Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Hello. Welcome back to Rogue startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. Today I am chatting with Adam Robinson, founder of RB two B.com. and this is a great episode. Adam and I talk through a lot of, like, founder psychology, self limiting beliefs, self sabotage, and ultimately how to escape this kind of doldrum of hell. When you think you have product market Fitzhen and traction, but you really don't. And what to do to escape that and move on to building a really successful business. Adam has goals of building $100 million entirely bootstrapped SaaS business, and I believe he'll do it. Hope you enjoy this chat with Adam.
Adam, I see your stuff on LinkedIn, and you're pretty visible, like, in the bootstrapper and SaaS space. I'd love to hear at this phase of your journey what, when you wake up every day, what are you struggling with? What are you addressing in your business? You all are successful both on the b, two b and b two c, e commerce side. What's going on these days?
[00:01:09] Speaker B: It's one company, but we have two business units. Now that we actually have a b, two b business, they're at such different phases that they have such different problems.
I actually put out a monthly update. I think it hit yesterday. That was the timeline of our ARR growth of the total company over the last 18 months, or, like, two years or something like that, since September 22. And, like, in September of 2022, we had 12.5 million ARR and six people. And I was like, this is a unicorn twice over. If we hone in on our ICP, our churn is going to go down. You know, we'll be at 50 million ARR by the end of next year because, like, we have super low penetration in this big tam, and, like, everyone's buying it. No one's ever heard of it. It's just this incredible. It was this lightning in a bottle product market fit. And, like, long story short, the churn picture didn't change. You know, we got surprised, and it was easier to replicate than we thought. We had, like, 20 competitors pop up, and it's just the opposite of what we thought. But, like, you know, having very little experience kind of brought on this advisor who's now our coo named Santosh, and we, like, hired 50 or 60 people in two months. You know, whole management layers, all this stuff.
And, man, it was gnarly, and it was, like, really bad for a lot of reasons. Like, we were overselling people. The Tam we thought was 50,000 stores that we could sell a 30K deal to in seven days. It was actually 1400 stores that we could sell a 22k deal to in 30 days. That's just a wildly with, by the way, like a 60 or 70% annual churn rate.
And I thought it was going to be like a 30 with all those other demos. Wildly different business than I thought two years ago. And that's my fault. But what are you going to do? It's all of the signal that the data and looking at other companies in the space, it's all pointing towards this.
The middle. About a year ago, maybe a little longer, we had a big sale, I mean, big sales team. We had like 20 people in the sales actually like BDRs and AE's because like, that's what, you know, whatever company y in the shopify space had. That was like also kind of like.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: That'S what Jason Limp says you should do.
[00:03:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, totally. And like it was clear that it wasn't working. The VP sales who had hired quit and then we just made the right decision instead of replacing him to like go down to four salespeople. But then we sort of backfilled in engineering and product because still I would say we have fallen out of product market fit now because of the competitive dynamic, not because our product doesn't work anymore. It's just not quite as differentiated. And then the actual penetration into the tam is much higher. So it's just so different.
But there are companies still set up for the throughput that was going through a year ago, which like SaaS, it's not really about what your ARR is. It's about how much is going through and how much you need to onboard. And then the service component is not most of the people.
We literally last week just got to the point where we're like, okay, so I'm listening to my co founder, Diana. She's like, we're not getting enough out of the partnership team. We're not getting enough out of the whatever team. It's like, you know what's happened? We don't have product market fit anymore. So the stuff that we did when we had it just isn't working. And it's not about these people. Not like they just can't do as much because there's not this word of mouth element to it. Right. So, yeah, the struggle is my team is too big.
That's over there. That's on the one side. Right?
[00:05:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I just want to, like, I want to pick at that a little bit because I think to me, what I'm hearing is like, product market fit may be strong, right? Like, if a product that people want, it might just be that, like, the opportunity or the boat you're in. Like, isn't what you thought it was. Like, that's what it sounds like to me. Like, y'all have, like, high churn. Maybe that's just kind of the nature of the space, the number of.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: It's definitely a high churn product category. Yep.
I think that you're correct, but I think, like, so you can have a great product that doesn't have product market fit due to the situation that you're in. Sure. Yeah. And I think that, like, it's just. I think it all depends upon how you define product market fit. You know, if you define it as that, kind of, like, the world's pulling the product out of you, you know, everything that you do works, and it's just a matter of choosing which thing you're going to pursue. Cash is piling up in your bank account.
You feel like everyone has too much in, like, whatever. It's like we've kind of shifted to the opposite of all of that. Right.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: Fair.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Even though the product crushes it for this narrow band of people from an ROI perspective. Right.
So, yeah, it wasn't that much of a struggle because I think that this, I would say I, like, lost the plot when it comes to being a bootstrapper and getting very seduced by this.
Let's just spend, let's be at shows. Let's do whatever we're going to reduce the size of our team to.
I think an aspirational SaaS thing is like a million dollars of ARR per head. So that business unit with the growth paradigm it's in, that's where it should be. And, like, that's the move we're going to make to get it there. And actually, interestingly, one of the things that brought this to clarity was when you are as inexperienced and sloppy as we were hiring and people say you don't have processes.
You know what I thought was like, oh, yeah, we do. We, like, use panda doc to, like, you know what I mean? Like, you know, and they're like, like, oh, we have an OKR spreadsheet, right? Like, and it's just like, now. So, like, we hired an executive coach. He's working with eight people on our team, and he's been working with us for the last six months. We're implementing eos. And now it's so clear to me what having processes actually means and what, like, the habits of operating as an efficient, 50 person organization actually need to be.
And when you start to running a company like that, everyone goes from being underwater to saying, I actually need more on the engineering product roadmap. Right?
And it just became very clear to us that, quite frankly, we could do the same amount of meaningful things, not things that don't matter, which is what happens when you adopt one of these systems. It's like, well, what is actually going to move the ball forward down the court? And let's only do those things and let's not do anything else. And when you look at the business through that lens, that's another gauge of the team is just way too large for what we're trying to do. Right?
[00:08:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:08:31] Speaker B: For.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: I think this is a. This is a super important point, because I think probably to. To some degree, most of us are in this boat, right? We have something that's like, I was chatting with Dan Andrews from the tropical NBA podcast about like, yo, let's grade our business. He's like, yeah, our business is like a b or a b plus. And I gave our business kind of the same thing. Like, how do you. How do you decide? Okay, it's a b, but we should just shoot it in the head and go do this other thing like y'all have done. Like. Or how do you say, oh, it's a b. But if we do this, and if we do this, and if we do that, like, this is the. This is the trap of the entrepreneurs, like hope, right? It's like, yeah, fuck. I'm just one step away from this thing being an a to where it's really worth my time.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: It's funny, ever since we started the b two b side, which has just been. It's a different set of problems, but it's just been so wonderful. I love zero to one. It's just so incredible that this company didn't exist in February, and now it's like, everyone's talking about it, and it's growing and all this stuff. But Diana, my co founder, I handed off the d two c business, which is this one we're talking about, to her and the problem she's been dealing with the last six months, I'm just like, oh, thank God. I'm just not in that world anymore. And that business has felt like such a burden to every. To us, the executive team, I'm sure the employees. It's kind of how it's always been. But exactly what you said happened to us in the reverse order. We decided to do this, and we were like, wow, I actually love that business with 22 people. Like, you know, it is printing a ton of cash, like an astronomical amount of cash, even if it gets a little smaller or whatever. And in a year, we will be able to turn around and show it to hundreds of different people, and they will be happy to take us off, take it off our hands if we want, by simply saying we have a $1 million per head ARR SaaS with a leading brand in the space, that is a 50% total margin.
Are you interested in that asset?
It complements your portfolio. The answer is probably yes.
Whereas right now, it's like, oh, we got to. We're not running efficiently. It's like there's all this operational blah, blah, blah.
What I wish that I would have done and did not do six months ago was basically say, okay, this is kind of a burden for us.
What would we have to do to be looking at this thing and say that it's an a. Right?
[00:11:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
And do you think it was just team size? Like, it's a good business at this scale is kind of what I'm getting, like, this opportunity scale.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: One of the thought exercises is, like, was this business just meant to be 17 million ARR and not 22? Right.
You know, like, 17 making nine is better than 22 making five, something like that. Right. Like, for everyone? I think so.
For me, it's like, look, and the goal is not let go of half the team working on that, and then everyone else assumes all of their work. The goal is to let go of half the team and focus on 25% of what everybody was doing, but just do it even better. Right. Like, put people in a greater state of calm with much more focus, let go of activity that was happening, that wasn't moving the ball forward.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: Autumn, you know, except that we will maybe get a little smaller. We'll generate two thirds of the pipeline spending, 10% of the dough. Right. And it just. It just is. Right.
That's how I'm thinking about that.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Have any of those specific activities or features or product pipeline been tough to just say no to more so than others? Has it been tough to just scale back the scope?
[00:12:43] Speaker B: This implementing this EOS framework has just been so much of that.
I think this is just a natural result of it. Right. It's like, once you keep doing that, it's like, well, what do we really need to be focused on to move the ball forward? Right.
I guess the right way to answer is it's been this slow movement toward this over the last six months, and I think this was just the culmination of it. And like, now our executive team is starting to get conditioned to think in this way. It's like, okay, this isn't the right team size, but when we do it, we need to be like even more judicious with like the rocks and not squirreling and, you know, whatever else.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: Can we do things in a different way that would like, you know, take a lot of the sort of inbound away from these people or like, whatever.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Right, right.
Gotcha. Okay. And so you've been kind of alluding to it, but on the b two b side is rb two b.
I'll summarize it as like, identifying anonymous website visitors and pushing that to your slack channel so you can contact them via LinkedIn. Is that.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Yeah, LinkedIn and email. We send a LinkedIn URL, headshot, email address, some basic firmographic info.
[00:14:07] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Cool. So love it.
Know several people that use it. We don't use it, but may soon for like our, for our product type service. I think it'd be a really good fit for that. We do like done for you, podcast editing. And so I think, like, our customers are businesses and they hang out on LinkedIn and stuff. So that's all cool. The thing I wanted to ask about is you have, I think, a cool business model where it's free, like with a pretty significant, like paid option. So tell me about how you kind of arrived at that kind of pricing model.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Yeah, not well, is the answer.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: That's the best way. So, yeah, I mentioned this in the story of my other business. It's like one thing that I learned in this, like, getting very ambitious and then crashing back to earth is that there are high churn product categories of SaaS companies. On one end, you have your CRM, you have your email marketing tools for e commerce businesses. These are things where they're systems of record, they're housing the database and they're.
Those are the companies that get enormous because people only leave them to go to competitors.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is when you are selling leads to someone and trying to make it a SaaS, which is what this is. Cause, like, regardless of how good the leads are, there are certain people that cannot make money from leads, right? Like, there are eight reasons why someone will cancel a lead tool that they do not apply to canceling a CRM. So my attempt originally to make cause. So RB two b was going to be that. Right? My first idea was, okay, it's going to be high term product category, at least we could go for a lower term buyer Persona and go up market first because I created this founder brand in the b two B space and I thought that I had the brand value to just go in there, which normally isn't the case. So I was like, that's how I'm going to use this. Then the content was working so well that it was like, man, there's so much benefit to scale of the content. If I had a free offer, it would actually benefit me so much more than someone who didn't have this content megaphone. And they could both play off of each other the scale of both of them. So it was like, okay, then I'm back in this high churn buyer Persona, high churn product category, which just sucks. Cause, like, it, maybe it'd be great cash business, but, like, it'll cap out a 20 million error or something.
And, like, that's awesome. But, like, I just wanna know if I can actually grow a company bigger than that. I'm like, in this paradigm in my life, I'm like, can I bootstrap 100 million ARR somehow, you know?
[00:16:45] Speaker A: Cause you kind of already did the very good but not enormous side on.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: The, yeah, like, it's a great business, you know? Yeah, it's a great business, but, like, for me, it's like, and I'm sure it'll change. But, like, the ultimate ego of validation as a founder is like, can I join that club of bootstrapping 100 million ARR? Like, I think maybe three companies have done it, maybe five, I don't know. And like, Mailchimp. I was in the mailchimp space in my first startup, and I just, like, admired that company so much.
So anyway, my attempt initially was going to be give the leads away for free and then charge for a workflow because that's lower churn than the leads. So it was like unlimited leads. And then, like, for this HubSpot integration and salesforce integration that did these certain things, you would pay. And the idea was maybe we're trying to get money from like one to 2% of people, but, like, we could get enormous because that would be super sticky and, like, literally everyone would just use this thing. And the crazy, it was just like, people loved the idea of it in my thesis was like, $4.95 a month. Who gives a shit? Like, nobody. Who's going to get value out of this cares about $4.95 a month? And that was correct.
We could charge people before they used the free version, but the second they started using the free version, their willingness to pay went to zero because they're just like, dude, first of all, you could parse the slack block and do whatever you wanted to with the lead, but the value was so overwhelming of the free version that every single person was like, I don't need the paid. I don't care what you add to it. Like, this is the most amazing product I've ever seen, and it's all that I need. And, yeah, like, six weeks after launch, we had, like, I think, 2300 sign ups and 13 paying customers. And do you have an idea how? So, like, you know, we basically switched to where it's metered, and 85% of our signups have below the metered amount.
They get it for free. Over 200 leads a month. You start paying this, like, you know, it averages to 275 a month, but it's still super. A mid market SaaS. We're looking to get like six or $700 a monthly from, like, it's zero fraction pricing, basically, so. And now it's like a 9% touchless conversion rate. So, like, that's like, how dramatically different just doing that is. But the churn is also absolutely, absurdly ridiculous. We're not doing anything right now. Like, we need to, like, start figuring out churn reasons and figuring out the front end of the funnel also. But, like, you know, that's just part of it, right?
[00:19:15] Speaker A: Like, yeah, so, so 9% free to paid is what you guys are seeing right now?
[00:19:20] Speaker B: Yeah, nine to 10% free to paid. Some. Some weeks higher without a touch, you know, but also, it's like a nine or ten month average life right now based upon five months of data, so. Right, but the cat, you know, the CAC is zero. It's just basically the cost of my LinkedIn program. So it's one of these things where it's a very. It's a highly lucrative business. It's just a question of how big the ARR can get. You know, with that leaky bucket dynamic, can we. I just believe with, like, with, like, every percent you can lower monthly churn, you get, like, another 10 million ARR that you can grow before you peter out.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: I know that privacy concerns are something that, when I first saw it, I was like, what? I see some stuff right on LinkedIn, I hear people talking about, is this cool? Obviously, in Europe with GDPR, this is not cool here in the states even.
I think folks wonder about California and some, uh, countries, uh, some, some states or areas that might have tighter kind of regulation. Like, aside from actually the. What's, what's happening there. How do you think, as a founder, about, like, risk and entering a dynamic where. Where there's this thing, right. Like, entering a market with this kind of dynamic because it's a form of platform risk or kind of, you know, business risk. Like, tell me about how you think about that.
[00:20:45] Speaker B: So if people have seen the way I've handled some situations over the last six months or so, I think I have a kind of contrarian view in a lot of things. Like this company, 6th Sense, sent me a cease and desist, and I posted it on LinkedIn and rewrote the post that they cease and desisted me on. So, like, some would view that as risky. I view it as incredible marketing. Right? Like, the best pr I could ever have gotten in my life. Was that right? So, like, in terms of this approaching a. So, like, here's the way I look at it.
If you're telling me something is legal, and I personally just view it as the way that the feature of the Internet that, like, no one has done yet. And you're also telling me that the leading brands in the space could do it, but the reason that they're not doing it is because they are afraid of not getting valuations from investors because it can be perceived as gray area. I'm very attracted to that fringe market. If you're telling me that people have looked at the space, that is obviously very valuable and the reason they're not doing it is because they're scared, but it's legal. I love that. Then you have this added benefit of a vocal minority of privacy, people that yell at you and call you scumbag, which is great content, and people in their network come and sign up, right? So, like, you can't be bothered by that. Like, people, like, I had this guy on my webinar this week, which is, he's a privacy guy and he hates me. Like, he think he literally calls me a scumbag on LinkedIn all the time. But I'm just like, look, I want people to hear your side of the argument. And if they decide they don't want to use this, then they can decide not to use it. I don't want to hide anything.
I'm not hiding anything. Yes, there are people who are going to think that this is pushing the envelope, but I think people are so off on this data privacy thing, and there's just deep pockets funding these privacy people's focus on a certain area of privacy so that this other much more obvious thing gets ignored.
That's just the way the world works.
Um, so, yeah, you know, I am very drawn to markets like that, and I want to tell one more story. When I started retention.com, which was called get emails, the day that I started it, cookies were supposed to go away in 18 months. Third party cookies in Google Chrome, it was going to kill that product as it stood that day. We've learned how to do it in another way to where it wouldn't totally kill it, but it would adversely affect our ability to, like, accurately identify people. We could still programmatically do it. It was just. It would just lower the accuracy by about 25% of that happened.
But it was supposed to be completely gone away. And I was like, whatever.
Every year, hey, we're going to test. It's going to go away in twelve months or whatever, and then finally they come back and say, oh, we're not getting rid of it. Right? So, like, I saw that I love betting against regulators ability to do things in a certain amount of time.
Do I believe that what we do will be okay?
It'll probably be regulated out of existence in like, 20 years. I think ten seems short if you think about, like, it took five years for Google to say, we're getting. I mean, I think they were even saying it before 2019. It took like, seven years for them to basically try to do a bunch of experiments and deal with all these parties and then decide that that was just the way that the Internet worked. Right.
So, yeah, that's another thing that I like betting against. It's like, I love betting against massive policy swings.
The regulators apparently want to end all of web retargeting. It's like, good luck. There's multi trillion dollar companies now who make a lot of money on that.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Tough to bet against them.
I think it's important, again, because a lot of listeners to this show are SaaS founders like you, operating in ecosystems like Shopify or an app marketplace or something like that, to where both platform risk and betting with or against the establishment, if you will, is like an important business dynamic. What else do you see from a contrarian perspective that most of us might be getting wrong? Like third party cookies. What else do you see out there that you're like, oh, yeah, we all think it's going this way, but it's actually going to go this other way, aside from crypto.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: And by the way, I do think data privacy is headed one way, it's headed more restrictive.
The question that people get wrong is how and how long is that going to take an ideal situation to be an entrepreneur in my opinion is this was what was so beautiful about the get emails thing. The last company was just for Ecom companies. It was resolving an anonymous visitor to an email address.
Everyone thought in 2019 that that's spamming and it's illegal. So, like, when the whole world thinks one thing, it's hard. On one hand cause you have to educate, but on the other hand, like, that's just not a market that any entrepreneur worth salt would go into, right? So, like, the competitive dynamic is just so different, right? So I would look, look, nothing is, you know, immediately sort of comes to mind like that. But, like, I kind of like these confusing privacy backdrops as an operator because it just keeps people out of it. And then, like, you get a lot of traction. You get some copycats or whatever, but, like, you know, copycats are only going to do so much damage, right?
[00:27:00] Speaker A: Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Since you, since you kind of like, live and breathe in the, in the kind of like b two b lead gen space. Like, I think it's probably like the biggest challenge that most B two B SaaS companies have is like, I need more leads. I have a degree of product market fit. I sell my thing. I close well. I just need more leads. I do some coaching for founders and almost every one of my clients, it's like, I just need more leads. Like you mentioned LinkedIn. We just finished a big old series of six or seven episodes all about LinkedIn and what a great kind of channel it is for folks to generate pipeline for their business. What do you see now as we're recording this in August 2024 of, like, if you're a b two B company, just do this, right? Like, cut out all the other shit that, like, you're talking about with, like, when you implement EOS, it gets really clear, like, what's the, what's the simple, like, red button for a SaaS founder?
[00:28:00] Speaker B: So.
And I have not been part of, let's say, a 250 million ARR or greater business where they're, like, doing brand marketing and not direct response to get leads, right? Because, like, my understanding, understanding is it's all direct response until a certain point when direct response doesn't work anymore, you just do brand, right? So I've never been, this is for early stage founders. When I make the statement, right, every, so, like, cold email, the predictable revenue style of doing that was incredibly effective until I don't know when, right? But, like, I still get forwarded cold emails from people like, we got this new competitor called Squid pop up and I got like ten people forwarding me their emails that, like, they're sending saying that our products, their products better than us or whatever.
So that was just like a superpower of demand creation that I'm not going to say it's a 0% effective today, but it's just like 5% of what it used to be. So I think a SaaS founder is now in the position where it's like, okay, if that exercise, which was basically my entire demand creation effort, no longer creates demand, and that exercise is probably capturing demand that's been created elsewhere, now, if anything, how do I create demand? Right? And I don't know if there's like a blanket playbook, but I think that, I mean, I couldn't imagine there being something more efficient than what I'm doing, right? So. And you can push back all day long and say, oh, that's only working for you because, like, you're a SaaS guy who's on, you know, selling to SaaS people and, like, you're the founder and you're selling the founders and, you know, they're all on LinkedIn. So, like, whatever. But, like, when I say that, I mean, I can't imagine if the response rate to digital channels keeps going down. And you are basically back in the 1990s where your field selling that the super power efficient way of selling software is not building up affinity around a personal brand and selling zero friction products into it.
Another pushback I get is like, well, what if I'm an enterprise? Whatever. It's like, I believe that products will change to fit the distribution mechanisms available to them at the time.
[00:30:47] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:30:48] Speaker B: The most efficient distribution mechanism that I see is personal brand by far. Right. And it makes sense why it's like, you can make like, I've made 50,000 people feel like they're my best friend by, like, doing all that LinkedIn stuff. And like, so what's my motion? Right? I say all the time, I'm like, I spend one day a week on internal meetings. And the rest of it, like, I've gotten so much back from this founder brand, the rest of its founder brand, it's not all writing on LinkedIn, but it's like, I do ten guest slots per week. I'm in this remarkable position where this audience where people inbound me, but, like, if I did not, and I was a year and a half ago, I had an agency trying to get me on people's podcasts. The way that I do that is I need to cross pollinate as many other audiences as possible.
It's like a dinner with prospects that I don't have to leave my office to do. Right. So guest slots, LinkedIn, my own owned event. Like this is like, I can't measure any of it. I can measure post, obviously working though. Yeah. I can measure how well LinkedIn post does. I don't know directly what signups are coming from it, but it's just like, it makes it like, this is where demand creation is happening now, in my opinion. It's like creating organic social media content that is good enough to where your prospects actually want to consume it, even if you weren't selling anything and just doing that over time. Right.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: Yeah. And I would generalize a bit to say for you, it's LinkedIn. For some other folks, it could be podcasting. Like, I have a lot of friends who, their entire business is built on a podcast. And it's not like they're selling ad spots, but they're selling a conference or they're selling a membership site or something on the back of a podcast.
I believe that. Like, yeah, I mean, for me. For me it's either a toss up of LinkedIn or YouTube, you know? Like, I think. I think either. But the premise and that the concept is the same either way is like saying, create amazing content, build a brand. People know like and trust you and you just put this thing in front of them to buy a. And if it's self service or low friction, it gets whatever straightforward from there.
[00:33:01] Speaker B: I mean, that's what I think the future is. Unfortunately, like anything else in life, to be great at that is very hard. Right.
[00:33:13] Speaker A: There's a long, simple, but not easy. Yeah.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: Yeah. There is a long learning curve to getting to the point where you found your voice with content creation. But once you have found your voice, there is absolutely nothing more powerful. That's what I believe, yeah.
[00:33:28] Speaker A: What, in finding your voice, what has made the difference for you?
[00:33:37] Speaker B: So it took me twelve months, and there was literally a moment when it was like, I did not know what I was doing on LinkedIn until this moment. And then seven days later, I'm like, I know exactly what I'm doing because like, I got a huge post and then I did three more and they were all huge and basically.
But by the way, it was a result of everything that I had learned for the whole year of it not working and not really knowing what I was doing. So. Right. Twelve months, I started in like, I was trying to, like, you know, we were selling to ecom stores. So I was trying to build an audience on LinkedIn. Then, like, kind of move it over to Twitter or whatever, where most of them were.
And it wasn't really. It was kind of working in some ways, but not working in a direct business outcome way, but it was enough to keep me going and keep me kind of obsessed with the idea.
And then even before we had decided to make a b two B product for sure, I felt like I'd gotten good enough at the ecommerce stuff that I was like, what would happen if I pivoted this and directed it squarely at the revenue leaders of SaaS? Because a few of my posts had been and been about that pain that everybody was feeling in 2023, and they were huge. So, like, I did one about BDR, about the stuff no one was willing to say, but, like, everybody was feeling massive. Then, like, did three more kind of like that. And it's like, okay, now I am writing to me about my pain. Then people would say this back to me. It's like a unique type of pain that you could only know if you were in that seat. Whereas, like, trying to connect with Ecom people. I don't own an Ecom store, right? Like, I can tell them about this one part of Ecomm which they don't really give a shit about, but otherwise, it's just like, hiring, firing, make a good product, you know, whatever the dream of the bigger. But, like, when you start talking about, like, I hired. You know, I proved out my BDR motion with three. I hired ten and my demos didn't go up. And then my VP sales quit and I downsized to, you know, back to whatever. It's like people felt that less they did that last year, or they either felt it or they want to do it, right? So. So, and then I also got the appreciation for, like, you hear this word, hot take, right? Like, I really felt what it was. It's like something that you would tell your spouse that, like, you wouldn't say to the public because of, like, who that would hurt, right? Like, you're not supposed to be like, if you have a big BDR team, you can't go out and say that. Like, the whole BDR complex is fucked, right? Like, you just can't do it. You know what I mean? Like, there's a lot of reasons why you can't say that. So that's an example. It's like, you know, I really felt that part of it and, like, I started to feel like, the emotional journey of a perfect post. It's like you agitate this, like, very unique pain that you lived through and then you, like, provide the relief and, like, sort of end it in this. But, like, this is, like, after a year of, like, intense dedication to this craft.
[00:36:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I feel you, because, I mean, that's a fair bit of the transition that this show has been through. So just for context, I had a co host for seven years, like, 300 episodes of this show.
He was like, seven years enough. I'm done.
And since then, I've done quite a few interviews because I think one of the cool things about a podcast is stuff like this where I'm learning a lot, which is selfish. That's the main reason everyone else is hopefully learning a lot. But what I'm wanting to learn is not necessarily, like, oh, what subject line to use for your cold email, but, like, you as a founder, like, what's going on in your head? Because I think that's really, like, the most important and tough to figure out thing. And so that's, like, just for me, like, that's the evolution of this podcast is it's like, what are great founders doing to win right now?
And a lot of that, you know, I think before we started recording, you're like, man, I fucked up a lot. Like, I have a whole lot of bad things to say. And that's. That's the reality, man. It's like, none of us know what we're doing to different degrees. And so I can. I can really feel you, and I think it's the last thing I'll say on this. Like, even this is. This will be episode 324 of the show.
[00:37:59] Speaker B: Congratulations, by the way. That's.
[00:38:01] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:38:01] Speaker B: Yeah, you're, like, in the top 0.1% of podcasters.
[00:38:04] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been. It's been a long haul.
It is hard to suss that out of you as a host, right? Because, like, you and I don't know each other, but, like, how do I get this, like, super interesting nugget of, like, that contrarian take or that hot take or that thing that nobody expects to hear, because that's really what's valuable. Like, I don't want to hear all the shit you've said before, no offense, but, like, that, but folks don't want to just hear the same stuff. So I think that's from a podcasting and content perspective, it's like, it's tough, like, to get at that place you're at where, like, but I'm creating really unique, interesting, valuable stuff.
You can't fucking just put that in chat GPT, right.
That's really unique and difficult. So I feel you. Yeah.
[00:38:48] Speaker B: And that's actually one of the. This idea that you're talking about sort of like getting inside of the head of a very successful founder. It drives me so much in my content creation because literally five years ago I had one SaaS company stuck at 3 million arrival. Right. That's a. And it'd been that way for four years. That is a horrible mental health paradigm. Right? Like, there's a whole, can I not grow SaaS bigger than 3 million ARR? Like, this thing's shrinking at 1% a month. I can't have a family and live in Manhattan where I live. Like, nothing. You know, I go to all these, like, info whatevers and, like, nothing that they say works. I meet agencies that say they work with other email marketing companies, can acquire company customers on Facebook, but it doesn't work for me. Right. Horrible spot. I would do anything to learn anything from anyone that was ahead of me. Right. So, like, now I understand the advice that I was seeking was not appropriate because nobody understands the nuances of your situation. And, like, at the end of the day, you can't give a bad business good advice. Just like.
However, just understanding the thought process behind someone of why they're doing stuff and why they believe that it's working is just so revelatory for so many people. And another reason I share so much is I want to evangelize bootstrapping 10 million ARR for SaaS people. No one does it. I think the reason why they don't do it is because it's a little more painful. But realistically, the second you get traction after being in this horrible state that I was in for so long, money shows up at the door and says, if you sign this piece of paper, then you're worth $30 million. It's not true you're going to be an underpaid slave for the rest of your life. But I think just showing people that it is possible to do it, it's like the four minute mile thing.
I did it once, five years ago in a way that is totally different than I'm doing it now. But you can do it.
That's another reason that I'm out here yelling about all this stuff.
[00:40:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Love it. Love it. I think it's a cool place to wrap up, man. Thank you for. Thank you for sharing so much. Like here on LinkedIn, we'll put a link in the show notes for folks to check out there. Rb two, B.com if they want to check out.
Getting information on who's visiting their site directly into slack. Anything else? Any other places folks can kind of reach out and connect with you?
[00:41:14] Speaker B: Yeah, LinkedIn. Hit me up. Adamrobinson. That's where I'm spending most of my, you know, my time.
[00:41:21] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks, buddy. Appreciate it.
[00:41:23] Speaker B: Thanks, Craig. Great show.
