Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So let’s go to the new one. What’s happening with the new one?

Adam Robinson: I wanted to scale up Retention.com, but I’d never done it before, so I was very insecure about it. I convinced Santosh Sharan to join us as our COO. He’d helped ZoomInfo grow from $8 million to $100 million ARR. He had helped this company Apollo.io turnaround from being stuck at $6 million ARR for five years to being valued at around a billion dollars in a Sequoia led round.

We had a lot of momentum at the time and I thought this was going to be a unicorn twice over. We’re at $12 million ARR with six people and growing organically. It’s a really good place to come in. Finally, we kind of reached a point of stability. He’s always been saying that we’ve to sell this to B to B. If it works for selling $100 pairs of shoes, it is going to work for selling $150,000 software. It has to. So, we made a couple of bad attempts at it. Finally in September of 2023, our company was in a position to validate whether this was actually a good idea or not.

I had been building a LinkedIn audience over the course of the last twelve months trying to sell to these e-commerce stores. The audience building and the ecosystem ramifications helped improve the status of Retention.com in that world a lot. It just wasn’t booking demos for e-commerce stores because they’re on Twitter, but I was getting very good at it. I had this amazing consultant who works with a bunch of B2B people, and I asked him, “Do you mind if I just start writing for B2B people like myself that we’d be selling into?” He asked me to go ahead and do it with whatever you’re willing to say and how much you care about this content creation game.

Before my first post, the average likes were 50-70. The first post I wrote about this B2B stuff was about how BDR wasn’t working anymore and here are the reasons why. It got 3,000 likes. There was an unbelievable thirst for this content.

Sramana Mitra: What did you write about? You wrote about why your company was not working?

Adam Robinson: Now, why I thought BDR was toast. Why I thought 2023 killed the predictable revenue model and this idea that you can sit salespeople down in front of a computer and have them click screens and send outbound emails. It doesn’t work anymore. That was my thesis.

Sramana Mitra: In B2B?

Adam Robinson: I mean, to a large extent, it’s still my thesis. I just think that that whole way of doing things of mail sending is kind of over.

Sramana Mitra: People don’t open emails. We came to this conclusion that email marketing is far from where it was.

Adam Robinson: Last Labor Day, saying that the whole BDR role should go away was not something a ton of people were talking about. It got a lot of attention. I usually write all my three LinkedIn posts every week at once. When I wrote them the next week, I felt they were of the same quality as the last one. I thought if these do well, then I know how to write on LinkedIn, and it is going to be great. If they don’t, then I’m still sort of lost.

So, they just absolutely smashed it. My followers went from zero to 20K in a year, and with these posts, they went from 20K to 40K in seven days off of these four posts. The slope of the line has been like this ever since. We thought we definitely have to make it a B2B tool, because not only does Santosh have an intuition that people want it, we have a distribution mechanism that is absolutely phenomenal through this LinkedIn profile.

So that was Labor Day. Then we spent until March doing discovery calls and we had very lightweight beta where somebody could put a script on their site and we would send spreadsheets every day. Initially, it had LinkedIn URLs and profiles and some personal emails too. Then it was a spreadsheet of only LinkedIn URLs of people that were on the site. There was a tepid reaction to it; people were semi enthusiastic about it. Then one day we made an integration that pushed the LinkedIn URL into a Slack channel with a headshot. When I started picking up my phone and saying this person is on my website right now, the look that I would see on people’s faces was like that’s the best app they’ve ever seen. I could tell that they needed it, not that they wanted it. They asked questions like, is that for sale? How do I get that? What is your website domain?

That was very encouraging because it was similar to the very early stages of GetEmails where people had this wildly enthusiastic reaction to that core value proposition, which totally wasn’t the case with my first company. This was even better. Then we were thinking that it’s going to have the same churn problem because it’s just selling leads as a SaaS. There’s a million reasons to turn it off. So our first attempt was going to be to try to mitigate it through starting in the mid market, because that was how we were going to capitalize on this brand, which SaaS normally doesn’t have the luxury of doing but since we’re building such a great reputation on LinkedIn, we would be able to talk to these people as they pick up our phone calls. So that was plan one.

Sramana Mitra: Were you selling to the sales people?

Adam Robinson: Actually, no, we thought we were initially. Salespeople can’t buy anything at SaaS companies. It is marketing ops – VP marketing, CMO, or rev ops in some places. It depends on what size the company is.

However, over this period of time, the content started doing so well that we thought there’s so much benefit to the scale of this content. A free offer would do so much better for us than for someone who doesn’t have our reach. We decided to give the Slack integration away for free.

I’m obsessed with MailChimp. I’ve mentioned them earlier in this call. I thought that the free thing that they did was just so underappreciated until it was appreciated. This freemium thing is magical if you can make it work.

On March 1, 2024, we launched rb2b.com. It has been lightning in a bottle. I have a public bear metrics dashboard – rb2b.bearmetrics.com. It’s at $1.6 million ARR by the end of July 2024. We have five people, did zero ad spend – all organic, all freemium.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B
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