. But it is super highly profitable. We have a great brand. People love working for us.

(11:45):

We do stuff super lean and my life is incredible. I love my team. I'm paying myself a shitload of dough. The second you accept that check, that is off the table, never going to be your life, the way you're going to get rich is through either a secondary transaction transaction or selling the business. Selling the business is very hard to do, especially- you'll take a check and then you'll take a second one, you'll raise 30 or 40 at two or 300, whoever gives you that money, they need a 3 or 4x. So my point in all this is the thing I was saying about Clay is when they raised it 500, I was like, oh, they just took a billion dollar exit off the table and that would've just been so awesome. And then they go and raise it 1.25. It's like, shit, man. Now the number's like Five.

Pablo Srugo (12:32):

That's right. That's right. You raise the bar a lot, a lot every time.

Adam Robinson (12:38):

And I think there's a lack of appreciation for how pointy the pyramid is or maybe it's flat actually. And then it just goes up to a point, there's probably 2,500 people you could sell a business for $30 million to, a solid EBITDA business, strategic whatever, and then every time you add a zero to that, it's like-

Pablo Srugo (13:07):

Yeah, the pool of bars at some point you got to go public. Nobody left. That's right.

Adam Robinson (13:13):

And so then it's like IPO robust man, the number of companies that thought they were IPOing in late 2021 versus if they're being honest with themselves, the number that actually think they are now. And

Pablo Srugo (13:25):

The interesting thing about ambition is, and this has really changed I think over the last decade or so, because the thing is, if you think about the software businesses, the internet business post 2000 and now they're really big 10, 20 years later, and those are the people you hear on podcasts. Those are the people that you hear talked about, Brian Chesky, Mark Zuckerberg, whoever it is, and they obviously have at this point in their careers, in their lives, massive, massive goals. And a lot of times what they're talking about is you should have huge ambition and these sort of things, but when you go back to when those companies started take most of these, you take Zuck at Facebook, he actually didn't have in his mind at that time, I'm going to build a trillion dollar business. He was literally just playing around. You look at Shopify and Toby and he actually is quoted saying that his goal, we're looking back at let's say 2005 ish when he was starting, his goal was to build a 20% super profitable business and now it's nearly a hundred billion outcome. So my point is even some of the ones that turn huge, don't think that way at the outset.

Adam Robinson (14:30):

I kind of fell victim-. So here's the thing. I think if you get in a position really in SaaS and software, it's all about churn, in my opinion. And if you get a business that actually has true net revenue retention, I will not hold it against you if you feel compelled to really go for it.

Pablo Srugo (14:47):

Well, sometimes you should for sure. Yeah, that's right.

Adam Robinson (14:49):

Yeah, exactly. The mistake that I think a lot of people make is that they try to go for it and they're delusional about that aspect or they don't really understand the metrics behind it, or there's something that's going on to where maybe they're long deals so the churn doesn't show up for two and a half years or something like that. Yeah, dude, it's a plateau. Or they have a smaller TAM than they thought and they get there and they haven't built adjacencies or something like that. There's just a million ways you can plateau.

Pablo Srugo (15:24):

And why would you say that It's all about retention and you mentioned true net dollar. What's true NRR versus fake net dollar retention?

Adam Robinson (15:32):

I think a 50% gross that has enough expansion to still be positive is kind of fake NRR, you know what I mean? Low logo retention, but an expansion dynamic

(15:49):

That doesn't really- I mean I think MailChimp probably had that, but also their TAM was a hundred million companies  or something like that. a billion people was their TAM or something. So I think if you have that, the TAM's got to be absolutely enormous. Otherwise what I mean is it's like a real logo retention that has actual seed expansion, apartment expansion, something like that. There's just a very clear path to that growing. Email and CRM are generally, I think SMB email and CRMs that are exclusive SMB are the lowest, but those are- it's like if the state of the software is expanding over time, you've got a pretty good shot that if you're not selling to SMB, it's got a pretty good shot that it's real. I don't have any of that. My state does not expand at all. It sucks.

Pablo Srugo (16:43):

So let's actually dive on that cause we kind of jumped into the middle. Tell me a bit more about the origin story. What is retention.com and where did the idea come from? How did you get that started?

Adam Robinson (16:54):

Yeah, so I mentioned I was running this email newsletter app and I'm not drawn to email in any way. I just wanted to start a startup and I tried five different things and the email thing, we figured out how to basically poach customers from constant contact and then that got us 1% of their revenue and then after the lead pool was dead, the product that we were left with could not compete with MailChimp. So I mean it wasn't even close. If our users that we had acquired knew that MailChimp existed, we would've had zero customers.

Pablo Srugo (17:27):

But it was just like a MailChimp competitor. That's what it was. Like a newsletter?

Adam Robinson (17:31):

Yeah well, Constant Contact was the pioneer, MailChimp was the disruptor, and MailChimp had this incredible economic model which then fueled- they built a freemium product in a space that people did not think freemium products were possible

Pablo Srugo (17:44):

I see.

Adam Robinson (17:46):

They thought that the nature of email marketing was too complex to actually build a simple enough retool that worked and they were able to do it and it was epic. And I think that if it was just Constant Contact that we were up against, we actually probably could have grown that business to something well beyond what it was. But the fact that MailChimp just absolutely- I mean it wasn't just us, they destroyed everyone. They destroyed everyone. So aside from a few cases, you could say Klaviyo, they didn't destroy, but Klaviyo decided, I mean this is an incredible thing to think about. Klaviyo decided to be the go-to tool for Shopify when Shopify was 85 million in value. They were like a series B or something or series A, it's probably series B at the time, maybe a series A company. Shopify as Klaviyo grew to, IPO grew to 150 billion market cap. 

Pablo Srugo (18:46):

That's right.

Adam Robinson (18:46):

Wait, Shopify 1000X’d as this tool was like we are the best one for Shopify. They were able to compete with MailChimp, but I think that they were holding onto the right boat. I think we could agree, but basically no one else. I mean I think ActiveCampaign has a decent business ConvertKit(Kit.com now) was  out there doing the bootstrap thing for bloggers, but they fucking levelled all of the MailChimp levelled the entire rest of the space. It was like MailChimp, Klaviyo, a couple other vendors and then 200 vendors at 2 million ARR

Pablo Srugo (19:20):

Because by the way why? they just had a better product or just the pure economic model?

Adam Robinson (19:24):

So they got far enough along with this freemium model that they could max out all of the channels advertising their free product and then what are you going to do? you can't be more free than free and they have more money to spend on their free offer than anyone else, so you can't be more free than free. And they had this kind of moat with integrations and it was just no one took them seriously until it was unstoppable. It is a breathtaking execution. I mean I just sat there and watched the whole thing happen. I was just ;ike, how do I get in this space? How do I get in a place to do this at some point? and by the way, this is a really helpful thing for early stage founders, so if you can study this story, you should. So Constant Contact IPO’d with a hundred million ARR when MailChimp was at 2 million ARR, one of their co-founders talks about this on a podcast. At the time there was Constant Contact at a hundred million and then there was IContact and Vertical Response and they were both trying to do the exact same thing Constant Contact was doing with just far less resources. One of the co-founders was like, how do we do the opposite of that? And they were like, we're going to try free. So they had this up to 2000 contacts really. They started with 800 contacts, but they got up to 2000 for free and then just they had this incredible viral loop of, there was a massive stamp in the bottom right corner of that email that said MailChimp 100% free email marketing, and it wasn't even believable and people thought it was cheap and not a good product, but over time it just swallowed everything because it was just this incredible viral loop and then their brand was so cool and it was just the power freeze immense.

(21:05):

It's amazing.

Pablo Srugo (21:06):

It's huge. It's huge man. Prices are another thing that is kind of like we talked about, lifestyle business I think has a bit of a, let's say negative stigma for whatever reason, not free, but competing on price is another thing that's just not that cool, but it's awesome, man. You can make something free and still have a model that works around it. You can come late to a market and absolutely turn it upside down.

Adam Robinson (21:27):

Totally. And if you watch what I'm doing with RB2B, it's like I'm trying to, it's not really, we'll see. We'll see if I still have a free product in a year or two for now it's working. Yeah, I think with the rest of my go-to market, which is founder-led thought leadership, I think a free offer compliments that really well. The only thing I'm trying to do is air cover. If you look at my post, I don't really talk about RB2B almost ever, unless I'm bitching about churn or doing a monthly update or whatever. But I think I've earned the right to say my stuff is so good that you read the take and then people click through, visit my website. I want to see what this guy does, and that's the entire strategy. It's just like how can I make stuff that is so good that these different types of users and buyers that we have, they want to consume the content irrespective of what I'm selling and it's like building so much trust that eventually they have to click that button to figure out what I do.

Pablo Srugo (22:30):

So I want to talk about the LinkedIn stuff, but first let's get through the Retention story. So this is happening MailChimp, where does retention-?

Adam Robinson (22:37):

Yeah, okay, so yeah, right. The short version of the story is we're just stuck as you could possibly be. And then I'm trying everything. It's not working. I'm going to all these trade shows to figure out how to grow SaaS companies. Nothing that anyone says works. I bump into agencies, whatever their agency is, they say, well, I can grow your SaaS with Facebook ads and it doesn't work. And I'm sure anybody listening to this has had a similar experience. And then this very wise woman who worked at this company called Litmus, I shook her down after she spoke at a trade show and I was telling her my totally beat plan for how I thought I was going to grow this email tool, and she's like, dude, what I would do is I would try to focus on a problem, an email that hasn't been solved yet.

(23:20):

I was like, wow, what problem hasn't been solved yet? And I couldn't even think of one because I've been living in this, what are my competitors doing? What features do they have? We need a drag and drop automation builder and all this shit, and eventually someone told me at lunch that it was possible to get a deliverable email address from someone who did not fill out a form, who visited the website, so someone hits the site, they leave without filling out a form, you can get an email. I was like, I've never heard of that before. I know the biggest problem in email is list shrinking. If I could do that, I could sell it to literally anybody with a website.

Pablo Srugo (23:59):

By the way, that still sounds amazing. What are the simple mechanics of how that works?

Adam Robinson (24:04):

The simple mechanics are basically- by the way, this is legal in the US. It's not legal in Europe. GDPR is a first party opt-in for data collection on the internet and the whole chain of things necessary to do this. When you add that part of it, you can't do it, but you can do it in the US. basically ad networks. So the open internet, the open internet survives on these persistent identifiers, so it is an unreadable string of characters that identifies you as Pablo, and then when you go from website to website, they can show you stuff that you're presumably interested in or retargeting ads or whatever. The whole method is just using those and some other probabilistic things to get that persistent identifier back to a real person.

Pablo Srugo (24:49):

That's the crazy part because the cookie piece, I get the following you through, I get, but the tying it to an email is where I'm like, wait, what?!

Adam Robinson (24:56):

Yeah, yeah. And then you gotta do a bunch to make sure the email is safe to send to also, which is another part of it. My whole plan was to try to grow the email tool with this feature, and then what happened was we added the feature and people would sign up for the email tool, they'd use the feature, download the file, put it in Klaviyo and say it was awesome. That's a pretty good indicator of product market fit. It's like if someone's willing to endure a bad user experience and give it a high NPS score, you're sort of moving in the right direction. Meanwhile, it was like, okay, our email tool is so far behind everybody else. If we try to grow the email tool with this feature, it's going to be a shitty product. If we spin it out and connect it to everything, it'll be a great product. And just to give you, so I always like to say I've spent years on either side of product market fit, and so this product, we kind of got some validation when it was a feature inside of our ESP, which by the way, was making money. So I didn't want to distract everyone from the mothership because I tried a bunch of stuff the last three years that didn't work, and I had no idea if this was going to work or not. Honestly, I didn't know.

Pablo Srugo (26:06):

And what year is this by the way?

Adam Robinson (26:08):

2019. What I did was I went to Upwork. I literally saw Drift, was a popular company at the time, and it's this chatbot. 

Pablo Srugo (26:18):

Chatbot, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Adam Robinson (26:20):

They’re not as big anymore. But they made a huge splash. It was big. 

Pablo Srugo (26:23):

I remember they were the number one chatbot. Yeah, back then.

Adam Robinson (26:25):

Huge splash. Huge splash and great brand play. I mean just epic brand play. I was obsessed with it. And they got people to instal Pixel, which is what I needed to do, and it was self-serve on the signup, and then they had a PLG sales motion or whatever. I literally just took snaps- I have this Shopify Photoshop for Dummies app I use called Snagit. I still use it. So I just took screenshots of their entire onboarding process and mocked them up in this Photoshop for Dummies. And then I went to Upwork and got someone to make those into actual Photoshop docs, and then I got somebody else to make those into HTML, and I made a basic dashboard and a “download your contacts here.” Then in 12 weeks, my CTO made a backend that worked with a MailChimp and a Klaviyo integration. We launched it on November 9th.

(27:17):

I also, I went to digital marketer.com and watched their video sales letter class and they have a template for how you write a video sales letter. So I just filled it in with the information about GetEmails, which we were about to launch. I got someone else on Upwork, paid her, a girl named Romina, paid her a thousand dollars to make this word art video from the script that I made, recorded it on my iPhone. The video's all scratchy. You can actually, the videos on retention dot com's website. The video's all scratchy. I bought a song on one of these, you can buy the music-

Pablo Srugo (27:52):

Is this your classic video on how the product works, whatever, or what is this video of?

Adam Robinson (27:56):

It was just like, what if I told you I knew exactly who was on your website?

Pablo Srugo (28:03):

Okay, yeah. One of those explainers,

Adam Robinson (28:05):

It was animated words with the visuals or whatever,

Pablo Srugo (28:08):

Yes

Adam Robinson (28:08):

I put it on Facebook, ran it to a Shopify audience, spent $5,000 and got 10 K monthly recurring revenue in week one.

(28:17):

If I would've spent $5,000 on ads for the email app, I wouldn't have gotten $50 in MRR. I'm serious. You know what I mean? So that is what you're looking for. In a really funny story about all of this, I used to share an office with the guys who created Jasper, the first chat, GPT. It was phenomenal, but I shared an office with 'em for two years before they launched that product. We were both schmucks stuck at two or 3 million a RR for that entire time, and we were both trying anything desperately. They went to YC, they were venture funded, so retention.com used to be called GetEmails. I launched GetEmails in November of 19, they launched Jasper in January, 2021. They watched me grow. I got GetEmails to 3 million ARR, and I had these two things with tiny teams that were cranking out cash and they were trying stuff that was failing.

(29:24):

And we had talked ourselves into thinking that the way forward for us is to just have a portfolio of these 3 million ARR companies with five people, and if each one cranks out a million and a half bucks and you have five of them and you have a couple co-founders living in Aspen, right? You're doing great. And we were totally convinced this was the way forward, and this is so nuts. So we were talking about it a lot and he's like, I'm on board. And we had this plan. We're like, we're good at distribution. We're just going to find these people who can't sell and put a UI on their tech and resell it. And there is a, I'm trying to pull up this text, I don't know how to get to it, but there's a text from Dave that says, got my first sale, had the idea seven days ago, hopefully this is my GetEmails. 

(30:17):

And mind you GetEmails was a 250K ARR at the time. He was trying to just beat that. And that was Jasper. And by the end of month one, they were at 500K MRR, seven months and they were at - they were at 40 million. Those guys went zero to 50 in under 12 months and didn't hire anyone. It was like a team of eight. And then they brought this guy on who's like, we should do a big round. Then they did 200,000,000. 75 secondary, 125 primary, took some chips off the table and then ChatGPT came out. there's a lot of lessons there. I mean the lessons are immense. It's like you really have no idea how big the thing is you're working on until you throw it out there and see what the adoption is. Lesson number two is you're looking for something, like I said, with those Facebook ads, or if you ask Dave, I interviewed him on my weekly show, he's like, people were just dumbfounded. We would just be having conversations. How do I pay you for this, right? If your startup is stuck at a couple million ARR, it's probably something radically different that's going to get you to a true product market fit rather than just incremental feature building trying to outdo your competitor or something like that.

Pablo Srugo (31:42):

You're such a selfish person. I actually can't believe how selfish you are because you've been listening to the show, you listened to this episode, you loved it. You've listened to a bunch of other episodes and you haven't told anyone about it. You haven't told any of the many founder friends that you have about it. Think about how many founders have helped you out when you're building your startup. So don't be selfish. Tell your friends about this episode. Tell 'em about the show and help me help them.

I mean, that's what I was just thinking about that this morning I was talking to another founder, founder of Thatch, and he kind of had one of these stories where for two years he was funded, but him and his co-founder and a team of maybe five or so people just throwing out a product doesn't really work, playing around.

(32:24):

And when he hit it, he just hit it. He went from zero to 10 in a couple of years; it was just a crazy hockey stick type chart. And what I was thinking about was one of the things I noticed, I mean there's some founders who just- take Zuck, they put something out, it's just great Google, whatever. But there's a lot of other founders that are successful that what they really did differently than let's say founders where didn't work is they just didn't settle for these, okay, problem solution sets. They kept trying stuff until they found something that has the pull that you just described for GetEmailsl or for Jasper. Because like you said, once you have that 3 million or 5 million and it is just slowly growing, you can't change that growth curve. Something has to really change. Even the market just suddenly changed, which is kind of good luck to you and I've heard some of those stories. Otherwise you've got to change that problem solution set in a pretty big way to get true insane pull. That is true product market fit.

Adam Robinson (33:28):

I agree with that. And another thing I would say about product market fit since we're on topic is I believed this even when I came to this conclusion when I didn't have product market fit, I was like, I think you need very strong word of mouth to make anything else work. I was trying everything and the conclusion that I came to is the people who can afford to buy these Facebook ads are people who already have word of mouth and people are hearing about it everywhere and then the ad shows up and somebody clicks through and it appears as though the math is working. I don’t. I can't afford to buy this ad. It's not going to convert for me. It's like if you have this incredible body of word of mouth going, then you can do a bunch of stuff that's almost like scissors, snipping off conversions from that big body of word of mouth.

(34:15):

If you don't have that, everything you try will be pushing on a string. And I think word of mouth is analogous for early product market fit. I think it needs to, it's more than that at later stages. But yeah, I just truly believe it and I see, so it's like what's the biggest mistake early stage founders make without question, in my opinion it's doing what I did and you're like, I'm stuck. What do I do? You go to SaaS Fest or you listen to Nathan Locke's webinar and it's like, here's what Notion's doing in partnerships. And you're like, cool, I need a partnership's motion because Nathan said the notion was doing this. And it's like, no, it's not about Monday dot com's SEO strategy for you. Right? The reason Monday dot com's SEO strategy works is because they have an insane product market fit somehow, right?

Pablo Srugo (35:03):

A hundred percent. Yeah. What works post product market fit, it's two worlds. post product market fit,  You got to worry about culture, you got to worry about partnerships, you got to worry about how to sell, you got to worry about org charts. You got to worry so many things pre product market fit, you got to worry about getting pro market fit and you can't just use those tools here and expect great outcomes.

Adam Robinson (35:20):

And to me, it's like I did a show with Clay a couple of weeks ago and I kind of knew this, but I didn't really know this, that Varun, who's their co-founding go-to-market guy? He joined them when they had 20 customers paying a hundred dollars a month. That's crazy. And that was at the end of 2021. So a little over three years later, they are a unicorn. What did he do his first year? I think most people would've sat down as a go-to-market person, they would've been like, okay, I need my hundred shitty domains. I need to hook it up to Instantly and I need to get this pipe coming in and then I'm going to also work on my LinkedIn game and do some thought leadership ads and get that pipe coming in. And then whatever, he did not do any of that. He did calls from 10 to five every single day for a year. That is it, before they added on any other growth channels. And he went and manually found those people to bring to those calls. He went to these community groups, it was basically they identified that lead gen agencies had problems they could solve. So he would just sit there and scroll through these communities all day, find  somebody bitching about something about the existing data providing ecosystem that Clay could solve. And he was like, dude, can I show you to solve that? Come to this thing.

Pablo Srugo (36:37):

Oh, and is he doing sales calls or more like customer discovery and understanding the ICP calls?

Adam Robinson (36:42):

He was doing this reverse demo, so it ended up being a sales call, but it was more discovery than a sales call. He would basically bring a problem to this call and I will coach you on how to solve it in Clay and then either pay us or don't pay this. But he was taking all that feedback and giving it back to their engineer who was improving this product in this iterative loop. The point is, really the only two important things that were going on at that time were his conversations and then the product that was evolving from it. And they still do that today in many respects. They have this team of go-to-market engineers that's very closely intertwined with their actual engineers who are improving the product. And that's why I think they are where they are. The only thing you should be doing until you are getting referrals that you are not asking for , many every week, is talking to prospects or customers or writing code. If anyone is doing anything else, you are wasting your fucking time and money. You heard it here first. So that is a public service announcement and it's hard because that's what startup content is telling you to do. They'll bring me on and have me talk about how I grew my SaaS from zero to 4 million ARR in nine months using LinkedIn and I'll talk about what I do in LinkedIn, but the only reason that LinkedIn worked is because my product was dope. It was like great marketing with a shit product gets you nowhere.

Pablo Srugo (38:09):

Yeah. And beyond product, it's also that we say product market fit, but before product market fit, there's this value delivery piece of it. Are you actually solving an important, take your example, take retention. What sticks out to me listening to that story in the moment that woman talked to you is then you finding a way to solve a problem that isn't being solved, but it's not just a problem that isn't being solved. Probably one of the most important problems that people that are doing email newsletter stuff need solved. Who wouldn't want to know who's on their website so they can retarget them via email? Everybody basically would want that. So bringing that zero to one is- the other example that comes to me. I had one of the early employees of Rappi, which is kind of the food delivery app in LatAm. They're worth many billions of dollars.

(39:03):

And he said when they launched, they just faked it. They just put the 25 best restaurants and Bogota on the app without getting their permission and they just send couriers. And he said to me, this is him talking about the product market fit. To me, product market fit is something that wasn't possible. Now is possible. He's like, before you couldn't get any delivery from these 25 restaurants. You couldn't do it. It wasn't like you could do it, but it was hard. You couldn't do it. Now you can do it. And everybody wants delivery from these 25 best restaurants because it’s the best restaurants in Bogota.  So you go from zero to one on something that everybody wants, you're going to have crazy pull. And then it becomes about how do you retain them better? How do you market to more, how do you cast a wider net, all these accelerants. But a lot of times it's so hard to do that that people jump to the next piece and they try to do all the other things. And like you said, it doesn't matter if your LinkedIn game is great, if you're not delivering enough value and targeting a meaningful problem, it's going to lead to nothing.

Adam Robinson (39:58):

And that's the hardest thing because you're like, how do I grow this? and growth, It's almost like this term growth hacker has given early stage founders the wrong idea. It's like the reason those growth hackers have jobs is because the companies they work for have product market fit. A great growth hacker without product market fit is someone who's producing nothing, literally. None of those tactics work at all unless these guys who are renowned growth hackers, it's like you look at the companies they work for, it's like Guillaume Cabane, right? He's like this LinkedIn marketing guru, but he's known to be a great growth hacker. You look at where he’s worked, it's like Segment, Drift, Clearbit, Ramp, you know what I mean?

Pablo Srugo (40:49):

A hundred percent.

Adam Robinson (40:50):

Yeah. It's these epic product market fit stories.

Pablo Srugo (40:53):

If you go back to the history of it, they always talk about the early growth hackers were from Facebook like Chamath and these guys. And when you hear them talk about, they're obviously super smart, talented people, but you hear about some of the things they did. One of the examples I remember Chamath talking about is language globalisation of Facebook. So Facebook's English only, they're like, we need to penetrate other markets. What’s a growth hacking technique? using the community to translate posts live real time and then basically being able to offer Facebook to the entire world. Instead it's just English speaking and you're like, okay, that's clever, it's smart, it's clearly the right thing to do, but you don't get any of that unless you have such insane product market fit that you have a community and you have all these things. And basically when you look at everything they did, it was lubricating something that was already spinning on its own and you're just like, oh, this is friction. Oh, this is friction. Take it out, take it out, take it out. And then it just goes faster and faster. But if things aren't moving, it's kind of going like this. You're not going to just get it to accelerate by removing friction, just no momentum yet.

Adam Robinson (41:52):

Agreed!

Pablo Srugo (41:53):

So tell me a bit more, retention.com, we talked about how it starts off, what kind of happens next that you have that kind of initial week, you run those ads, you have great results. What's the next year like?

Adam Robinson (42:06):

Yeah, so the next year was pretty good. I mean, well, not really actually it was November, 2019 and we kind of went straight up and then Covid hit America in March of 2020. Everybody was very freaked out and this was a month, month to month service. We had an 80% revenue hit. But then very quickly e-commerce recovered. We got to 3 million ARR in 13 months and then nine months later we still weren't much higher than 3 million ARR. And this is around the time that I'm talking to Dave thinking that we're just a bunch of 3 million ARR guys. We started focusing more on outbound to e-commerce stores and then without us knowing it over the next 18 months, they became this killer ICP for us and they were much lower churn. So our business was growing because of it and then we kind of shut everybody else off and only focused on them.

Pablo Srugo (42:56):

So you flatlined because you weren't really, you had some early traction, but then you flatlined why exactly?

Adam Robinson (43:01):

Just super high churn dude, but letting anybody sign up for it, lead gen, publishers B2B, whatever. And really the bigger the company is, the better this is going to work, the better the tech will work and it kind of amplifies the throughput of an e-commerce store. So the more that's going through, you grow it 50%, you grow an abandoned cart flow 50% rather there's $5 or $500,000 a month going through that. So obviously the bigger store is going to benefit a lot more from it. And the benefit is linear and the pricing of the service is not linear and the bigger the company is, the lower the churn buyer persona they naturally are. We closed American Eagle in December, it was our first real enterprise deal and they spent nine months vetting it and three months installing it. That piece of technology is not coming out, it’s just not, it is now part of what they do.

Pablo Srugo (43:58):

And what did you change between that time? Did you change the product itself? Did you mainly change just the messaging? Did you change the go to market just to kind of get that growth back?

Adam Robinson (44:07):

Yeah. In 2022, we were in the middle of 2022. We were at around 10 and it was still just that one product. We added another product for e-commerce stores, which in addition to just adding to your email list, it expanded the audiences of abandonment flows. So it was like an email trigger in addition to just list growth. And then that's when I bought the domain retention.com. It was beyond, it was called GetEmails before that. And then shortly thereafter we decided to only go after these big Shopify stores. And there's a whole go-to-market motion that if you have incredible product market fit with the large Shopify stores that you can do and it's partnerships and affiliate and events and all that stuff.

Pablo Srugo (44:51):

But I'm interested more in that three to 10, how you went from three, because that part is still kind of an early product market fit in that three to 10 phase. And especially since you're one thing, if you just kind of doubled your way there, then clearly you already had it. But what did you do when you were flatlining to get that back?

Adam Robinson (45:06):

We kept trying to make the product better and better for our bigger customers and our bigger customers were these e-com guys and then Diana started focusing. So we were still a team of six at 12 million. We were a team of six when we launched, and we were a team of six at 12 million ARR. So it really was just this, let's stop picking up , let's stop. They can still sign up, but we're not taking any more calls with somebody who's running a Facebook ad to a lead form and excited about the product. We're not taking any more calls with BB publishers. We're not focusing on whoever. It was like, we really only want to get in front of these ecom stores. And she started prospecting exclusively them. It was the combination of making the core product a bit better. And what it also was, it was like what she would say if you asked her, she would say, we went from letting the market use the product however it wanted to, telling these ecom stores exactly what to do to be successful. That was the biggest change. So it's like we'd only do demos with ecom stores and then at the end of the demo, it was five slides that sort of answered their basic questions. It's like, here's your price, try it for a couple months and here's exactly the flows that you set up and exactly how you used this and exactly how you measure the ROI. So that was three to 10, and then we added another product, we added another product to 10, and then 20, we added the B2B thing.

Pablo Srugo (46:36):

Let's stop it there. Maybe just in terms of the story, but just in terms of advice, I often ask what's your biggest piece of advice? I know you wrote some stuff, take it however you want, but you also wrote some stuff on what's happening in B2B sales and obviously you're doing a lot in terms of top of funnel on LinkedIn. So I dunno if you have any big pieces of advice around that combination of lead gen and B2B sales and what's happening in that world and how founders should be basically generating and closing leads these days.

Adam Robinson (47:04):

It's just getting harder to do what was easy. So it was never really easy to manage a bunch of-. It was pretty easy to just get contact records from ZoomInfo and get sequences set up and outreach and just scale that up that I think we're all feeling that a BDR who is doing just that is very, unless you have this insane product market fit paradigm and they're just collecting hand raisers, it's very difficult to scale that out. So early stage startups, it's incredibly hard to think this way, but the reason, the only reason RB2B, which is selling B2B, the only thing has grown, we're almost a 5 million ARR with five people in 12 months. The only reason it's doing what it is is because I'm doing only brand marketing. You can't measure it on a day-to-day basis, but literally I cut everything else.

(47:59):

I'm not sending out cold emails, I'm not running any ads, not doing any SEO, I stopped engaging with all these UGC guys that we were engaging with because we ended up thinking that they're instructing people to use the product in the wrong way. All I'm doing is this very untargeted thought leadership, which is marketing to the people who are actually not in-market to buy. My dream customer who's reading this stuff is an enterprise deal that when they decide to add this to their tech stack, they're either coming to us and only us or we're in the deal when they're checking out

Pablo Srugo (48:34):

What's RB2B? just to give some context,

Adam Robinson (48:35):

RB2B is the same technology we just sell to B2B companies.

Pablo Srugo (48:41):

You sell to companies who sell B2B?

Adam Robinson (48:43):

Yeah, it's for sales, sales teams. It's like a signal for sales teams or resolve to a LinkedIn profile instead of a personal email. And so it's not an e-commerce workflow. And that was a question, right? It's hard to do B2B sales now everything's always hard, but I think I found myself in this position where I have this incredible brand play for the B2B product that's just this LinkedIn thought leadership. And every week out of nowhere we get 350 people signing up for a free product and 10% of them convert and the churn still sucks and we got to change a lot of stuff about the product, but as sure as I am that more cold emails will get sent next year than they did this year, and people will continue creating spam cannons of various forms. I also believe that this sort of antithesis of the spam cannon is like you keep saying pull with product.

(49:38):

It's like these personal social media profiles. They have pull with attention and if you pull attention over the course of a year, you've created a massive amount of trust. If you're super lucky, you can link yourself with the product category. So when someone sees my LinkedIn avatar, it's like, oh, that's the website identity guy. I am very bullish about the future of doing that. I think if you can manage to do it for your target audience, it's like the most efficient way to go from zero to one that you could ever imagine. I mean the problem becomes, if you've made software for elementary schools, you're probably not going to have the same result on LinkedIn that I do. I don't know if elementary school principals or whoever buys it are sitting there doing their-. Sales and marketing people are doing their jobs on LinkedIn all day.

Pablo Srugo (50:31):

Well, how targeted just on that LinkedIn advice because more and more founders I know that have some product market fit are trying to use LinkedIn and thought leadership stuff to generate top of funnel. But a lot of it I find is- the biggest mistake that I see on LinkedIn. And the question is how do you do it the right way is, it's almost hyper targeted. It becomes, so the obvious mistake is you're almost just pitching your product constantly. So that's obviously a complete waste of time. But then there's also the ones that, okay, at least they're not thinking about their product or thinking about the problems, but it's so targeted to their niche that it just never gets any reach. LinkedIn just doesn't end up pushing it and a hundred people see it or a thousand people see it. It just doesn't drive real results. How do you think about the content and you create a lot of content. What is your thinking about the sort of content you create that's still relevant but still big and can still get a lot of reach?

Adam Robinson (51:26):

Yeah, so it doesn't need to be big to be effective. I mean LinkedIn, the magic of it is, and it's not just in B2B sales and marketing. You can do a targeted outbound connection campaign, get connected to 3,000 people that you care about, and if they accept your connection and you write good content, they'll see it. And that will build trust over time.

Pablo Srugo (51:48):

Cool. Adam, thanks for jumping on the show, man. It's been great.

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