Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to Exit from Saudi Arabia

Autobia Co-Founder CEO Emad Daghreri bootstrapped his first company and took it public in the junior stock exchange in Saudi Arabia. He is now doing a second company. This interview focuses on his bootstrapping to exit story with the first one.

Sramana Mitra: Emad, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born? Raised? What kind of background?

Emad Daghreri: My name is Emad Daghreri. I am a founder from Saudi Arabia. I was born in a small village called Daghrer. It matches my last name; it is a privilege to have a village that is named under my last name. I spent the first half of my life there until high school. Then I had the privilege to be accepted in King Fahd University in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which is one of the best engineering universities in the kingdom. I graduated with a Computer Science degree. I was lucky to start my first startup at the end of the fifth year of the university. That was an amazing start of my journey as an entrepreneur in general.

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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 4)

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 identity product can also do audience expansion for them.

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.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped an IoT Company from NC

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

North Carolina, at one point, had a large concentration of cellular technology companies. Some of that talent then came together around IoT, including Bob Witter, CEO of Device Solutions. He shared his journey with me in 2016.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Bob Witter: I was born in Springville, New York. It’s in the western part of New York. I grew up in central New York. I went to school at State University of New York and graduated in 1981 with degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. I started my career in Rochester with Eastman Kodak company in the medical products division that was brand new at that time. I learned a great deal about how to do medical products that has certainly served me well even today at Device Solutions.

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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.