Latest / Growth After Headcount / $8.6M ARR, Nobody's Touched It In A Month — Adam Robinson (RB2B) #004
Transcript
- speaker-0: this is my perspective. I have this company called we have several product lines. One of them is called RB2B. This is what I write about on LinkedIn. As background, the reason I started posting on LinkedIn is because we were selling a product to the Shopify space and it had extraordinary product market fit at the time. And I was trying to figure out how to reach more of them because I could just stand in front of them at the time. Product market fit changes a lot over time. But at the time I could stand in front of them, say what we did, and they would buy it in one second. And it was just the most amazing thing ever. So I was like, I want to create what's the quickest way to spread awareness in this world? It's to build a personal social media profile Like people are on social media to follow people, not companies. Like, so I set out to make a person to spread the awareness for my Shopify app. When I was trying to figure out what to write about, I thought one of the things that I could write about is my journey as a SaaS founder, because e-commerce stores would probably find that interesting because they're similar entrepreneurial journeys. and I knew that there wasn't great building public content out there from somebody at my stage. what I noticed over a year is that whenever I wrote something really honest and like you know, the 2023 was a painful period for a lot of SaaS companies, like people, you know, you're Outbound sales operations stopped working. There was a lot of downsizing, it was kind of pre-AI, but it was like an adjustment of the business model for a lot of a lot of people. you know, I when I wrote about stuff like that, it would get like a hundred times the engagement of anything that I would write about, you know, trying to like get the attention of these e-commerce stores. So it became so obvious in the story, is it was like over a weekend. In 2023, over Labor Day, I was like, I had this mega viral post that I was talking about, like the BDR you know, business just shrinking and it wasn't working for us. And we let everybody go and our growth sped up, and like a bunch of people like wrote me about it saying the same thing, like, I don't know if this is working for me, you know, we should be leaner, like all this stuff. So I'm like And it was like thousands of likes that I got. So I sat down before dinner. I wrote these three posts and I was like, okay, I went to dinner, I was like, guys, like I had this viral post. I think I wrote three more mega viral posts. If like they all hit, then I know what this machine wants from me. If they don't, then I'm you know, kind of lost still. And it was like bang, bang, bang, super viral. And I was like, okay, I know how to write to this audience on LinkedIn, meaning B2B SaaS people. I'm gonna just Keep writing only to them because it's so much more resident than the e-comm space. And the product that I sell in the e-comm space, which is person level website visitor identity, it doesn't even exist yet in B2B. So we'll make a B2B version of it and launch it into this massive awareness that I have a high degree of confidence that I'm able to create. Right. Around that time, This company that I've used forever to do like product activation, it's called Intercom. They in if you're doing a book on AI, they're they're like the absolute poster child for transforming their business from a typical SaaS model of like charging people or buy seat for customer service. Yeah, yeah. To like they were the first building agent that answers a question and charge you a dollar. Right. So That was just coming out and I was like. You know, I thought it was really interesting that like I love lean capital efficient businesses. And I thought this thought leadership, incredibly cheap awareness that I was getting. Could be combined with this emergent technology that can actually handle a large volume of customer support requests without a human for real for the first time ever. Like, and like that would that that that would make possible a funnel that was like from a human perspective, you know, more efficient than anything's ever been. And We designed the whole business around things that AI could amplify. And most of it was around, so it's like, what do I mean? It's like we had the benefit of starting from ground zero with our product. I thought a super simple product would be necessary, at least where AI was then, for AI to be able to handle all the customer interaction. Right. So it's like. And that turned out to be true, right? It's like unbelievable. we're not even really working on it right now because we're like trying to figure out another business that sort of fits the characteristics of RB2B that we can launch into this thought leadership that I have and you know, kind of uses the data asset that we put together for RB2B. but it it's unbelievable when I say this. Like Tate, who built it, is the engineer, right? My CTO. He has not touched the code in over a month. I post three times a week on LinkedIn, but it's not even about RB2B. Right? Rob, who designed this AI customer support machine. Which the reason it works so well, there's two reasons it works so well. One, we kept our product stupid fucking simple and like refused to add to it basically. So that we could create documentation so good that Finn could solve nearly every problem by referring to documentation and like looking at their account, right? So like This is very different than the approach that I hear everyone else taking, which I mean, they already have much more complex businesses. It's like you read that like Coinbase CEO's release. I don't know if you read it yesterday. He fired 15% of his workers and he's like making teams of one person and a bunch of AI agents to try to get shit done. You know, it's like I I just like took a much more simplistic view on it. I'm like, okay, like. I think this customer success or this customer support use case for AI is almost perfect if your product is simple enough and it doesn't require a complex sales cycle and it's PLG and people can just buy it without talking to anyone. And like they all have the same questions before they buy, and they immediately understand what it is when you like when they look at the web, when they look at the homepage. And there's a free tier that they can go try it out, you know, and it's super easy to get in there and upgrade and all that shit. Like That to me, in you know, we launched that product in 2024 when again Finn was early, it was only resolving 25% of tickets successfully. Now it's like 98.6 for us. I mean, it's it's incredible. but even still, I thought that enough was there to like worth to for it to be worth trying this model. Right. And that was my approach. So like that's not. By any means, I don't think like cutting edge from like I'm using the most sophisticated agents. I had this like complex sprawling marketing operation, and I like replaced all of the people with like these agents that are doing individual tasks. I I was like, I I saw something. Something was presented to me, which was you can get an insane amount of awareness to this B2B marketing crowd or this B2B SaaS. Crowd just by posting on LinkedIn that is far more awareness than anybody else can get. Right. So like I knew I had that edge. And then this other thing was like, well. This product doesn't really exist over there yet, and people will for sure want it. But I could have made it a much more complex product, right? But it's so it's like by keeping it super simple, it sort of allowed this to happen, you know? And like It you know, it's it's unique. It's it it's a very situational thing, but like you know, I I'm trying to figure out right now like like it's like okay, like so so There's a guy who you should also talk to who's like The antithesis he's the exact opposite of my approach to this. yeah. So so th this is like a great compare and contrast, right? It's gonna be amazing to have both of us in your book, right? Because like I am very primitive in the way I approach this. I was like, I think I can build a business which existing out-of-the-box AI tool because of opportunities available to me, existing out-of-the-box AI tooling can like amplify by a thousand X what like a person used to be able to do to service a business like this. Right. Whereas that guy Amos, he literally started with a copy of our product and he said, To try to book a demo with a website visitor, AI could handle all of the qualification and contextualization and outreach for you. Right? So his narrative the entire time has been starting with the website visitor, we are going to create the autonomous business, which is what he calls it. Which to him, the autonomous business is I have all of these agents doing all of these tasks for me in my business. But like you look at his calendar, he was like on the phone eight calls a day, you know, talking to customers about what they wanted. And that and you know, his his co-founders are working nine nine six around the clock or whatever. And like, meanwhile, like like I said before, my business, none of us have touched it in a month. Right. And it's still growing. So it's way ahead of his. So, like, what's an autonomous business? speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: Right. Is it a business where you have a bunch of agents and three of you are working around the clock? Or is it actually something that you designed from first principles to be able to run itself? Right? So and I think you're gonna have a fascinating time talking to him about it because it's not like I disagree that he's trying to design the autonomous business. I just think I actually did, and it's a much simpler task than he thinks it is. You know what I mean? So, but and then just a little bit more background about the space that I'm in, right? So, like I launched this product, I was able to create a huge shitstorm on the launch. A bunch of competitors came in and they tried to basically copy it. And then some version of what happened to Amos happened to every single one of them. So, like the and this is not really related to This is just a a piece of side information. So, like the problem with my business is when I say what it does, the the promise that it makes to you in your head does not reflect the reality of the product. Right. So like I'm saying I can identify your anonymous website visitors. You're immediately thinking, Well, I should be able to spam these people in my sleep and book demos. Right. Like it's just not exactly how it works. There it's it's noisy. Web traffic's noisy in general. We're like de-anonymizing. ad tech persistent identifiers which are inherently inaccurate. There's a very low percentage of your ICP that actually hits your website. And then it's not a lead yet. So like it's kind of just a signal. So like once you get to the point where This signal, so so like and it's kind of a signal that needs to be combined with a bunch of other signals to actually do something. So like the kind of company that has the web traffic and the expertise to do that wants a bunch of other shit. Everybody else built all that shit. And so like they're now all fighting for like the same later stage SaaS startups who can, you know, actually action signals. Well, I kind of was just like, look, if I'm honest with myself, my core customer can't book a demo using this data. But for $79 or $149 a month, our average subscription price is like $200. It's like, they'll just look at their website visitors until they don't want to anymore and they'll cancel. And that's just going to be my business. Because if I add all this other shit, then I'm increasing the complexity to the point where. It's not what we wanted to design from the first place. Right. And like the churn's horrible for these reasons. And like, you know, it'll stall out at some point. Like, but it's still going super strong now. And and yeah, it's like it's like so so why is RB2B the last man standing? And all of these guys did this other thing. It's like, well, I had this awareness which no one else could create. Right. And then we had, you know, we're basically a data company with like three different product lines. RB2B is one of them. And we have a shared data team that manages this data asset that we use across all the companies. speaker-1: mean, between retention and... speaker-0: RB2B to be, and we have a data arm also. Like we have like we we sell like you know flat file data sets to people. So we we had the ability and the staff and the resources to construct a data asset that did not have a variable cost of fulfilling a contact. Meaning across the three businesses, we were able to spend a million dollars a year on salaries and annual contracts to data vendors and stuff like that. To where when we push when we resolved a contact and enriched it and pushed it to Slack, it costs us zero incremental cents. Whereas like all the other competitors had to pay a nickel for like whatever the email or whatever it is. so the combination of the cheap awareness and the fixed fixed price data asset and my desire to keep this thing unbelievably simple, it's like we're able to price. Below the cost to acquire a subscriber for any B2B service. And in order to make these guys, it's like it's like one aspect of them adding a bunch of stuff was the customers who are getting real value out of this needed a bunch of other features. The other aspect is they actually needed to charge 20 or 30 grand a year to like make any sort of marketing and sales funnel work. Yeah. Whereas my thing starts at $79, right? And again, like I'm bootstrapped. they have investors. There's like a lot of reason they it's like this is a sub-VC scale opportunity that a lot of people just can't pursue, you know. But to me, it's a miracle. You know what I mean? Like, like it is so amazing that this business exists and it continues to thrive, and we're basically not even touching it, you know. And I haven't heard very many other examples like that. And so and I think it's just speaker-1: it's hard to replicate. speaker-0: Yeah, like I think it is because and and this is why I'm trying to like launch another business into this funnel that into this thought leadership that I have. I'm doing it anyway. Even if I didn't have RB to be at this point, I'd probably be posting on LinkedIn just because like I believe in the power of this, you know, like compounding personal brand over time. Like can just do so much with it. so like, you know, I have this idea, which I don't know how good it is yet, but I've started to talk about it where You know, the there's there's a contact data space, right? So like you have a list, you need emails and phone numbers. you used to go to Apollo Zoom Info or like whatever to like go do that. Is there a way? Is there like an agentic, you know, sort of API driven, no UI, demand for that product? And if I Approach the market with a high quality database, a very good at a disruptive price. You know, can I basically pull off a marketing play that's good enough to like get a bunch of people buying this contact data for me? And this is right, relatively commodized market. You know, it's like I'm selling data I already have. It's like this awareness funnel that I already have. will that work? I still don't know, right? Like, but I'm like trying to figure this out. because this RB2B thing like so great. What's amazing about RB2B is I have no competitors. Contact data markets, super competitive, you know, but like but like at the same time, everybody needs to buy emails and phone numbers. So, like, can I like have disruptive marketing in a way that would, you know, compel people to pay attention to my solution and not do what they're currently doing? I don't know the answer yet. so So yeah, what's what's unique about I think there's a lot that's unique about it. my ability to create this thought leadership content seems to be quite unique. No one else can really do it for whatever reason. You know, it's just I it's this, you know, it is it's like there is a perfect alignment in my thought leadership between me being the author. Than the readers who do their jobs on LinkedIn, these like other B2B SaaS people. And like I am like an aspirational version of a lot of them. They're like earlier stage founders. They would love to be bootstrapped, you know, 30 billionaire or like whatever. Or they work at other companies that are way farther along than me, but they're not the founder. And they would just love to, you know, for for for what my content represents, like they would it's just Aspirational content for a lot of them, right? And then those people happen to be the buyers of my solution also. So there's this incredibly amazing alignment. And the weight of my words, because of how credible I am as a SaaS founder is amazing, right? Like the no no one else where I am is putting out content like I'm putting out, right? Like that's just the long and short of it. So that is unique and it's very difficult to copy. And then For all of the reasons that I described, no one could really hang out in the market and compete with us. You know? Exactly. Yeah. speaker-1: new entrants especially with all it's easier to build. I see so many companies and founders trying to build something that exists but they don't have the brand, the network to distribute it. speaker-0: Exactly. Exactly. And that's my idea with it's like can I make a brand in the contact data space? In i you know, there's like a couple of huge companies, there's a handful of people in the mill, and there's like a bunch of tiny guys with no brand. Can I make a brand in the contact data space that like kind of means contact data for Claude or contact data for AI agents? Right. Like and that that's that's that's the that's exactly how I'm thinking about it. And again, I don't know the answer. but I'm trying we're trying to figure that out and we're probably gonna push a product out. And I might it's it's like so much easier to push products out these days that I might pull it back if it appears to not be working at all. You know, and just say like, sorry, didn't mean to waste everybody's time. but like but like yeah, I mean That's my perspective. and it's I think it's just gonna be so different than everybody else that you talk to. No, they're gonna have way more complex ways to like scale with fewer people. And the irony is like Amos is a perfect example. They are not as far along and they are working way more on it. You what I mean? Like the truly autonomous business Is RB2B D B. speaker-1: It's simplicity combined with personal brand and really keep it as simple as possible and finding the right niche. It's speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: rare. I guess it's very hard. speaker-0: Yep. Yeah, that's my model at least. And I'm looking for other opportunities to like kind of do it over and over again because I think it's so incredible. but I think other people will be able to do similar things in different areas. It's just like I mean, this guy Greg Eisenberg talks a little bit about this. He like thinks that I mean, I I don't know how much of his narrative it is now, but like a year and a half ago it was like, yeah, like. In this new world, building the audience is the hard part. And then he's like, there's a middle stage of providing some sort of service through an agency. And then the final stage would be, you know, kind of making tech that does that instead of the agency. Or maybe it's a tech enabled service, which is the endgame or whatever. So I think that's easier to say than it is to do. And I think he's even probably finding that it's easier to say than it is to do. because I'm not seeing any Huge successes come out of that massive content brand that he has yet. but my journey with RB2B was like a version of that. You know, I happened to tap into this ability to build the audience before we even built the product, and we built the product because I was able to, you know, and I think in a vibe coding world, that is an essential ingredient to being. Successful. If anyone can just copy anything you're doing, then you know the edge is either your ability to cut through the noise from a marketing standpoint, or you have some kind of unique data that like AI agents can use to like take action, or the holy grail is like a network effect, right? Like podcast can't vibecode, you know, a two sided marketplace that has 10 million users on each side. They're like frequently transacting with each other. Right. Like so yeah, my speaker-1: How do you see existing companies? I think you challenged it a few times, Sixth Sense, the players who have hundreds of employees and now they're trying to catch up on their AI game and then now they internally lead their operations and now they have to compete like you guys for example. What are their survival chances? speaker-0: Well, I think I think there were a lot of companies in that era that made it farther than they should have because of what was going on in that era. Right? Like, you know, tech companies were buying other tech like crazy, the money was free. You know, if you a venture investor invested in you, all of a sudden all of their portfolio would buy it. Like People got a long way with, you know, I I have not heard a single time that like sixth 6sense was obviously amazing for me. Like most people who were buying it were buying it to be cool and like not in a bad way. They were just everyone was doing it and it's intent data and you need it. And like it was very difficult to tell whether it was or wasn't working for you. When money's free, that's not a huge problem. you know, it's it's a big problem for them now. So like from a product standpoint, I guess what I'm saying is like every business situation is so different. It's hard to say, like, yeah, Sixth Sense, for example, like what are they gonna do to survive? But I think they have a bigger issue than like AI versus not AI. It's like that product concept got a ton of initial traction and has not withstood the test of time, which is not it's not like They're the only ones that's ever happened to, right? Like that's a a fairly common thing in tech. But what I would say is change is hard and Many times it's easier, you know, not not doing what I've done, but like, you know, these breakout companies that go from zero to a hundred million ARR in a year and a half with 50 people, like they're all AI native companies. They have an AI product. They're doing it superficially amplified by AI. It's not how I did it, you know, and but like It intercoms magical because a legacy SaaS company was actually able to transition to that, where they're like core growth engine is this AI first thing. I think they were in a very unique situation. They had an AI research operation for three years internally before Chat GPT hit. Chat GPT was the unlock that made it all work. And they were able to go all in on it. I think Other companies will have a hard time doing that. You know, it's just whatever. It's just it's hard to change a group of people. You know, it's just easier to start from zero the you know, with with speaker-1: Definitely. speaker-0: like a totally AI first angle than it is to change what you're currently doing. Right. So I mean it's just hard. speaker-1: Just one question going back to retention when you started at the fingerfin. How many two years reached five million ARR or roughly that time spent or what was it? speaker-0: Probably. Yeah. speaker-1: Would it be different now if you have the same tools that you have now? Would you think it would be faster? speaker-0: we could have just done so like we had six people when we launched that company and we actually kept we kept the product again super simple for different reasons, but we still only had six people up until 13 million ARR. It took three and a half or four years. but a lot more work was being done than is being done with RB2B. Like we were giving everybody sales demos, like There was an onboarding person who was helping people on board. There was a customer support person who was answering every ticket. We had again for someone doing sales notes, we had sales assistant, and then we had me who's like kind of doing product marketing stuff, and then we had our CTO, right? So like, but everybody was flooded with work. And there was never going to be anything that changed that. Right. So like that seems really lean. six people but like i'm telling you with RB2B like no one is touching it right now and it's at eight eight point six right like so i have a you know i have a crazy attraction to this very very lean way of doing things but this rbdb thing was like next level like the what what What we what we were able to do because we were able to design the business model from scratch, I had this cheap awareness available to me and you know, the AI tools that were just becoming becoming available at the time. speaker-1: And do you think there's like a path to 100 million era of something? speaker-0: Not for that business because the churn is so high. It's a it's in a categoric for all of the reasons that I told you before. you know, whenever you're selling leads or intent data as a SaaS, your churn is going to be higher than if you were like a system of record, like a CRM or like for e commerce stores, it's the email marketing tool that they use as their CRM. leads in a tented is just not sticky. There's just a million reasons you'd rip it out. So so yeah. But like It doesn't need to be my my goal is like cash flow. Like I'm like really interested in the fact that like I can pursue these sub VC scale opportunities that people with investment cannot, and they can really work for us, you know, as businesses. Like so it's like my approach is maybe I'll get to like fifty or a hundred by creating a portfolio of these things that have these like interesting Motes to them, you know? speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. No, makes sense. People say there's going to be a one-person billion dollar company. Do you believe that could happen? speaker-0: Yeah, those I mean those those those guys with the hawking the trisepatide, you know I'm talking about? Those two guys. There's like a New York Times story where it's like Two man one point eight five B company. Weird. Yeah, th this was like a really popular Was there a company that reached four and fifteen million of revenue in a year with two people recently? speaker-1: Yeah, I fixed it. speaker-0: Yeah, Medvi. Go read about these guys. So like there is a lot of polarizing and controversial things that they did in order to do it, but like they did what you're talking about. I mean it's two guys, but like it's a dude and his brother, but like they were selling they were selling like off label GLP ones basically. And like doing all of the they're creating fake doctor profiles on Facebook to like run flash sales and like you know. It was it was a very they scaled up every part of what would be a D to C operation using a bajillion AI agents or whatever. speaker-1: I will check it out, hear about that. And do you plan to hire somebody in coming 12 months? speaker-0: we we're actually hiring someone to like run the support part of RB2B while we while the three of us who built it like go do this new thing, whatever the new thing ends up being. So so yeah, we're we're we're hiring someone to like maintain that so that we can work on the new shit. Yeah, man. Nice.