Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Jeff Wilkins, CEO of Motili (Part 1)

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

Jeff has turned $1M of personal investment (with his Co-Founder) to $80 million in revenue. Pretty capital-efficient, this entrepreneur’s journey!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with where your story begins. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jeff Wilkins: I grew on the East Coast. I was born in Bethesda, Maryland, outside of Washington DC and moved around a lot as a kid. I spend time in Maryland, North Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania.

Candid Discussion of a Bootstrapper’s Journey Through Failures to Success: Robly CEO Adam Robinson (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You’re obviously list-building for email marketing on behalf of these aggressive marketeers. Does this mean that this list can also be used to market through MailChimp or Eloqua?

Adam Robinson: This is my vision right now. What we’re doing right now is, we’re updating all of our marketing pages to communicate this message that we’re a mid-market ESP. Our differentiator is this Robly ID technology.

Candid Discussion of a Bootstrapper’s Journey Through Failures to Success: Robly CEO Adam Robinson (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You got this $3 million cash cow. You had other people running it. You didn’t have to spend time on it and it gave you cash with which you could do other things.

Adam Robinson: Yes, that’s great to have but it’s not that exciting. I had been building this lead.com product. I went down to Argentina. Tate was the sole developer the entire time. We never had anybody else. We wanted to hire a team.

Candid Discussion of a Bootstrapper’s Journey Through Failures to Success: Robly CEO Adam Robinson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was your analysis of the gap in MailChimp’s story where you could actually come in and do something?

Adam Robinson: What I had observed over the years is that people had success doing very narrow things. I’m sure you’ve heard of this guy Nathan Barry at ConvertKit. He has the perfect tool for bloggers. He went from zero to a million a month in 36 months.

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?