Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Could you double click down and explain with a bit more color and depth exactly what it was that you were doing at Retention.com, which had a different name at that time. Explain the workflow, the value proposition, and the complexity of it.

Adam Robinson: The value proposition was that we can identify 35% of your web traffic and give you email addresses of people that don’t fill out forms.

Sramana Mitra: How do you do that?

Adam Robinson: The three questions are, how is that legal? How does it work? What do I send? Those are the big three. I’ll just take them in that order, because I’m sure, even though you’re not asking, everyone’s thinking about them.

In the US, it’s CAN-SPAM compliant and doesn’t violate CCPA or anything to do this. It seems like it should intuitively, but it does not. That’s the legal part.

Next, how does it work? There are a bunch of ad networks that show display ads. They need a persistent identifier to basically serve a display ad to your browser across websites. We’re basically really good at looking at those persistent identifiers and a million other things and deducing who the actual person is.

Sramana Mitra: I see. When a display ad draws in traffic into a website through a click-through, you have that identifier that you can pick up at that point and that you can correlate with actual email IDs.

Adam Robinson: You’ve to have a ton of data to get an accurate enough email to make it work. Then there’s this other part where you have to be really good at email deliverability to make it work too. Email deliverability is very hard. You can’t just give someone a list of random emails that aren’t hot and active.

Part of the magic of it was figuring out an email. What made it work was figuring out which emails you could actually send to. Then even further than that, what really made it work is when we figured out that the people that it worked the best for were e-commerce companies that had over 50,000 people on their email list.

We don’t even sell to anybody else now except the biggest of the Shopify ecosystem – the top 1500 stores in the Shopify ecosystem and above is the only people we’ll sell to. It’s just dangerous for people smaller than that and they’re high churn. It causes problems with Klaviyo and whatever else. Those are the lessons over many years.

Sramana Mitra: In 2021, you went full-time with this. Is that what you’re saying?

Adam Robinson: That is correct. I’ve started a new company now called RB2B. It’s sort of the same thing. Now, Retention.com has 55 employees. I’m still the CEO. My Mondays are internal meetings, mostly related to that. Then the rest of the week is on the new company.

Sramana Mitra: So you’re doing the same thing again, but let’s just break it into two. So in 2021, you are working on this email identification company.

Adam Robinson: That’s what Retention.com is now. It was called GetEmails. I think the trajectory was – we ended 2020 at $2 million ARR, 2021 at $5 million, 2022 at $7 million, 2023 at $12, and we’re still in 2024. It was always growing.

It was called GetEmails up until the end of 2022. We were selling to kind of everybody. We went from zero to one off of this Facebook ad campaign, which was hilarious and amazing. This is kind of bad, but I learned. I had this crazy idea. My wife and I did a 60 second video where we were being amusing and there was a different background every time. We were sort of answering the sales questions, if we could get people to anticipate the ads, then we’d won the game.

Then I figured out there was this vocal minority of privacy people that really hated what I was doing. So I’d make an ad. They would call me a scumbag for ten different reasons. Then I would make the next ten ads agitating the reasons they were calling me scumbags. That’s what social media loves. The ads did incredibly well.

Facebook ads for SaaS is not great because it’s a bunch of entrepreneurs and there’s 20% churn per month for users. But we had this self-serve PLG product that you could click your way to a $5,000 a month subscription. For the first six months of these ads, every two weeks someone would come in and buy a $10,000 subscription and pay back the whole ad.

Then I just kept going until it stopped working for six weeks. That was zero to one. It was really attractive from a payback standpoint, which I think is very important in the early days of starting a company. The awareness that it was giving and the power that it was giving to our cold email effort was phenomenal. I still have people walk up to me and say, “I know you from somewhere. Oh, wait, you did those GetEmails ads in 2019.”

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B
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