Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to Exit and Bootstrapped Again (and Again)

Retention.com CEO Adam Robinson has bootstrapped his first company to exit, and before the acquisition, incubated his second one within it. He’s repeating the same incubation model by incubating a third company within his second one. Really cool strategy and a great interview.

Sramana Mitra: So tell me what’s been going on since we last talked. You sold your company.

Adam Robinson: I sold the first one, which was called Robly email marketing in 2021.

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Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B (Part 7)

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?

Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B (Part 6)

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 entirely. There’s a great analysis by this guy. There’re two ways you can grow a LinkedIn audience.

Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B (Part 5)

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 ARR. He had helped this company Apollo.io turnaround from being stuck at $6 million ARR for five years to being valued at around a billion dollars in a Sequoia led round.

Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Well, I think what you’re pointing out is that if your ad can rattle people enough to get them to comment, it’s with comments and discussions in social media posts that you get distribution. That’s what snowballed the algorithm distribution. So by rattling these people, you were getting that distribution. So whether people liked it, resonated with it or not, you were getting distribution, you were getting your ad in front of enough people who actually were interested in buying.

Adam Robinson: I think a mistake that people can make is that it’s not good for your brand. But when you’re starting a startup, you don’t have a brand. I don’t think you have a brand to ruin until you’re like well past $10 million ARR.

Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Could you double click down and explain with a bit more color and depth exactly what it was that you were doing at Retention.com, which had a different name at that time. Explain the workflow, the value proposition, and the complexity of it.

Adam Robinson: The value proposition was that we can identify 35% of your web traffic and give you email addresses of people that don’t fill out forms.

Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B (Part 1)

Adam has bootstrapped his first company to exit, and before the acquisition, incubated his second one within it. He’s repeating the same incubation model by incubating a third company within his second one. Really cool strategy and a great interview.

Bootstrapping to Exit from Saudi Arabia: Emad Daghreri, Co-Founder CEO of Autobia (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did your journey evolve in that 2012-17 period. How far did you get from a revenue growth point of view?

Emad Daghreri: Until 2017, the demand was high, and we started getting million dollars contracts. I had to open a technology hub in Bangalore and Jordan just to be able to keep up with the demand.