Adam Robinson [00:00:00]:
1234. Exit. Exit, exit.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:15]:
Yeah, man. Thanks for being on. I'm glad we met a couple weeks ago for real life in Brooklyn.
Adam Robinson [00:00:23]:
Who knows where that was? It was, like, in another time, in another place.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:29]:
I sat in the front row for your presentation, and you shouted me out, which is pretty cool.
Adam Robinson [00:00:33]:
Yeah. I had to get you off your phone, though. I was like, you're, like, texting somebody. I'm like. I'm like, Dave, look at the slide.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:43]:
They were texting me. They said, you got to come to the back. You're next. And I was like, no, I want to sit up here for a minute. So, you've basically found this power alley with LinkedIn, and I it's been a big growth lever for you, for your business, and I want to unpack some of that today. But actually, I want to start with something that I saw you write. Maybe yesterday or this morning, maybe this today. Are you doing your first live event this afternoon?
Adam Robinson [00:01:13]:
First live event. Thank Chris Walker for that one.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:16]:
Can you share that story? Share what he does, why you think it's a good idea, what you're doing and where it fits?
Adam Robinson [00:01:21]:
Yeah. So, I think Chris believes a lot of the things that I believe about this founder brand stuff. He feels that being super authentic and uncopyable is, like, kind of a north star of his, which is why he used video. He was like, I was writing these text posts, and then I'd see people sort of rework the text posts, and he's like, you know, what if I'm filming myself from two different directions? Like, literally, you can't copy that. Right. So, it's just better than the. Whatever.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:49]:
Seems like he only posts videos now.
Adam Robinson [00:01:50]:
Yep. So, the motion that he has, which is kind of answering this question, also. So, anyway, I was kind of gloating to him and Andy Muborn about how I was so amazed. Like, I sort of had this idea for what RB two B's motion would be, and it was just wrong for, like, a weird, nuanced reason. Like, my plan was to, like, give leads away for free.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:12]:
Wait, can you explain, since you're going to talk about. Can you explain RB two B for people? Because they'll be like, RB two b. Yeah, exactly.
Adam Robinson [00:02:18]:
Sorry.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:19]:
That's one of the products that you built, right?
Adam Robinson [00:02:21]:
Someone hits your site, they leave. They don't do anything else. We can resolve it to a LinkedIn profile and push it to slack, and it's free. Like, we're doing a big freemium offer. Like, we were just talking about mailchimp earlier. So my like, churn is like the biggest enemy in these SaaS companies. My current company has always been high churn. I thought that we had solved it 18 months ago by honing in on an ICPD.
Adam Robinson [00:02:45]:
It turns out it only solved it by like 20%. It's still ridiculously high churn. I'm sure you've worked at some companies that are that way. Also. The problem is, unbeknownst to me, which I just learned from talking to a bunch of investors and just the experience of the last 18 months, there are high churn product categories that no matter what you do, they're going to remain high churn. You can bolt on other products and try to get bundles or whatever, but like, at its core, if it is not a system of record or completely indispensable and there's people that can come in and turn it off. People are going to come in and turn it off.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:19]:
Yeah. So for context, your main business is a company called retention.com, which is 22 million ARR. Probably more than that. Now, you started another product which is called RB two B. That's the freemium offer. And you are a serial entrepreneur, founder, and used to really only write about e commerce. And now you kind of shifted to focus on B two B. And that's why we're connected and that's why you're on this podcast.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:45]:
It's interesting you said that about the category. So you're trying to get out of that category, or are you saying like.
Adam Robinson [00:03:49]:
You just so what I was so let's say a CRM is the lowest churn thing there is. The other side of that would be selling someone leads and trying to make it a saasden. Theres nothing higher churn than someones ability to interpret whether or not leads are worth the amount of SaaS theyre paying for and then either canceling it or not. Right. So in an effort to try to make what is an intrinsically super high churn business low churn, my idea was give the leads away for free and just charge for a really sophisticated integration, which is like a workflow, which a workflow is somewhere in the middle. Its substantially less churn. Anyway, the fundamental problem was, which I didn't know about, is when you push something into slack with no code, you can parse that slack block in Zapier for a quarter of a cent per record and throw it anywhere you want. So there's this huge problem of a massive amount of value in the free tier.
Adam Robinson [00:04:44]:
And no matter what I even propose to people, there was this weird willingness to pay. Before that, they signed up, and then they were so enamored by the free version that I couldn't even have a paid conversation with them after that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:57]:
The free product was too good.
Adam Robinson [00:04:59]:
Yeah, there was just, but interestingly, I was having this conversation in real time with LinkedIn, and people were giving me the vocabulary to articulate and understand this. And so I was talking to Andy and Chris, I'm like, dude, so now what we think the move is, is accept the fact that it's a high churn business segment. People on the way in that we think are high value, basically cap leads. So we are selling leads at Saasden, but, you know, have a quick two touch sales motion for people that we are 99% certain we'll book a demo in four weeks and get them on a paid plan. So that's gonna be high churn, but, like, that's gonna be a super fast ramp just based on businesses I built in the past with the top of funnel we have. It's gonna be great. LinkedIn literally got me there, which I was just so, like, LinkedIn got me all of the trialers. It got me like thousands of waitlist customers.
Adam Robinson [00:05:49]:
It got me like hundreds of discovery calls. And I'm telling Andy Muborn, who's another LinkedIn guy, and Chris, I'm like, I'm just amazed by, like, my favorite book for starting startups is four steps to the epiphany. And the basic idea of four steps to the epiphany is most people want to just build their product and they want to launch it, and then they want to go sell the idea. With four steps to the epiphany is tech is so hard, and your intuition is often so bad with what you think will work, that if you are not validating and possibly even collecting money from people as you're building the tech, odds are by the time you get to where the tech's done and you try to launch it, you're not going to have any buyers. So it's a dramatically risk reducing experience if you have one person building and one person actually forming the customers along the way. This was that times 1000. I just could not believe with this. So, like, with the founder brand content that I was creating and how I was articulating these problems that are experienced by revenue leaders in this market and the authority that was building the respect for me and us and what we were doing and how transparent I was being about my own SaaS and my own problems.
Adam Robinson [00:06:57]:
We could get anybody on the phone. It was unbelievable. Had thousands of people on the waitlist before we started. And then as we launched, I'm making posts about. I literally was thinking people would see the slack block be like, oh, all I got to do is pay $4.95 to push these to outreach or whatever. Done. Not one person did that. Not even a single person out of.
Adam Robinson [00:07:19]:
We've had 6000 signups did what I thought that everyone was going to do. I'm blogging about this in real time, and hundreds of people would write back with their suggestions about what I should do. And I was just like, how incredible is this? A couple of people commented in the comments. They're like, this is the best execution of marketing and product I've ever seen in my life. Also, you're getting real time feedback. And then there's these founders who are like, I don't understand how you can write that because you're just admitting that what you're doing is not working at all. So anyway, I was gloating about this to Chris and Andy Muborn. And Chris is like, dude, LinkedIn feedback loop is unbelievable.
Adam Robinson [00:07:59]:
It's so short, it's so fast. But the best feedback for me is this weekly event that I do. It gets 50 to 200 people every week. I put it on my podcast afterwards. He's like, it's so good for getting the temperature of the market, what people are really struggling with. He's like, I test out my market messaging with this group of people every week. And like, you know, it helps me refine that since like, so much for him is just, this is all his top of the funnel, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:28]:
And when he talks about that or how do you see, is it the 50 to 200 people that go to. He's had me as a guest on them. They're great. But do you think it's like I'm trying to give practical advice for other people? Is it the comments in the chat? Like he might share something, and then people are in the chat saying, yes, oh, I've been stuck on this. Is it that? Is it that where that feedback loop kicks in? You think so?
Adam Robinson [00:08:48]:
He's like, I do a ten to 30 minutes monologue typically, or he'll have somebody on like, you. I watched that episode, by the way, it was really good. And he's like, afterwards I just open it up for questions. And the real value is in people just whatever they're asking about. And then, by the way, that turns. Every single one of his LinkedIn posts is either a question that someone asked him during one of these interviews or he does guest slots on other podcasts, gets it recorded, and then he has a team slicing short form up by idea and he writes his text post. So it's doing so much for him. He's so much more efficient than I am.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:23]:
So what's the topic of your live event and what audience is this for?
Adam Robinson [00:09:28]:
Yeah, so like I'm trying to like talk about inbound led outbound as like this thing that I'm experimenting with in terms of a go to market motion. And the story is kind of like 18 months ago I had two BDrs and it was sort of working. And then I hired ten and then the ten bdrs were booking the same amount of demos as the two bdrs. I think that happened to a lot of people last year. Then we shrunk the staff again and it started working. It's like there's a lot of reasons why outbound is getting harder. And really what you need to scale is the demand creation and not necessarily the demand capture, which is what these bdRs, I think, are relegated to now. So I'm describing that entire way of doing things as inbound led outbound.
Adam Robinson [00:10:16]:
And like, what does it mean for me? It's like, well, LinkedIn is perfect because I'm selling into people. It's the magic alignment between me being my ICP and my ICP living on LinkedIn. And it's an incredible awareness generator for me and for us. Then the other thing that I'm doing is I was on nine podcasts last week. I'm trying to be on every single guest slot that I possibly can because I dont know what kind of listenership you have. Im sure its great, but the people who are listening to this are fanatical. Theyre so devoted and its like I get elevated in their mind just because im talking to you. Its like, even if 50 people listen to one of these nine podcasts that I did last year for an hour, its totally worth it because thats also creating the initial demand that might bring somebody back to our website, which then we can sort of use our own tech to identify them and try to bring them back again and whatever.
Adam Robinson [00:11:18]:
That's the idea.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:19]:
All right. And so this is a live event and you're gonna is this for RB? The live event is for RB. Two B.
Adam Robinson [00:11:26]:
Exactly. It's for.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:27]:
Okay.
Adam Robinson [00:11:28]:
And I think it's the camps that I've found are interested in this tech. It's like demand generation marketers, founders who are effectively doing that job for themselves, trying to solve the outbound problem and then legion agencies, that's like the three main pockets of people that when I'm like, this is what I do, they're like, I'm ready to drop everything and try it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:48]:
I think it'll be two and a half years ago since I wrote that book. And I think LinkedIn has become even bigger. And I think especially if you're a founder in b two B, it is the channel. And I think you're a perfect example of that. You have close to 80,000 followers, but it's not even the followers. It's like if you look at the post, the level of engagement and the comments you get on your post, that is the advantage. And then you'll have this feedback loop that you're going to create, like. And so you're going to go do this event, right? And this is what I talk about all the time, is how we, we've turned, basically turned my LinkedIn following into a business with exit five.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:27]:
That was the whole strategy. But you write on LinkedIn, you get feedback. Now you have ideas for other things. Oh, this topic would be great to do an event about, or this would be a podcast episode. Man, that podcast episode we did with Adam on X, Y and Z topic was really popular. Oh, we're doing an event in three months. Like, who should we have speak at that event? It's going to be Adam. And so I'm not, like, trained up in marketing as demandgen or ABM or even product marketing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:50]:
I'm good at two things. I'm good at copywriting and storytelling, and I'm good at content and social media and building an audience. And that's basically, I don't really have any frameworks and playbooks. I know how to write online, get and hold attention. I know how to use the feedback loop. I know how to basically take ideas and be, like, a tastemaker for which content we should go and create. And I like talking to people like you because I think this is a skill that I'm not able to articulate for, like, a secret ingredient that you can use to be good at marketing. And we've talked about it a little bit on this podcast, but I like to do, like, specific episodes on.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:25]:
On LinkedIn because I think still, people are sleeping on it. Devin Reed, who's a friend of mine, he runs content at Clary. He wrote a post the other day about how, like, a year ago, the CEO at Clary didn't do anything on LinkedIn, and now he's been writing on LinkedIn, and they've grown like 12 million impressions, some absurd number in revenue and pipeline. And I just commented on that and I was like, damn. Imagine if your CEO didn't have time to play around on LinkedIn, because there is this narrative out there. Sometimes it's like, well, the founder CEO doesn't have time. Or like, I love my other favorite narrative. Like, there's so many people out there who are doing good work that are not showing up on LinkedIn.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:01]:
Like, I'm sure there are, but there's an advantage if you can write. And I think what you've done is you have taken this. Like, I'm going to stand out by being transparent. I'm not going to give two f's about what people say or think about me. I'm going to share my journey. I'm going to try a bunch of stuff. I'm going to be transparent, and I'm going to use that. And it's worked perfectly to help you grow the business now.
Adam Robinson [00:14:22]:
Yes. And by the way, I'm the CEO of two startups, right? Like, one of them has 60 people and the other one has five and is eight weeks old, which in many ways is even more challenging, you know? So I really do believe, and look, I'm trying to get more efficient at it. I'm trying to get more out of what we're doing, all that stuff. But like you said, if you're in b, two b, and you can actually figure this out, there just can't be a better channel than it, right? Like, I see what it's doing for, it's incredible what it's doing. And this is like, it gets into, like, it's like, well, what's incredible about it? It's like I can now walk into an event like golden hour, and I just stand there and I'm sure this happens to you, too. I just stand there and groups of two people will come up and be like, man, love your stuff. Like, so awesome. Like, you know, sort of like, whatever the current, it's like that post last week.
Adam Robinson [00:15:13]:
Oh, my God. Like, I had just put out this monthly update where I was like, we're down four months in a row, and we just were down 2.3%. I don't know when this is going to end. It's terrible. This is like the worst thing I've ever written, but it sucks. Whatever. And people are just like, wow, dude, like, how'd you write that?
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:28]:
So brave of you.
Adam Robinson [00:15:29]:
Yeah, exactly. But like, they don't even say their names when they come up and say hi, right? Like, they feel like I am their friend and that may sound shallow and narcissistic as a desire to create or whatever, but like, that to me is the power of this thing. It's like I am scaling in this universe, the group of people that literally feels like they are friends with me as I'm rolling this other thing out. And all of this stuff you said about my content, basically, I'd never done it until I read your book and decided that it was time. And it's like, well, what it's like with any marketing, it's like, well, how am I going to stand out? Because otherwise I'm just, no one's going to care about any of this stuff. And that was what I decided I could do. Right, Preston?
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:18]:
Its unbelievable. I mean, ive felt this from a business standpoint since 2016 of working at drift where people reacted that way. And that was the eye opening thing for me. We used to joke about, we had this podcast called Seeking Wisdom and we used to joke about it. David whos the CEO and founder, I was kind of like the young, up and coming person. He was a seasoned entrepreneur. We had two different tales that we were telling. I would play host to get the good stories out of him, but we would get people come up to us and be like, I love the podcast, or, can I take a picture? And we'd be like, wait, what? This is crazy.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:51]:
And it creates such a, you create this audience of like super fans and people who actually know you. And some of them will buy your product, most of them don't. And that's actually totally fine because they will spread your message and evangelize your thing. And I'm feeling that again with exit five now. And what's crazy is that golden hour event that I saw you at, I hadn't traveled for work in like four or five years, and I had to, like, take a nap for like six days after that because like, I, and I almost quit this business twice. I just was like, I don't want to build in this space. I want to go write poetry in the mountains or something, you know? And I left that event with so much energy because it just was like a slap in the face, like so many people, and I say this with no ego at all, just like, I went in there and so many people were like, Dave, DG, what's up? Can we hang out? Take a picture? I talked to, hey, that thing that you wrote, and I was like, wait, this many people? Like, it just, I hadn't felt that in person in so long I was like, this many people know who I am and what I'm doing because I write on LinkedIn. That is crazy.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:50]:
And so it would be silly of me to not build something in this space, and it does create the advantage. However, you're really good at this, and I think that there is a lot of advice from, like, kind of online digital writing, that whole digital writing crew who loves to tell you, just write online and the future will unlock for you. Like, not really, because anyone can write online. Like, you have to have something to say. And you're a good example of that. You're sharing transparently. Like, can you maybe talk about what your content strategy is? Let's get into the nitty gritty of, like, what did you start writing about? How do you write? And I want to know everything from, like, do you post? Do you comment? You talk to some of it in that talk, but I want to, like, on. People love that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:32]:
Like, do you schedule posts? How do you comment? How do you come up with topics? You've done some crazy stuff, like doing a documentary. I want to. Let's start at the beginning and talk about first, how did you decide what to write about and what level of transparent to be?
Adam Robinson [00:18:45]:
Jeff? Yeah, so, like, I was willing to be very transparent about what was going on in my business, in my financials, because I felt like I was bootstrapped. It was kind of remarkable. At the time I started writing, we were 12 million AR and had six people. So I had noticed that just saying that and saying nothing else, people were like, holy crap.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:06]:
Yeah. Hey, look, I'm not a big math guy, but that's $2 million per employee. That's a good benchmark, right?
Adam Robinson [00:19:12]:
Yeah. So, like. But that kind of got me thinking. It's like, okay. And one of my friends was like, well, it's just because everyone else makes less money and has more employees, you know? So, like. But then we hired a bunch of people. Now it's 22 million, whatever, and it's nothing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:26]:
Do you think you had the confidence to share those things because you are bootstrap? Like, it is your business? There's no. I do feel like in the venture back world, there's so much, like, we don't want anybody to know what our actual revenue is because that's how you show the cards to VC's for future rounds. And is there something in there?
Adam Robinson [00:19:44]:
I think absolutely. A lot of what I do, I mean, I didn't want this to be about six cents at all, but, like, I don't think a venture back company could have done that. Back to them. It's got to be some wild man that doesn't care. Maybe they could have. Maybe somebody would have. I don't know. So here's what I think.
Adam Robinson [00:20:00]:
I think so long as everything is great, you have a lot of rope to hang yourself with. If you're venture backed or private equity backed. The second something goes wrong, it's very true. Yeah. The second, it's not absolutely perfect. And it is like one inch away from what you promised them. I don't even care if they don't have control of your company. From what I understand, it starts being this enormous psychological pressure from someone that believes they understand your business because they are rich and probably got that way some completely different way than your business.
Adam Robinson [00:20:35]:
They make you feel bad about everything you're doing. So I think it would very quickly, whether or not it was an explicit directive to stop being so transparent, I think they would belittle you into stopping this. Like, last month would have been a great example. It's like if I would have gone to some investors and been like, I'm about to put out a very long post about how we've been down four months in a row and we're down 2.3% this much. Like, what is the possible upside that you're going to get from that? Right? Like, why in a million years would you put that out for everyone? And by the way, it was terrible to put out, but, like, the only reason I put it out was because I'm committed to doing it at this point. And I know I've just been told by so many founders, I love that you keep it real. Everyone is hurting right now in sass. No one else is saying that they are right? Like, yeah, there's not single other brand that is just like, I am getting my teeth kicked in at this moment.
Adam Robinson [00:21:27]:
And here is literally the path that, like, here's how bad it is.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:32]:
It's why, like, memes and jokes and it's almost like, you know, the best comedians are the ones who just say the most, like, relatable stories from daily life. You know, so I'm pumping my gas and you're like, yes. And that's what makes it funny. It's like, that's what's relatable. It's like, wow, this guy is the CEO of a $20 million SaaS company, and he's talking about how he's having a really hard time right now. Like, shoot, nobody's doing that. And we don't even have to argue the pros and cons of bootstrapping and venture capital. I'm just talking about from like a attention standpoint.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:04]:
If you're going to play the game on LinkedIn, you're most likely not going to be able to say anything in the other camp. Here you are kind of exposing everything that you're doing. It's a way to help people separate the signal from the noise.
Adam Robinson [00:22:14]:
Right? Totally. Number one, you just have to be different. I think when you're thinking about what your content strategy is going to be, like, you can't copy me because I've already done it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:24]:
And actually, so a lot of people that are listening will work at venture back companies, and so we're not railing on that. I just think what the lesson that I would take from this is, oh, if that's you, and you're not willing to share transparent stuff about metrics and financials, then you can't just come with vanilla content. What's your angle going to be? Is that how you would think about that?
Adam Robinson [00:22:44]:
Exactly.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:45]:
Okay.
Adam Robinson [00:22:45]:
Like what separates you from the sea of everybody else's content out there? Because if you really want this to work, it has to break through in some way. You have to offer something that nobody else is. And that's, I think, the difference between okay and great, by the way. Okay is fine for a lot of things. You can be okay at this game, and it can serve the purpose of when you're trying to hire someone, somebody does research on you, they look at this, they can see what you care about, what it's like working at your shop or whatever. That's still enormously valuable. It's just not going to be this gigantic electromagnet pulling people in from your target audience. Right? This any marketing, by the way, it's not just LinkedIn.
Adam Robinson [00:23:30]:
It's like if you are not different, it's not going to work. It's just not okay.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:35]:
So lesson number one, be, be different. Have something to say.
Adam Robinson [00:23:39]:
Exactly.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:40]:
Now, let's talk about how do you turn those crazy founder thoughts about being different into actual writing. This is where I hear from a lot of founders or people that work with founders. This is where things break down. Like, you got all the thoughts, but how do I actually turn them into writing?
Adam Robinson [00:23:54]:
So I can send you my golden hour slides, which I think are insightful to just flip through in general, which tells this whole journey. But long story short, for me to hit what Devin Reed calls content market fit, it took twelve months. And my starting point, which I would actually recommend, is I worked with a ghostwriter, and I think the advantage of working with a ghostwriter is if you were a marketer and you were to go to your CEO and be like, you need to post on LinkedIn, you would get two types of objections. One is I don't want to be famous, which I would call bullshit on because you're not actually going to be famous. And there is nothing more effective for the growth of every part of your business than you being famous in this small world. Then the second set of objections are things along the lines of, I don't have time to do this. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't want to get on that treadmill.
Adam Robinson [00:24:45]:
I don't, I don't. Right? So the ghostwriter knocks out all of the second type of objections, and it doesn't require a lot from the CEO. If you are good at articulating what your perspective can be and how you can actually be different, you can actually look, there's some structural things about LinkedIn that are different from others to other social media platforms.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:09]:
Can you talk about how you worked with this ghostwriter specifically?
Adam Robinson [00:25:12]:
So, yeah, in the beginning, which is the path that I recommend taking, it was like, maybe like an hour or two of idea generation type conversations and, like, coming up with a content calendar to post every day divided into certain topics. Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:30]:
Were they, like, interviewing you? How were those, how were they getting content from you?
Adam Robinson [00:25:34]:
More or less? It was like a two way conversation of, like, okay, so, like, last week, we kind of talked about this stuff. Like, what do you think about this, this or this? Half of it was work in public. So it was me coming. Like, we're experimenting with this stuff. We're hiring a bunch of people, like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, what do you think about this, this and this?
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:52]:
And would you meet with this person every, like, once a week at least?
Adam Robinson [00:25:56]:
Maybe so, like, already?
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:57]:
That's just a great. And I'm repeating this back because I think even if you don't hire a ghostwriter, marketers that, listen, this, you could do this in house with your founder, with founder Key exec or whatever. Like, we got a 30 minutes meeting on the calendar. I've done this in the past with founders, but what I think is great is you kind of already had this theme, which is like, you weren't like, let's think of quotes that I like and inspirational sayings. You're like, no, basically I'm just going to. This is almost like a live blog of us building this company and then the content there becomes easier than trying to think of something witty to say. Right?
Adam Robinson [00:26:29]:
Yeah. So I heard another example that I just think is so helpful. I was just like, yes. So I was talking to the CEO of this company called Aligned. They're like a sales, I don't know exactly what some kind of PLG sales tech. And hes actually had a couple posts do really well and hes been every part of the sales.org adventure backed startups before. So ive realized that work in public for me is talking about when I was VP sales at my last company and all of the weird pain that I was experiencing then. And hes like, this is venture backed.
Adam Robinson [00:27:10]:
Im not going to do what youre doing, but I can do something very similar to what you're doing. But just talking about my last life because the problems are basically the same now, right? Like a VP sales struggles with VP sales issues. And by the way, that's who they're selling to. So that's like an interesting idea. If your first response is, well, I just can't work in public because my investors won't let me. It's like, well, is there some tie to your target market and ideal customer profile that relates to past experience that you can work in public as of five years ago?
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:45]:
Yeah, I mean, that was like the whole thing that I wrote about in the book, which is like just inherently, as a founder of this company, you most likely didn't just start this company because you're like sitting at a bar and you're like, ooh, I have a plan to get rich. Let's start a niche. B two b technology startup. It's like usually you have some background. Like I always use the example of Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom. He was some lead engineer or something at Webex. Right? I like, they helped create Webex. And so it was a natural extension to go and create Zoom.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:14]:
And so most cases, like in the drift example, David, our CEO, he had started three or four other martech companies and drift was his fifth. And so it's like, let's talk about all of the lessons you've learned building these types of companies and you don't have to share financials or metrics to do that.
Adam Robinson [00:28:33]:
Right, totally. But it's what you said in the very beginning, it's teasing out that perspective that is unique, right. That's super unique to Dave. Cancel the fact that he like was basically the architect of HubSpot and was on that whole journey. And you know, I mean, I would read every single word that guy wrote because I want to be him someday. I mean, that's just the reality of it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:56]:
And also the ghostwriter. And it's interesting to hear you say, like, start with a ghostwriter. I haven't had that epiphany, but I can understand now, and I agree with it. It's almost like you've never worked out. You hire a personal trainer to teach you what exercises to do, and then eventually you can go and do it. You're like, actually, I don't need this person anymore. I got the stuff in my house. I can do this myself.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:15]:
Right?
Adam Robinson [00:29:15]:
Yeah, because there's certain, I mean, look, whenever I say this, people are like, send me the templates. But there's certain templates that when you're learning LinkedIn, if you adhere to those templates versus just rambling, it's going to do way better in the template. If you study people's hooks, like, there's a type of hook that typically does quite well on LinkedIn, right. So like a ghost writer should understand some of that. So you can like work with them for a few months and then I think, see if you get the content bug. Right. Like the way you're going to absolutely crush is if you make this your life. That's just the same with anything.
Adam Robinson [00:29:49]:
There's no shortcut. That's just the sad reality of, here's a good hook.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:54]:
Two weeks ago, Scott, you wrote this hook two days ago. Two weeks ago, Scott lease told me, outbound sales as we know it is dead. Here's why Scott thinks he's only got three to four years left as a sales consultant and what the future of b two b sales looks like.
Adam Robinson [00:30:07]:
Yeah, nice cliffhanger too, with the future. Yeah, LinkedIn loves like, definitive stuff like the golden age of sass is over. 99% of startups think they should. Whatever, they're wrong.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:22]:
The amount of times ive said, heres my favorite marketing tactic, and its like 100 things in that list.
Adam Robinson [00:30:29]:
Yeah, look, I didnt start actually writing my own stuff until nine months in, and it was really hard. Thats another reason why I think dealing with a ghostwriter is an okay idea in the beginning. If the CEO is like, no, im not going to do it, its like, well, if youre in the b two B space and hes saying, no, propose, are you willing to work with a ghostwriter for three months and spend 1 hour a week with them to just see if you can start seeing the benefit of this? Because a lot of people that do, I hear people say, I don't know exactly what this is doing for me, but it's doing something and I like it. And that's the start of getting the bug to where I mean, now it's so crazy for me that I'm just like, man, how do I go even deeper into this? I'm already as deep as I can get, and it's like I'm just looking for like another layer to pull back. Cause I'm like, I've never seen a tool as powerful as this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:21]:
Do you think you were successful though? Like, obviously you have good content, you have a way of writing. You mentioned this earlier, which I don't wanna, like, sleep on for people. It basically took you twelve months to figure out what to do. Should people just accept, like, did you have a reason why? Like, did you know, like, hey, I think this can be a lever for our business. I'm just going to do it and I'm going to shut up and not care about it for twelve months. Like, how do you get people to swallow that pill that this is going to take time? Because I do feel like, like anything, if you do something for three to four months and it's not working, you just want to stop doing it.
Adam Robinson [00:31:54]:
Yeah. So, like, providing some context on my journey is helpful to answer this question. So in the beginning, after reading your book and talking to some other people, I was like, okay, I have an awareness problem in the shopify market that I'm trying to sell into. We have very low penetration and no competition. What is the quickest way to spread awareness? It has to be building a personal social media profile these days rather than a business. Right? And then it was like, okay, what platform? And the actual founders were kind of more on Twitter. But Twitter's so much more competitive as a platform in terms of the balance of content creators versus consumers than LinkedIn. Theres a deficit of content creation relative to the active users on LinkedIn.
Adam Robinson [00:32:40]:
And so what I bought into was like, all right, so the founders may not be on here, the ecosystem definitely is. And ill do Twitter eventually, but ill start with the initial audience, maybe try to get like ten or 20,000 followers on LinkedIn and then go try to slay the Twitter beast, which will be much harder. So thats why I started on LinkedIn. It wasn't like it wasn't working. It just wasn't doing what it is now, which is perfect content audience fit, or whatever it's called. Content market fit, the Devon Retarm. So it was doing some of this stuff that I was talking about. The thing that it never did was reliably source real business, meaning it wasn't booking us sales demos in the Ecom world.
Adam Robinson [00:33:24]:
But I think that's because the Ecom founders were not living on LinkedIn. Whereas now it's like there's a linear connection between the amount of impressions we get in a week and the amount of signups for RB two B that we have. It's like a very easy thing to see and say that that's entirely responsible for that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:42]:
But it's interesting because it's like the way to grow impressions is to not actively promote your product.
Adam Robinson [00:33:50]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:51]:
Like for example, if you look at all of your posts from the last couple of weeks, right, the one with the least engagement. Do you know what your post the least engagement is? If you had to guess, I think.
Adam Robinson [00:34:00]:
It'S probably when I put out yesterday on the event, trying to promote my event.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:04]:
Exactly.
Adam Robinson [00:34:05]:
They were promoting it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:06]:
Right? Right. Now, however, there is a weird, I do notice a weird thing. Like if I promote the exit five newsletter, I might get like six comments on that post, which is not very many comments or post mine. But if I go look in like my HubSpot analytics, I'll see 200 new email subscribers that day. And so I feel like people are seeing it and it's like a prompt for them to go do it. Now, if I only posted that, though, it wouldn't be able to drive any results. So I don't have any doubt that you drove hundreds of signups from that post. But my point is, like, it's hard for people to think about in the marketing strategy of the business when you have goals and stuff because they want, like, we want more.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:42]:
It's like, okay, well, if we grow impressions from Adam's account, we're going to grow more signups. So how do we get more people to sign up for the product? Well, let's talk about the product more. It's actually a no. You have to do the more top of the funnel things that just lead to overall more awareness for Adam, more awareness for r to b two b be is eventually going to drive more people back to our website. And it's just not very like linear step by step. Right?
Adam Robinson [00:35:04]:
And all impressions are not created the same either. Like, I can write about certain things that will get far more impressions, far more likes, but the people who are commenting are of a lower direct connection to people who would be high value prospects for our company than if I write about another subject, for example, something like that. SCoTT Lease Post, that's going to get a lot of AE's and sales leaders commenting they're the ultimate users of this tech, but they're not the discoverers and the buyers. Some marketing title typically is. Does that make sense? Salespeople are not looking for RB two B. If anything, they're like, I don't need another new tech that you think works because you're in some CMO community. Then they're saying it does and you're going to like jam it down my throat and give me goals on the back of it. I would rather just use my Apollo list, but salespeople are, I believe, the largest cumulative group of people that are actually doing their jobs on LinkedIn.
Adam Robinson [00:36:05]:
So it gets the highest engagement. And it's not like it's totally unrelated because it is B two B SaaS and it's good to have awareness in that universe. But if I write about ABM and the shortcomings of demand base, for instance, I will get much lower impressions, lower likes. But the quality of the people commenting as it pertains to future high value user of our business is night and day.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:30]:
Yeah. Are you going to get a demand based lawsuit also? You trying to get one from them?
Adam Robinson [00:36:34]:
No, I am friends with their CRO. Not yet. It's just so helpful when these people see, I knew you knew some of these people commenting. They're like, oh, this is whatever I'm like. It's like if you've ever started something from zero, you immediately recognize the opportunity of someone serving you a cease and desist who's like a dream competitor. Right? Like, I'm not even worthy of being competition to them. They didn't even send me a season assist for this reason. But then I can say back, it's because they're scared.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:05]:
You know what I mean?
Adam Robinson [00:37:06]:
Like, running this Damian Goliath. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:08]:
There's just little. I think that stuff is fun. Like, people get so mad about it. This is like, what's fun? We're all just playing a game here. There was one time at Saster, I had Jason on the podcast last week. I should have mentioned this, but I. They asked me to leave because I wasn't even doing anything. I wasn't even being a jerk.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:25]:
I was, like, filming it. We decided to not spend on a booth and not do anything. And I just did interviews. Like, I walked around the floor and I just did interviews and we had a camera crew and they didn't like that so much. And David like tweeted out, like, I just got a text from Dave Garrett. He's been kicked out of Saster and it's like people pick that up and it went mini viral. It's like you got to look for those opportunities and like I don't know if it's in the laws of power or the laws of startup marketing, but any opportunity to punch up like you never want to punch down. But if you can punch up and take every advantage that you can get, like if we saw a bigger company steal our messaging and we could screenshot that and show that they saw it, like you do this, you, you say oh so and so from so and so company signed up for our product.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:08]:
Like that stuff is great.
Adam Robinson [00:38:09]:
It's fine. Yeah totally. I mean you asked me about what it actually looks like now, right? So now I write everything and I'm trying to do videos for a lot of it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:22]:
So where do you write?
Adam Robinson [00:38:24]:
At this desk but sitting?
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:28]:
Do you schedule, do you like write in a Google Doc and then copy and paste it and schedule it into LinkedIn? What's that? What do you do?
Adam Robinson [00:38:34]:
I use a consultant who works with other b, two b founders named Alec Paul. He's very expensive and he's got a long waitlist. But feel free to email me and ill introduce you so you can join it if you want. So my Mondays are crushing. Its like all of my internal meetings. Its nonstop. I dont even get a lunch break. Its terrible.
Adam Robinson [00:38:52]:
One of those meetings is an idea generation meeting thats 1 hour with Alec and then theres a half hour meeting that is related to inbound that is occurring off of my profile. Does that make sense? It's like a deeply integrated sales motion at this point. Anybody that we want to talk to, we use my LinkedIn profile to talk to them. Yep. Before, during, or after they start using product. So Tuesdays I have now mostly achieved an empty schedule except for other podcasts and now my own event. So that I try to dedicate to writing the three or four posts that I'm going to write. Before I'd made this divide, it kind of was crushing because all of my days were stacked and I was like, man, it's Thursday night.
Adam Robinson [00:39:36]:
I haven't released three posts yet. When am I going to do it? But having this wide open Tuesday feels really good to me. I feel like it kind of needs space to write well or whatever. And then I have a 1 hour video shoot that is either video related to. It's just this. It's like me and Christy, our film girl. It's either talking heads related to the posts I wrote a or we're going to make another season of the docu series in the fall. So she's already, she's building content so that we can put out, you know, 510 episodes of, like, what launching RBW was.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:09]:
Do you use a scheduler?
Adam Robinson [00:40:11]:
So what? Alec, the purpose he serves is sort of channels the ideas, how he views properly, makes sure the hook is perfect because this is like one of the things that was bothering me about my ghost riders. Like, at the end of the day, you're a customer of an agency. So, like, getting great work out of most agencies is very hard. But Alec, his role is like, make sure the hook is perfect, make sure the post is perfectly edited, make sure the close is wonderful or whatever. And then he posts it. He actually does the posting. So I write in a Google Doc that is now 150 pages long. I just like, push the post down and then he goes.
Adam Robinson [00:40:47]:
Edits it, you know, puts it in links.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:49]:
So if you put. Yeah, sometimes I just write and I'm like, ah, the hook wasn't great, but whatever. But he, the reason you hire him and work with him is because basically that it ensures that every post is going to, no matter what you're writing about, there's going to be a proper format, a proper hook.
Adam Robinson [00:41:02]:
Yes. And he has a partner that does this. They do this sales motion together. Does that make sense? There's like a semi automated.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:12]:
Yeah, I got it.
Adam Robinson [00:41:13]:
Messaging thing in my inbox that they run.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:16]:
So basically you're searching for interesting ICP ish people that have commented or engaged on their posts, on your posts, and will trigger some type of, like, hey, thanks for the comment, by the way. Did you know that we can blah, blah, blah Dm, like, dm funnel flow? Yeah. Cool.
Adam Robinson [00:41:33]:
Yep.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:33]:
Do you have any idea how much revenue that's generated so far?
Adam Robinson [00:41:36]:
Well, I mean, the issue is we don't have the features built yet to monetize our b two b. Does that make sense?
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:45]:
Yeah, yeah.
Adam Robinson [00:41:46]:
It's at 28k mrr or something. So 300.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:50]:
Wait, so you're doing this play for the free product? So it's to get people to sign up.
Adam Robinson [00:41:53]:
Oh, cool. Exactly. Very soon it will be free for like 80% of the world. And like, you know, 20%. Yeah, probably half of them will try to, like, charge.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:02]:
So is, is your LinkedIn like a mess? Like, if you just log in right now, you just have like a 600 messages. Like, can you still use it personally?
Adam Robinson [00:42:09]:
Yeah, because they run a folder that's different than my personal folder. Does that make sense? They've got all of their activities in my other, and they keep my focus folder pretty clean.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:22]:
Do you have two folders in the LinkedIn inbox?
Adam Robinson [00:42:25]:
Yeah. You can have a different folder that they pull all of their activity into that doesn't exist.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:31]:
Yeah, you can create a new folder. Other.
Adam Robinson [00:42:34]:
I mean, maybe I just. Do you have other focused?
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:37]:
I have other that's like, okay, so.
Adam Robinson [00:42:39]:
They run their business out of the other and then my stuff is in focus. But, like, interesting. If I go into my connection requests, they only want to accept people. And we haven't even gone through and accepted the connection requests of the ICP visitors yet because it takes them a ton of time. But I've got like 8000 pending connection requests. Yeah, you know, but I'm having a great time with this, the thing I'm interested in, and I'm wondering if you ever felt this is, in talking to Scott Lease, who you read that hook from, he was like, you're super excited about this, but you've only been doing it for whatever, a year or something like that. He's like, I've been at it for ten years. He's like, I feel the weight of having to write these posts.
Adam Robinson [00:43:21]:
He's like, it's real.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:22]:
It's like, well, you don't have to. He doesn't have to do it. No one's telling. No one's making it.
Adam Robinson [00:43:26]:
He's like, it's the only thing that keeps my little consulting business going. He's like, there's no other source of.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:32]:
Yeah.
Adam Robinson [00:43:33]:
Awareness.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:33]:
I mean, that's the game then. Like, that he's playing. And I'm not even saying this in a negative way, like, if that's your funnel, like, there are definitely other ways to build. I think it's just like anything. I think it's a tactic. There are lots of other ways. It might be the most effective, and you might have to lay them all out. But, yeah, it's like anything, it's like if that becomes the golden goo, like, if you're so tied to that channel and that channel goes away, it could go away because, like, LinkedIn takes it away or you stop being interested in it.
Adam Robinson [00:43:58]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:59]:
And then you're like, then I got to find a new channel. And, you know, that is what it is. So for me, I was definitely in like a two year rut, maybe two, three years rut. So, like, when I was at drift, it was perfect because our ICP was marketers. They were all on LinkedIn. I could write about what we were doing. People liked our marketing and our brand. It worked really well.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:16]:
Then I went to privy. Privy was in the e commerce space. And so even though it was a SaaS company, like, that world was more on Twitter. And, like, I just. I kind of hit a plateau. And then, like, I just kind of talked about, like, what I was doing as a CMO. But, like, we only had six people on the team, and it was during COVID and they cut, like, a million dollars of the budget. And so, like, not that much interesting stuff was happening.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:36]:
It's. I didn't have much to write about then. I was, like, a solo consultant, solopreneur, and I started writing about that, but didn't really hit. When I committed to exit five, I went back all in on LinkedIn, and, like, I still had, like, a hundred thousand followers or whatever. But then my growth has, like, been back, because now I'm like, it's purposeful again. And so I think whether you're you or Scott or me or whoever, I think it's like, it will work if you see where it fits in the business. So one of the reasons yours is working so well right now is because you're fired up about the businesses you're working on. You see very clearly how, like, LinkedIn will work to grow that funnel.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:10]:
If you ended up selling, like, t shirts in six months from now, then that it might not be the best channel. But for me, like, I'm like, oh, yeah. Now I have this megaphone. I have 165,000 followers on LinkedIn, and I get to talk about exit five, and it is related to this audience, and so it does work. But I haven't had any luck with Twitter. Twitter. I might even just delete it. It's just like, be cesspool for me.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:29]:
I just tweet some random stuff sometimes, but LinkedIn is definitely where it's at.
Adam Robinson [00:45:33]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:33]:
So, all right, you got to go? I got to go. I'm doing a rare thing today. I'm recording three podcasts back to back to back.
Adam Robinson [00:45:39]:
Nice.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:40]:
And so I'm going to go talk to this woman, Jen Herman, who is great at Instagram for b two b. So we talked about LinkedIn with you. But anyway, go find Adam on LinkedIn. You'll see him stirring the pot over there on LinkedIn. He's Adam Robinson on LinkedIn. Follow his stuff. Connect with him. Check out his stuff.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:56]:
I think you've done a great job, and I've enjoyed getting to know you. I'm sure we'll hang out. Maybe I'll find a way to make a trip. To Austin, and there's a good crew down there. Okay.
Adam Robinson [00:46:03]:
I'll take you out on the boat.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:04]:
Okay? Sounds amazing. All right. Adam, good to see you, man. Good luck with your event later today. I'll see you.
Adam Robinson [00:46:09]:
Buddha exit.