Candid Discussion of a Bootstrapper’s Journey through Failures to Success: Robly CEO Adam Robinson (Part 4)

Adam Robinson: After hiring agencies to try do Facebook marketing, none of them worked because our product wasn’t good enough. It was only good enough for this uncompetitive channel. We had to do stuff that MailChimp isn’t doing. I didn’t want anything like the freemium model because they’re doing that.

The company which I cannot name got acquired. The acquirer chopped this partner business they had. They spent $50 million in building it. I wasn’t quite sure about the economics of it. After it got chopped, the guy who put it together reached out to me.

Candid Discussion of a Bootstrapper’s Journey through Failures to Success: Robly CEO Adam Robinson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you pause a moment there and explain why you were able to deliver these enhanced open rates? What was the trick in that?

Adam Robinson: It wasn’t actually the rate. We just aimed for 50% more opens. We built an automation tool where we sent your campaign out. After sending the mails, a little window comes up where you can change the subject line.

Candid Discussion of a Bootstrapper’s Journey through Failures to Success: Robly CEO Adam Robinson (Part 2)

Adam Robinson: My brother came to me, “I’m using this customer review management and email marketing product called Rake Point. I just got an email saying they’re shutting their website down and I need to download the data.”

He’s like, “As a really useful product, these guys raised $25 million. I know he spent a ton of money acquiring a ton of customers. Let’s see if we can build this software and go find his customers.”

Candid Discussion of a Bootstrapper’s Journey through Failures to Success: Robly CEO Adam Robinson (Part 1)

Entrepreneurs love to discuss success. Few are willing to discuss what they tried and failed at. Adam does a terrific job of sharing his journey through various failed experiments to a model that is now gaining traction.

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 background?

Building Two Open-Source Startups in a Row: Sysdig CEO Loris Degioanni (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How do you charge?

Loris Degioanni: We charge based on the number of machines that they need to manage with our platform. It’s the typical function of the number of servers that you’re running.

Sramana Mitra: What is the next milestone after you started monetizing? What are some of the major milestones based on this model that you came up with?

Building Two Open-Source Startups in a Row: Sysdig CEO Loris Degioanni (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The $2.5 million of seed capital that you raised, what was the next milestone? How long did it take you from there to deliver your first product?

Loris Degioanni: Based on my background and experience with open source, I decided that I wanted to approach this second adventure with an open source philosophy. This was very important. That was our strategy and vision early on.

Building Two Open-Source Startups in a Row: Sysdig CEO Loris Degioanni (Part 5)

Loris Degioanni: These dynamics towards micro-services means that these companies can essentially break their software into smaller pieces and then use APIs to talk to each other. This spawned a massive industry that is led by the cloud vendors and by open source projects like Kubernetes.

I witnessed the creation of these industries and immediately thought, “We should focus on this. This is new and very different. Managing and observing a software that is split into a thousand little pieces is very different than monitoring a giant monolith.”

Building Two Open-Source Startups in a Row: Sysdig CEO Loris Degioanni (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You started your next company in 2012?

Loris Degioanni: 2013. I left Riverbed in 2012. My rotation period with Riverbed was for two years. Despite being very happy at Riverbed and despite learning a lot, I was infected with the bug of being an entrepreneur. It’s really hard to get rid of. Even in the nicest places, I don’t think I can work for somebody else.

I need to wake up, feeling that I am making a difference. I couldn’t feel that at Riverbed. The company was successful. I was contributing, but I couldn’t find that path on what I was doing. Also, you don’t have ownership. I prefer to have situations where I am have more control and impact.