Bootstrapping, Team Growing, & Fast Changes at Retention.Com

you could potentially call him the king of LinkedIn we're going to get into how he bootstrapped his company to 22 million bucks of Revenue at retention. comom and then most recently launched a new product for B2B called R B2B which he's grown from nothing no Mr Right in the beginning of this year so he's now adding not not not grow to but he's adding 60,000 of new Mr per month on average for the past three months please tell me welcome to the stage Adam [Applause] Robinson thanks for being here man are

you pumped I'm very did I screw up the intro at all those are the right metrics right Perfect all right make yourself comfortable make yourself comfortable let's jump in so um you weren't always a B2B guy right retention. comom launched in what year uh retention. comom so it it's called get emails okay November of 2019 was when we launched it 2019 yeah and you had a conversion event where you converted to B2B which we'll jump into but just to set up the next 20

minutes I got ad him to give me his p&l so we're going to jump into his and law St 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 beautiful term I think it's good we can't make it more AG has there been a counter claim has there been any I I wish unfortunately we'll see they won't do it all right 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 going to 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 premium to paid conversion rate on average 3 to 5% right that's probably what you guys are seeing right a good conversion from trial to paid free to paid is about 3 to 5 per. how the hell is this guy getting a 10% conversion rate from free to paid we're going to jump into it all right give him a round of applause again if you're excited for those three bullet points all right it's gonna be good let's jump into the p&l first right pnl first so this is from

2023 where you learned a bunch of lessons why did you go so aggressive 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 Rog de moer 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 their they're literally their final step up to the plate they're just like this is it we're going to try one more thing

0 to 50 million AR with like an island of six people in 12 months and then they went 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 was stuck in the exact same place you're like well I can do that too so I tried to do it too thank God I didn't raise money uh 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 million AR with six people and I basically just took all the free

cash and put it into trying to create what I viewed as like a the Unicorn company and like honed din in an ICP thinking it was going to like completely solve this term problem long story short a lot changed in 2023 for a lot of people uh me included our company included and the term problem did not really get solved six six employees 12 million of Revenue do the M that's two million 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 sayate 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 Psych just it is a strange thing I thought I would you know I really lost my religion during this period um 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 there's so much pressure to do it you know it's it's from all angles yeah I think founder paath might launch a service where will

will say founder paath invested $1 or founder paath invested in the retention series a at a billion dollar valuation and it'll just be for a dollar and it'll be for o1 shares but it gives you the headline you want to go put out into the world but but I I don't even know it's headline I think it's just like it it it's everything man what do you mean you only have six employees oh it's a cute company yep you know it's it's just everything and like I don't know 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 I'm a metric 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 20124 yeah you know that was a little while ago but uh I I you know we're making a lot of money profit this is nice which when you find your religion

is what you're happy about ultimately MH what made this so efficient I mean when you look at the gross margin of 87% even that is above most SAS companies 75 80% and then the bottom line you're taking a run rate of $6 million of net income home well we're a data company so the margins I think are typically better than SAS as you keep scaling you know you kind of have this like wonderful quality where you compile a lot of data at SAS margins and then you don't really have to increase the spend on that data

if you do it the right way and you kind of make the cost fixed so that's that's why the cogs is so good what was the GNA break that down 346,000 on GNA in January what was that probably just like executive salaries and like you know stuff like that how many how many Executives do you have on this um six okay that that are probably in there okay and this is all just be clear this is retention. comom no RB Tob yet the the RB Tob was still very much an idea it wasn't yeah it wasn't a thing all

right so let's keep fast forwarding uh 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 imagine you know you get this cease and assist that everyone sees on the right from well you tell the story who didd you get the CN assist from so just 2023 was was hard for retention. comom uh the e-commerce space in general was going through a difficult time uh I thought we were going to get Revenue expansion we were getting a ton of contraction and like cancellation and stuff and these

guy we were using their tool to sort of compare it to what RB Tob might be and these guys come in and they're like it's six months before the contract expires they're like we're going to 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 so I was like you know what [ __ ] these guys like and and I kind of just put this [ __ ] post out that sort of described what they did and then I think just as an old Playbook if somebody does something like that to

you you send them AIS and assist 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 the 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 great greatest PR opportunity for a company that is 3 weeks old that has ever existed in the history of the world because I'll go from a LinkedIn guy to every single six sense customer knowing exactly what we do at rbb yeah but you had to have this

conflict in your head of uh 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 seee 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 without a doubt there you go uh 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 want to be a founder-led brand and I want to sort of tell the stories but then you have all goes through a PR Machin and you 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 assist any time in your life for anything raise your hand hi okay you can relate to this you're

all laughing because the things he's saying is the same things you felt when this hit 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 RB Tob 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 hundred thousand sever okay so 1600 likes right engagements 913 comments hundred hundreds of thousands of Impressions how do you turn this kind

of marketing to cold hard rbnb ARR cash so that post was incredible um you know I think that strangely like the reason if you look at my stuff hardly any of it is sales content you know maybe one out of every 10 post I'll put some like hard CTA at the bottom of it uh 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 Y 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 y you know and then they keep seeing posts I'm sure after you click that visit my website LinkedIn in the algorithm keeps serving you more

of the stuff um so I 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 F it's like people don't want to be sold to on social media I really don't think so and 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 a keeps growing

and that begets website traffic that converts let's pause there for a second um 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 bucks it might be a thousand bucks just on a count of three yell out what you're willing to pay for a lead one two three okay I heard like a 100 a th 5,000 like there's a big range most of us when

we're going 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 1600 leads here that that was pre-launch yeah yeah so this is the start of rb2 totally thch yeah that that that close to that post dropped three or four times and it

literally generated you see the proof 1600 1,63 and 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 SOS 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 and this kind of Storytelling on LinkedIn which strategy simple call to action drop in Google form don't over complicate things it's working for you you got to get them in the funnel right you got to build uh sort of this conversion metrics and as you were doing all this as you were 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 uh so the activation to me has been the biggest I mean as Wes said uh

everybody that I speak to they're like 35% script and install is a dream you know 3 to 5% paid conversion and and look the ch's kind of a disaster we need to solve that somehow but how bad is it like 10% a month it's 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 9mon LTV yeah SOS 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 uh and it's still super

early um but it's very bad but the activation and the free- to paid conversion is 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 conversion metrics nobody wants to see nobody want to see metric no he's like yes okay yeah look this is these are metrics right this are the metrics pretty cool August

8th to September 6th this is just till yesterday basically right you can see 3,000 new trials almost a 10% conversion R to new customers what does your payall look like how are you doing this uh it's just like a credit based system you know because it's a it's he didn't say it's SAS there's not a pricing page with monthly occurring fees it's like pure usage based tied to a bucket CR it's not transactional yeah exactly a bucket of credits yeah it's charging assess for leads which is part of the reason why

it's high TR so give me an example of like if I want to buy 100 credits from rbb what would that cost and what am I getting for that so the premium 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 bucks a month for that and then sort of if you want a thousand it's maybe like 300 bucks a month 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 yeah yep and are you doing any any P I guess actually let's just

keep working on this for a second there's 100 expansions there as well is that just people saying this is amazing I want more leads so give me a big I would describe that expansion as right sizing in that number is terrible but again that includes like 40 accounts that y this guy can yep yep well I mean you can see the total revenue growth in the upper I mean the problem is if you double that then there's not you know well why isn't I mean Santos has experience here he was high up at Apollo he was high up at Zoom info before you recruited him why is he not concerned about a 9month lifetime value and high

churn we're so young you know if you so Nathan Barry has a public barometric dashboard just like this for convert kit if you go back to when he was at these Ro Vue levels his turn rate was 10% the next year he was at 10 million it was 8% now he's like down to three I'm never going to get there because unless I add a system of record type product to this is that the next step uh 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 chm was a disaster for that product and the only thing they could do to lower turn was get other people using other products in other departments okay okay because it just becomes more difficult you know what are you building right now that you haven't announced yet uh I mean I don't know we need to like I think we need to get sales people using something like this is a marketer you know tool so it's something related to sales no near term like you buy it or will you buy it or

build it you have plenty of cash you'll build it okay that was a quick I'm so scared of I'm so scared of buik who else is scared of the who else is scared of the m&a process you don't want to go buy us Ione work Integrations I don't want to deal with it yeah I'm I'm scared of that all right that's fair that's fair um 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. comom so you see revenue is slightly decreasing here it's going

up again by the way that was q124 okay so what do you got now at retention 23 2 23.8 and is this green bar inclusive of the growth of RB Tob that rbb wasn't around yet cuz I was well q no q124 like are you adding on that q1 2024 the rbb revenue on top so rbb launched March 1st mhm so that didn't have any rbb Revenue oh I see so if if you were to put Q2 and Q3 in it actually if you retention. comom really hasn't grown if you stack rbb on top of it then

it's growing again I see I see which maybe that's my future just so what do you do do you shut down how do you get your team excited about working on retention. comom which is clearly a less exciting product than RB Tob well I mean that's the thing it's it's making $1 million of profit this year year so it's exciting for the founders uh the weird thing about human psychology is that even if something is making you $1 million if it's not growing the thing that's growing from one to two is more

exciting so like I I think just I've been like having that conversation with everybody on the team that I can uh and you know sort of saying like look like this is 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 0o to one or 1 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 maybe I don't know hopefully no one's 80 in here but uh you can see here though just to back up these numbers again may there's only 5K of Mr right and you can see today now 200k of Mr and you can see the green table below how much new Mr added per month on average like 60k per month in fact it's only September 6 you've already added 10,000 of new Mr 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 going to do but I'll say it to your face now it's like okay turn'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 lead pages to like several hundred million Le Pages uh because of turn stalled out at 17 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 were just marketing for us right now into actually paid in lower turn than the product itself the guys there you have it again six 12 bucks of Revenue with six employees 2 million of Revenue per employee then said you know what these Jasper guys are great I'm a little jealous let me try it he tried reiterate stay at 12 million in 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 to be thank you thanks Nathan enjoy that yeah good great great interview thank thanks man