RB2B

Over the past 10 years, I’ve bootstrapped startups $0-$1M three times. Each time was TWICE as fast with HALF the resources. Here’s the breakdown of what I did, how long it took, and how many FTEs we had: 1. Robly Email Marketing January 2014 - May 2015 - Took 17 Months, staff of 25 when we hit it - Entirely sales-led - We had a call center to book a $35/mo subscription and did a 1-to-1 manual onboarding (it was a really, really good list) - Stalled out at $3m ARR, sold to PE in 2020 for $10m 2. GetEmails (now Retention.com) November 2019 - April 2020 - Took 27 weeks, staff of 6 when we hit it - Did Facebook ads, drove a 15min demo - Diana Ross did a thousands of them - Currently $21.7m ARR, 27% total margin 4.5 years later 3. RB2B March 2022 - June 2022 - Took 16 weeks, staff of 5 when we hit it - Founder-brand driven Inbound-led Outbound (mostly Linkedin) - Check out our dashboard (in comments 👇) for up-to-the-minute metrics TAKEAWAY: Startups are HARD. The longer you do this, the more skilled you become at the craft. We’re all looking to capture lightning in a bottle. Each swing you take, you’re closer to it. Keep building.

I’ve now worked with 100 founders, marketers, and salespeople setting up RB2B workflows. Here are 8 surprising use cases that companies are using to turn signals into revenue (besides booking demos): 1. Which pages drive ICP traffic - We wildly underestimated value proposition here - We need to make our own dashboards and offer a small upsell 2. Cross-selling existing customers from product pages - Morgan at Chili Piper gets credit for this one 3. Multithreading across customers - Sendoso use case #1 - Buying groups are the MOST valuable use of the intent signal - We’re building buying group functionality 4. Finding lookalike site visitors of successful customers - Sendoso use case #2 - I personally love it - although it’s fairly similar to an ICP visitor 5. Looking at competitors on your site - Who doesn’t want to know who’s snooping around? - You can see which pages they are paying the most attention to 6. Looking at investors on your site - Even if you’re not raising in 2024, still need to know who is thirsty 7. Discovering new ICPs on your site - Akooda use case #1 - 13% of their organic traffic is HEALTHCARE, reading about problems they solve 8. Current customers clicking on support pages - This one saved us with our biggest customer at Retention.com - They were looking at deliverability issue page, we saved the day, and customer TAKEAWAY: The power of Person-Level Website Visitor Identity goes far beyond booking demos. Our creative customers are figuring out new use cases every day. It’s helping us help our existing customers get more value out of the tool. It’s also helping us build out our product roadmap. Most importantly - it’s helping churn!!! Thank you RB2B community for being so badass and figuring all this stuff out. P.S. Tomorrow at 1pm EDT I'm doing a LIVE event with Clay and Sendspark to teach you how to convert "signals" into revenue. We'll show you exactly how to capture website visitors, enhance that with Clay, and then automate personalized videos for each person. Register here: https://lu.ma/55ob97py

In the next 18 months, Enterprises' increasing investments in AI will come at the expense of existing technology spend, causing a decrease in SaaS revenues. If you're a SaaS founder, here's how you survive: BACKGROUND Enterprises worldwide have spent $154B on AI solutions in the first half of 2024 According to a recent IDC forecast, GenAI spending will continue to enjoy over 70% CAGR between 2024-2027 But with high interest rates, we are seeing slower than usual revenue growth for the buyers. AI is expensive and a typical AI budget includes costs for infrastructure, hardware, hosting, data acquisition, R&D and salaries. So where is all this money for AI coming from? I see two areas that may contribute towards an increase in AI budget in the absence of high growth in revenues. 1. Decrease in overall spending on SaaS and non AI purchases  2. Decrease in overall hiring with increased employee productivity So what do you if you are a SaaS founder? Remember... As the market shrinks, it also provides non-linear opportunities to some. Here are a 6 things SaaS founders can do to complete against shifting budgets: 1. Realize that most growth in future will come from competitive displacements and not net new growth 2. Integrate AI capabilities in your own SaaS as buyers start to reward SaaS tools with AI capabilities 3. Identify and dominate a Niche or Vertical markets 4. Develop partnerships, ecosystems and community 5. Build marketing and thought leadership for your community 6. Review pricing to stay competitive for your niche In the short run (next 18 months), there will be some pain for SaaS companies that fail to react effectively to these evolving times. Some will even go out of business. But, In the long run (2026 ) SaaS companies will thrive with increased operational efficiencies and enhanced user experience with the use of AI. We will eventually enter a decade of digital transformation opportunities where buyers switch to an AI first paradigm causing one of the biggest bull runs the tech world has ever seen. Just make sure your SaaS business survives to witness it. 

Sales KILLED sales. Don't take my word for it. That's what Kevin "KD" Dorsey told me. The way we do outbound makes it 10x harder on all of us to do outbound. Here are real #'s KD saw on the frontlines: Connect Rates: 2020: 12-17% Today: 3-4% Open Rates: 2020: 50-60% Today: 25-30% Response Rates to a sequence (emails 1-4): 2020: 10% -> 8% -> 6% -> 4% Today: 5% -> 4% -> 3% -> 1% I'm sure you're thinking: "Adam, of course outbound is harder now. There is SO MUCH more of it." True, but... The more we do the worse we also seem to get at it! That's not how it should work. Personalized emails objectively perform better. Yet 93% of emails sent today are automated. Why? Because companies are addicted to speed and scale. They've forgotten what “good” looks like. Here's how we fight back: We have to create messaging that is so good that it survives in a low engagement environment. What does that mean? We need to start building our outbound machines based on inbound signals. Here's a few suggestions from KD: 1. Huddle with marketing. - What are our highest performing headlines? >> make subject lines of emails - What are our best performing content pieces? >> lead with value - What are our best short/long tail keywords? >> speak to problems 2. Start with email - Start with your highest ACV/lowest churn/stickiest buyer persona - Create persona and industry-specific messaging - Make the messaging problem-based - Drive inbound w/ outbound activity 3. Stack calls on top of email engagement. - Every vertical has a different pickup rate w/ calls. - Use what you learned in email to formulate the call scripts. - If your email inboxed, the iPhone MIGHT add your name to callerID (big win) 4. Iterate - Forever - Never stop - Keep testing TAKEAWAY: If you’re selling on the frontlines (or running a team of sellers), you know outbound is harder than it used to be. That doesn’t mean it’s not the SINGLE BEST WAY to scale your startup. But the engagement rates from 2015-2021 aren't coming back. We must fight back against endless sequences and mindless automation. We have to create better, personalized messaging. We have build a better, more efficient, signal-based machine. It’s time to sell better.

If I was a first-time startup founder, I would not aim to build a $1B unicorn. VCs will hate this, but here's why you should think SMALLER and try to create a $3m-5m ARR profitable SaaS instead: 1. It’s relatively easy to get a small, profitable SaaS working. One extreme of entrepreneurship is the solo consultant, the other is sending people to Mars. SaaS is somewhere in the middle. Smaller goals mean smaller teams and less complicated products, probably no management layers, no big expensive tech, no SOC2, etc. 2. It’s much easier to bootstrap a small, profitable SaaS.  If all you’re trying to do is get to sub-$5m ARR, you can very likely build a solution that exploits a small hole in a very large market, and do it quite profitably. You won’t need VCs to sign off on your idea, which means far more ideas are available to you. 3. Your odds of success are much higher if you are aiming lower. According to Notion Capital, 3% of startups make it to $100m ARR, whereas 60% stall out between $3m-$10m ARR. You are 20x more likely to be successful if your endgame is single-digit ARR.  This might be a hard pill to swallow, but as a first-time founder you are probably not skilled enough at execution to pull off a unicorn. I never have, and I’m 12 years in. 4. You will learn VERY VALUABLE lessons as you fight to $3-$5m ARR. Just because you aren’t shooting for the moon doesn’t mean you won’t learn many of the exact same lessons you’d learn if you were playing much bigger. I learned SOOO many things about teams, product, sales, and marketing being stuck for 4 years at $3m ARR.  5. You will be able to start a bigger, better startup with the free cash.  GetEmails (now Retention.com) was the result of 3 years of experiments inside of Robly and currently has 7x the revenue and 4x the free cash. RB2B is being funded by Retention’s free cash, and looks like it could be much larger.  6. You will eventually enter the Bootstrapper’s “Promised Land”. While you and your co-founders may not be excited about $4m ARR with $1.5m of free cash, if your second startup is 3x bigger and your next is 3x bigger than that, you will be in a position where you are being paid the equivalent of a small exit EVERY YEAR with resources to do whatever you want.  TAKEAWAY  Starting a SaaS startup is hard.  Especially as a first-time founder.  Lowering your ambition will increase your chances of your success. And smaller successes in the short-term can compound into much larger successes down the road. VCs will try to interfere with this restrained ambition. They want you to aim higher, grow faster, build more complicated products, and hire more people. All while incinerating capital as quickly as you are willing to tolerate.  That won’t maximize your probability-weighted average of long-term success. The most important rule of the game is simple: Stay alive so that you can keep playing.

Two weeks ago we had our first MASSIVE f*ck up at RB2B. It caused 50% of active users to churn and caused lots of brand-damaging blowback. Here’s what happened (and how we fixed it): To set the stage:  - We launched RB2B (our Person-Level Identity tool) on March 1 - My plan was to give away the leads and push to Slack for free - Then get people to pay $495 for integrations - But people could parse the Slack block with Zapier - And do whatever they want w/ the leads without paying - There was too much value in the free plan, not enough in paid - Nobody was converting So a month ago we realized that despite having INCREDIBLE top-of-funnel and mostly positive feedback, with our current pricing, we didn’t have a business. 1. People could easily “steal” the paid plan 2. $495 was too high for small biz, pricing was broken 3. Mid-market needed a filter and Hubspot or SF integration to pay 4. Pricing was fundamentally broken My original plan was instead of pulling value back from the free plan - which has had viral expansion - we would add value to paid, and eventually get people to give us $495. Also I really liked the idea of giving the leads away and charging for a workflow, because selling leads and intent data as a SaaS is a high-churn category. The more people we spoke to the more we realized that wasn’t the best plan. Peoples’ willingness to pay was HIGH *before* they got a taste of the free plan. Once they saw the insane value of free, willingness went to zero. (We have an added internal issue where we are still creating our fixed-price data asset and at the moment we’re paying a high per-unit cost for data for the free users… Many of whom we believe may not be looking at the data regularly) How did we solve these problems? 1. In mid-may, we created a “free trial” for pro, which would run out mid-June 2. People could continue with the free plan, but had to log in and click “free” 3. The free plan did not include killer features like the HubSpot integration, Hot Pages, ICP filter This broke our internet and ruined Robb Clarke’s weekend. Here are some stats: 1. Support requests for the week shot up from 1,571 to 2,319 2. “Script Churn” went from 7.6% to 52.4% 3. We were hurled hundreds insults over chat, email, and in LinkedIn comments BUT… We did manage to stop buying records for users that signed up, installed the script, and WEREN’T actively looking at them. If you really cared about our data, you either figured out how to get it back on, or you talked to us. And many people decided they actually wanted the paid features when the trial ran out. TAKEAWAY Startups are hard. Epic fails are unavoidable, especially this early in the journey. I hate the brand damage that comes from making a sudden change like this. But the reality is that we don’t really have the time to roll things out properly. And I’ve found that if your product is great, when you’re a young startup, most are forgiving. Thank you for your patience! 🙏

If you have to give away a $200 tote bag or $60 bottle of tequila to generate leads, your business is fundamentally broken. Here's why TOP-OF-FUNNEL "gifting" doesn't work: I recently saw a SaaS business offering $200 tote bag or an Amazon gift card on Linkedin, just to get prospects on a sales call. This is such a bad idea on so many levels! It screams that your business model is broken. Desperate marketing tactics do not work in B2B. Giving somebody $200 gift card in exchange for a meeting is not real marketing. That’s not a real lead. This does not count as leadgen Leadgen is a process of finding people that have a problem that you solve or has demonstrated interest in your solution How does somebody’s interest in Tote bag qualify them for MQL? If you have a ton of VC money to burn and senseless MQL targets to meet... Then please give away Tote bags all day, feel free to send some my way. But, if not... Please stop cheating yourself. You are better than that. If you can only find leads via gifting then it may be time to face the hard truth. Perhaps something more fundamental is broken in your business. This practice isn't much different that TimeShare developers loading Las Vegas tourists onto buses to listen to pitches about fractional vacation homes in exchange for free tickets to Cirque du Soleil. Most don’t buy. Those Time Share developers have no reputation to protect but B2B companies do. In B2B, trust and credibility plays a big role in purchase decision. Prospects should be drawn to your product or service because it genuinely solves their problems, not because of a freebie. Instead of quick fixes, focus on these core areas: 1. Understand Your Audience: Deep dive into your target market’s pain points and needs. Make sure your product is solving a real and differentiated problem in a way that others aren’t 2. Offer Genuine Value: Provide insights and case studies that demonstrate your expertise and the real benefits of your offering. Offer value to your audience in every interaction. 3. Build Relationships: Relationships are built on trust and thought leadership content, not on gimmicks and short-term incentives. It’s time to wake up and fix what’s really broken Instead of resorting to desperate measures Let’s commit to authentic, value-based marketing that builds lasting business relationships Your Tote bags will be forgotten. Your transparency and authenticity will not. *post edited for clarity

Congrats to our friends at Clay on their Series B funding! Nothing is more fun than seeing the workflows that the Clay community creates and shares on LinkedIn about how they use RB2B Clay [insert other SaaS tools]. We’re excited to continue growing this partnership to support world-class Go-To-Market teams with Inbound-Led Outbound using RB2B Clay! CONGRATS CLAY TEAM!

THIS IS HOW YOU AI. 🤖

It's beautiful 🥹