How Adam Robinson Launched RB2B With LinkedIn Posts and a Google Form

You could potentially call him the king of LinkedIn. We're getting into how he bootstrapped his company to $22,000,000 of revenue at retention.com and most recently launched a new product for B2B called RB2B, which he's grown from nothing. No MRR in the beginning of this year. So he's now adding, not not not grow to, but he's adding 60,000 of new MRR per month on average for the past three months. Please tell me, welcome to the stage, Adam Robinson.

Thanks for being here, man. Are you pumped?

I'm very pumped.

Did I screw up the intro at all? Those are the right metrics. Right? Perfect. Alright. Make yourself comfortable. Make yourself comfortable. Let's jump in. So you weren't always a B2B guy. Right? Retention.com launched in what year?

Retention.com... So it's called GetEmails.

Okay.

November 2019 was when we launched it.

2019. Yep. And you had a conversion event where you converted to B2B, which we'll jump into. But just to set up the next twenty minutes, I got Adam to give me his P&L. So we're gonna jump into his profit and loss statement from January 2024 this year. The next five or six minutes after that, we'll talk about lawsuit marketing on LinkedIn. I made that up. Is that nice?

That's a beautiful term.

I think it's good. We can't make him regret. Has there been a counterclaim? Has there been any

I wish, unfortunately. We'll see.

They they won't do it. Alright. So we'll get into that. And then I always look for just who is beating the market. When you look at free to paid, can you guys just think... I'm gonna ask you to answer this. Think about what you guys would consider. Wes, let me ask you, Wes. What's a good free to paid conversion rate? So freemium to paid conversion rate on average? Three to 5%. Right? That's how you guys are

seeing. Right? A good conversion from trial to paid, free to paid is about three to 5%. How the hell is this guy getting a 10% conversion rate from free to paid? We're gonna jump into it. Alright? Give him round of applause again if you're excited for those three bullet points. Alright? It's gonna be good. Let's jump into the P&L first. Right? P&L first. So this is from 2023 where you learned a bunch of lessons. Why did you go so aggressive, and then what did you learn and pull back?

So, really, the reason I went so aggressive is because I was sharing an office with Dave Rogenmoser and the Jasper AI team. And for for two years before they started that company, and we were all stuck at, like, two, three million ARR. They were out of money. They created... They're they're literally their final step up to the plate. They're just like, this is it. We're gonna try one more thing, 0 to 50,000,000 ARR with, like, an island of

six people in twelve months. And then they went and raised a bunch of money, and they hired a bunch of people. And the craziest thing, when you're sitting on the other side of an office from somebody who is stuck in the exact same place, you're like, well, I can do that too. Mhmm. So I tried to do it too. Thank God I didn't raise money.

So just to be clear, when you scale from six to 50, you didn't raise. You just used your own profits.

We were we were 12,000,000 ARR with six people. Mhmm. And I basically just took all the free cash and put it into trying to create what I viewed as, like, the unicorn company and, like, honed it in an ICP thinking it was gonna, like, completely solve this churn problem. Long story short, a lot changed in 2023 for a lot of people, me included, our company included, and the churn problem did not really get solved.

Six six employees, 12,000,000 of revenue. Do the math. 2,000,000 of revenue per employee.

I... I'd highly recommend doing that if you can, by the way.

But why do... Why... The reason I want you on to say, why do we feel so insecure about all the other ones raising and think we need to go play that game when we're crushing it?

It's human psychology. Weird. It's just... It is a strange thing. I I thought I... You know, I really lost my religion during this period, and I feel like I've gained it again. But I wouldn't be surprised if I lose it again.

Let's talk about...

It's just so... It's... There's so much pressure to do it. Yeah. You know? It's it's from all angles.

Yeah. I think Founderpath might launch a service where we'll we'll say, Founderpath invested $1 or Founderpath invested in the Retention Series A at a billion dollar valuation, and it'll just be for a dollar. Yeah. And it'll be for 0.001 shares, but it gives you the headline you want to to go put out into the world. But

But I I didn't know it's headline. I think it's just like, it it... It's everything, man. It's... What do you mean you only have six employees? Oh, yeah. It's a cute company. Yep. You know, it's it's just everything. And, like, I don't know. It it just takes a lot for your ego to withstand everything that's trying to make you a bigger vanity metric company.

I feel this all the time on metrics. Like, how many of you guys have felt slightly potentially insecure about metrics in the past? You're like, I need a bigger team. I need to raise more. I need to hire... It's rare. It's honest. We can be honest in here. It's how it works. So here are the lessons he learned when he lost his religion. Let's move forward now to where you found the religion again. So what... Break down your P&L here in January 2024

Yeah. You know, it was a little while ago, but, you know, we're making a lot of money Mhmm. Profit This is nice. Which when you find your religion is what you're happy about ultimately.

Mhmm. What made this so efficient? I mean, when you look at the gross margin of 87%, even that is above most SaaS companies at 75, 80%. And then the bottom line, you're taking a run rate of $6,000,000 of net income home Yeah.

Well, we're a data company. So the margins, I think, are typically better than SaaS you keep scaling. You know, you kind of have this, like, wonderful quality where you compile a lot of data at SaaS margins, and then you don't really have to increase the spend on that data if you do it the right way and you kinda make the cost fixed. So that's that's why the COGS is so good.

What was the G&A? Break that down. 346,000 on G&A in January. What was that?

General... Probably just like executive salaries and, like, you know, stuff like that.

Okay. How many exec... How many executives do you have on the...

Six Okay. That that are probably in there.

Okay. And this is all just to be clear. This is retention.com. No RB2B yet?

The the RB2B was still very much an idea. It wasn't

Yeah. It wasn't a thing. Alright. So let's keep fast forwarding, getting into, I call it, lawsuit marketing. And really, it's a bigger question about transparency and telling authentic stories even in public forums. So I imagine, you know, you get this cease and desist that everyone sees on the right from... Well, you tell the story. Who'd you get the cease and desist from?

So just 2023 was was hard for retention.com. The ecommerce space in general was going through a difficult time. I thought we were gonna get revenue expansion. We were getting a ton of contraction and, like, cancellation and stuff. And these guy... We we were using their tool to sort of compare it to what RB2B might be, and these guys come in and they're like, it's six months before the contract expires. They're like, we're gonna

triple your price and hang up the phone. And and it's just... I was so upset about that, like, just being beaten down to nothing, right, from from this market we serve. I was like, you know what? F*** these guys. Like... And and I kind of just put this s***post out and sort of described what they did. And then I think this is an old playbook. If somebody does something like that to you, you send them

a cease and desist, and they apologize. They say whatever. But, like, we're kind of living in a different world today, and I have a different view about this stuff. I mean, I just immediately saw that, and I was like, oh my gosh. My lawyer will let me post this. This is the single greatest PR opportunity for a company that is three weeks old that has ever existed in the history of the world. Because I'll go from a LinkedIn guy to every single 6sense customer knowing exactly what we do at RB2B.

Yeah. But you had to have this conflict in your head of marketing, Adam, and risk mitigation, Adam. The risk mitigation part, you rely on your lawyer. No good lawyer would ever say yes to you doing this. You did it anyway.

So he he said, basically, I'm like, what is the maximum Penalty. Penalty. Right? And he's like, well, I mean, all this is nonsense. But, like, if they sue you, which they can, maybe you're in court and you pay a few hundred grand, three or 400 grand over, like, three years or something. And that takes a long time.

And your thought was worth it?

Totally. I mean, with... Without a doubt. There you go. And he's like, the lawyer is funny. He's like, I would never do this or recommend it, but I understand the method to your madness. Yeah. You know?

Yeah. It's it's that... A lot of people talk about I wanna be a founder led brand, and I wanna sort of tell the stories. But then you have... You get all those PR machine and end up with fluffy crap at the end that no one can resonate with. Raise your hand in here if you've ever received a cease and desist anytime in your life for anything. Raise your hand high. Okay. You can relate to this. You're

all laughing because the things he's saying is the same things you felt when this hits your inbox, and that's what makes it relatable. And a little part of you is now like, you know what? Maybe I should go try RB2B. Right? That's sort of... Right? That's sort of how it goes. How do you convert that? And you guys can see the engagement right over... How many... Do you know impressions? Do you have it memorized?

Oh, man. It was like, yeah, several 100,000.

Several 100... Okay. So 1,600 likes, right, engagements, 913 comments, 100... Hundreds of thousands of impressions. How do you turn this kind of marketing to cold hard RB2B ARR cash?

So that post was incredible. You know, I think that, strangely, like, the reason... If you look at my stuff, hardly any of it is sales content.

Mhmm.

You know, maybe one out of every 10 posts, I'll put some, like, hard CTA at the bottom of it. But I don't I don't know why, but, like, just putting this stuff out... And and I do understand what I write, who the audience is that it's activating, so to speak Yep. And try to keep a good mix there. But, like, I think most of the magic is just this visit my website link. You know, they see

me writing interesting stuff. They see me telling this, like, unbelievably, brutally, honestly transparent, you know, stuff about the journey, and they're just like, what's this guy do?

Mhmm. Yep.

You know? And then they keep seeing posts. I'm sure after you click that visit my website, LinkedIn, and the algorithm keeps serving you more of the stuff. So I can't say that I know why I'm doing it, but, like, it's just working so well that I, like, continue to do that. And I I do think that it's it's the way of the few... It's like people don't wanna be sold to on social media. I really don't

think so. I think the beauty of organic content is that you are bringing people along on this journey and, like, you are building community around these ideas, and you are forming relationships with people through commenting. And that just... The reach is so large, the audience keeps growing, and that begets website traffic that converts.

Let's pause there for a second. How many of you... Or what would you guys be willing to pay for, let's make the math easy, a thousand leads into your business. Right? So they're they're signing up for a lead. You know, it's a lead. It's a qualified lead, marketing qualified lead. You know, they're they're doing a demo. Just in general, what are you willing to pay for a lead? It might be $10, it might be a thousand

bucks. Just on the count of three, yell out what you're willing to pay for a lead. One, two, three. They heard like a 100, a thousand, 5,000, like there's a big range. Most of us, when we're wanting to pay this amount for leads, we think we need to have, like, the beautiful tech stack and tracking has to be perfected and let's let's test it a bunch of times and all this. When he talks about converting on LinkedIn, this is it. Okay? It's a free tool. It's a Google Form link. You drop it in. You rock and roll, and there's 1,600 leads here.

That that was prelaunch. Yeah. We...

Yeah. So this is the start of RB2B. Totally.

A thousand... This is the launch. Yeah. That that that close to that post dropped three or four times, and it literally generated

And you can see the proof. 1,600... 1,630

In hundreds of discovery conversations too. That was the most incredible part of it. It's like, I'm such a student of Four Steps to the Epiphany. And, you know, that guy's saying, like, oh, cold call 50 people a week. Like like, Santosh and I were getting on the phone with, like, 10 people a day between the two of us for, like, six months. So we really had a good idea of what we wanted to deliver at launch. It was amazing.

So TLDR here. Again, a lot of people would be like, let's do a product hunt launch and see what happens back in the day. It's like, look, you can get more leads and and more opportunities to communicate with customers doing it, following this kind of storytelling on LinkedIn with strategies, simple call to action, drop it in Google form, don't overcomplicate things, it's working for you. You gotta get them in the funnel. Right? You gotta build, sort of this conversion metrics. And as you were doing all this, as you're posting more B2B content, you were thinking a lot about sort of, look, I think LinkedIn should work like this. Here's what it actually should be. Maybe pick one thing on here that was the biggest surprise for you and go deep on it.

So the activation to me has been the biggest... I mean, as Wes said, everybody that I speak to, they're like, 35% script install is a dream, you know, three to 5% paid conversion. And and, look, the churn's kind of a disaster. We need to solve that somehow.

How bad is it?

Like, 10% a month. It's Okay. It's... We just had an agency, like, cancel 80 accounts and put them under one account, so it looks like it's even worse than 10% a month. But, like, it's like a nine month LTV. Yeah. Santosh is not worried about this. He's like, we can do... You know, we can have tangential products that other people in other departments use, and it's still super early. Mhmm. But it's very bad. But the activation

in the free to paid conversion is so far beyond what I had expected. And I believe that it's that way because the content is targeting such a tight audience of the right people on LinkedIn, and it's just leading to that. You know?

Should we look at the funnel really quick with conversion metrics? Nobody wants to see Okay. Metrics. Nobody wants to see metrics. We'll we'll... No. He's like, yes. Okay. Yeah. Look. This is... These are metrics. Right? These are metrics. Pretty cool. August 8 to September 6, this is just till yesterday, basically. Right? You can see 3,000 new trials, almost 10% conversion rate to new customers. What does your paywall look like? How are you doing this?

It's just like a credit based system. Mhmm. You know?

Because it's a it's... He didn't say SaaS. It's... There's not a pricing page with monthly recurring fees. It's like pure usage based tied to a bucket of transactional.

Yeah. Exactly.

The bucket of credits.

Yeah. It's charging a SaaS for leads, which is part of the reason why it's high churn.

So give me an example of, like, if I wanna buy a 100 credits from RB2B, what would that cost and what am I getting for that?

So the freemium offer is 200 leads per month, and it's like the LinkedIn URL into a Slack channel. And then for integrations and email and everything else, it starts at $99 a month for that. And then sort of... If you want a thousand, it's maybe like $300 a month. Mhmm. Mhmm. You know, we get an average of... This is not on there. Average of $270 per month.

270 per month is the average new customer. Yep. Yep. And are you doing any any pay... I guess, actually, let's just keep working on this for a second. There's a 100 expansions there as well. Is that just people saying, this is amazing. I want more leads, so give me a big...

I I would describe that expansion as rightsizing. And that churn number is terrible, but, again, that includes, like, 40 accounts that Yep. This guy can't

Yep. Yep. Well, I mean, you can see the total revenue growth in the upper Yeah.

I mean, the problem is if you double that, then there's not... You know?

Well, why is it... I mean, Santosh has experience here. He was high up at Apollo. He was high up at ZoomInfo before you recruited him. Why is he not concerned about a nine month lifetime value and high churn?

We're so young. You know, if you... So Nathan Barry has a public Baremetrics dashboard just like this for ConvertKit. If you go back to when he was at these revenue levels Mhmm. His churn rate was 10%. The next year, he was at 10,000,000 ARR. It was 8%. Yep. Now he's, like, down to three. I'm never gonna get there because... Unless I add a system of record type product to this.

Is that the next step?

I think other products first. I don't know what the system of record would be. So I talked to the Clearbit team, the Clearbit Reveal team. They said churn was a disaster for that product, and the only thing they could do to lower churn was get other people using other products in other departments Okay. Because it just becomes more difficult. You know?

So what are you building right now that you haven't announced yet?

I mean, I don't know. We need to, like... I think we need to get salespeople using something.

Mhmm.

Like, this is a marketer Mhmm. You know, tool. So it's something related to sales. I have no near term, like...

You buy it or will you buy it or build it? You have plenty of cash. Build it. You'll build it. Mhmm. Okay. That was quick.

I'm so scared of... I'm I'm so scared of buying stuff.

Who else is scared of the M and who else is scared of the M&A process? You don't wanna go buy us. Want to work integrations. I don't wanna deal with it.

Yeah. I'm I'm scared of that.

Alright. That's fair. That's fair.

Mhmm.

Anyone curious about anything else on this in terms of the funnel? We talked about top of funnel. We talked about conversion to new customers. We talked about expansion and churn. Let's go back here just to get our bearings again. This is retention.com. So you see revenue is slightly decreasing here.

It's going up again, by the way. That was Q1 '24. Okay.

So what are at now at retention?

Twenty three twenty twenty three point eight.

And is this green bar inclusive of the growth of RB2B?

That... RB2B wasn't around yet because I was

Well, Q... No. Q1 '24. Like, are you adding on that Q1 2024 the RB2B revenue on top?

So RB2B launched March 1. Mhmm. So that didn't have any RB2B revenue. Oh, I see. I see. So if if you were to put Q2 and Q3 in, it actually... If you... Retention.com really hasn't grown. If you stack RB2B on top of it, then it's growing again.

I see. I see.

Which maybe that's my future.

So So what do you do? Do you shut down or... How do you get your team excited about working on retention.com, which is clearly a less exciting product than RB2B?

Well, I mean, that's the thing. It's it's making $11,000,000 of profit this year, so it's exciting for the founders. The weird thing about human psychology is that even if something is making you $11,000,000, if it's not growing, the thing that's growing from one to two is more exciting. Mhmm. So, like, I think just... I've been, like, having that conversation with everybody on the team that I can. Mhmm. And, you know, sort of saying, like, look. Like,

this is the... It's the fuel behind everything we're doing. Like, we continue to launch more products. Like, it it... This is a tremendously important business. It's 85% of our revenue. It's 120% of our profit right now. Like, it's just what we should care about. It's just when anyone talks about something that's zero to one or one to two, it... For some reason, it's more exciting. It's like a baby is more exciting than, I don't know, an 80 year old.

You got... Maybe. I don't know. Hopefully, no one's 80 in here. But you you can see here though, just to back up these numbers, again, May, there's only five k of MRR. Right? And you can see today now 200 k of MRR, and you can see the green table below how much new MRR added per month on average, like, 60k per month. In fact, it's only September 6. You've already added 10,000 new MRR in September so

far. I pulled this screenshot last night. So, like, my big questions when I see patterns like this, just founders in general, but, like, when I'm not with you and I'm thinking, what's Adam gonna do? But I'll say it to your face now. It's like, okay. Churn's really high. He's got a rocket ship, really strong marketer, like Russell Brunson esque. Like, can he convert that attention into sticky revenue that keeps printing money?

I hope so.

Yes. Yes.

I certainly hope... He was able to, by the way. He was able to grow that business, which was not that dissimilar from Leadpages Mhmm. To, like, several 100,000,000. Leadpages, because of churn, stalled out at 17. Mhmm. So I'm hoping that I can use some of his sort of tactics of, like, you know, content courses, community, something like that, and, like, maybe monetize some of the free users that we're just marketing for us right now into actually paid and lower churn than the product itself.

Hey, guys. There you have it again. 6... $12,000,000 of revenue with six employees, 2,000,000 of revenue per employee, then said, you know what? These Jasper guys are great. I'm a little jealous. Let me try it. He tries it....

Stay at 12,000,000 and six employees. It's not worth it.

He doesn't like that. He goes back to being disciplined, launches a brand new product using controversial marketing tactics on LinkedIn that are working very, very well. The question now is, can he take this sort of explosive momentum and keep it going into additional product lines, selling to additional personas, keep the profits there. Guys, give it up for Adam Robinson at RB2B.

Thank you. Thanks, Nathan.

Enjoy that? Yeah.

Good. Great. Good. Good. Good. Interview. Thank you.

Thanks, man.