Ep. 8: Bootstrapping with Adam Robinson

Anis Bennaceur (00:02.462)
Ladies and gentlemen, very excited to introduce you here to the one and only Adam Robinson, the founder of RB2B and retention .com. Adam, extremely excited to have you

Adam (00:13.96)
What's up? Thanks for having me. Can't wait to hop

Anis Bennaceur (00:18.43)
Amazing. Adam, I'm gonna start asking you this question that I love, which is, I would love to know what are the three pivotal moments in your career, in your life that made you who you are and where you are today.

Adam (00:33.358)
Yeah. So like I, um, I was a wall street credit, credit default swap trader and I worked at Lehman brothers. And if you were around in 2008, you know what that name means. And, uh, I went down with the ship, you know, um, got hired by Barclays after like made tons of money and it was like a crazy thing to be a part of. Um, and that was like a transformational experience. So I think number one is just like after college, getting that job.

I mean, I worked there for almost 10 years. And then transformational moment number two was the year after the meltdown, everybody doing what I was doing made a ton of money because we just bought everything and it all went up in, like my trading book made like a hundred million dollars or whatever. And I got paid like three million bucks or something or three and a half million bucks is like a 28 year old.

bought a Ferrari and like lived in like this, like, you know, so, um, that's not really about the lifestyle that I had. Um, it's about the fact that I was able to save tons of money living in Manhattan, which is very rare for someone in their twenties because of that crazy event. And it enabled me when I eventually had a bad year the next year and got paid down 90%. I just quit. was

I want to go try to be an entrepreneur. barely even know what that means, but like, I don't want to do this anymore. You know, I kind of like for, for my, time and place I was on a single, I was like, now's the time I got to like, try to like chase this entrepreneurial dream. Cause that's kind of what I wanted to do in college, but like, you know, what do you do? It's like, well, I want to make money first. So like go work on wall street. So that was transformational event number two. then, man, probably the third.

was like when my first company became profitable, you know, cause like I'm a bootstrapper in like the, have seen this happen so many times. It's like someone's first startup will consume all of the resources around. Right? So like if you were a founder of your first startup, kind of doesn't matter how much money you saved. It will consume all of it. You know, I want a couple of the guys, you know, a richer guy than me started this company called

Adam (03:00.942)
It was like a financial stuff. was like making the bond market like more transparent or whatever. Uh, he put like $8 million into his, like any, then he raised a bunch of money to like whatever, uh, you know, it consumed all of the cash that I had available. Uh, my brother was a financial partner in my first business. It consumed all of his available cash. And then like, there was a turning point and all of sudden it was just like shooting out, you know, it took five years for me to pay myself.

But then I had like a nice salary for a while. So that was like probably number two. And then the weird thing about that business is we used this data mining strategy. It was in the email newsletter space, right? So we were competing with like MailChimp, right? Incredible brand. still, mean, the reason RB2B is what it is is because of MailChimp. It's a big freemium offer, but like I think people under appreciate the power of free and

You know, I got that business to 3 million ARR and couldn't get it past that because the, what we did to get to 3 million ARR was finite and the product was not good enough to grow in the real world. No matter what I tried, I couldn't give you a grow. wasn't about, you know, it kind of tempting to like, go try to raise a million dollars and try other stuff. We're like, thank God I didn't do it because that would have just been wasted money.

The third pivotal moment, which I think is truly defining like in my confidence in myself was what is now retention .com start off as get emails four years ago and getting that to a thriving business, not having this like cheat code that stopped at 3 million error. Now I know that I can do it right. Like now I know that like, uh, and by the way, RB to be like my metrics are public. Like it's blowing the doors off. I know how to get something from zero to

over and over again. And I know that I know that, which like before you've done it a few times, you know, once you're lucky twice, you're good. Right. So that's probably like the third pivotal moment. It's like, now I know, I know how to start startups with incredibly small amounts of resources, right. Which is, which is what it's the best way by far.

Anis Bennaceur (05:12.928)
I love that. I love that as a former lead bootstrap founder, it's definitely one of the hardest and toughest things to do, but then you learn so much

Adam (05:24.034)
man, everything's working against you in the beginning. So if you can get through that phase, then like, like I started RB to be with not a ton of resources, but now I have so much wind at my back, you know, like understanding an audience and like people that will work for me and like all, all this stuff. It's just incredible.

Anis Bennaceur (05:46.08)
Now that you're profitable, you're making a solid amount of revenue, right? Well, first of all, I was going to ask you, you went from, boost traps your way from zero to over $20 million in AR. What's your take actually on boost trapping versus fundraising? And now that you're highly profitable, how much easier do you think?

things have become for you to run as many experiments to do a lot of new things that you were, you know, initially impossible because you were bootstrapping and not taking even a salary, right? What are your thoughts on all these things?

Adam (06:29.55)
So I think bootstrapping is so difficult, like if you could, you know, hardly anybody does it to 10 million. And I think there's a lot of reasons why, but I think that if you can manage and it'll take a little longer or whatever, but if you can manage to bootstrap to 10 million, I believe that the world is at your fingertips. Why? Because that day you could turn around and sell it for $50 million. You could hire a CEO and like be a board member and work two hours a month. You could work a hundred hours a week if you want. You could then turn around.

If you got there super efficiently, you're going to be able to raise a hundred million dollars to go make it huge. Right. So you can go the unicorn route if you want, or you could keep running it super lean and pay yourself $5 million a year in a few years. Right. Which, which no one does. Right. So, um, I think that the discipline to just stay super in the lessons that you learn from operating that lean,

It's just undervalued versus the perception that you're losing ground versus competitors and you need to speed it up. Right. So like, that's just my personal opinion. Now it's like, how do I do that? That's the problem. Right. So, know, bootstrapping is tough. You got to get money from somewhere. I saved mine. Maybe you could do like a friends and family, like a restaurant would or whatever. Um, you gotta get some money from somewhere. I wish I had less money when I started my company because I think I could have made it work with 200 grand, but

You know, I was able to not take a salary and put an extra million dollars cash in over five years. Like I spent a lot of money on it. Um, but like, I think it's like, be less ambitious with your first venture is smart because I don't think it's that hard to get to two to 3 million ARR with virtually no staff and then create a stream of cash that allows you to be this studio of experimentation.

You can carve off a little part of a big market where you're differentiated even, and you can find customers and like, even if it's like not going to be, you know, a 50 million error company, it's like that, that's nice. And then your next thing that you do almost certainly will be more successful than that because of everything you learned in your prior. like, I started getting emails and kept Roebley and then it, it like was clear that get emails was going to be much better. we we sold Roebley.

Adam (08:53.166)
And then all I had was get emails. Now I thought retention .com was going to be a unicorn, you know, high churn buyer persona, high churn product category. It's it's it. won the market we were going after by far, but now we're at a size where it's hard to outpace the churn with the deal size that at. So our next play is like, can we go up market or not? And that will determine the fate of that business. It's like, if we can't, it's stuck at 22. If we can, maybe we get it to 30 or 35. Right. So, uh, meanwhile,

RB to be go to RB to be .barometrics .com started 17 weeks ago. It's at like almost one and a half million ARR with a team of five, no ad spend, you know, it's just crazy. Right? So I wouldn't be surprised if a year for now I'm like, well, what do I do with this retention .com thing? I got to focus, you know, entirely on this like new thing. And by the way, what I'm trying to say is like, they keep getting better and

the last one gave me the resources to do the next one, which I think it's like, know, maybe that's how business should be. Right. Like, like you will very likely not hit it out of the park on your first endeavor because of everything that I described. If you got a great education, which I did not from a prior career, like you were great at product or like you really learned the craft of sales or you like really learned how to build at the startup phase.

Awesome. Most people are not in that position. that, yeah, I think

Being realistic about the window for the type of success that people want when they start in tech will make the emotional journey much easier. It's probably not coming in your first decade, but I think you can get to this point where I'm at right now where dude, this doesn't have to be that good to like stack it on top of retention .com. And as a bootstrapped founder of a, you know, 25 % total margin business, and this won't be more than that. It's about to get Epic, right? Like which, you

Adam (10:58.082)
I don't think people are thinking about it. If you go the venture route, there's one way out, right? Like, and it's not super high probability.

Anis Bennaceur (11:06.236)
I love a lot what you're saying here and definitely relate to what you're saying in the sense that bootstrap for six years and then eventually I took for my second startup a, the venture route, but either way, I think, I think that you never get it right. Absolutely. Or very rarely get it right. The first time

you get all the learnings and that's fine. You you bump your first car in your case, was a Ferrari. But anyway, you bump your first car.

Adam (11:35.79)
That was the first car that I bought. lived in Manhattan. You didn't need a car.

Anis Bennaceur (11:41.12)
and it's pretty wild. And then you get a nicer car that you'll most likely bump a lot less, but you'll know how to drive it a lot better and you'll be a lot smarter. In your case, How I'm sure it also made you a lot smarter around being efficient around, you know, taking shortcuts around doing things that are very different from what most people would typically try doing. Right. As you said, you're running no ads.

And we'll talk about it in a second. You're using LinkedIn to create a ton of visibility. But speaking about visibility and transparency on your metrics, you mentioned that bare metrics page. You did something very extreme there, which is sharing publicly all of your metrics. Why did you do that in the first place? And I'd love to understand what you learned

Adam (12:38.286)
Yeah. So like, um, there's this guy in the email space named Nathan Barry. 10 years ago, he did that. He shared publicly his metrics and

You know, it's 2014 or something like doing what I'm doing influencer style. it just, it wasn't a thing back then. He was blogging occasionally about the journey, but there are tens of thousands of entrepreneurs in SAS who have looked at that barometrics dashboard hundreds of times. I know because I'm one of them and I bring it up and people are like, I visited at least quarterly just to see what's that. So it's like the most memorable part of his journey.

to so many people is that dashboard, right? Now, I think about how thirsty, when I was stuck at 3 million five years ago, I think about how thirsty for any Nathan Berry content I was because of how well he was doing, right? And how stuck I was. So to me, the ultimate thing is you create the same honeypot, getting people in there, trying to figure out how you're doing what you're doing.

But there's a place that they can go to actually learn what you're doing, which is like my LinkedIn, right? Like, so it's like, that to me is the ultimate package for startup founders. And like, what I'm doing is not going to work for anyone else because I'm me and they're them, right? But it can be inspiration, right? I'm hoping to share my approach and that by hearing the way that I'm looking at things.

It can like encourage people to think outside of the box and like come up with their own version of like breaking through or whatever. Right. So like that's the whole idea around it. I think we're in an attention war and I'm going to do whatever I can do to get people talking about me. It's like, I want to introduce this inbound, let outbound category. And I want people to call me an idiot and say, it's not any different, whatever. Like I've won if people are talking about it. Right. So the short story is like, it's another vehicle to just get people talking about this.

Anis Bennaceur (14:50.686)
All publicity is good publicity, right? And so...

Adam (14:53.006)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I just know no one else will do. just know like a fundamental principle I have in marketing is like, do what no one else is willing to do. I know no one else is willing to share their SaaS metrics. Like part of that is embarrassing. And we have a 12 % monthly churn rate because we started three months ago or whatever, right? Like that is shameful for a SaaS entrepreneur. Literally like I'm ashamed of that. can't create a low churn SaaS, right? Like, but like whatever, like enjoy, you

Anis Bennaceur (15:23.792)
I think it keeps you honest to what you're doing and it puts an added element of pressure in terms of, how do we fix these problems? You look at problems right away and when you talk about them, it makes them even more real for you, right? What are your pains? How are you going to solve them? what are the main learnings? It's all about learnings at the end of the day.

Adam (15:47.726)
Yep. And, um, yeah. And I think it also adds so much credibility to the content to actually, it's like, not only am I in the game, I'm showing you exactly where I'm at in the game. You know, like that's so powerful. It's like, you can take my word for it that I have a 22 million error. So was like, you can literally see the Stripe transactions for RB to be right.

Anis Bennaceur (16:15.402)
Yeah.

Adam (16:17.856)
It's crazy. It's just amazing. I would want to see that for anyone's business. Like not just mine, you know,

Anis Bennaceur (16:26.826)
I know, do you think more and more people now will follow suit and do what you've done? Are you starting to see it with other entrepreneurs taking that sort of leap of

Adam (16:35.672)
So I hope so because I think it's good for the community and good for the world. think it is a body of work that gains tremendous value the farther along you get in the trajectory so that if you can start early stage and do it, you will not have to, you know, like I love Max at Warmly. Like his content is not as valuable as mine.

This is his first startup and he's gotten a tool to 1 .3 million ARR, right? Like over 18 months, uh, you know, he just raised $6 million and is hiring 15 people, right? Like that's not going to work. I'm telling you, because I've been in this game for 12 years. He hasn't right. So like that content's interesting, but it's only so valuable. Max's content in 10 years. Once he's making decisions that are actually good decisions.

And he can, you can go back and see the trajectory of how he got there. That is an incredibly valuable body of work that is not out there. And that's what I'm hoping to provide. I'm hoping to provide something where I happen to be starting from somebody who bootstrapped 20 million error in my company is crushing it. So like, you can go back from three years from now, you'll be able to go back and sequentially look at all my LinkedIn posts and see what I was doing as this thing

Anis Bennaceur (18:00.97)
Yeah.

Adam (18:00.994)
Which is like amazing, right? Like, like I would kill for that, which is why I know it's so good. Right? So the problem is normally in my position, you can't make the content because your investors are like, you know, you have this relationship that you're afraid of with your employees or like, you're just not comfortable being that transparent with whoever. so that's why I think early stage founders are the people who are doing it. It's cause there's such a barrier for the later stage.

But hopefully as more of them start and they actually get their companies to grow, they will be putting out stuff in five years that's as valuable as mine is now.

Anis Bennaceur (18:36.906)
I love that. You're definitely head of the pack here. And one of the other things that, related to what you just said here is that there's, there are other types of founders who will be very secretive about what they do, not even mentioned on Crunchbase or TechCrunch, how much they raised and how much revenue they're doing. you know, Dandy as a company, for example,

hyperscale that no one even talked about how much revenue they were doing for a while or how much they raised because the minute people figure out that what you're doing is successful, they're going to try to copy it and compete with you on pricing and then it ends up being raised to the bottom. What's your take on that? I have a very strong opinion about it, but I'd love to know what you think

Adam (19:26.37)
Yeah. So we're definitely feeling it at retention .com.

Adam (19:34.632)
I don't know, man, the awareness is just so valuable that I think, well, I mean, I know, look at what I'm doing, right? The trade off is so heavily in favor of giving anyone any reason to follow your story. And the thing that I couldn't do with retention .com, I think I can do here, which is this like Russell Brunson, true like tribe, you know, like there are people that are

that are buying into what we're doing for reasons that are not feature in price. They're buying into what we're doing because they believe that the information and community that we are providing them will actually unlock a path to this point of freedom that I have highlighted and that I am the credible person to help you get there, right?

Couldn't do with the retention .com. The opportunity wasn't right. wasn't the right person. It was not the right product to tell a story like that. it just wouldn't have worked, but like, think if you have that element, at least for a while, and I hear that people are finally being able to like sort of undercut Russell in that market, but like, man, he had four or five years where that was what the moat was. You know, it was this like insane buy in to your one funnel away.

You know, and it wasn't about like, Oh, click funnels is $97. like, you know, so and so is 49. So like, I'm going to switch because it's 50 bucks a month. Less like pure and thinking that, you know, so, um, I think it's like, yes, you're right. But even still, I think it's like better to get there and then deal with the price war. like my journey there with retention .com would have been so much slower if it had not created this insane awareness and brand heat that like brought everybody in now.

There's a script on our site. It's easy for us to get the deal, but like a year and a half later, five other vendors are saying we'll do more for less. I'm like, whatever. think I'd rather be a 21 millionaire dealing with that than like, you know, 15 not right.

Anis Bennaceur (21:35.146)
Yeah.

Anis Bennaceur (21:42.688)
Yeah, 100%. I think also a lot of the people who end up cloning your success, they don't get the why behind what you're doing. They don't get all the learnings. They don't get all this single details that will give you a compounding advantage when you're going to build the next most adjacent feature to what you're building.

Adam (22:01.678)
By the way, I love what you said, compounding advantage, because that's what being the first does. So

When, you know, I don't even know like bullseye, there's this guy who's trying to do exactly what we're doing with like the same copy and the same whatever. Funny enough, they have our pixel on their site. So I know like how many people they're resolving per day versus us. And we're like, they get five a day and we get 190, right? So like the compounding advantage of that is like, they will be able to capture a certain percentage of our market.

Over time, it will be increasingly annoying as that number gets larger. Right. But like, they're not doing what we're doing. You know what I mean? Like their product does what ours does, but that's not what's going on here. I think I had this realization a few weeks ago, which was when I started getting obsessed with Russell Brunson, that like, I think I'm in the edutainment business.

Anis Bennaceur (22:54.56)
100 sound.

Adam (23:08.81)
I happen to have a SAS at the end of a funnel, but like if something else was at the end of the funnel, it would be working equally as well. So long as it was equally as valuable to this audience, it just happens to be RB to be that people are flowing into from the awareness. If visit my website, took them somewhere totally different that was sort of. You know, an equally interesting product for them. Like it would be work. It's not, you know what I mean? It's like the product's good and differentiated and the pricing is disruptive.

And the content is sort of disruptive and viral and they're working off each other. But like you could, it's like, could take the product out and stick something else in that was similarly disruptive and it would work the same. like, if you took the content away, it wouldn't work. It's not that it wouldn't be a decent business. It would not be doing what it's doing. You know I mean? Like what I'm really crushing the competition at is the content side, the awareness side, right?

Anis Bennaceur (24:06.612)
Yeah, I absolutely love it. Going into RB2B and creating it, so I know that you used to have GetEmails, then Retention .com, then RB2B. I'd love to understand what was the transition from one business to the next, and then what is your take on the future of

Anis Bennaceur (24:33.418)
Where do you think it's Yeah.

Adam (24:34.334)
So, so first question is like, how did, uh, how am I spending all of my time on RBDB and not retention .com given the fact that it's 22 million error on 50 people. uh, I, my co -founder, Diana Ross handles day to day at retention .com. Now my Monday is entirely dedicated to internal meetings, half of which are related to that business. Half of which are related to RBDB. Then the whole rest of the week.

I'm literally like I'm trying to make the whole rest of the week's content creation or stuff related to content creation. the same kind of thing happened with GetEmails and Roebley. It's like it appeared that GetEmails was going to be so much bigger than Roebley that like I got a team to manage that and then Tate and I went over and played with GetEmails with like a couple new hires. So like, you

retention .com is kind of stuck in the mud. Everything that I'm doing with RB2B is giving me back so much more than that. So like I got to, and by far this content thing is the most valuable thing. So it's like, I got to focus all my time here, you know, give me a group of people that I can sort of work with on this new thing, guys handle that. Let me know if you need help. I'll tell you what I think is a good, bad idea, but like, you know, that's your business now enjoy, right? So that's really,

how it happened, it's the, you know, and some people say it's like the ability to relinquish control over something, but like, to me it's not challenging because the new thing has always been, the reason that I have ended up being so obsessed with it is because like I'm getting so much more back from it than like banging my head against the wall with the other opportunity, right, so.

Anis Bennaceur (26:20.493)
And now, know, on our B2B you're spending, your buyer persona are, as the name says, B2B companies, right? Where do you think the future of outbound is going for these types of companies?

Adam (26:37.26)
Yeah. And I want your take on this too, by the way. So, I believe that we are in a world where any sort of push channel is going to get more challenged and more expensive. And if you have the ability to create the best organic social content for your audience,

you have the ultimate leveling advantage versus the biggest companies in the world with the way that the social media networks are set up now. Everybody's on social media all day. Everyone but LinkedIn's algorithms are now drifting towards interspaced. So if you can create the best TikTok post, it doesn't matter if you're Coca -Cola or Josh Moe in his garage. If it's Josh Moe's garage, it will get more views than Coca -Cola's if it's better content. Now the magic comes

being able to put ad spend behind it. Once the machine has told you it's a winner, which LinkedIn has, right? So like the incentive to be able to harness excellent, whether you're creating it yourself or whether you're aggregating UGC and harnessing it that way, the incentive to harness the best social media content for your audience is through the roof. Like, like I can't emphasize that enough.

Right? Like the fact that the platform can tell you what's great. And then you can then take money and give it to the platform who wants to show people that cause it's great to accelerate it even further in your target audience. Right? That is a crazy idea versus like, ads do I get showed on LinkedIn? Right? Like, Timmy, a capital, you know, five chubby Jewish guys with yarmulkes, right? A picture of them. You know what mean?

or like Rippling showing me a carousel of like businesses in Austin who use Rippling, right? Like I don't care at all, but like something that I'm writing that like literally pierces the heart of every other CEO in my space, right? The, 2023 debacle with trying to hire BDRs and make them productive that everyone felt, right? Like that's just much better content.

Adam (28:58.408)
You know, and like that's what my ad is. Right. So it's like, I have this ability to reach people at a scale and for an efficiency that no one else does on LinkedIn who cannot create this level of compelling, organic social media. That to me is highly motivating to get even better. Right. And if your market's not on LinkedIn, you got to do what either clay or notion did, which is like you clay clay's founders are not really prolific content posters.

their creator community is, it's amazing what they've done, right? All in the name of Clay. It's incredible. Notion, kind of same idea, right? Like I love this story from D2C, it's Jolie, the showerhead brand. This guy with three employees, he's not the face of the brand. He got 30 ,000 pieces of UGC about Jolie produced last year for $0. The only thing he did was he sent showerheads to people. So I guess it's cogs, right? But like $0, it's incredible, right?

Anis Bennaceur (29:58.308)
I absolutely love this. As someone who founded a consumer network as a startup and bootstrapped it, I totally understand the value of UGC and harnessing that to drive revenue. And in your case, a lot of people are not only buying what you do, but also who you are, the messaging that you're sending. when I even talk with our

with our reps over here at Attention, they post a ton of really good content. And the minute they jump on a call with someone who liked their content and commented it, they tell me, hey, I feel like that, yeah, they feel like celebrities when talking to these people and people just want to buy right away from them. That's something that I noticed even when I was posting over a year ago when we were launching Attention, people would see my posts around what you could do with AI and they said, hey,

Adam (30:38.53)
night and day.

Anis Bennaceur (30:57.534)
I don't know much about your product, but I want to see it and I want to buy it. And I was like, man, that's incredible. That is more powerful and unique than just cold outbounding someone that has never heard of you. Maybe your value prop resonates with them, but hey, you might as well start targeting them or making sure that they see the very intelligent content that you're right. And you post and sharing things that just, you

might just very much resonate with what's keeping them up awake at night. So my question to you is, you're extremely visible on LinkedIn and you cracked something around generating content, not only for yourself, but also, I mean, from other people from your own community, mentioned Clay, Clay crushed it there. And it's very interesting that the founders are not that visible in real, you know, compared to the,

entire community of clay agents and clay experts. So my question to you is what did you learn about UGC in 2024 that most people get wrong

Adam (32:09.774)
So me personally, with my own content, it happened in 2023 when I pivoted to speaking to SaaS revenue leaders as a SaaS revenue leader about things that ruined my life in 2023. Like we had a VP sales quit, we downsized our sales organization from 20 to five people. Lo and behold, it picked up, right?

We were stuck and then we grew from 18 to 22 like after we got smaller, right? Just cause the cultural aspect of the company was so, so much better. So, um, that was my breakthrough. was like, that was when I found my voice. I'm like, I know what to write now, right? I know what people want. know what a hot take is. know like what people don't want to hear from me, but like these people, you know, they're living the same experience that I

And I feel like I have the ability to communicate the hard part of it in a way that just for whatever reason, other people are not able to, or they won't let themselves. Right. So, that's number one. then, look, the UGT, you know, I, I'm a bootstrapper. I hired a lot of people for attention .com when I thought it was going to be a unicorn. It didn't work out that way. Like we didn't, didn't, the essence of it is we didn't solve the churn problem for a lot of reasons.

If we solve the churn problem and got revenue expansion in year two, we would be a unicorn right now. Instead didn't solve the churn problem getting contraction in year two, because of the competitive environment, and just the way SAS changed in the last few years. And it's like a good cashflow business, right? Like fine. So, the UGC thing really, it was like being obsessed with Ryan Babensian and Jolie and knowing as soon as I knew I was going to start another company.

I was like, I'm going to do it. How Babensian did it in B2C.

Adam (34:05.614)
Clay, think last fall it was just this creators program was like just becoming obviously amazing. Like of course they had people in Slack posting highly engaged or whatever, but I don't think that, you know, it wasn't clear to me that that was like this amazing thing yet, but they made a template incredibly fortunate for us. It's the same exact people that want to write about RB2B that wrote about Clay. So we can just almost copy that playbook.

so it's like a really easy transition from wanting to do what Babensian did and seeing the exact group of people to start with, which is by the way, not what I thought nine months ago. I thought nine months ago or whatever, six months ago before we had the product, I was like, we are going to get our free. Non -agency small users to post UGC, which

It didn't work. It's like then us asking them to post UGC that doesn't help them is all about us. So the motion would have been us paying them more and more for crappier and crappier posts. Whereas the agency community that's posting about clay that grows their business, you know? So the incentive alignment is perfect. Right. so yeah, that's just a learning. It's like the UGC things can be a lot better for you. If you can create that magical incentive alignment where

them posting is good for them, right? And you may have to feed them stuff, but at the end of the day, if posting will grow their business and you have a thing they can post about that will grow their business better than anything else, they will post about it more than anything else, you know?

Anis Bennaceur (35:47.172)
Exactly, it becomes a social currency for them, which is extremely valuable at that point. I totally agree with you. So, you know, looking at your career and the businesses that you made, one thing that people don't really realize is, hey, they see you crushing it today, but they don't really see, they only see, you know, the visible part of the iceberg. They don't understand.

Adam (35:50.232)
Mm -hmm.

Anis Bennaceur (36:12.64)
really the amount of work. And I know that you work 24 seven when I text you at 11 PM, you respond in the next five minutes, you're a force of nature, man. What does it like, what do people not realize you think in your opinion about how hard it is to do these things?

Adam (36:31.852)
Yeah, so first of all, want to say most of the, I happen to respond to you a few times at weird hours, but most of the time I'm not working then. really try. I'm excited to get it in the morning. So I get here at eight. I have a two year old and I have another kid on the way and on September 27th, it's like July 11th right now. So

I try to get home by six, no matter what. And then it's not about like working, you know, really. And I try to like only work during her nap time on the weekends if I do it all. Right. So, that's kind of like how I bought, I compartmentalize my life. I'm always thinking about it, of course. And I think that like, but that's just how it's always been. mean, I don't know. I don't know that I would want it another way, you know, cause I like love being engaged in what I'm doing. that being said, I've gone through some incredibly.

um like uh low grade painful times right so like roebley for example that thing from when i was like uh 26 30 to

2014 34 to 38 that's when it was It was like I was a single guy It was making a million and half of free cash but shrinking and I had two co -founders but shrinking at 1 % per month Not a good place to be You know, it's like that's cool. Like with 500 grand as a single guy. You can kind of do whatever you want but like Your expenses are not shrinking at 1 % a month if anything they're going up. So like

You're looking, and I was living in Manhattan, and I kinda wanted to stay there. I certainly didn't wanna leave because I couldn't afford to like, have a family there or whatever, right? But that was eventually why I left when I was 30. I'm like, I can't afford to in this place and do what I wanna do. I gotta get outta here. So,

Adam (38:32.758)
It's not, it's a weird type of pain, right? Having like a slowly sinking thing. There's never a moment where you're

I'm desperately like, have to get out of this prison, but like the entire background of my life was I need to figure out what my next act is. And then at the same time, I'm questioning my prowess as an entrepreneur because I can't get this thing to grow more than 3 million. And like, no matter what I try, and then I'm reaching for anything and then people come along and they're like, I can run Facebook ads for you because I ran Facebook ads for email marketing tool X and it worked, right?

But it works for email marketing tool X because email marketing tool X has a brand and the features are better. And like, and, and, and right. I was the person who was copying and it's not working for me in that situation. So, you know, that was not too long ago, even right. Five years ago, I was still stuck at three million ARR wondering whether I was good enough to like get anything bigger than that. Right. So, look, I get that struggle.

You know, I would not be able to do what I do had I not gone through that struggle, you know, in like, I think it's like, yeah, it's just a really, you know, it's like, inheriting money is dangerous because you don't go through learning the lessons of what making a lot of money actually, how hard it is, you know? so it's really easy to like, to, to lose it if you just get given.

You know, whatever. So I think it's like a similar thing with startups, like the pain in like, just listening to these people with these big promises and nothing working or whatever. just gives me it's judgment and clarity and like, you know, studying these, whatever. So, long story short, I've been there, you

Anis Bennaceur (40:32.96)
I think one of the things that you mentioned there is churn, right? And if you don't fix churn, whatever your growth is today is going to be deadly, right? If you're churning at 10 % month over month, then at first you can grow 30%, but then you're not going to be able to sustain that 30 % growth month over month. And so over time, your growth ends up being lower than your churn. And that's when things plateau

start killing you. And so many founders do not realize that your biggest focus should be retention and churn. Pun intended there. I want to switch gears a little bit. know that you work with Santosh today, right? Who's a legendary figure, with almost every successful good -to -market business out

Adam (41:11.276)
Yes. Yeah.

Anis Bennaceur (41:31.277)
What did it take to, I know that you're an incredible founder too, what did it take you to bring him in as your COO and how are you able to convince

Adam (41:43.022)
Yeah. So like Santos has worked in some capacity with like 20 different data companies. He was super involved with the biggest ones. Like he worked at zoom info in very instrumental years for eight years. And then Apollo, they were totally stuck. He was president for 18 months. They were like 5 million error. When he left, they raised it like almost a billion dollar valuation from Sequoia. And then it's been up into the right since then. So like he was kind of in a situation where he was trying to

a business sold as like the halftime CEO of this data company in Australia. He had a lot of capacity. can't, know, I, I would, I, wasn't, I was seeking out somebody to help me grow my company, but I wasn't seeking him out. I got connected to him for a different reason. So I got connected to him when I was trying to figure out what the enterprise landscape for retention .com was, because I couldn't see anyone talking anything about it. I thought I knew why, but I

seeking people with a deep understanding.

Adam (42:48.654)
After we talked for 30 minutes, I was like, if I can get this guy to work with us, everything will be different. You know? And like, I'm like, dude, will you just talk to me again? And he's like, I don't know how I can help, but yes, sure. Here's my calendar link. So I'm like, can you just tell me which direction to run in? Because I was convinced that I had a unicorn on my hands. I'm like, I just need to build this company and I don't know how to do it. Right. So he's like, look,

And he was super expensive. He's basically like, let's do a four year deal. You know, pay me a ton of money. Give me like a, you know, co -founder equity stake that I've asked over four years. Fire me after he's like, I'll be an advisor, but I'll give you four hours a day for a year. And then either we break the deal and you only gave me whatever and you've gotten most of the benefit from me anyway. Or, you know, if we both want me to stay on, we could all join full time when I'm like done with this commitment that I have. And then after a year.

you know, but he very quickly started working eight hours a day on it. Um, and then we were so euphoric and then so, you know, long story short, 2023 was like real up and down for us. Uh, and then this B2B stuff started really being interesting around the time where it was like, do I want to join full time or not?

The answer by the time it was time to make the decision was like, yes, like this is definitely, cause it was like, it's so, you know, like marketers are giving me a hard time, but like, this is not a conventional playbook we're running, you know? And it's that kind of thing is really interesting for him. marketers will say, it's just marketing, but like, I don't know. Every individual part of what we're doing is just marketing, but I think there's a big, a uniqueness to the package of it.

I think so long as I can offer him that he'll stick around the second it becomes boring. He's out. Like he's either retiring or he's going to go find the next version of like me before this started and you know, help them basically.

Anis Bennaceur (45:01.792)
Yeah, think that's most brilliant people will actually just care the most about what's exciting them. And the minute something exciting, that's one of the drawbacks of bringing these very smart people is that they leave. And by that point, you start attracting more opportunists who just see it the little party iceberg. Sweet. Adam, this has been incredible. I want to ask you one last question, which

Who do you think, who are the top three people that we should invite on this podcast? Who are people that deserve to have a slot in here?

Adam (45:42.21)
You had Varun on yet or Kareem have you had either? I mean, I I would talk to them. You know, it's like, they're just on such a different path that I'm on. And I think if I had a crystal ball, I think they're euphoric right now. I think they're going to be able to do what Apollo did and raise again at like a billion and a half in like two years or something like that. And then they either need to get taken out by like done in Brad

Anis Bennaceur (45:45.288)
No. yeah. I love maroon.

Adam (46:11.96)
or something like that. Or they're gonna feel pretty stuck. But man, what they're doing is just so disruptive. It's like so interesting to me. So I definitely have them for sure.

Adam (46:30.926)
I don't know what kind of people are you trying to, I don't really know. mean, dude, it might be interesting to have my LinkedIn content guy, Alec Paul, even though he doesn't have a big following to just like, he works with like some of these guys that everybody knows. Right? So like, what is the magic of that guy? You know, and like, why do people pay him so much? Right? Like, like, what is he, what, you know, what is

Anis Bennaceur (46:34.108)
Thank you.

Adam (46:59.458)
Like, why is he so good? You know, that might be an interesting conversation.

Anis Bennaceur (47:04.82)
Definitely ask you for the intro. Awesome. Adam, this has been incredible. Thank you so much again for your time and I'll see you on the other side.

Adam (47:13.238)
All right, thank you for having