#108 Lessons from a founder who built a lean, profitable SaaS—and still hit a growth ceiling | Adam Robinson

Summary

Always Be Testing, Episode #108

“Lessons from a founder who built a lean, profitable SaaS—and still hit a growth ceiling”
Guest: Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com
Host: Tye DeGrange
Date: November 11, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Tye DeGrange welcomes Adam Robinson, founder and CEO of retention.com, to dive deep into the nuanced journey of building and growing a lean, highly profitable SaaS business. Adam shares the hard-won lessons from a decade-long entrepreneurial ride, including how he built a company that hit impressive financial goals without compromising on work-life balance, managed the evolving challenges of product innovation, and navigated both B2B and consumer SaaS markets. The conversation is candid, practical, and rich with tactical advice for founders, operators, and marketers interested in data-driven growth.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Adam’s Entrepreneurial Backstory

[00:43–07:01]

• Adam recounts his transition from finance (credit default swap trader at Lehman Brothers until the financial crisis) to tech entrepreneurship, inspired by friends who created Vimeo.
• First SaaS venture: an email newsletter app launched in January 2014, which plateaued at $3M ARR using inventive, sometimes “scrappy” tactics (like crawling contact data).
• Lessons from the early years: “The actual things that I’m doing every day have changed so much year to year that it’s just wild. It’s like not the same job I had 10 years ago.” (Adam, 01:27)

2. The Growth Ceiling & Embracing Lean Principles

[07:03–09:44]

• Adam details how he transformed the business by focusing on cutting costs, burn, and complexity, arriving at an ultra-lean operation: 40 people, ~$30M ARR.
• Reflections on achieving major financial goals: “I thought literally written down my dream… was 2 million a month MRR. And if we could get there, I would have no other problems. I would be satisfied. I would never ask for another thing in my life.” (Adam, 07:44)
• Realization after reaching financial targets: Topline growth slows, satisfaction becomes a moving target, and value is more than just exit numbers.

3. The Trap of “The Number”

[10:05–11:39]

• Cautionary tales from a Vimeo founder: “He had a number and then he had this perfect business, got offered a price that got him above his number… [he says] it was the wrong goal… If he just would have let it happen over the last seven years, he would have just been much more energized by his life every day.” (Adam, 10:20)
• Emphasis on the value of holding onto a good business and not being seduced by exit figures.

4. Lifestyle Design: Running a Business to Live, Not Living to Run a Business

[11:39–13:49]

• Adam describes his decision to relocate to Aspen for family and lifestyle, framing his business success as an enabler of quality of life.
  • “I want to just set my life up to just do this for a few more decades.” (Adam, 12:06)
• Discussion on the value of “fishing on the beach” type philosophies, and how entrepreneurship can create that freedom.

5. Navigating B2B and Consumer Sides of SaaS

[13:32–17:18]

• Adam is candid about his challenges in splitting attention between retention.com’s e-commerce and B2B products.
  • “Well, not well, to be perfectly honest.” (Adam, 13:49)
• Insights on building a personal founder brand, transparency (posting P&Ls publicly), and the differing content needs of B2B vs. B2C SaaS.
  • “It became clear… there was some author, audience, platform fit when I wrote about the B2B stuff that it did not... on the B2C.” (Adam, 15:12)

6. Product-Market Fit, Churn, and Competitive Moats

[17:18–20:33]

• Describes distinct market dynamics:
  • E-comm SaaS tends to be sticky as it’s intertwined with the customer’s business (like Klaviyo).
  • B2B data products are less sticky, with higher churn and easier switching.
• Importance of product differentiation: “Nobody can run this business like I can run it. And unless you could, you wouldn’t be in the market which is kind of what happened.” (Adam, 19:57)
• RB2B’s lean operation: ~$6.5M ARR with only three full-time employees; competitive edge is both product and personal founder brand moats.

7. Product Innovation: Staying Ahead of the Curve

[20:37–24:42]

• Adam previews a new e-commerce product inspired by B2B “clay” tables (data enrichment, AI-driven micro-segmentation, and personalization at scale).
  • “If you knew the persona of the person… you could create 300 variants of copy. That’s very easy to do with something like a clay table and OpenAI and that will work.” (Adam, 22:38)
• The unending demand for innovation: “We cannot stop innovating ever, anywhere, or these businesses will die.” (Adam, 26:10)

8. Founder Brand as Growth Lever

[29:01–32:00]

• Adam attributes RB2B’s entire success to his large personal brand and content—1M LinkedIn impressions/month leading to 30,000 unique web visits without paid campaigns.
• The challenge: founder’s audience is much broader than the paying customer base—how to create or white-label complementary products for a wider audience.
• Wrestling with the urge to chase new ideas versus maintaining differentiation.

9. Looking Ahead: Relentless Growth, Innovation, and Personal Balance

[26:10–27:46]

• 2026 focus: relentless product innovation, hiring for product leadership, and listening keenly for signals from the market.
  • “It’s just like you are either innovating or you are dying a slow death.” (Adam, 26:25)
• Adam highlights the importance of having top-tier product leadership as a competitive advantage.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On building and iteratively changing as a founder:

  “The actual things that I’m doing every day have changed so much year to year that it’s just wild.” (Adam, 01:27)

• On chasing and reaching ambitious goals:

  “I wrote the goal [of $2M MRR] when I was 37 and I did it on my like 44th or something… all of a sudden like… I’m playing with the house’s money.” (Adam, 08:13)

• On the perils of selling too soon:

  “He had a number… he got above his number. And he’s like, ‘it was the wrong goal.’” (Adam, 10:20)

• On family and lifestyle design:

  “I’m bringing my 3 year old and 1 year old to Aspen… I want to just set my life up to just do this for a few more decades.” (Adam, 11:40 & 12:06)

• On product differentiation:

  “Nobody can run this business like I can run it. And unless you could, you wouldn’t be in the market.” (Adam, 19:57)

• On continuous innovation:

  “We cannot stop innovating ever, anywhere, or these businesses will die.” (Adam, 26:10)

• On leveraging a personal founder brand:

  “My founder brand is entirely responsible for the success of RB2B.” (Adam, 30:07)

• On juggling kids, work, and personal mission:

  “Once I had kids, it was just like, I got kids, I got work. I’m trying to stay in shape. I’m trying to see some friends... but that’s it. I have a simple life in that regard.” (Adam, 33:52)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro & Adam’s journey: 00:43–04:24
• Early SaaS growth tactics: 04:24–07:01
• Profitability & hitting the growth ceiling: 07:03–09:44
• Reflections on exit numbers & fulfillment: 10:05–11:39
• Lifestyle & moving to Aspen: 11:39–13:49
• B2B vs. B2C business tensions: 13:32–17:18
• Product-market fit, churn, and moats: 17:18–20:33
• Personalization and tech trends: 20:37–24:42
• Innovation imperative: 26:10–27:46
• Founder brand and growth: 29:01–32:00
• Family and purposeful living: 33:22–34:29

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Closing Thoughts

This episode provides unusually candid insight into the journey of building a profitable, bootstrapped SaaS company, the ongoing challenge of innovation, and the personal side of entrepreneurship. Adam’s practical quips, openness about missteps, and emphasis on enjoying the journey—not just the destination—make this a must-listen for anyone interested in SaaS growth, founder life, or data-driven marketing.

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For more on Adam and his work:
Follow Adam Robinson on LinkedIn, check out retention.com, and keep an ear out for innovation announcements in the Shopify and B2B SaaS landscape.

Transcript

[Adam Robinson]

Foreign.

[Ty]

Here we are. Adam Robinson, CEO of retention.com. he's back. We had episode number two. This is episode number eight, and we're trying out some new digs.

[Adam Robinson]

108.

[Ty]

Number two to 108.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ty]

Holy cow. How do we do it?

[Adam Robinson]

I'll come back on. And what is it? 2 14? Yeah, that. 108 plus 108.

[Ty]

I think that's good.

[Adam Robinson]

Plus 6.

[Ty]

Yeah, let's do that. It's been a journey, man. You've seen so much change since then. It's been awesome to see with our B2B and the software you've launched and the learnings you've had. It's been a ride.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah, it. Sure it has. Yeah. I mean, it's always. I was talking to somebody a few weeks ago in some way or another. I've been at this since like 2013. I had a spell and I feel.

[Ty]

Like we can connect on that.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah, like 2014 for me. Yeah. My first product was launched in 2014, in January. It was an email newsletter app. Built it. I wasn't building. I was sitting there waiting for it to get built for the year and a half before it. But I kind of like to say January 2014 is like the starting point. And there was a real lull because my first business was stuck at three Millionaire. I wasn't there. I had a girl managing the operations and I was trying to figure out what was next. And I was like, I will work my ass off again at some point. I am not going to sit here and make up stuff for myself to do. I'm going to chill out until it comes. I was thinking about it all day long. But I wasn't just in there grinding, losing my spirit, trying to will something forward with all my might in 12 hours a day and have it not move. So I've had like a lull in activity, but, like, I think my schedule's 8:30 to 5, no weekends kind of thing. Currently I work by myself, which is great because you're super productive. I'm an office full of people. You got 40 employees. So, like, I had an office. It's like people are just coming by to like, talk all day. I didn't like that when I had one. But what my point is is the actual things that I'm doing every day have changed so much year to year that it's just wild. It's like not the same job that I had 10 years ago.

[Ty]

Yeah. Can you give people the recap of like. Because it sounded like it was Tell the. Maybe the high level backstory for people that don't know where you've gone from and what you are now to talk about how it's changed.

[Adam Robinson]

So like the one minute intro is moved to New York City. In 2030 2003, I arrived at this MTV crib style apartment with four other guys who were starting Vimeo literally like in Dreamweaver, building the HTML page. Dreamweaver? Yeah. Like I'm baby blue. Remember it like it was yesterday.

[Ty]

Yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

And then I watched them over 10 years of being a credit default swap trader at Lehman Brothers and also doing incredibly well in many ways financially and status and all that stuff. I watched those guys and something about it just looked way cooler than what I was doing. Words for the time. Now I know it is much more satisfying for most people to build over the long term and see that progress than it is to just extract money from the financial system and go back to zero every year and have no other purpose in life or value that you're really providing. Not to say that it's bad, it's just not. In my opinion. It's not as fulfilling. Work is where we can sit back here and say, man, like, wow. Like a lot different than it was in 2013.

[Ty]

Bringing something new to the world that adds value.

[Adam Robinson]

Totally. So I kind of made a bad career move. I moved to London for a year and it didn't work out. And I came back and like after the financial crisis, the, the market I was in, credit defaults. I've just kind of got smashed. The opportunity got. Yeah. And so I was faced with either accepting a much worse position than I had before I left or taking some time off and figuring something out. And I always knew I wanted to live like these guys. I wanted to start a tech company in this apartment. And I did it when I was 30 instead of 22 like them. But that was the start of it.

[Ty]

Yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah. It was a newsletter app. I got really lucky in that. This is just a really weird story. My brother was using a. This SaaS app for customer reviews and email marketing that got like turned off by VCs. And at the time I was looking for something to do. He's like, I really like this product. Do you want to just try to rebuild it and get their customers? Because they raised 20 million bucks. They're out there. So that was the original plan. And then we met the founder of that company and he told us there's this. The old dog in the email marketing space was constant contact. He's like, I'M not going to tell you too much, but they're leaving a ton of information about their customers all over the Internet. My co founder's starting a data company. I can't tell you exactly what it is, but like go look for it and you'll find it. So this is crazy. I think we found something he didn't even know about. They were making a community page for their paying customers. They had 250,000 paying customers in the URL. It was an unencrypted six digit number. When you jumped it by one, it was a dead page. When you jumped it by two, it was the next customer. And it had like first name, last name, business name, zip code. And they were paying customers. So we took that, we crawled it for three months, sent the file to Bangladesh, got phone numbers from Google back and we built this call center and that got us to 3 million ARR. But that's a very, very difficult. So at the peak we had like 38 people smiling, dialing. Then it stopped because we just couldn't compete with Mailchimp outside of that one channel back down to four people, which was very profitable at 3 million ARR. And then there was this horrible period of like two, three years when we were just stuck there. And I'm like, this isn't enough, right? Like we need. I need more. I need kids in Manhattan or whatever. Yeah, I need more money than this.

[Ty]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

So, yeah, it started on this long journey of trying to figure out what was next. And then I tried so many things, so many things did not work. So much wasted time, so much wasted money trying to chase after these fads and SaaS at the time, recreate other people's products I thought were working or whatever. And then somebody told me at a lunch that it was possible to get an email address from someone who visited a website without them filling out a form. And I was like. And that it was legal in the U.S. i was like, what? I'd never heard of that. I know the biggest problem in email is list growth. If I could do that, I could sell it to everybody. So then it took another year to figure out how to do that. And then that was get emails which turned into retention.com which get. Which RB2B is a version of that, but like optimized for B2B companies.

[Ty]

Amazing.

[Adam Robinson]

And here we are.

[Ty]

Yeah, it sounds like you've talked a lot about simplifying the business, cutting burn rate, cutting cost, being smart. Is it a leaner, meaner organization? You talked about how your days are a lot more. They're pretty balanced. Not like you're going crazy grinding away and trying to go for growth at all costs. Tell us a little bit, how has that shift happened? Especially in the last year since when.

[Adam Robinson]

We were stuck at 3 million ARR. I thought that if. Which is like 250k or something mrr monthly recurring revenue. I thought literally written down my dream. The top line goal was 2 million a month mrr. And if we could get there, I would have no other problems. I would be satisfied. I would never ask for another thing in my life. Right. And we do it in a lean way. I'm a lean guy. I'm a bootstrapper. The total ARR of our companies is around 30 now and we have 40 people, which is insanely lean for a SaaS. It's crazy. It's super profitable.

[Ty]

Congrats.

[Adam Robinson]

It's incredible. Yeah, literally. And we hit that 2 million mrr thing maybe a year ago, like a couple years after I was trying to do it in five, by my 42nd birthday. I wrote the goal when I was 37 and I did it on my like 44th or something like that or whatever it it like in many ways that was correct. Like a lot of the stuff that I had been worried about until that point, financially or whatever, it just like all of a sudden like has shifted to just like I'm playing with the house's money and interestingly it hasn't. The top line growth has not been that substantial since we hit it. I'm wondering if it's because I set that goal and like had I set 50, would we still be crushing. But I also think every one of these things journeys like RBDB is like a whole new journey that I just like just the value of the education of the experience. Potentially dot com. I like thought it was a unicorn and then it wasn't. And then, you know, now we just didn't innovate the product for so long. We could have innovated the offer without changing the product and we're going to do that now. So just all of this stuff is so valuable and I just feel so grateful to be in a position where it's like, okay, like these things are not shrinking. When you add everything up, it may not be growing exponentially. Yeah, I'm an unbelievable position.

[Ty]

Yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

If I just sit here and do this for another decade, that's my exit. You know what I mean? Like, that's my exit. And then like I'm just like having a great time, you know, that's Beautiful.

[Ty]

So I was going to ask you, are you satisfied? You kind of answer that a little bit. It's like you set this big, audacious goal that you've achieved. You've exceeded that. As you said, you can keep rolling on this for a few more years and have an interesting, exciting, positive outcome. It sounds like, is that. Is that satisfying or is there?

[Adam Robinson]

I think a lot of people have like a number. If I were. So I've tried to distance myself from that idea. Just having heard stories from so many people about like one of the guys who started Vimeo, he had a number and then he had this perfect business seven years ago, but he got offered a price that got him above his number. And he's like, it was the wrong goal. And he's like, every founder I tell it to is like, basically like, I want to find that out for myself. But he's like, it was the wrong goal. Like every a. If I he was running it profitably, if he just would have like let it happen over the last seven years, he would have just been much more energized by his life every day. And he's like, since I sold that business, he's like, I'm not a billionaire. I can't overpay for a great business. And cheap businesses are cheap for a reason. So I've been looking for something like that ever since. And he's like, furthermore, that sale marked the end of the platform that I started when I was 18, that I had been launching all of my other stuff out of.

[Ty]

Got it.

[Adam Robinson]

And he's like, starting from scratch is just so hard.

[Ty]

Yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

You know what I mean? Like, which kind of makes me appreciate what I have so much. Like, I have this platform that is we have a good brand and a strong brand. Shopify space, Strong brand. In B2B, we can be a data company if we want to. Like, we have a core team. I have competent executives. I got legal and finance dialed. The team is amazing in like, I don't know, I'm actually moving to Aspen in January. Like, I'm pushing this lifestyle.

[Ty]

Leaving us in Austin.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah, unfortunately, I'm bringing wakeboarding club. I know I'm bringing my 3 year old and 1 year old to Aspen and going to raise them there. But like, doesn't sound horrible. No, I mean, it's my dream. My wife finally opened her mind to it and like, I didn't really ever think I was going to be able to afford living there, you know, and all of a sudden like, she opened her mind to it and we're looking at places. We're like, this is not going to feel good to rent this, but like, we can do it. I want to just set my life up to just do this for a few more decades.

[Ty]

It sounds like kind of the whole adage of like, there's that, well, I just want to fish on the. Fish on the beach in Mexico and enjoy my life. It's like, why don't you. Why don't you hire more people and get more fish and. And then create this and then to get sold. And then so what, you can be on the beach and go fishing in the sun. So it feels like a little flavor of that. And it's like, do you like to ski? Snowboard?

[Adam Robinson]

I mean, that's the interesting thing is silly question. There's this saying which anybody who's been in these places is like, people who live there, they go there for the winter and they stay there the summer. So, like that we got a house like one mile outside of the core of downtown of Aspen, but I'm getting an office that's a block away from the gondola. All right, so then when I have an hour and a half, I can.

[Ty]

Like, well, I'm going to manifest this with you and maybe one day we can join you there if we do.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah.

[Ty]

Because that. I've never been there. I don't know if it's my place.

[Adam Robinson]

It is a man.

[Ty]

But I absolutely obsessed. My wife and I both love skiing. We've been fortunate to get exposure to it early and did it for our honeymoon. We did a do trip. So I mean, we'll have to.

[Adam Robinson]

Where'd you go for your honeymoon?

[Ty]

Zermatt.

[Adam Robinson]

Nice.

[Ty]

Yeah. Our one year, we did one year, I think we did Whistler and our two year, I think we did Deer. Deer Valley in cool Park City area.

[Adam Robinson]

So sweet.

[Ty]

It's good times. Yeah, it's amazing.

[Adam Robinson]

It's the best.

[Ty]

You. This is so interesting what you've. What you've created. And you. How do you. A bunch of questions popped up out of the conversation to get to Aspen, which was more exciting, perhaps, but how do you straddle the consumer and the B2B side of the business?

[Adam Robinson]

Well, not well, to be perfectly honest. I mentioned before we were rolling that I started creating content and the original goal was when I thought retention.com was a unicorn. I was trying to like, at the time, we had such crazy product market fit and no competition that you could just say what you did to a Shopify store and they would be like, yeah, I'm buying that tomorrow. Yeah. So I was like, how do I create more awareness?

[Ty]

Yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

I was like, there's no question building up a personal social media profile is a place. LinkedIn had the most favorable creator, consumer content dynamic. But more of the audience was on Twitter. So, like the idea was start on LinkedIn, get 10, 20,000 followers, then try to like have Twitter game. Once you learn how to create content a little bit. That was a plan. Meanwhile, it's like, what am I going to write about? How am I going to compete with Nick Sharma's content or whatever. Like these people who are actually Nick Shack, like people who are actually running these businesses, right? Because, like, I'm not a guy running businesses. And I knew I was willing to be way more transparent than like anyone at the phase that I was on my journey. And these ecom guys were all curious about SaaS and we all share broader business pain, right? So, yep, one of the pillars of what I was talking about, like maybe 40% of it at the start was just like this building public, wildly transparent, putting my P and L up online and stuff. And I just noticed it's like, okay, I'm trying to write about email for E Com, which I've never sent an email for E Comm. And I don't know why anyone would read that for me. But like the posts got really good, but the engagement was like, whatever. And then I'd write about like 2023. It was a really hard year for SaaS companies. Everybody tried to scale a BDR org got their nuts blown in. They had to let everyone go. It was terrible. I write about that stuff. It gets like 3,000 likes.

[Ty]

Yeah. When you came on the first time, that was like, you're in the heat of that, I think.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah, I think so. So it became clear to me that there was some author, audience, platform fit when I wrote about the B2B stuff that it did not even close to have that effect on the B2C. So much so that. And we had this B2B data guy working for us at the time in Santos. She's like, this product doesn't exist for them either. We need to sell it. So we built a product after the audience. And since then, I have not paid enough attention to the Shopify side. I mean, I have completely. It's like I go to the one and a half hour executive meeting and I have one on ones with some of the execs who work on that business. But until very recently, which we haven't even launched it yet. But no product innovation. It was like I really regret not having. For better or for worse, I was the product visionary over there. I was the one pushing any bold and aggressive move that we made. And since the end of 2022, nothing has changed. So I would grade that as like a D minus. The business has not failed, but my leadership has not helped it at all. It has been a slowly melting iceberg since a peak in late 2023. Just because it was like there was this full service enterprise thing called Wunderkind which did what we did. Then we were the cheapest game in town for nine months. Then all of a sudden we had six people undercutting us and we like kind of didn't change anything.

[Ty]

Yeah, there you go.

[Adam Robinson]

So that equals slowly melting iceberg.

[Ty]

Totally. But our B2B has kind of taken off and taken over. It sounds like.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah, our B2B is. It's good, not great. I would describe it as. It's like the SaaS is interesting because different product categories have different churn. Yeah, it's like a klaviyo. It's the CRM of the E Comm store. If they rip klaviyo out, they're putting something else in. It's where they store their database. It is low churn. It has this amazing net revenue expansion quality to it because the brands allow you to charge more with email list size. So the companies can get huge sort of same thing in B2B HubSpot. Like the CRM and the email program. Those companies can get enormous because they have actual revenue expansion and they're super sticky.

[Ty]

Yep.

[Adam Robinson]

I sell leads and intent data packages to SaaS. The problem with that is no matter how good the data is, there's nine reasons you'd rip it out. New employee. I don't like these leads. You know, it's not ROI enough. It's whatever. Right.

[Ty]

So apparently not as sticky.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah. So no matter what, it's just you can't make that product as sticky as Klaviyo no matter what. And then the Shopify buyer behaves like a VS and B basically. They're super price sensitive and like whatever else. Anyway, RBDB has a lot of those issues. Like even smaller bits of freemium, lower price thing. Like even smaller businesses. It's like this kind of. There's this inherent accuracy issue because we're dealing with ad tech, persistent identifiers. Ad tech is horribly inaccurate. But no one knows because it's anonymous. When you de anonymize someone and it's the wrong person on that low a volume, it's very easy to tell. So anyway, that being said, it's at 6.5 million ARR. Under two years in and we have three full time employees working on it. That's magical. The Churn's so bad that unless we keep tacking on other products, which we'll probably do, it's going to stall out here in a few millionaire. It's kind of doing what we're doing but still great business. People talk about the 10 man, 10 million revenue company. It's like this will be like 9 or 10 million three man. That's insane. Yeah, it's wild. It's crazy. And then we were just able, my founder brand was so loud in that audience that we were just kind of able to. To be the leading brand and then we got a bunch of follow on copycats and then just because of the problems with the product itself, they've all quit the market. It's like too small. And these Churn Dynamics, they're all venture backed. They literally can't run. And I have such good top of funnel that nobody else does. Nobody can run this business like I can run it. And unless you could, you wouldn't be in the market which is kind of what happened. So it's like this really interesting.

[Ty]

Kind of created a unit. It's like a unicorn. Not, not, not by definition but in characteristic.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah, totally. It's like impossible to. It just looks easier than it is. Which they have learned.

[Ty]

Yeah. That's amazing. What, what are you most excited about right now?

[Adam Robinson]

We're building something. We're building something on the E Com side that is. I. I think it's like super amazing. Have you ever heard of clay?

[Ty]

Yeah, it's been brought up on the pod a couple times.

[Adam Robinson]

Yes. So clay is this magical thing in the B2B world where you drop a list in and then it's plugged into every data provider and you enrich these data points kind of like with waterfalls of data vendors. If you want web traffic and you want is it an E Comm store and like whatever else and then you can have ChatGPT. Look at all of that enrichment and write targeted communication that then gets like sent out on instantly or like whatever Gmail or wherever you want. But it is amazing because it's got all the data that you would ever need and per credit it's more expensive. But the fact that you don't have to go farm this out in a million different places is incredible. And it's a beautiful thing because it's allowing people to use LLMs. I mean that's a very strong use case for an LLM. It's like enrich this contact with a bunch of data that was hard to get until now and then have the LLM look at all that data and write something based on who I am. Right.

[Ty]

Shocking. What?

[Adam Robinson]

It's just, it's just like a great.

[Ty]

We're able to get now.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah. So the E comm side is not exactly the same because like we don't think a couple people are trying to do it, but we don't think the most effective way to hyper personalize is at the individual level. But like the idea of clay, like a clay table helping you create micro segments. So like if you envision a card abandonment email. Right. Or any email that really gets sent out, like if you knew the Persona of the person, whether they looked at a predictive page in your network, what their funnel stage was, what their offer sensitivity was, and the pages they looked at on your site based on that, you could create 300 variants of copy. That's very easy to do with something like a clay table and OpenAI and that will work. I mean personalization works.

[Ty]

Yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

So it's just like I'm really excited about that because it's like with the way these tech vendors have taught people how to do the craft of email marketing and SMS marketing and whatever else, like they're not going there, you know what I mean? So like a really cool integrator layer could exist and somebody will win this. I hope it's us. That's like kind of you have your different tables of micro campaigns. One's for your card abandonment for email, one's for your cart abandonment for sms, one's for your whatever. And it's not just on the retention side. Like the same type of personalization can be done all over the place.

[Ty]

Interesting. So, so yeah, it's like scaled personalization.

[Adam Robinson]

Exactly. Yeah. And it's like you look at it like we have like a prototype, it doesn't really work yet and we're having a hard time getting testers before Black Friday.

[Ty]

Yeah, yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

But like you look at it and you're like, yeah, If I had 250 copies of myself, like I'd be doing this, you know, for sure.

[Ty]

Like just can't give up E comm, huh?

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah, well, I mean I like, I like it, I like. So this product and the other product I have, it really only works for a store that has traction and I just really believe that like if you've gotten An E comm store to the point where it has traction. You are a very talented human being and like I think you have to share a lot of the same values that I do about running lean and like all the stuff.

[Ty]

Yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

Strength of products and all that stuff. So like entrepreneur. Yeah. I just like I have, I have really enjoyed meeting everyone in that ecosystem both on the brand side and the tech side.

[Ty]

That's awesome.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah, I like it. I don't have the content edge that I do in B2B but I'm hoping that there's some angle.

[Ty]

Yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

I saw a meme account on Twitter that was this compliance app. They hired this guy to just. It's a European compliance app and it's just like compliance jokes. And in a month they've gotten 20,000 followers. I'm wondering if there's some angle like that where it's not my founder brand, it's some other concept And I like.

[Ty]

Where you're going with it. You might have a segment of the business, correct me if I'm wrong, where the top of funnel is smashing. The core business itself may not be as wildly viable. If you will post that top of funnel. But then if you create something that is a little bit more compelling at the economic level and at the differentiation level and you've got a little bit of an edge there, you don't necessarily need to have that dominant top of funnel piece that you have with.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah. I mean, and the good thing about Shopify space too is like it is, I mean it is wildfire when you get something that works.

[Ty]

Yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

You know.

[Ty]

Yeah. Like once wildfire internal group kind of gets catches it and once a part of it, it's a no brainer. Amazing. You kind of already answered the question. But looking ahead to 2026, is that going to be a core focus? How do you think about prioritization going forward and what is kind of coming up for you as planning for next year happens? As we here we are already in November.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah. So I think the biggest lesson of the last few years is like we cannot stop innovating ever, anywhere or these businesses will die. I don't know why that sounds so hard for me.

[Ty]

Aggressive, but.

[Adam Robinson]

No, no but yeah. It's just like it's like you are either innovating or you are dying a slow death. And I see what we're building now and we have not validated the demand hypothesis yet. Looking at it, I have a very strong feeling that it's going to work. And that's super exciting. But unlike the Last go around we're just going to have to keep building it. You know what I mean? It's just on this decade long if the initial demand hypothesis is proven then it's like okay, we got to start doing this and we have to expand the TAM and we have to expand the product and we have to. It's never going to end.

[Ty]

Reminds me of growth is never done entrepreneurship journey. And I feel very. It resonates with me for sure.

[Adam Robinson]

And I think for me in particular it's just like having somebody in the. We have this guy Phil Roselli in the product seat now over there who is unbelievable. He's leading the charge on this and he has had a lot of the revelations around how he believes the micro segmenting and E Comm should work versus the individual level. So yeah, it's like always we had never historically hired well for that role but like always having someone like that there and I quite frankly I should probably hire somebody for RBDB who's. Who's like that.

[Ty]

Yeah, it was, it was kind of alluding to. I was kind of going there and my next thought was can you. Is there something there for the B2B side that could be a compelling offer or is it kind of focused on consumer for now, Clay's there for B2B.

[Adam Robinson]

You know what I mean? So one thing that I love in businesses is this thing where you're like if something is absolutely crushing it over here, would it work over here? Because that's kind of what RBDB was. That's kind of what get emails and retention.com was like Wunderkin was crushing it with this version of what they were doing. And then it's like what if I dumb that down and made it like $9 to start? What happened? And I think it's compelling story too. It's like dude, like B2B. You know, it's like, I don't know, like. Like it's just so obvious why that would work. It's after you see Clay and you see the power of it, it's very hard to use and get up the curve or whatever. Once, once you're up the curve of it's like wow, like I really understand why this is working. Yep. So it's really cool stuff. Like a lot of the AI companies crush because their UGC is amazing because people create content on social of how smart they are. Right. So like there's some of that aspect.

[Ty]

To it is a wow factor in terms of show and tell. Like look what I was able to do exactly Right.

[Adam Robinson]

And it like helps their agencies, helps their business. It like, you know, gets, gets awareness for the vendor or whatever else. So that's like the next like major thing. And then on the B2B side, I don't really know. So I think we're trying to understand the data business a little better. Like we built this suite of APIs that we don't really know what the use case is for yet. But there's always been an API for giving an IP address and getting back a company. There's never been an API for giving an IP address and getting back a person. And the pixel does it a little bit better. But there's a lot of reasons people don't like putting pixels on their site. For whatever reason. We have this API thing that we're exploring and then I am more so it's like I have this founder brand which is entirely responsible for the success of RB2B. There's no way this business would work. I mean, it's just unbelievable. Like, I don't know, I get like a million LinkedIn impressions per month and that leads to 30,000 unique website visits for this website. We didn't buy the domain two years ago. Right. So like in no paid, right? Like very light paid. So it's just this amazing velocity going through there that my founder brand is entirely responsible for. So one side is like kind of product and revenue, but the other side is like I'm just interested in like expanding the founder brand across channels. Kind of like first. And then this mental hula hoops I'm jumping through right now is like the breadth of the founder brand content is very wide relative to the actual paid user of rbdb. The breadth of the founder brand content is. I don't want to sound like an asshole. It's like virtually everyone in SaaS because it's like founders who haven't gotten as far as I have and then people working at larger SaaS companies who just want to be a bootstrap founder of a very profitable company and move to Aspen. Right. If you look. Whereas the paid user of RBDB is like usually the marketer of a 5 to 20 person US based SaaS company. That's like 5% of the people that are reading my content. So I look at like a LinkedIn automation platform, I'm like, man, it'd be sweet if I could like sell that. So white label. I don't even know what it is. Or like it would be sick if I had like a go to market. There's this thing called log Growth machine. It's like a database plus cold email, like instantly, plus the LinkedIn automation, like Kreach. I'd probably get in trouble with LinkedIn if I sold that. But like still. But then on the other hand it's like, well, none of that is new. I mean, part of the reason why RBDB was so explosive was because my content was viral and this thing was totally new and so different.

[Ty]

Yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

And it's kind of not anymore, but still, I'm the only game in town for free and under 400 bucks. Right. So it is very differentiated in that regard. Whereas like I feel my urge is to go try to somehow partner with these guys and let me white label some type of solution. But at the end of the day people are already doing that. It's just not different. So that's why it's kind of like I want to see if we can't just get a machine for the content going across all these channels and then maybe something comes to us someday. That's like the API stuff. Right? I don't know what that business is.

[Ty]

But I like that.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah.

[Ty]

It's especially interesting to get around that placing of the pixel concept and get another way to do it that's more amenable to the end user.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah, yeah. There's all sorts of weird use cases. Maybe it's ad tech, enterprise retailers have a use for it.

[Ty]

Amazing.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah.

[Ty]

Adam, this has been amazing. You come in, you've been dropping knowledge and it's been fun to have you back 106 episodes later. So persistence and continuing the. The relationship and we'll see, we'll see on the slopes, hopefully.

[Adam Robinson]

Perfect.

[Ty]

Yeah, you do.

[Adam Robinson]

You got to go to Aspen. It's the best.

[Ty]

Never been in my opinion.

[Adam Robinson]

It's the best place.

[Ty]

Yeah. I have to check it out on the bucket list at some point. But you know, for those wanting to know more about you, like anything you want to share with the audience that's maybe hasn't been shared or something where maybe they don't know about you.

[Adam Robinson]

Well, I got two kids, a three year old and a one year old, which I mentioned.

[Ty]

Amazing.

[Adam Robinson]

And I'm really excited about raising them in this mountain environment because I think just the way they spend their free time and this whole dynamic with mobile phone, it's just giving them this gift of access to big nature all around is just amazing.

[Ty]

Love that.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah. Pretty passionate about that. I don't know. Other. Do you have kids?

[Ty]

I do five and two and a half.

[Adam Robinson]

Another one on the way. What happened to my life is. Once I had kids, it was just like, I got kids, I got work.

[Ty]

Yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

I'm trying to stay in shape. Yep. I'm trying to see some friends every once in a while, but like, not really that's it. And there's not, there's not much else. So like I have a simple life in that regard, you know.

[Ty]

Yeah. I'm very similar. Yeah. It's awesome.

[Adam Robinson]

Yeah.

[Ty]

Can't beat it. It's, it's good stuff.

[Adam Robinson]

Totally. It's a very purpose driven existence. Yeah. And like the challenges never stop and always just this, like, how could I be doing this better?

[Ty]

Yeah.

[Adam Robinson]

How could I not get this pissed off?

[Ty]

Like, you know, whatever.

[Adam Robinson]

Right. No.

[Ty]

You're constantly checking yourself and trying to, you know, make sure you're on the right track. And I, I, it hits for me for sure. And I think a lot of people get that. So it's been awesome to have you on and thanks for being so generous with your time.

[Adam Robinson]

Thanks, Ty.

[Ty]

Absolutely.

[Adam Robinson]

Let's do it again, man.

[Ty]

Let's do it again.

[Adam Robinson]

It.