Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about your LinkedIn strategy a bit more. So you said you have a follower count of 40K, or more?

Adam Robinson: It’s over 90K now. It went from 20K to 40K in a week last September.

Sramana Mitra: So you have 90K followers, presumably mostly B2B staff people.

Adam Robinson: Almost entirely. There’s a great analysis by this guy. There’re two ways you can grow a LinkedIn audience.

One is like how a LinkedIn ghostwriter would – try to find viral content, post it, and then get other big accounts to engage with it. That will give you a huge audience of very untargeted followers.

If you write deep thought leadership pieces around very specific pain, then you will grow much slower. However, the concentration of ideal customer profile (ICP) in your engagement is astronomical. About 75% of my commenters and engagers are within the ICP that I sell into.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I’m familiar with that strategy. I have more than 435K followers with that strategy. The point that I want to explore a bit is that you said you wanted to give these 90K followers the Slack integration for free. Were you able to get these 90K people to accept that, or how did you convert that 90K into engaged users of your product?

Adam Robinson: We did a really good job in hyping it into the launch. Part of my LinkedIn strategy is to work in public. I’m constantly talking about what I’m doing. I’m building a B2B SaaS company that I’m selling to B2B SaaS. They’re paying attention and the actual product is relevant to them. So I would say, 20% of the content would have an actual CTA [Call to Action]. That was either us trying to get a discovery call with people or trying to get people to sign up for a waitlist.

You’re not going to convert everybody to a sign up. We did 300 discovery calls between October and March. We had 2,000 people on a waitlist before we started. I think we’ve had 15,000 free sign ups and we have 500 people paying us $300 a month now.

Sramana Mitra: $300 a month is your pricing.

Adam Robinson: Yes, it’s graduated. It starts at $119 and goes up to $1000.

Sramana Mitra: What is the workflow of what you’re offering? You give people an identification of which LinkedIn users are coming to their website. From there on, what are they doing?

Adam Robinson: Yes. So there’re some shocking stats. The traffic coming to our site is all from LinkedIn. The LinkedIn audience is so targeted that like the PLG metrics are insane. We get 85% of people to put the script on their site without talking to them, which is amazing. I’ve heard 35% is good. We have a 9% free to paid conversion with zero touch.

The problem is that it’s very easy to get them to put a script on. Our onboarding is just straightforward. The problem is exactly what you say. It is not to our users, it is not intuitive. There’s a lot of friction between where they are and feeling comfortable with reaching out to these people.

A few of the friction points are how do you email someone who is on your site without being creepy? How long should I wait to do it? What are other people like me doing that’s working? They’re very simple answers, by the way. Definitely send in the first 24 hours, preferably within a few hours. Just connect.

First of all, most people’s web traffic is not high quality in terms of ICP. It’s like 95%. We’re about to launch an ICP filter to figure out a way to only reach out to the people you care about. Then once you find people you care about, connect with them on LinkedIn, and then put them in an email flow that you would put anybody in. It’s like almost brand impressions or whatever, but it’s just a much higher intent person than you would have Apollo or something. 

Sramana Mitra: Are you are also giving them the email IDs?

Adam Robinson: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: So it’s a LinkedIn profile and an email ID so they can throw them into an email autoresponder once they’re identified. Okay, got it. Interesting.  

Adam Robinson: As for pricing, the LinkedIn URL push to Slack was free. It would be free for 90% of our signups. It’s free for 200 leads a month. Then if you want emails, then you go to the pay plan. It’s more than two hundred credits a month. If you also want emails and integrations, then it’d be paid. The LinkedIn push to Slack is free because I wanted to keep that as that value proposition is just so good. It’s 100% free to identify your website business and push the LinkedIn profiles to Slack.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B
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