Sramana Mitra: I’m trying to help my audience learn from what you’ve done. What is the rationale for having separate companies?
Sramana Mitra: How did you build that relationship? That is a journey story that would be interesting.
Sramana Mitra: Was there a business model? Were you monetizing? Ryan Millman: Yes. Initially, the business model was based on ad revenue – everything in 1999 was ad revenue-based. I figured out how to tie in with some APIs to one of the first digital photograph manufacturers. People could then order the photographs they were
Ryan has built a portfolio of bootstrapped businesses over the last 25 years that adds up to over $50M in revenue. He discusses the strategies and nuances, pivots and positioning, and more.
Sramana Mitra: Very good. So, this one is at $1.5 million already? Adam Robinson: $1.7 million within nineteen weeks. It was very fast. It was just five people. Sramana Mitra: So that means this year is going to close at probably $5-$6 million, right?
Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about your LinkedIn strategy a bit more. So you said you have a follower count of 40K, or more? Adam Robinson: It’s over 90K now. It went from 20K to 40K in a week last September. Sramana Mitra: So you have 90K followers, presumably mostly B2B staff people. Adam Robinson: Almost
Sramana Mitra: So let’s go to the new one. What’s happening with the new one? Adam Robinson: I wanted to scale up Retention.com, but I’d never done it before, so I was very insecure about it. I convinced Santosh Sharan to join us as our COO. He’d helped ZoomInfo grow from $8 million to $100 million
Sramana Mitra: This one is called Retention.com now, right? Adam Robinson: GetEmails at the end of 2022 focused only on these e-commerce stores. Then we added another product suite, which was a big product upgrade. Not only were we giving people emails to email for workflows like abandoned cart, abandoned product, or abandoned website, our