Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This one is called Retention.com now, right?

Adam Robinson: GetEmails at the end of 2022 focused only on these e-commerce stores. Then we added another product suite, which was a big product upgrade. Not only were we giving people emails to email for workflows like abandoned cart, abandoned product, or abandoned website, our identity product can also do audience expansion for them.

They can help you get out three times as many emails. The core problem is that Klaviyo can only send emails to people who are logged into the store. But nobody’s logged into stores like Joshmosocks.com. So that’s a really valuable product.

I had this view that GetEmails was kind of a spammer name, and we were doing much more than GetEmails at this point, but it was still kind of a gray area product. We had a lot of free cash, so I wanted to just buy the biggest domain that has something to do with what we’re doing. It happened to be Retention.com. Retention.com is not a perfect name, but I could buy it for $800,000 for it. I think it was worth every penny. It’s just to me, it was.

Sramana Mitra: It was.

Adam Robinson: There’s so much authority in being a CEO of Retention.com and RB2B on LinkedIn.

Sramana Mitra: What is the current run rate of this company? But it’s, and it’s still running. You still have that within your. These two companies are running in parallel and they’re separate, yeah?

Adam Robinson: The run rate of retention.com is just shy of $23 million ARR.

Sramana Mitra: It’s still independent and you still own that company.

Adam Robinson: Yes. Me and my two co-founders.

Sramana Mitra: And it’s still doing the same thing?

Adam Robinson: It is still doing that. We made all those changes in September 2022, and it is identical in 2024. Now, we’re just trying to go upmarket with a different sales motion. In upmarket, they’re already using tools like ours, and we can provide incremental identity resolution. Their scale is so big that it’s real numbers, you know. We’re just trying to figure out how to do business development with that sales motion right now, but we’re good at sales. This upmarket move should should get it growing again, but it’s very healthy, positive cash flow.

Sramana Mitra: Have you solved the churn issue or is it still high churn?

Adam Robinson: The churn issue is not going to get solved with that business. It was a little bit easier than I thought to replicate the product. We’d built this incredible brand.

 And here’s the medium length story about churn. When we added that entirely different source of value to the product, it literally doubled the value of the product. I thought we will cut the price of our high end in half so that next year when they renew, we’ll get revenue expansion because we’ll double the price.

A year and a half later, we had six copycats. We get the deal every time the first time because our brand’s so good, but then we have six people on BuiltWith prospecting them saying we’ll do more for less.

We’re actually getting contraction at the renewal. This Shopify buyer is tough. They’re founders who are spending their own money. They’re very ROI oriented. They’re not brand loyal. They do not like paying a lot of money for SaaS. They can be getting 60 X ROI, but they’ll switch for $200. To someone who’s not familiar with a buyer like that, it’s crazy, but it’s just the way they are.

The churn problem will get remediated a little bit if we can actually crack this mid-market omnichannel retailer segment, because they’ll never pull it out. It’s a much different sales motion.

Sramana Mitra: Are you integrated with any system that makes sense in the Shopify marketplace?

Adam Robinson: Channel partner?

Sramana Mitra: Well, in the Shopify the marketplace, you kind of integrate with the Shopify system and there are all kinds of things that you can do by being in the Shopify marketplace. Similarly in the mid market, there’s BigCommerce with the exact same model. There’re some other e-commerce platform providers with the same model, but those are the two big ones.

Adam Robinson: So long story short, we can only sell to 1500 Shopify stores and confidently make them successful. I thought that number was 50,000 in 2022, which was another mistake that I made. Totally misassessed that.

Sramana Mitra: I understand. It was a TAM misassessment. You need a certain scale for you to be able to add value. But if you go to the mid market with say BigCommerce, you have almost everybody in that sweet spot, no?

Adam Robinson: We’re integrated with all the ESPs already, but these mid market ESPs who don’t already have a built-in-identity solution think we’re the greatest thing in the world. There’s this weird market dynamic where there’s this company called Wunderkind. It’s an identity provider that does what we do, but they’re a managed service. There’s this funny attribution problem with tech platforms where they all say that it’s their money that they’re making. So this Wunderkind takes the entire bottom of the funnel. The ESPs hate it because they could just as easily send the abandoned cart email.

So anyway, short answer is we’re trying. It will be a very important part of that motion.

Sramana Mitra: For you to be able to exit retention.com, you would need to figure out the mid market, right?

Adam Robinson: I believe so. There just has to be a story better than the one I told you. But if not, it’s funding my venture studio.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B
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