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Andrew Warner: Hey there freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses for an audience of entrepreneurs who are building their businesses. Joining me is Adam Robinson. This guy, I. He blows my mind for a couple of reasons.
Number one, he’s got this software called retention. com where if you, you, my listener end up going to somebody’s website, your email address could get passed on to that person’s website without you typing it in. And then that’s that site could then email you and say, Hey, you didn’t buy for me. Why don’t you go and buy?
Which blows my mind. And as I’m looking at him, I’m watching him and he’s smiling with pride instead of like this shrinking. Oh, I can’t believe that he said it that way. There’s a whole like privacy thing. I’m not supposed to talk about what, no. Proud of it, talks about it, stands up for it. And then the balls on him, he comes out with this new business.
Our B2B our B2B is if somebody comes on your website. He will slack you a message with their LinkedIn information, with their email address, and so on, so you can follow along. He charges for some aspect of this, but just the other day on LinkedIn, he posted a message saying, Here’s a multi page document showing you how you can do all this without paying me a dime.
And that brings me to the third thing, and the most important thing that I want to find out from him. I freaking hate LinkedIn. This guy seems to live on LinkedIn. He grows his audience on LinkedIn. He’s got fans and followers and a whole community of people who both love what he’s saying on LinkedIn and also want to build their businesses on LinkedIn the way that he does.
And I want to learn from him. I want to learn how he built those businesses. And I also want to learn what he did on LinkedIn. I’ve done a lot of talking here. I’ll finish it up by saying Adam Robinson. Uh, this interview is sponsored by gusto. Anyone out there who’s doing any kind of, um, if who’s got a team, you need gusto for your benefits, and I’ll tell you later why you should go to gusto.
com slash Mixergy first. Good to see you, Adam.
Adam Robinson: Hi, Andrew. Thanks for that killer intro
Andrew Warner: A lot of talking. Give me, give me numbers. Like where’s the revenue at for this business?
Adam Robinson: 21. 7 million. A R R if you include RB to B it’s 21 point. Nine 5 million,
Andrew Warner: All
Adam Robinson: we were at, we’re at 250 K ARR. Yeah. All bootstrapped.
Andrew Warner: What’s the profit
Adam Robinson: We’ll probably drop seven to eight mil to the bottom line this year.
Andrew Warner: you’re walking around making 70 million a year. Now,
Adam Robinson: I have, I have co founders. It’s not
Andrew Warner: how many co founders
Adam Robinson: Uh, two
Andrew Warner: you split the, you take the money out of the business and split it between the three of you.
Adam Robinson: yeah.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Adam Robinson: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know how else to say it. Like, yeah, yeah, that’s. That’s why we do it. That’s why we run it so
Andrew Warner: Right on in this,
Adam Robinson: it’s not, it’s not to just sit there and watch the bank account grow. It’s to like, go save for our family and, go have fun. Right? Like,
Andrew Warner: this whole thing started because you were competing with MailChimp, with Klaviyo, with all these other email providers, you had a company called Robley email marketing. And the problem you had was what this was before.
Adam Robinson: The problem with that business is that business, meaning the email newsletter, marketing, automation, email marketing, whatever you want to call it. That is such a hard and competitive space. It is the second, there’s probably a second oldest SAS space behind the CRM and there’s 200 vendors.
There’s only a few of them anybody’s ever heard about. And the few that everybody’s ever heard about are completely dominant. It’s like MailChimp and then Klaviyo came in, won the game again after it had already been won, which is. Astounding in its own right. I was one of the 200 vendors that was like stuck at 3 million.
And, um, I spent years trying to figure out what MailChimp was not doing. Cause like I couldn’t do what they were doing and what they were doing was a hundred percent free email marketing for 90 percent of the market. What are you going to do? Be more free than those guys. I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t think it’s possible to be more free than a free. app
So, and then like, yeah, it’s like, you know, trying to undercut on price doesn’t really work with that motion and their brands. Great. And they had this like integration smoke. Anyway. Um, I had heard through the grapevine that it was possible to resolve a website visitor To a deliverable email address without them filling out a form. The first time I heard it, I was like, that doesn’t sound legal. But I was like, even if it’s not legal, there’s probably people who would buy that. And then I found out, yeah. And then I found out like, this is just how stuck I was at the time. Right. Like, and then I found out that in the U S it was, but in Canada, it is not in Europe, it is not. so I basically set out to try to figure out how to do this. I basically made two one year bets that were terrible, that did not work at all. There were huge wastes of time and money trying to do stuff that MailChimp wasn’t doing. And then this was the third one, because it took me 18 months to figure out how to actually deliver that. That serves. So here’s some like entrepreneurial wisdom I have acquired. if people are willing to endure a horrible user experience and they still give you a high NPS score, that is a very strong indication that you are at least headed towards product market fit. I wouldn’t say that you’re there, but you’re heading there. I tried to. Make this a feature of my first company before we spun it out and made it its own product, people were hearing about it, signing up, using the identity feature. In the email marketing app, not using any of the rest of it, downloading the file, putting it in Klaviyo and saying it was awesome.
Andrew Warner: Oh, wow. How did you do
Adam Robinson: So that’s like a really,
Andrew Warner: that’s a great indication. That means that one feature that is so loved that even people who are using your competitor are downloading and uploading, most people don’t even know the terminology, let alone are willing to put up with how to do that.
How did, how can you get somebody’s email address just because they hit your website?
Adam Robinson: a lot, there are a lot of ad networks that need to be able to follow people’s browsing activity for retargeting purposes, obviously. and audience segmenting and all sorts of stuff,
you can basically buy your way into some of those networks. And you can triangulate between whatever the pseudonymous, which means anonymous, whatever the pseudonymous, identifier of that browser is. You can triangulate a couple other pieces of information and get it back to a person. That’s what our tech does.
Andrew Warner: Get more specific. I get that
Adam Robinson: Yes, like, like we de anonymize, we de anonymize anomalies. Um, so like some of the networks use a form of encryption that is one way, meaning adam at retention. com gets encrypted the same way every time. You can’t, a human being cannot, there’s no application, nothing. You can’t go backwards with this encryption and get back to adam at retention.
com. But adam at retention. com gets encrypted to the same hash every time.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Adam Robinson: That makes sense. So if all these hashes are floating around and you had a plain text version of every email that ever existed in the world, and you hashed all of those, then you could just look for hashes. And then with each hash, do a simple V lookup and say, Oh, the hash is matched.
So now I know what the plain
Andrew Warner: Okay. And hash just means you’re scrambling, the information. And as long as you’ve got this email scrambled and you can compare it back to, the ad network, which also has the email scrambled and you say, okay, this scramble looks the same, but why would the ad networks or how do the ad networks get our email addresses?
Adam Robinson: Somewhere, somehow you opted in,
Andrew Warner: Okay. All right. I see.
Adam Robinson: there’s very clean paths to opt in and then there are called dark paths to opt in. So like,
there are websites on the internet that are dedicated to generating contact information to sell it. Right. So like think credit card, healthcare, mortgage, like whatever their lead gen sites.
Um, and lead gen sites largely fuel these networks with opt in contact
Andrew Warner: Got it.
Adam Robinson: and the opt in rules in the U S are like, not sort of, it is what
Andrew Warner: Okay. All
Adam Robinson: the spam law in the U S off the spam law in the U S, which is different than Europe is opt out and not opt in. GDPR is opt in for data collection on the internet, which is like super strict.
Even the California level, the California legislation, which is substantially more strict than federal, it’s all about. Disclosure, implied consent. So basically getting people to accept that you’re going to track them with cookies and then, providing them opt out. So
Andrew Warner: Okay. Fair
Adam Robinson: that’s the U S that’s where this stuff works.
Andrew Warner: fair enough. I’m not looking to get political here. I’m just looking to understand mechanics. And what you’re saying is, look, you get all the email addresses that are available on the internet. That’s not super hard to get. And you hash them using the same hash system that these ad networks use.
The ad networks get email addresses from all these different lead gen sites that are part of their networks. They hash the information. They’ve got rich information on the users who are coming through the site. You use the same hash to, get an email address. All right. This is the thing that you did.
Okay. Did you then spin it off before selling the email marketing company?
Adam Robinson: We spun it into its own product when this is another like sort of interesting thing about the entrepreneurial journey that I’ve had. So we made it its own product. It was called get emails because what did it do? It got you emails. Yeah. and. Like, you know, Robley was stuck at 3 million for like four years.
People would come along and be like, you should run Facebook ads. You know, the reason you’re stuck is your UX is wrong. Or like you need to do new website or whatever. So try everything. And I tried Facebook ads a few times because people were like, oh, you can, make ads work with this, product never worked.
Right. And then with get emails, I made a very low quality. It’s, it’s, it’s on the retention. com YouTube page. If you scroll down, it’s called the OG get emails vid. Yeah. That video costs 1, 000 to make and. It’s terrible. I went to digital marketer. com and I took the video sales letter script template, and I just filled it in with information about getting emails, recorded it on my iPhone, uh, the voice.
And then I had this girl Romina who’s awesome do on, on Upwork do word art. That is video. Number one, I spent 5, 000 on Facebook on ads. And it generated 10, 000 of MRR month one, From November 9th to December 1st. So like, that was another indicator. It’s like, wow, with Robley, I could have spent, if I spent 5, 000 with Robley, it might’ve gotten me a hundred dollars of MRR you know, so it was like, it was so unlike anything I had ever experienced, like you said this message and people actually wanted it.
It was like my first, I had read about product market fit. But it was my first actual experience of like, Oh, this is the signal you get back when people actually want what you have. from then literally after month one, I was like, okay, this is going to be a lot bigger than Robley.
Like. We need to like move the key team members on to get emails and then get Robley operating on its own and then just, sell it. So that was, what we did.
Andrew Warner: I’m looking at the internet archive version of get emails. com. I don’t think it’s a bad looking site at all, but I, I see here you, what you’re offering people is a CSV file of the data I
Adam Robinson: Yeah. The one was that totally, it was not good. Um,
Andrew Warner: Not bad.
Adam Robinson: we got to millionaire arm probably like, maybe nine months, something like that. Yeah, it was good. And then, and then actually strangely getting meals got stuck several times because it’s always had a horrible churn problem.
and then each time we kind of innovated our way to like the next S curve, if you want to call it that. and we’re kind of in another one right now. It’s like, we got a lot of new competitors. We need to figure out a new, whatever. I mean, I’m, building two other businesses, not even related to it right now, which you alluded to, which will be the next escorts for sure.
but yeah,
Andrew Warner: guess you and I have talked about this before the interview started. You said that there’s a retention issue or a high churn issue. Why wouldn’t this just be a set it and forget it part of people’s businesses. They need the email addresses of the visitors who are coming to their site. They have a system for how to market to them.
The whole thing just to set, forget, and keep paying
Adam Robinson: that was what I thought 18 months ago
Andrew Warner: happened.
Adam Robinson: what I have learned from both experience and talking to lots of growth equity investors is that there are categories of software. That are low in high churn, the lowest churn category of software generally is a system of record. So that would be a CRM that would be accounting software.
That would be something that literally warehouses. Mission critical data for you. One step up from that is, or worse than that is like mission critical workflows. The only, you know, it’s what’s mission critical is the question there. The total opposite extreme is when you try to make a SAS. Out of selling leads to people. And the reason why that ends up being a high turn product category is because there’s just so many reasons why someone would stop buying leads. It seems set it and forget it. I agree with you. I thought 18 months ago that if we focus on big Shopify stores, our churn would drop next to nothing. And it would look like Klaviyo.
It just didn’t happen. Why? Because somebody leaves a company, somebody new shows up and they’re like, what is
Andrew Warner: Isn’t it enough to say this is like, we collect email addresses using this landing page software. We
collect
addresses using retention.
Adam Robinson: scared I’m scared of the deliverability or like I’m, you know, there’s just nine reasons why someone would stop using it, even though it seems so obvious that it’s set it and forget it. There are still nine reasons why people churn, whereas like, there’s one reason why you would switch from Klaviyo is to go to another ESP.
That’s it. Otherwise you’re sticking with Klaviyo,
Andrew Warner: I see
Adam Robinson: know, like, like the fundamental thing is when you’re selling email addresses, the only thing that changes about your business, if you turn the email addresses off is you are no longer getting those email addresses. Everything else is the same. If you turn Klaviyo off. And it’s 30 percent of your revenue. You immediately have to replace Klaviyo or you might die, you know, immediately. Right. so, so that is the position that I found myself in and. I thought that I was going to try to build RB to be in a way to rectify it and be a mission critical workflow and free for everybody else.
So like the original idea was I’m going to give the leads away for free. And then I’m going to focus on trying to convert 2 percent of people who want a very specific HubSpot or Salesforce integration. And they won’t buy it and they’ll pay 500 bucks a month and they won’t buy the integration until they know the leads are valuable.
Therefore it will be very low churn. Right.
Andrew Warner: the our B2B is a new business. It’s like retention business to business only for you guys. Okay. That’s the vision.
Adam Robinson: yeah, exactly. And the reason, you know, you just, these things never end up how you think that they will, when you start, like, that’s another thing that just learned over and over again, like whatever I think, and by the way, we’re eight weeks in now.
And what I think right now will not be what it ends up as. But the, biggest problem, which I learned like two or three weeks in is that, The magic moment with our B2B is when someone sees these profiles in the Slack channel for the first time, and they see the headshot and they see the LinkedIn URL and they see the business email.
And it really feels like a person. We were sending people spreadsheets first and it wasn’t
Andrew Warner: Yeah.
Adam Robinson: but something about the Slack channels magic. So it’s like, if you, and so I decided like, Oh, I have this viral LinkedIn content motion. I want to make that emotion, that magic moment viral. So that needs to be free.
The problem with making that free is that with no code, you can parse, which is what this document was about that I post about with, no code, you can parse the Slack block with Zapier and take the lead out and do whatever you want with it. Right? So like, even when I pile on features, if I’m giving 100 percent of the leads unlimited away into Slack forever. I almost can’t pile enough features on to make it’s like two in people on LinkedIn said this to me over and over again. It’s like, there’s too much value in the free version, not enough value in the paid. So I was like, originally I was like, well, I’m going to just keep stacking more value under the paid.
The more people I talk to, they’re like, dude, like I’m just going to use the free version. I’ll just take the leads and go put them in hubs by myself. Like, you know, like people were like sending the leads into one Slack channel. Sending them to hotspot filtering down to ICP and HubSpot, sending them to another Slack channel for their sales team.
Like
Andrew Warner: wait, can you do so? I get that. I get that issue. I’m looking at it right now on the example on your site, which is such a beautiful example. It basically shows a Slack channel with a list of everybody who’s been on my site. Coming through on the Slack channel with their name, their title, their photo, their location, their email address, the whole thing, and then a little ad for, uh, for retention, couldn’t you at some point do what other platforms do, which is like say, and another person from, progressive just went on your site and don’t show their name and the rest, if you want more than these 10 people, then you have to pay you, isn’t that a standard way to do things
Adam Robinson: so that’s, what’s going to end up happening now. We, so we’ve had, uh, 5, 000 companies sign up for this in the first two months. 80 percent of them get under 200 leads per month. So we’re going to make up to 200 free, kind of like the MailChimp play. And then of this 20%, we’re basically going to focus on people that know how to book outbound demos already.
We’re going to try to get them on the phone, show them how to use the tool, and then have a sales rep harass them for the next three weeks. And basically when they book a demo, try to get them to pay and then not really touch anybody else. My whole point is. That will end up being a high term business for the same reason, because it’s just selling people leads.
I think it’s going to be a great business. It’s going to be a super lean, super fast growing. Like I think we’ll be able to get to mid teens ARR with hardly any people pretty quickly. Uh, just because. This is, I mean, I know what get emails was like when I started it. This is like a hundred times more momentum.
Andrew Warner: I’ve never been a part of anything like it in my life. I’ve been looking at this. Here’s why I think this would have more momentum. It’s because I could do it myself. I don’t need to say to somebody else in the company, can you please go and integrate this into whatever? I could do it myself. And if the company won’t let me put it directly into our Slack, which I get, maybe I’m not an admin, I’ll do it into my own personal Slack.
And then I’ll get this information. And now I’ve got something that’s useful. And eventually I could go back into the company and say, I’m connecting this into the company. Let’s get going. But it’s such a do it yourself type of tool, right?
Adam Robinson: totally. And people actually tell me they’re like, great job on making it free. Cause it’s like a ask for forgiveness thing that’s going on. That’s happening. It’s like mid market sass are putting it on their site. They’re being like, this is awesome. And they’re legal. People are like. Or their CISO is like, get it off the site right now.
You know, like we have to like vet this, like give us the documents, like whatever. Um, so, so yeah, that’s, that’s part of it. It’s like, you know, PLG. Yeah,
Andrew Warner: Let’s get into then how you grew retention. The part that I know is, what you do on social. You got a lot of fricking swagger. You got like a good, look, good way of writing, but also a good way of hitting people in public, which is, interesting and supporting people. And, uh, who was that company that, you just recently went after you should let this be synthesised.
Adam Robinson: six cents gave me the greatest gift they could have ever given a, a young
Andrew Warner: Yeah. You know what? Just as a way of showing people what’s going on on your LinkedIn. I don’t think this is representative of what you usually do, but it’s, it’s an interesting example. What, happened and what did you do on LinkedIn? Right.
Adam Robinson: you have to do something in my mind, you got to do crazy stuff or you’re, no, one’s ever going to know about it. So like the opportunity there’s the industry leader in of intent data, which is kind of what we sell.
We sell this first party intent signal is six cents. I bought their product to check out this company level website ID. Part of it that I actually think is the most valuable of the whole suite of tools that they have. They have 200 million of ARR, by the way, massive company, 1400 employees. They were worth 5.
2 billion two years ago. So then. You know, our sales guys won’t use it cause our B2B is better or whatever. And it’s free, which is crazy. But, um, we get an email from the CS rapid six cents, six months early. And they’re like, the price of this tech is going to go up by three times. And I’m like, they just don’t want us using it.
That’s crazy. I’ve never heard of such a thing. The price is going to go up by three times. And then they come back the next day and they’re like, Oh, by the way, we’re willing to renew flat if you sign six months early. And I’m like, do you think I’m an idiot? Like, and I live in this world of S and B where like, if I raised the price, 5, I would be burnt at the stake.
Literally. I would have zero customers if we were 500, 5. So I’m just like, I’ve endured that pain over the last year and a half. So I’m like, whatever, I’m going to go try to just punch these guys in the face. So like I wrote this, I don’t typically write like this, but I was just like, this is what these, these guys tried to three X my price.
Here are the reasons why. I don’t think they want me using their tool. And like, reason number one was like, they know their data is terrible. And I’m like, you know, person levels better than what the reason or two is they’re scared of me. Right? Like, obviously they’re not scared of me. Like I’ve heard, but like I wrote this, so then I kind of forget about it.
It gets a ton of engagement because. Strangely with this company, there’s like, a really, shiny outside brand, but over, over years and years, they have oversold a bunch of people and torched their careers. So there’s this like underbelly of the internet that hates them, which I didn’t even know about until I started kind of posting about this stuff.
So then by some act of God on Monday night, last week, they send me a cease and desist, I’m like, call the lawyer. Like, can I please post this on LinkedIn? Like, what is the maximum legal downside if I post on LinkedIn? And he’s like, there’s no case here, whatever.
Like they can sue you. It’s America, but like it can max cost you a few hundred thousand dollars over a few years. And I was like, Oh, Incredible. So the next day I actually posted the cease and desist on my LinkedIn profile and said, and by the way, they demanded that I take the post down, apologize for it and tag all of the commenters.
There were 463 comments, all negative, by the way. I don’t even know if you could do that in like a LinkedIn post. Tag them on LinkedIn and respond within eight hours saying that I was going to do it. And they sent it at night. So I waited 16 hours and I posted the cease and desist on a post. And I said, last night, Sixth Sense threatened to sue me over a LinkedIn post.
Here’s the cease and desist and what they’re demanding that I do. So I said the three things and I’m like, they want me to, you know, comment, tag the commenters who all hate Sixth Sense anyway. And then I’m like, Here is my theory about why they don’t want me to use my product, which remains consistent, said the post over again.
And then I’m like, I’m trying to rally the troops here. So I’m like, Oh, the billion dollar bullies are trying to sue the way the outcomes viral, you know, biggest post in B2B everybody’s talking about or whatever, as someone who had a seven, they’re obviously not ceasing to. It’s going to be cause they’re scared of me, but now I can just run this one sided feud with them. By the way, all of their customers are our perfect next year customers. And B2B is so boring, right? Like they, they, they’ve never seen anything like this before. So it’s just, I’m having a really good time as you, can tell.
Andrew Warner: I can tell that you do have this, like you’ve found your momentum. I want to know how you got to this, but you know what? Let me first say my sponsor is Gusto. Anyone out there who’s got a team of people, you are paying them. You’re giving them benefits. And meanwhile, the software that you’re using stinks for you and stinks for them.
And I highly recommend that you check out the most beautiful software in this space. It’s made by Gusto. Go to their website, gusto. com slash Mixergy to see how beautiful it is. Try for yourself for free at that URL. And I’m telling you, everyone who has tried it, who’s been on here has said they like it, except I’m going to be honest with you, Adam.
There are a few people who said that they stopped using it. And here’s the reason why they consistently said it because their company had outgrown it. And there will be a point where you’re going to go public. And Gusto is going to be too, too. Hopefully Gusto by then will grow to, to service you. But if you’re going public tomorrow, there, it seems like they’re not ready for it.
But if you’ve got a growing business. Until you get there, I’m telling you Gusto is beautiful and I’ll give you a great experience for free right now, limited time if you use gusto. com slash Mixergy. All right, walk me through like how you develop this, whole LinkedIn strategy.
Adam Robinson: It was a long and painful journey. So I want to say a few things. Before I start telling the story of the journey that I think are very important. Number one, I think that there is that a content market fit exists in whatever platform you are creating for. It takes a tremendous amount of time and energy to figure that content market fit out. There’s no shortcut. Took me 12 months. When I say that other people that I think have content market fit often say it also took me around that time.
Andrew Warner: When you say 12 months, you’re running a business, you’ve got stuff going on in your life. How much time are you dedicating each day to writing for LinkedIn during this 12 months log?
Adam Robinson: It’s horrible.
Andrew Warner: me
Adam Robinson: I mean, not, not every day. Uh, I, I always, I batch it. So, I have this whole presentation, which I can give you a link to, so people could go look at the slides and they’ll see the entire story of the journey. I’m not doing right now what I was doing 18 months ago when I
Andrew Warner: yeah, take me to the beginning
Adam Robinson: I have always, I’ve always, I’ve always batched it though.
So like in the beginning, part of my hesitancy, which I assume is part of every entrepreneur’s hesitancy is kind of exactly what you said. It’s like, I don’t have time for this. And then I, another hesitancy of mine was like, I don’t know what I’m doing. So like,
Andrew Warner: right I
Adam Robinson: like, I know, I know what I’m good at now.
And I know that I’m not good at social media. And I know that there are people that are good at social media. Like I know that I’m good at serving and now 18 months later, 18 months ago, no way. So I advocate actually, you know, if you can spare the cash and some people are not in that position, getting a ghostwriter, and working with that ghostwriter for like 90 days. I want to say one other thing about this though. The reason that it is so powerful for me right now is because I am now selling a product into an audience. That has two characteristics. One, I am my ICP. I am my ideal customer profile. So when I talk about my pain, which I talk about a lot, it cuts through in a way that nothing else could.
When I was selling to the big Shopify stores, when I talked about my pain, they could partially relate to it as pain is an entrepreneur, but nothing about their e commerce experience. Other than that, having to let go of people, basically. Was the same as my SAS experience, right? When I talk to revenue leaders about problems in sales with SAS, booking demos, BDRs, response rates, whatever, they’re feeling it, right?
So if you are your ICP, it’s dangerous. And then if you are your ICP and they also do their job on that platform, it is incredibly dangerous. Meaning they live there, right? Like SAS people live on LinkedIn. That’s where a lot of
them
Andrew Warner: believe they ended up on LinkedIn I thought LinkedIn was gonna end up being the mid level executives at big companies and those aspiring to be them But no, they’ve found a home there instead of
on
Adam Robinson: tell you. Yeah. I can tell you they’re there
revenue leaders,
Andrew Warner: But so you’re saying, look, anyone who’s listening to this, who’s maybe selling consumer software or selling products to consumers or to people who’s not them, it’s going to be really hard for them to do what you do, which is tell your story, shock about your battle, your day to day stuff.
I get that the part though, that is relatable though, is you do have to sit down and write. You do have to sit down and create. I watch YouTube shorts endlessly and I’ll watch people who make things like, Oh dude, I was invited to a house party. This guy’s doing million selling slime here in Austin. Not too far from where you and I are.
Selling slime millions of dollars. His whole thing is video of slime. Yes. It’s this dude. I went to his house. His house has no furniture, huge house, no furniture, except for a ping pong table in the center in the living room. Sean Puri was there from My First Million. He’s playing ping pong in the middle of this thing.
He had no food, no drinks, except for water and like one type of beer because nobody drinks beer anymore. Pickleball court and all this stuff. Anyway, this is the type of person that he is. the reason I’m bringing this up is he may not be talking to his audience, but he had to figure out his own content strategy, created his own slime based content, and then sold slime.
So, whatever you’re saying still applies to people who are not their own, ICP. Talk to me about the early days. Would you then carve out one day where you said, I’m just gonna sit here and force myself to write even if it pains me? Was it that?
Adam Robinson: I’ll talk to you about like, let’s say what I was doing three months in three months in, I wanted to use video. I just have this view that even if you get lower reach from video on LinkedIn, which was a platform I was targeting, maybe rightly, maybe wrongly, which is debate, I If you, if you should, if you’re selling Shopify stores, create content on LinkedIn is your first stop or not.
but I wanted to create videos and I wanted to create them daily. So I had a motion. I had, I was producing a podcast at the time and the podcast producers would also produce these three minute videos for me. And they sent me a template for videos and you can go back and look at them. You can go to my LinkedIn and look at what I was putting out.
the template was like. Hook story, three lessons, soft CTA. And I had these like whiteboards and I would like hold them up and be like, well, then I learned this and I learned this and I learned this, you know, do this or whatever. and I would batch it and I still batch it. now Tuesdays are my content day.
So like yesterday I wrote like three or four LinkedIn posts, sat there and wrote, I think I wrote my favorite I’ve ever written yesterday, by the way. Look forward to it tomorrow, 30 PM our time. It may or may not have something to do with what we’ve already talked about, to give you an idea.
So, um, I batched it and I would basically like, as the week was going on, I would like write little hook ideas and then I would sit down, so. The setup I have, I got early on, cause I want to do video. This is a Sony a seven camera behind a teleprompter screen. And the reason I got it was I wanted to look people in the eyes when I’m doing zoom calls with them, COVID world, everybody’s in zoom calls.
I think it’s a superpower to look people in the eyes because no one does, everybody’s looking down. So I got this set up. And the other thing you could do with the setup is you could put. Words on a PowerPoint presentation and flip the slide and put them on the teleprompter so I could sit there and just, I’d have two hours allocated to do this.
I had the hooks written out from during the week. So I’d go in, Friday afternoon at 3 PM, I’d write the story, I’d write the lessons We do it in Riverside. They would all get saved in Riverside and these guys would just like crank them out and post them. So that was the system that I had then. now I write. My LinkedIn consultant, Alec edits in posts. I have a whole video team. Cause I’m very ambitious with what we’re trying to do in video.
Like I made a docuseries last year and then I hired the team that did it. And we’re just trying to basically, inject more narrative into the LinkedIn posts, like it’s a lot of reporting right now, but, like narratives very hard for me to write. so anyway, and then we’re going to make another season of docuseries later in the year.
but yeah. Tuesday’s my content day. A lot of people aren’t recording their own podcasts like this one on Tuesday. So anytime I can get on anyone’s podcast to tell the story of RV to be a retention dot com, that’s part of my motion. It’s part of like what I’m doing. and I viewed it as the same, effort, right?
It’s, it’s, it’s the same for me to go write a post as it is for me to get on this interview with you and try to just be everywhere,
Andrew Warner: Okay. How do you come up with the lessons? How do you come up with what to say? I, I asked this because it feels easy, but I’ve actually been brought in by other entrepreneurs who say, Andrew, you’re a good interviewer here. A couple of things that have been on my mind. My team will send you other things that have been on their minds.
Just ask me questions and probe so that we can then turn it into content. It’s not easy. How do you sit down and come up with it?
Adam Robinson: So Alec, we have a one hour idea generation call every month or every week. I’m sorry. every week on Monday, we do one hour of idea generation, and then we do 30 minutes related to whatever the messaging goal is at the time. Right. So we could be trying to set discovery calls with VP marketings of series B SAS, or we could be trying to get waitlist signups for.
This product that we’re like not launching or whatever. Um, so during the idea generation session, at this point, I’ve been working with them for nine months. We’ve had a lot of huge posts. We know what the greatest hits are. We know what we think people care about. We want to continue to try to discover more greatest hits.
And I was just on with Andy move on. Who’s a LinkedIn guy in the sales space. And I thought he, he just said something that I want to share. He’s like, you’re not building audience on LinkedIn. You’re building a library of greatest hits. Which builds the audience on LinkedIn. Does that make sense?
So you’re building a library.
It’s like, it’s like your content pillars, right? What you’re doing by creating every day is figuring out what ideas audience is building around. And that’s what will build your audience in the long run. Does that make
Andrew Warner: I, what I’m understanding you to say is you’re testing different ideas with a daily post. You’re not coming up with what your message is. Those daily ideas will give you a sense of what your big message is. And that’s what people will start to know you for. And you start to create short pieces of content around it.
That’s what you’re saying.
Adam Robinson: Yes.
Andrew Warner: I see. Okay. So it’s not.
Adam Robinson: of throwing spaghetti.
Andrew Warner: But so you’re, you might be testing out what happens if I compare myself to MailChimp just randomly as a tool, or you might be testing out what happens if I talk openly about my churn. And then you discover, Hey, you know what? People love churn. I’m going to be the churn guy.
Who’s going to have other little pieces of content that got it, that creates empathy. That shows people how to break churn that shows people that I’m like them too. Okay. I think I’m following you. What about that? What? What? I thought you initially said was you’re creating a content library.
What I have found with my interviews on Mixergy is that because I have the transcripts, I’m creating a content library that then people will come through Google and find an interview that I did. Okay. Maybe 10 years ago with Linda from Linda. com about how she sold her business or content business for a billion dollars to LinkedIn.
They will then come and discover that. And from that, they’ll sign up and be a member of my site so they could get the full package that comes with her stuff. And so on. I don’t find that you get that on LinkedIn or on Twitter. It’s basically goes right into a graveyard there, right?
Adam Robinson: And that’s a huge problem that I have right now that I’m trying to solve. Yes, you’re totally right. Goes into a graveyard. There’s a lot of limitations to LinkedIn. Graveyard is one limitation. Another limitation is. it is not a sequential platform, meaning it could serve you a post from me that was from six months ago.
And then, you know, serve your wife or whatever, something from yesterday. And you couldn’t do episode 12 and then assume that in episode 13, someone knows what it is because it’s not, um, but yeah, so, uh, this guy, Anthony Kanata, who was. CMO of gain site and hop in and all that stuff. He’s got this startup right now called audience plus, and he’s trying to solve this problem for people like me.
it is basically a no code, beautiful place to showcase your content that will also have SEO and like this, that, and the, uh, but
Andrew Warner: Meaning pull in the data that you have already on LinkedIn, but organize it on your own website in a way that’s searchable and SEOable,
Adam Robinson: Yeah. Like you own your audience because of what you just described. If you’re, if your audience is finding you through SEO from Mixergy site, that’s your audience. I don’t own my audience.
Andrew Warner: You don’t do the email thing where after every message, the top comment is your, email newsletter. You don’t do that from what I can see.
Adam Robinson: I don’t, I just started an email newsletter last
week. I’m going to, I’m, I’m starting an email newsletter. I’m doing a weekly webinar, live event every Tuesday, from now on. and I’m just going to start trying to like, you know, like, yeah, it’s
Andrew Warner: And the webinar is
getting people to join your email list, like register for this live session
Adam Robinson: yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. and then another, thing that I have to do is. Address this problem, which you said, it’s like, I’ve got some, I read my negative Glassdoor reviews for the first time On LinkedIn. That’s incredible content. It’s buried. No one’s ever going to see it again.
Right? Like I need a place where people can go to like, get deeper into our world. Right. So, um,
Andrew Warner: I can’t
even,
Adam Robinson: to use audience,
Andrew Warner: I’m sorry. I can’t even sort your comments by the most liked or the most commented, which is what I wanted to do. And you could do that on, on YouTube. Sorry. You were going to say something.
Adam Robinson: um, no, uh, that was it. this is a problem which you’re highlighting.
Andrew Warner: Okay. All right. So if I were to tell your story with retention, it’s you found this tool, you spun it off, you then just found that naturally ad actually advertising worked for you at first for finding your first customers. Once the advertising took, is that right?
Adam Robinson: there, there’s a better
Andrew Warner: Yeah. Tell me like the whole, how you got to this
Adam Robinson: So zero to 1 million was. You know, I had this crazy intuition. It was right around the time that like Instagram stories and snap and everything was becoming popular. The video use of these social media platforms. I was like, man, what if I make a one minute amusing talking head video with a different background?
Every week, and I could get people anticipating the ad that answered all the sales questions, right? Then I will have won the game. And I actually did that. And they’re on, they’re at the bottom of the retention. com YouTube page too. and they got outrageous. they’re just hysterical.
so I did that and that got us zero to one, uh, in, the characteristic of the ads were like, Facebook will bring you very bad SAS customers that turn it like 20 percent a month. I’ve heard everybody say that. The nature of our product was you could PLG your way into like a 5, 000 a month deal.
So one whale would come in every week or two and they just, you just pay back all of the ads. so I could keep running them and then, six months in or whatever, it stopped working. Like two months went by and I didn’t get a whale. And I’m like, I got to stop doing this. We got to focus on building features for bigger customers or whatever, but like that was zero to one and it was so fun.
It was like probably my, it wasn’t organic social. It was very push, but it was like. I kind of didn’t know I had it in me, and then I did that and it worked so well and I was like, wow, like I kind of have a knack for this stuff. You know? so yeah, that was zero to one. And then the product was good enough.
So here’s another belief I have as an entrepreneur. If your product is growing on its own by word of mouth. Then there’s a million in one ways that you can speed it up. If your product is not growing on its own by word of mouth, then all of this other stuff that everyone’s telling you that they’re doing to make their business grow will not work for you.
Does that make sense? Because it’s going to work. It’s going to work for the businesses that have the better products, because they can afford to like pay more for the ad or whatever they’re talking about. So to me, it all comes back to the product and this product market fit and having an offer that gets people’s attention and that they want and like, whatever, it’s like, You know, which is why I do a lot of this crazy stuff I do.
It’s like, what do you mean? This thing is free, right? It’s like, it’s like when you repeat back the core offer that someone has and it stops them in their tracks, you’re in a good spot. so yeah, we basically kept a super lean team. Zero to one was those Facebook ads. One to 10 was six people.
Cold email done out of the Philippines, one salesperson doing 15 minute demos did like 2000 of them. And then at 10 million, I got, I watched the Jasper AI guys go from zero to 50 in 12 months in their office. We shared an office here in Austin. I was like, Oh, I can do that too. Right? Like, like, it’s just the most amazing when you watch someone who was as stuck as you were do something.
That you didn’t think you were capable of. It will make you
Andrew Warner: Because from what I understand from you, Adam, you had seen them when they were doing the proof days. This is the little widget that would come up on Shopify stores. And then they created what became Jasper. And you said, wait a minute. So they create another product. The second product builds on the first, the second could be even bigger.
I’m just going to be a product making machine, just like they were. That’s what you took away from it. It wasn’t that they had hit on a good product. You took away. be a studio of products.
Adam Robinson: And, and I also took away, this is kind of a weird thing to say. Like, I thought that like unicorns were reserved for like Stanford kids. And like, you know what I mean? Like, I really believe
that like super geniuses who were doing highly technical stuff and they were above me. Right. I really felt that, but like these dudes were from Maryland, literally we, we all sat there for two years, stuck at 3 million, trying to figure out how to get unstuck from 3 million.
So anyway, around the same time that I wanted to go be like Dave. I found Santo shoes, my COO right now, we figured out the big Shopify stores were our ideal customer profile for the tool. And we hadn’t before we figured out another product suite to sell them. And that was when it was like, how do I create as much awareness for this as possible?
We have no competitors. We have zero penetration. Like this is just going to be a slam dunk. It’s going to be a unicorn twice over. And it didn’t. It happened that way, but basically long story short, I thought I was going to have hardly any churn and revenue expansion in two years in the churn went down a little bit and there was no revenue expansion in the second year.
It was like, I got a bunch of competitors now who are now trying to like steal our customers.
Andrew Warner: And so what you’re saying is, look, now this, that’s where I am right now, stuck at where we are because we’ve got competitors who are picking off people. And because, uh, there’s a lot of churn in this business naturally. And so I need to think about what the next product is. That’s the way out of it.
Adam Robinson: High churn product category, high churn buyer persona and SMB is a, an SMB e commerce store is a high churn buyer persona. They’re super price sensitive. They’re a zero brand loyalty. It’s just the opposite. It’s very easy for them to start and stop doing stuff. It’s the opposite of, let’s say an enterprise company where doing anything is super hard so that if they do something it’s for several years, minimum because of the amount of effort it takes to do it in the first place.
Right.
Andrew Warner: Mind, I would have thought that any SMB just sticks around with the software. If it’s part of the business breaks, I paid for WUFU forms for years after the founders had left the founders left. I stayed a subscriber because it’s part of my site for 25 bucks, 50 bucks a month. I’m not going to go and hunt it down, but you’re saying that’s not the way it is.
Adam Robinson: mean, we’re trying to charge more, you know, it’s like not 25 bucks is I think the problem it’s like with what we have to do for onboarding, it’s really like 500 to a thousand is the low end. So it’s like the top tier of these Shopify stores. And then it’s, there’s just a lot of problems with it,
Andrew Warner: Okay. All right.
Adam Robinson: but it really, the big guys, crush it.
And then there’s like the, another, misinterpretation that I had made. Is I thought there were a lot more very big guys in that ecosystem than there are.
Andrew Warner: In the Shopify ecosystem. I see.
Adam Robinson: So now we got to go up, go up market and it’s its own set of challenges. But, um, you know, that’s the journey of the,
Andrew Warner: I’m smiling right now because I’m looking, you said, go back to the old retention. com to the bottom. And I did go to the bottom. You’ve got videos like this one that I have in front of me right now, 36 views, you talking at the camera, talking about how an eight figure founder built a massive network.
Like there’s so many of these videos where I could see you’re into it. You’re focused. You’re everything. 36 people watched it. I’m 37,
Adam Robinson: yeah, you will. Well, so like we never did anything to try to get people to watch the YouTube stuff. It just kind of served as a repository for the video
Andrew Warner: I’m just bringing that up
because
you’re working really hard and getting very few video
views at all. And at the same time, I guess what you’re saying is, and then eventually. LinkedIn is where you decided to go. You suffered for a few months. You found a pattern, which is what your content creators, your production team told you to do.
You work with the pattern. And once you work with the pattern, you were able to go break free and come up with your own thing. And when you came up with your own thing, that’s what brought you to where you are today.
Adam Robinson: Yes. Very, very succinct. I would insert a lot of pain in there along
Andrew Warner: What’s the biggest pain that you had after you started? Like, right now it feels like, Ah, biggest pain was he was stuck at 3 million with his friends over at Jasper, who were also stuck at 3 million. I could live with that.
Adam Robinson: I mean, yeah, everybody’s journey is so painful. I can’t tell the full story, but two weeks before we were about to get paid 10 million for my first startup, Robley, one of our engineers deleted the entire code base and we didn’t have a backup and for 16 hours, we were We thought it was all gone.
Andrew Warner: And how’d you get it back?
Adam Robinson: My co founder worked with the founder of the backup company, who was like, what do you mean you were writing a new backup as you were deleting the old one and you didn’t just have a backup file. They spent 12 hours trying to find the first folder of an incomplete backup, which they did. And then they were able to recover 98.
5 percent of it. So that’s how we got it back.
Andrew Warner: can I tell you
Adam Robinson: like that was out of acute pain during that period. I don’t know how else to
Andrew Warner: I feel like, I remember before they hit Jasper, I was talking with Dave Rogan Moser. I was here in, in Austin for an event. He came out for dinner and I said, you look, I forget what it was. he was kind of sad and bummed for, I feel like the same reason you are. You, you put a lot of pressure on yourself and you.
Compare yourself a lot to other people. And I feel like Dave, especially once he got that Y Combinator access, he started realizing that there was this big, massive success, that those people were no smarter, they were just the same goofy people as the rest of us. And here he was stuck down here and they were up here and he didn’t know how to break through.
It wasn’t like his life sucked because his family was dying or your business was dying. I feel like for you, it was, why am I here when I know there’s so much more that I could be. And for. Like competition and comparing yourself to other people can really be, can be murdered, but I feel like to some degree it pains you, but also fuels you.
And that’s the biggest pain that you may be lived with. What do you think?
Adam Robinson: Yeah. I mean, you, yeah, of course, definitely. Yeah. Whether it’s definitely, it’s definitely comparing myself to other people, but it’s also a challenge against myself. now I know I can create a 20 million AR company. I have no idea if I can make a hundred million AR company. I hope I can, I’m going to try, but like, I don’t know if I can do that yet, cause I haven’t done it. You know. When I was at 3 million, having a company above 20 would have been the ultimate ego validator of entrepreneurship. Now that I’m here, it feels like I’m just getting started.
Andrew Warner: No, it feels like it’s inadequate. It’s getting started and I can definitely see your swagger’s up over the years. You had swagger even in the beginning, but your swagger’s up
your momentum’s up, but there’s also the sense of. Damn it. Why am I not there? Does that
Adam Robinson: right?
Or I just, I just, yeah. Or I just like want to. You know, when I was stuck at 3 million, I was dying for the content that I’m making. It was nowhere. I want to show people that they can bootstrap to 20 million. Also, I want to show people that it’s possible to bootstrap a hundred million and I want to report the whole journey because it doesn’t exist.
Right. Like, like you got some people reporting work in public kind of stuff where at one, two, 3 million, nobody’s doing it at 20 million. Certainly nobody’s doing it at 50. Nobody’s sharing real problems. Nobody’s nobody’s is, uh, showing people what is possible. So that is also a big motivator for
Andrew Warner: I do dig that even when you don’t show your vulnerability I do sense the reason I think that I thought that you are doing worse than you are is I do see the frailty on The page all the time with you and I dig that I dig that cuz I don’t want I don’t want a guy I don’t want to follow another person who’s the Tai Lopez of sass.
We don’t we don’t need that. We want someone who’s You’re doing the thing we are. Tell me what you’re going through. Tell me what you figured out. All right. If you’re into this stuff, you can go to retention. com and your mind will be blown by what they’re doing or even better. If you really want to be like, what can they really do that?
Go to R for retention and then B to B for business to business, right? It’s rb2b. com. Am I right about that? URL? Yeah, it’s new and I still
got it.
and better still. Or in addition, follow Adam Robinson on LinkedIn from my money. There are very few people who do LinkedIn well, and don’t make you feel like you’re in an episode of the, of the office.
Every time you log into that site, you’re one of those people. All right.
Adam Robinson: Thank you.
Andrew Warner: Thanks. Bye everyone. Oh, gusto. Thank you for sponsoring gusto. com slash mixergy. Bye.
