[Music] Adam bootstrapped his business to $20 million in annual revenue after his last company failed to get traction but even more impressive is that he grew it to a million bucks in just 16 weeks with a simple offer in a minimum budget like I just think spending as little money as possible like operating with as few tools as you can I love this concept it's like if you have that $100 million offer or word of mouth or product Market fit like I think it's all the same thing if you have that almost anything you do will work if you do not have that nothing you do will work but he'll be the first to admit that it wasn't always easy in fact he made tons of mistakes and setbacks along the way but it was like really brutal man it was like I burnt through every dollar that I had saved the second they found out what it actually was that we were trying to sell eyes glazed over it's like it was a waste of time no one cared spent a million dollars of salaries making this thing I don't know what we're going to you know I don't know what we're going to do until he realized he wasn't thinking big enough let me tell you something really interesting we are not Geniuses the way that I view this game with every new stab you take you're like ACR lotto tickets 6 weeks of building maybe eight Max in November we spent 5 grand on Facebook ads and got 10K of monthly recurring revenue on on a website that literally the the back end took took 8 weeks you know what I really do I wouldn't start I would try to sell this is the story of Adam Robinson who was fired from his last job and decided to take a swing at entrepreneurship after struggling for years his most recent business exploded to over $20 million in annual revenue in this interview he shares everything he's learned building his online businesses and exactly what he would do today if starting over from scratch let's dive in here you are founder of this 20 plus million doll company and today we're going to dig into some of the behind the scenes of how you got there but I want to back up like when did you get into this starting companies and Entrepreneurship so I started my first company I launched the first product in January 2014 so I'm like almost 11 years in I would say 10 and a half years in at this point and it has not been a straight line up at all you talk very publicly on on your LinkedIn you have some of these videos that go viral um but let's maybe back up to initially your first business I think you sold it for eight figures how did you how did you get into that and like what did you learn from that business that you're applying to the next ones unlike a lot of successful entrepreneurs that I've seen like I what I did before that was I was a I was a Wall Street Trader I worked at Leman Brothers and traded credit to fall swaps for like 10 years and what inspired me to go try to do that like become an entrepreneur is the first day I ended up in Manhattan I walk into my apartment and my roommate literally is like on Dramweaver this app that you used to use to make web pages he's making this baby blue homepage that says Vimeo across the top and like and like I'm I'm living with these guy you know I watch that happened over so many years you know I didn't even have vocabulary for it at the time but like now I know it's like watching them build something with like these like fun and interesting people was just so much more fulfilling than trading which is like every day is a new day every Year's a new year it's just all about extracting money out of the system for yourself and there's not a creative aspect to it so you saw that that planted the first seat of oh maybe I could do this business thing and then what was you tried one thing and it automatically worked and and easy peasy or what yeah I mean I wish I basically had a really good year in the a really bad year and I got fired and then at the time that I got fired there weren't really like other job the market I was Contracting it's just a really bad environment as dumb as this sounds I was like I want to start a startup in this apartment like they did 10 years ago like looked so cool uh and it started this journey and I wasn't spending time with qualified people who were starting other startups I was spending time with other people like me who had no idea what they were doing trying to start other startups love the idea when even before retention. comom started now it's 20 plus million doll AR company you had this idea of what you thought it would be you validated it before can you talk about how you just mocked it up and like do you know how to code no no so like probably one of the things that like makes me I don't know I Prouds the right word but like makes me feel validated as an entrepreneur is like the time it took us to build my first product right robly so Roble was 18 months all sorts of problems we built way too much we spoke to no one while we were building it it's a miracle that that business worked after we basically saw that people were willing to use the identity feature and robly download the file and put it in clavo and told us it was awesome I was like okay I don't want to detract any resources from the mother ship that is paying the bills I don't want people to squirrel I am just going to go mock this up and naggot which is like Photoshop for dummies go on upwork find somebody to design the Photoshop psds which is like pre figma I guess and then get somebody to build the HTML and then just when I get all that give it to my CTO six weeks of building maybe eight Max launched it on November 9th and then in November we spent five grand on Facebook ads and got 10K of monthly recurring revenue on on a website that literally the the back end took took eight weeks you know that that's insane it's like you you acrew these skills what did we do to launch it like the fir there on the retention. comom YouTube page you can go like almost near the bottom and see there's a video called the OG get emails vid I watched digitalmarketer.
com course on how to create a video sales letter I literally took their script framework and just like filled in get emails value points and objections to overcome went on upw workk found this girl Romina to make word art I I recorded my voice on my iPhone reading the script got some music she made some animation and like that was the ad $1,000 you know like and and it crushed I love this concept I think it's so true it's like if you have that you can call whatever you want a $100 million offer or word of mouth or product Market fit like I think it's all the same thing if you have that almost anything you do will work if you do not have that almost nothing you do will work you know my original Vision was like I would sit a top these like four or five Investments that I had which by the way the other four went to zero and like kind of actively manage them or whatever it was it was the stupidest thing the world like now what I thought then was like you could do that what I think now is like the more you can focus on one you know Elon can focus on a few things like the rest of us it's like you're lucky if you can focus on one thing and if you can get a team to focus on it like that's a true gift so uh that that's kind of how it was the one thing I was working on that worked and then instead of some other person being the CEO of it I just ended up being the CEO of it but it was like really brutal man I got super resourceful I was like renting my apartment out Airbnb events like whatever just trying to keep my expenses as low as possible to make it work there was one thing that got you to like a few millionaire are but like you're but it was only competitive in that channel and it's like not in the rest of the world it's lack of product Market fit in nothing you do works you listen to all of the stuff everyone else is doing that is working and you try it and it doesn't work M and that's the situation uh so yeah I just like you know three years in a row I was just banging my head against the wall doing small and big experiments and then in the fourth year you know I had heard of this technology where you could like get an anonymous website visitor the email address of that person even if they didn't fill out a form and being in the email business I was like man like if I could do that I could sell it to anybody with website I know it like I'm positive no idea how so finally figured out how to do it and then ah now we now we have something that can grow this email marketing tool past 3 million AR launch this feature people would sign up for the email tool use the feature put it in clavo and say it was awesome so like it was very clear that like people wanted that and they didn't want the rest of it luckily uh we were able to sell that email marketing tool to this rollup that like wanted to like see what it was like to run one of those companies inside of their business um which a miracle and then uh you know now that company's retention. comom 22 million you know ultimately the game here is try a bunch of things find the one that working double down on the on the thing that's working was there a particular uh Rock Bottom moment or sort of time in your life when you were doing this thing that in maybe your second business that wasn't working and you're like how do I find something that works yeah so Rock Bottom was was one night and it was like sometimes time in late February in 2018 basically what we had done is one of the attempts to get robley growing again was we basically created a V2 of it we tried to make it to where it was like more advanced than this vendor called MailChimp spent a year on it built a whole new software uh and like we were super excited about this but I now know what I did wrong like we didn't speak to anybody what we were building it we just assumed that we would be able to find these people who were like magically above MailChimp and needed this spent a year building it went to this trade show pulled this big stunt uh hilariously like I I hired a bunch of so like we were trying to go after people with big email lists and this Market of Internet marketers was all male so like I hired a bunch of models and I had them walking around to people saying how big is your list right like so this stum was great and it got talking to literally Everybody by the end of the first day probably pretty dude it's like you start talking and like the the second they found out what it actually was that we were trying to sell eyes glazed over it's like how do I stop talking you want my business C great will you go away right like they're like it was a waste of time no one cared and then I vividly remember being in this Airbnb with my wife and like all of these like girls who we hired who are like drunk and making a bunch of noise and I'm just like what are we doing like no no one cares about what I spent my last year on spent a million dollars of salaries making this thing I don't know what we're going to you know I don't know what we're going to do but back at that moment the thing you were trying to sell wasn't working and you're like oh what about this other thing had you done that before like did you have any indication that you could build this or you were just strictly finding a man I had no idea how to do it and by the way this is like how you I think you should do things you know like one of my favorite books which everyone should read is Alex Hero's $100 million offers I think it's underplayed in SAS I think people think about SAS as like Solutions and like you know all of this like fan technology but like at the end of the day in my opinion what a $100 million offer is in SAS is it's your one sentence description and it should be it should make someone who you're talking to feel stupid to not do it and if you can formulate that from day one like before you have any product before you have anything it's going to facilitate every single conversation you have the entire way right you need to do this product Discovery and you need to get people to talk to you it's so hard hard to get people to talk to you now if you don't have something that punches them in the face is that obvious then you're not even going to be able to get to the first part before you should even start building your product to figure out if you should build it so maybe even to reverse engineer that if everything that you had went like went away today and or you were to go back to starting from scratch would you maybe come up with 10 different value off single sentence value offers and go to a conference and be like how about this and just see what what lands with people before dedicating any resources to actually the feasibility totally I think the best entrepreneurs in some way or another they have done that whether they realize it or not my favorite story about this is this guy Wy Celli who who sold a company to Conant contact who was in our space after like 18 months and what he did so he was the first salesperson at seamless and then he went and started a company after they got like really big uh what he did was he walked around to restaurants with a pitch deck and he changed the slides of the pitch deck until he had people handing him $750 checks from the pitch deck about his software right in incredible yeah that's punch in the face yeah and like and like he's like and then when I got the checks and when I could get one check a day he's like then we started building it you know right right but he's like they'd hand me the check and I'd be like amazing I don't have this yet but when I do you're going to be the first customer to have it and then when you zoom out on that um and play any of these passs out of hard business versus easy business like what does that look like the ones that start hard stay hard the ones that start easy stay easy and I think that's just like a really good representation of product Market fit which reminds me of an even better story about this um this guy Matt Meer had a great dane and he lived in Manhattan and there were no toys being sold at these tiny pet shops that the Great Great Dane didn't just immediately destroy so he's like this sucks he makes a Photoshop representation of a website with a box of toys five big toys for a big dog walks around Washington Square Park dog park shows them his phone and he's like would you pay $29 a month for this five new toys every month for your great to any want destroy them when they said yes he put a square thing in his phone swiped their credit cards got 50 purchases based on a Photoshop doc without even a website before they did anything else wow and they they're publicly traded New York you New York Stock Exchange that is a story that every entrepreneur should hold on to because it's like it's just so hard you're intuition is a very poor indicator of Market viability what would be your advice to somebody who is like how do I think of this idea obviously you want to talk to a bunch of people and validate the the demand but like how would you think of these problems would you just sit down and just write 10 things a day 100 things a day or I think my position on it is like you're going a c certain way I think what you try to do as an entrepreneur if you're going a certain way is you like kind of like can't see but you're feeling these tangential areas trying to like find something that feels like a diamond but like you don't know if it's a diamond or not and you pull it out and it's a rock you know what I mean like it's just you always have to be throwing spaghetti against the wall I think you always have to have your antenna up for like interesting ideas or like you know something I love is like something that's being done in one way over here that you could like do over here any examples of of that that come top mine I was sharing offices with the Jasper AI team and this was before Jasper AI they were also some two and a half million Schmucks at the time and they had spent 18 months trying to build this personalization software that when they launched it no one bought they had an expensive office they went wear y combinator raised bus they'd spent all of their money and at the end of 2020 uh they were just like dude like we have you know three weeks of cash left like we don't even know what we're going to do here you know we're trying to get out of this office we got to fire everybody like so they did all that they fired everyone they got someone to suas their office and at the time I was like Dave like I think there's a pretty cool opportunity in like being the distribution vehicle for these like this Tech which like is being used in some ways but like not every way and like just going to these guys and seeing if they'll give you SAS margins to like sell their stuff basically you know because that was kind of how I interpreted my business he's like yeah that does sound pretty cool and he's like I think I got one open ai's got this thing and they're like giving us you know nine months of of unlimited uh sorry of the exclusive use case of the long form blogger access to this model they have called GT gpt3 or whatever um and then he sends me this stripe receipt and he's like got the idea seven days ago first customer today hopefully this is my get emails because get emails was actually farther along than either Ro or his company so literally that that idea he's like success to me is is where you're at and then dude like 0 to 50 million AR I I sat there and watched it from I was in a conference room on one side by myself they' fired everybody and they put these six desks in an island and they were on the other side of this office on brazo street I watch those dudes from Maryland take this company from Z to 50 million AR in 12 months faster than any company ever in the history of SAS you know what I really do I wouldn't start a SAS if I were the first if I were first time I would try to sell something else you know maybe info or like get a job for as much people hate hearing this like go work for a SAS company like a good one and like get really good skills in either product or like some type of marketing or sales or like engineering you know like uh see if you can start to understand why certain products that that are being built either take off or do not you know like see if you can understand why the product team thinks it's an interesting idea to build it like all of those skills you have to learn some way and if you learn them on someone else's nickel that's just a I mean in my opinion that's just like a much better way to go and then you're in this position where if you really get some skill you can go out on your own and you can start you know doing some fractional work to pay your bills while you're trying to figure out what this SAS is that you're going to start right you know a consulting firm is much easier to execute than subscription software it's super hard and it helps when you have built say a powerful personal brand and are just sharing what you know like people are bought in to ad them probably more so than to any of the products but that's a powerful thing that you could carry through the anything else that you do in your career 100% yeah and that that is the other thing that I would be doing if I were just starting out um I would be posting on social media every single day on some Channel trying to understand what is good cont content I don't even think it matters what channel you pick I don't even think it needs to be related to the business you're working on it would be very very helpful if it was but if you can find your voice it will help either that business or some other business someday and it will open up doors that you never even dreamed about if you have a very if you have a strong pres on social media you can talk to anybody that you want to I can talk to anybody I want to in B2B because I'm like the LinkedIn B2B guy can you talk about what are some mistakes that a lot of entrepreneurs get wrong when they're trying to build a business and what have you done to stay Scrappy I think it's very easy to get too many steps ahead in a lot of like kind of like tools or like equipment or like whatever this isn't as much postco but pre-co I feel like if you started a business you felt like you needed to have an office or like you weren't real which is absurd I mean it's just such a crazy idea that you wouldn't like work at home it just so stupid to say now but like that was a real deal back then and I remember you know I like read some books on content Marketing in like 2011 and I bought two Sony like the A7 equivalent cameras to like go film myself doing what like I don't know used them once you know and I always tell people it's like like uh they think they need to form an LLC or whatever like a company and it's like okay a year after you make your first dollar if you're still making money go form your company right like don't just like don't waste your time until then like I just think spending as little money as possible like operating with as few tools as you can uh the example that uh I love is get emails which is now retention. comom um Diana who did all of the sales and is my co-founder she ran sales with her sales assistant Alice out of a Google spreadsheet until we hit 10 million ARR and the first year we bought was Salesforce like 15 demos a day you know we had we had over 1500 paying customers so imagine how many demos that was right like it was all out of a Google sheet which is free they would color code it like you know it it was just a beautiful system nothing novel about it she wrote a post about it and everyone's asking for the spreadsheet it's like it's not it's not the spreadsheet it's like the fact that like they had the discipline to like you know run it that way for so long okay and then maybe like the the secret to word of mouth is the product Market fit how do you look at that so if you have this like core offer or product or whatever you want to call it that is just so good that people talk about it right like there are a thousand things you can do to speed that up and almost in my experience having been on both sides of this like almost anything that you do will work and it's just like trying to figure out within all of those things what's my maximum point of Leverage that I can push on the hardest till I Max it out and then go do something else like that's my interpretation of what it means to like successfully Market a startup like that for me right now with rbb it's like LinkedIn maximum point of Leverage trying to push it as hard as possible from as many ways as I can I'll get maxed out at some point and then I got to figure out what else I can do right like um so with Word of Mouth kind of you listen to guys like me who are saying that I'm doing these things to grow my business and if you have it those things will probably work if you don't and your product is like not good enough for whoever you're selling it to to just like tell people about on their own without you encouraging them you know nothing you do is is going to work in terms of just finding the things that work and doubling down on those what are what are some other underpriced channels that you have found working for you right now well I think it depends on the business um but look our maximum points of Leverage on rbb it's like very obvious to me it's like the LinkedIn thing is just it's like how do we get more LinkedIn repressions everybody needs to post one post more per week you know we're going to do some thought leadership ads like we just want to grow The Impressions like double we also have this amazing ugc thing where there's this company called clay they have a whole Legion agency community that they call Clay creators rbb fits in so well to all of the workflows that clay does that like they're now just rbb creators too so like we are cultivating the same kind of tiered ecosystem of creators and we're trying to uh motivate them to post on an ongoing basis by giving them visibility through all the channels that we have to create visibility I mean those are the those are the obvious ones for us and how do you think about like hiring and firing my favorite saying related to hiring and firing is higher unreasonably slow fire unreasonably fast in terms of firing fast it's just there's an old saying it's like I've never regretted letting someone go I've only regretted not letting them go sooner there's just a tremendous relief that comes comes from letting go of someone when it's not working we talked a little bit about the Jasper guys of like you're again they were I think in another interview I've heard you say like they are Schmucks just like me and so I want to capture at some point I guess how do you look at that do you look at yourself as is this like recording still yeah it's yeah so like here's a really good example of of the effect of being around that the Twitch TV founder this guy Justin whoever he did an interview for I need to go find him but it was like how it was built or something like that and like they went through this whole story and long story short they had this cash flowing business that was not exciting they focused on 1% of their users which were the gamers a year later it got bought for a billion dollars and the host was like don't you think you won the lottery and he was like let me tell you something really interesting my brother lives downstairs in my house in San Francisco and he just sold his company for a billion dollars to Bo it's called Cruise self-driving whatever and he's like we are not Geniuses like there is no way that probabilistically both of us should have been able to sell businesses for a billion dollars but he's like the way that I view this game is that with every new stab you take you're like ACR lotto tickets and I heard that and at the time when I was stuck at 3 million AR I'm like oh that's cool for them they live in San Francisco you know I don't like whatever but man there is something so real about sitting across an office with the same struggle as some guys who did not go to Stanford who do not live in San Francisco who are like from are from Maryland like just trying the same stuff you know like every day day in day out the same grind and then you watch them literally create a unicorn in 12 months and it's like I think I can do that too you know like there's just it's so palpable right like it just became so real for for me and before that happened call it what you want to call it normal guy schmuck like whatever right like like I was just some guy trying to make it happen like very much so to a large extent I think that I still am right like it's just it it strangely the thing that's the most different for me now is just how much I'm getting back from what I put in but everything else kind of feels the same I've heard You' talk about the impact of people on your te can you talk about like the impact of finding great people to work with again back to horoi like this is my perception of this whole game he ends 100 million dollar leads with this story about a game of dice he's like business is like a game of dice everyone is handed this die when they start the die is multi-sided everyone has a different number of sides there's sides that are red and sides that are green and you the whole game is like you roll that die and if it hits a green side one of the red sides turns green if it hits a red side a red side you just get to roll again everyone's got a different amount of sides everyone starts with a different mix of red and green but if you keep rolling eventually you're going to be in the position where you're hitting green almost every time that's kind of like what it is with great people if you keep at it long enough and you develop enough credibility and you're doing you have you're working on interesting enough things like like over time the the level of talent that you're working with is going to just get really really good if if you just look at the overall average of the people we have working at retention.
comom Now versus my first company it's just not it doesn't even resemble the the staff that I had then cuz like who was I right you know what I mean like it also seems like judging by just talking to you you have these really good like portable stories and anecdotes and it seems like you read a lot as well have there been any books in particular that have been most impactful for you this was incredibly rework and remote by the 37 signals guys incredibly impactful both then and now I think if you read this you should combine it with reading the Y combinator blog I I'm like some of both of these like I agree with so much of what the Y commentary blog says but I agree with so much of what these guys say um and you know they're just extolling the virtues of bootstrapping basically and like the the beauty of small and like you know kind of like a lot of Concepts that it's very easy to uh you know in in in the media machine that we all live in and the sort of like Capital machine that we all live in it's you know it's kind of like uh there like a Buddhist approach to like business in a lot of ways I feel like now the best book if you want to start a software business by far if you can just read this I read it every time I start a company and as I'm starting it probably several times I haven't actually made it in the stage my companies at passed about half you know because like the back half is like how you scale up to like hundreds of millions of ARR but like the beginning is so so good it reads like a textbook it's super dense sell at the very least as you're building at best before you even start right and then you have to have the discipline if you're not getting the correct feedback back to just go back to the beginning scrap what you've built start over brand new product hypothesis go find customers as you're building I would read this one a lot of people probably watching this might be like oh I should be making content or maybe they're trying but it it'ss like seven views what would you tell that version of Adam or somebody watching this when you start the purpose is not to get engagement or to book demos or to like get get a bunch of followers the purpose is to start your journey to finding your voice because the second you do the world's at your fingertips you have to start right like like like if that's going to be where you end you have to start at zero you started zero I started at zero Isaac started zero everybody started zero I love this quote too the best time to plan a tree 20 years ago the second best time is today right like the purpose of posting is not so that you'll get engagement today it's so that you will find your voice years from now and and your voice is comprised of um things you're actively doing experimenting books you've read people you've met your life experiences who have been some of the most impactful either people you have met or just people you have learned from along the way you know recently I'm I'm kind of obsessed with Russell Brunson because like he he I watched him grow SAS through what I viewed as an entertainment business you know he had this clickfunnels product but really what he was selling people was access to his brain and building funnels through information and Community right like I'm obsessed with this idea now because it's it's like if what you're selling is helping people grow their businesses really like not just software features like the people who are competing with you are competing on your software features and it's just so much bigger of a vision you know a big one a business book that I love which is like so amp it up is probably my favorite Business book but I think it really starts applying when you get you know 10 million when you when you when you get a bunch of employees it's like I love running organizations in the beginning super lean to where there's no slack but like eventually you will have slack in your organization just because that's what happened amp it up is all about how you can just get more out of yourself and your organization and you can have higher standards and people can ship stuff faster and people can do it better and you know whatever it's like this guy's just incredibly inspirational in his expectations in his pursuit of Excellence let's put it that way maybe somebody watching this is um is at a job that they don't like or maybe has started to try to grow their business is getting stuck you have maybe been in both of those positions what would you tell that person who is just like wants to get this 20 million AR business or even a 3 million AR business but is just feeling stuck so look being stuck this is my deep belief as as deep a belief as the word of mouth thing right being stuck is part of the journey uh it's just going to happen to you I've been stuck five times I was stuck six months ago I started this new company it's what got me unstuck my experience as an entrepreneur and like I I I think a lot of the people that I know it's just getting stuck and getting unstuck again it's just part of the game you just have to accept it as reality and like keep throwing spaghetti against the wall like it's all about just this mindset of continuing to experiment and those experiments out of every five you do you know the longer you it might be zero that work in the beginning but like pretty soon you're going to be batting you know one or two out of five on these experiments and things that actually unlock meaningful growth um so it's you just got to keep going got to keep building I mean that's the only advice that I have it's like just keep experimenting keep honing your skills keep getting better and and that's it keep rolling the dice baby Adam this has been amazing where can people find you and learn more about your story most of what I do is on LinkedIn just search Adam Robinson rbb retention. comom check out rbtb. com the website it's dope and uh you could email me adamant retention.
