Remembering Adam Robinson, the Founder Who Built RB2B in Public

Adam Robinson, the founder of RB2B and co-founder and CEO of Retention.com, died on November 1, 2026, in a plane crash in Florida. His wife, Helen Sharp, and their children, Emma and Charlie, died with him, KUT reported. Our thoughts are with their families, with everyone who lost someone on that flight, and with the teams at Retention.com, RB2B and MoltSets.

Adam was our guest three times in 2024, the year he launched RB2B. Each time he did what he was known for: he showed his real dashboards, said plainly what had failed and took questions from the founders watching. This is how we want to remember him, mostly in his own words.

In a statement, his companies remembered him as:

A friend, a mentor and a bold, outspoken leader who lived life to the fullest.

Retention.com, RB2B and MoltSets, as reported by Fox News, November 3, 2026

Even a competitor paid tribute. Larry Kim, CEO of Customers.ai, wrote that he had butted heads with Adam online and that Adam was a builder who pushed their whole category forward, Gizmodo reported.

From Lehman Brothers to RB2B

Adam spent about ten years at Lehman Brothers before he started building software, he said on the SaaS Club podcast. On January 1, 2014, he and his co-founders launched Robly, an email marketing platform, without outside funding. One Robly feature became more popular than the email app itself, so in November 2019 they spun it out as GetEmails, later renamed Retention.com, which helps online stores identify anonymous visitors.

On March 1, 2024, he launched RB2B, which brought the same idea to business-to-business companies. His one-line pitch on our August 2024 webinar: someone visits your website, leaves without filling out a form, and RB2B sends their LinkedIn profile into your Slack channel, free.

He chose enough over a unicorn

Adam’s most honest story was about the time he tried to be someone else. He had shared an office with the team that went on to build Jasper, and when they took off and raised a lot of money, he decided he could do the same. Retention.com was at $12 million in annual recurring revenue with six people, and he put its free cash into trying to build what he saw as a unicorn. It didn’t work. He told our New York audience in September 2024 that he was thankful he had not raised money to try, and he was frank that the pressure to raise comes from all angles.

He went back to building a small, profitable company, and that company paid for everything that came next. RB2B was built on Retention.com’s cash, not on a funding round.

He built RB2B in public

Before RB2B existed, Adam wrote about it on LinkedIn and collected interest with a free Google Form, then he and a colleague held hundreds of discovery conversations so they knew what to ship on launch day. When a cease-and-desist letter arrived about three weeks after launch, he asked his lawyer for the worst case, decided he could live with it and posted the letter. Most of his posts had no sales pitch at all.

What made people follow him was that he wrote about the misses as well as the wins. When Alina Vandenberghe of Chili Piper asked on our July 2024 webinar how he found the courage to do that, he said he had once been that reader himself, following Nathan Barry of ConvertKit and wanting to know not just what worked, but what didn’t and why.

It sucks to write it, but I just feel like it’s the content that everybody else wants to read. It’s the content that I wanted to read before I was making stuff like this.

Adam Robinson, founder and CEO, RB2B and Retention.com. Watch at 24:40

He fixed his mistakes out loud

RB2B’s first pricing was a free plan plus a $495-a-month plan with integrations, as he described in his August 2024 newsletter. It brought in 3,000 sign-ups and 13 paying customers. Most founders would have kept that quiet. Adam posted about it, and his readers helped him find the problem.

The core problem that I had, which was identified to me, which I didn’t understand, was I had way too much value in the free plan and not nearly enough in the paid plan.

Adam Robinson, founder and CEO, RB2B. Watch at 40:13

In week seven he switched to usage-based pricing: most users stayed free, and sites with 200 leads or more paid. By August 2024, about 9% of free users were converting to paid without talking to anyone.

He knew why people hesitated to buy. A product that identifies website visitors makes buyers nervous, and he said the trust objection was the largest one. That was the reason he put his face on so much video, and he expected people to read his content for six months before they trusted him.

His last post

Adam never presented anything as finished. In 2024 he told us churn was a problem he hadn’t solved. His last LinkedIn post, on November 1, 2026, said RB2B had reached $10 million in annual recurring revenue with one full-time employee. It set up a friendly public debate with his friend Jesse Ouellette, who thought combining RB2B and MoltSets could cut churn and double revenue, while Adam wanted to keep them separate. He asked why he needed to do either, and wrote:

Honestly, I’d be thrilled if RB2B never grew another dollar.

Adam Robinson, LinkedIn, November 1, 2026, as reported by Fox News

It was Adam in a few lines: real numbers, a strong opinion and an open invitation to argue with him in public. Many founders learned from him that way. We were lucky to be among them.

Watch Adam’s sessions with Founderpath

• Bootstrapping, Team Growing, and Fast Changes at Retention.com: his September 2024 keynote in New York.
• RB2B’s freemium pricing: the August 2024 webinar where he walked through the pricing that failed and how he fixed it.
• Organic LinkedIn with Adam Robinson: his first visit to our studio, in July 2024, on posting the bad with the good.

Adam’s words and figures come from the published recordings of these three sessions, his RB2B newsletter of August 2, 2024, and his interview on SaaS Club. Details of his death and his last post come from KUT, Fox News and Gizmodo.