Adam Kitchen:

Okay, we're live. Welcome to the very first episode of Creator Journeys, where we study the world's leading creators across social media to find out how they build, scale, and monetize their personal brands. Super excited and very appropriate to start on LinkedIn with someone who has completely taken over the platform in the last six to 12 months—Adam Robinson, he is the CEO of Retention.com and now RB2B. Welcome to the show, man. How are you?

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Adam Robinson:

Thank you for having me on. I'm happy to be here, and this is a topic that's very near and dear to my heart.

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Adam Kitchen:

Well, look, you're not someone who needs a lot of introduction on this platform. I'm sure everyone knows who you are, especially in the B2B space. Now, I want to go back around 12 months or so because I'm from the eCommerce space. I built my business on content marketing, and specifically, I have a Klaviyo agency. So, I've always been aware of you and Retention.com. But it wasn't until around, let's say, 12 months ago, when your face just started to appear everywhere.

And at the beginning, it was just more general posting, and then all of a sudden, it was like you exploded. I've now seen you write recently that around 75-80% of your week, correct me if I'm wrong, is spent on content ideation and execution. So, my question is: what were you doing before then to fill up your time? What convinced you to delegate those responsibilities out and really go all-in on this content game?

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Adam Robinson:

So, I'm gonna share this chart, which tells the story. Can you make that? Can you add that to the presentation? Okay, here we are. This is a graph of my LinkedIn followers since my first post in September of 2022. So, this is probably along the same sort of frequency that you started seeing me, I would guess. You know, like around a year, year and a half ago, I was getting okay at the game. And then Labor Day last year, there was an explosion, and the trajectory of the slope changed, and it’s never looked back. So, the question is, why?

And the very quick answer is... you know, I was... I was making— which may have been why... uh... I'm going to just... oh nope, I'm gonna stop sharing my screen. So, the question is why. With my previous business, which sold into e-commerce stores, big Shopify stores, all Klaviyo users, um, I had some really good product-market fit in that market, and I had not made a single social post before September 2022. And I read about founder brands, and I talked to some people with personal brands, and it was just clear that building up a personal social media profile was the best way to spread awareness in the world we live in today—or at least I thought so.

Building a brand page is not because people are on social media to connect with people, that's it, and they’re not there for any other reason. So, the question was like, okay, what platform? Because the Shopify guys were all on Twitter, and then LinkedIn had this weird thing where maybe it wasn't as spot on for the audience, but a lot of the ecosystem was on there. Like the agencies, the vendors—they’re all posting and stuff. And the creator versus consumer dynamic is so different on LinkedIn than Twitter. Twitter is freaking hard, right? LinkedIn—still, 2% of people that are active users create too, right? Like Twitter—that’s probably like 80%, right? Like, who logs into Twitter every day and doesn't tweet? You know? So, I mean, maybe there’s some people; it’s a very different dynamic.

So, um, the idea was like, start on LinkedIn, try to figure out how to build an audience, get 10, 20,000 followers, then go try to crack Twitter. So that was kind of happening along that September 2022 to September 2023 journey. Um, I had some deep internal conflicts about it because I just know what I'm good at now and what I am good at versus what I... what I'm good at. I understand so deeply why I am good at it. Do you know what I mean? It's like, dude, I've been in this game for like 12 years; like, I know how to get a startup going from zero, and I know exactly why I'm good at that. And I reflect on the decisions that I made when I wasn't skilled at that, and I look at other people playing the game at an early stage, and I'm like, you’re making the same decisions I made, but I have the skill to understand the game so much better that, like, I know that I'm going to crush them, right? Like, I just know it.

So, for someone that has that degree of confidence in what they're good at and is humble enough to say, like, I'm really not good at many things, but like, these things that I'm good at, I'm just an absolute killer at—to approach the world of social media with zero experience is very daunting. I'm like, I don't want to tweet against LeBron James of tweeting—that's not a good use of my time, right? I'd rather manage these companies and try to make them bigger. So, that to me was like a mammoth objection for me to go over. Like, you read Guard's book, and he's like, oh just, like, book some time in your calendar and, like, start tweeting. You know, just do it every day as if something would happen, and like, that would actually yield some productive fruit.

So, um, the way that I overcame this... it... it did. So, like, there's this concept that I think is very important with creating content if you're starting from zero, similar to a startup or any business, you have to find content-market fit, right? Another way of saying that is you have to find your voice. That does not happen quickly, right? The reason to start posting when you know it's not going to work—which I have not internalized until very recently—the reason to start is not about getting business, it is not about getting engagement, it is not about growing following, it is about finding your voice. Once you find your voice, all of that other stuff comes in a way that you could have never expected, but it just requires being blindfolded and throwing darts for a long [ __ ] time. Took me a year. I've heard people say it takes longer.

But yeah, I was conflicted about this whole first year of zero to 20,000 followers because I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing, which really bothered me, right? I didn't know why I was making, but I was just like, whatever, like, okay, I'll try writing about, like, you know, the spiritual aspects of business this week, or like, I'll try writing about hiring and firing this week, or like, I'll try to write about, like, you know, how I think about product this week. Like, now, no way, dude. I know exactly who is going to engage with a post of mine. I have, like, founders, marketers at series B and above startups, and salespeople in my universe. I know when I've written a post for salespeople; I even know how well it's going to do, kind of. Right? Not always, but like, I know when it’s a banger and I know when it's not, you know?

So, like before that, it’s like it just requires this faith, right? Like, you’re like, I’m gonna figure it out at some point, but like, I just don't know what I'm doing. It's a really uncomfortable world because, like, as entrepreneurs, you know, it's like we want certainty, you know what I mean? It's like we're in an uncertain world, so anything that can provide some certainty is like very comforting.

So, uh, so yeah, man. Um, so what happened in that aha moment—that's like what this was all build-up for. So, I was very conflicted before because I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing. I was trying to write content for eCommerce stores, and I was not an eCommerce store owner. I wasn't even executing like in an agency. You were at least executing on behalf of them, right? My product served a very niche function in an email. I never even sent an email newsletter for an eCommerce store. How am I going to write about email marketing for eCommerce? Like, you know what I mean? It's like I just felt so unqualified to opine on anything related to them and their business that that was really conflicting to me. And, you know, I also just didn't think I was creating the best posts that I could.

I looked at this guy, Sam Jacobs, and his thought leadership just felt better, deeper, more meaningful, better story trajectory, like the whole thing. So, I flipped to this guy, Alec Paul, who I work with now. And then, uh, you know, for two months with Alec, we were trying to write for eCom, and the quality of the posts got better, and we got like some demos, but it was still like, for what I was paying for it, and for the amount of time I was spending on it, it was just like not producing an acceptable amount of business. Um, all the while, my COO Santos is like, "Bro, if this product works for someone selling a $100 pair of shoes, it will work for someone selling $50,000 software." I am telling you, like, I came from that world. No one is selling it. They're all afraid of the privacy implications. We have to offer a product, so we hadn’t even built it yet. And I was like, you know what, Alec, like, or you know what, Santos? Like, I'm gonna see if LinkedIn is a good top of the funnel for that.

Like, before we even had a beta product, it was like I'm gonna start writing for B2B SaaS people. And Alec was like, oh man, because all of his clients are B2B SaaS founders. A lot of them sell into martech, which is like the LinkedIn paradise, right? Um, so craziest thing happened. I dropped a post about BDR and how it, for us, had become impossible, and we let them all go, and we sped up because, like, the culture improved so much. Um, absolute... I mean, I went from like my good post getting 70, 80 likes to like 3,500 likes, right? Just like... and I was like, holy [ __ ], like what just happened? Like, did I unlock something? Right? And then a week goes by, and I sit down. So I try to write my LinkedIn posts, I try to chunk them, I try to do three at once, and that's like the content for the week. Takes like an hour and a half, two hours.

So I've been kind of letting ideas marinate of what else I could write about and sort of tap into what I thought I understood about why that post was so good. And basically, it was like my understanding still is like no one else was willing to say what everyone was thinking, right? If you can figure that out... and the hard thing about it is you have to be in a very specific position to have that observation, right? Like people have told me like, I articulate the pain that only a scaling SaaS founder would know, you know? No one is willing to say it because you have employees, you have investors, you have all of these hype circles that you're having to manage.

I have employees. I think they appreciate it. When you come and work for me, you know that this is coming, right? Like, it’s no surprise that when it sucks, I'm gonna say it sucks, and when it's great, I'm gonna say it's great. So anyway, I sit down and write these posts. We were in Santa Fe last year over Labor Day for like a week, maybe two weeks. We had—it was 6 PM, we had an 8 PM dinner. I'm like, guys, I got to write my LinkedIn posts. So I sit down, I write them, and then I come back to my wife and friends two hours later. I'm like, guys, and I've been telling them about it. I'm like, this crazy viral thing happened for me. I don't know if it's gonna happen again. I'm like, guys, if these posts are bangers, I understand what it means to write a great LinkedIn post. If they're not, I'm still where I was a year ago. I have no idea why I'm writing what I'm writing, right?

And then dropped them, and it was like, you know, two million impressions over three posts. Just like, absolute explosion, you know? And then that happened, and I remember talking to my co-founder Dan, and I'm like, man, like, if we have something to sell into this audience, like, I know how to write these posts. Like, I can write a thousand of them, you know? Like, I get this now. So, like, we definitely need to build something. So that started the journey towards RB2B, you know? And it just was so magical because the content... so, like, I'm a huge believer just with startup philosophy in software. It is so hard to build that you must be building your buyers as you're building your product. Like, you need to get people to pay you before it is there, even if it's $1, right? Like, you gotta... and if no one is willing to pay you for something that's going to be there in six months, it's not good enough, right?

So, this brilliant reach into this highly targeted universe allowed us to get on the phone with 300—we had decided that like demand gen marketers and like people doing ABM, so like VP marketing, like series B and beyond or whatever—that’s who we wanted to actually speak to. It allowed us to have 300 conversations with those people. You know, and the original conversations were like, we already have that because everybody has this, like, you know, company-level ID stuff. And then by the end of it, we talked to enough people and it kind of got around. Like, we had, you know, 50 beta testers; like, 10 of them were paying us. We had 3,000 people that were on a waiting list for this. Like, and it was literally just like all because of this.

My favorite startup book's The Four Steps to the Epiphany. If you read that book, that guy's like, you should cold call, you know, five people a day, and that'll get you one meeting a day, and like that'll—like, we were talking to literally 10 people a day that we would have paid, you know, $500 an hour to speak to, like, for this information. And then it got to the point after three months that we literally knew before the conversation started, based on who we were speaking to, what they were going to tell us. Like, what a killer position to be in before you launch a product. Yeah, still got it [ __ ] wrong, you know, the first six weeks, but like, it was just this incredible thing that this founder brand unlocked, you know?

If you have no following right now, you obviously can't do that, but I had no following a year and a half ago, and I couldn't have done it a year and a half ago. But like, you know, I love this guy Russell Brunson. Like, he's, he is like, in so many ways, the sort of godfather of this and the master of this, and I think he doesn't get taken seriously enough in the B2B world because he's from this, like, for lack of a better term, like, you know, kind of scumbag, like, internet marketing underbelly of the internet world. But like, he... so like my... he's like, you need to start just universally. You need to start posting every day on social media or making something. And it's like, well, why? Because you have to find your voice. Because eventually, once you have found your voice, it will unlock this spectacularly efficient way to reach people.

Organic social media, right? If you can create great organic social media, especially with the thought leadership ad concept and kind of like interest-based social media algorithms on other platforms, it is the ultimate leveler from day one of your company. If you can create a better organic piece of content than your huge competitor, you will get better awareness than them because the platform has an incentive to show that to people. Absolutely, it's a superpower. It's like so motivating to me to try to get even better, right? Like, I know if I can create a banger and no one else can, then I can also put money behind it, and my cost per click's going to be like a quarter and everybody else’s is 25 bucks because LinkedIn actually wants people to read that [ __ ], you know?

So, like, to accelerate it, they’re willing to do it for almost nothing. Um, yeah, that was a long rant, but...

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Adam Kitchen:

Well, it was highly contextual to the question. It's actually a nice segue onto the next part because, like you said, you have to have a degree of blind faith, right, in the beginning to keep going. And I think a lot of founders, like you said, if you have no audience at the beginning, you sort of feel like, what's the point in doing this? I can spend my time doing more purposeful activities that move the needle. But once you unlock that leverage, that's when magical things start to happen. And for you, you've obviously been able to instantly start another business and just validate it off that audience. But I want to come back to a quote that you made. I think you were giving a speech or something on stage, and you wrote in a post the other day that somebody came to you afterwards and said, "Yeah, well, this is all great, but you know, how many leads do you generate from this?" And your response was something like, "I have no idea."

So, I guess the question is, you know this is powerful, I guess, based on all the real-time feedback, the comments, the intuition, and seeing the numbers on the dashboard. But how do you quantify, as a CEO, the impact of this strategy given, like, how nuanced and difficult it can be for some people to track the impact of content?

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Adam Robinson:

Yes, that's a great question. So, I just dropped our public-facing barometrics dashboard into the LinkedIn live comments. That is how I know it's working. You know what I mean? So, like, I made that post, and some of the pushback I got, which I thought was reasonable, was like, the only reason you're allowed to approach it that way is because you're the CEO. Anybody reporting to anybody is going to need it to be tracked and measured in order to sort of evaluate their effectiveness of this, which I thought was fair—very fair. Even that being said, I don't think any other CEOs would approach it... so, like, I'm approaching this with the blind faith that I approached making content with last year. It was not nearly as much of my role as it is now. Like, I'm literally like—I've given Mondays to internal meetings, and then the whole rest of my week is guest slots, webinars, you know, virtual events, you know, trying to get on stage places. I'm going to start making courses, like all sorts of crazy stuff, because this is my interpretation of what the future of the world holds.

So, like, I don't... it's like, I don't measure it, you know? It's like, our finance person hates that. She's so... like, part of it is super obvious that it's working, right? The LinkedIn stuff—super obvious it’s working. Like, I'm making—I'm spending way, way more money actually making, like, really high-quality video assets that we've dropped one of. I made a docu-series last year, and the reason that I still have these people on staff is because the response to the docu-series was, like, people would, like, write in, like, "I've just never seen business content this good," you know? Because, like, normally, it's something like this. And, like, there was this girl that hired as a subcontractor who's telling a deep story around my pursuit of a unicorn and falling flat on my face, right? So, like, you know, it’s sitting there on YouTube, we’re not... it’s not contextualized for YouTube. It’s kind of like a Netflix show; it's not contextualized for LinkedIn. Like, it's just the... you know, so there are a lot of problems with it.

But like, I’m spending a lot—I think that now that my audience is the size that it is, and like whatever else, it’s like, I want to, from now till the end of the year, continue to make one of these videos per week that’s, like, much more high quality, much deeper storytelling because I think people are ready for that from me, and they kind of weren’t last year. But point is, I get a lot of flak for that, you know? It's like, we're trying to be efficient in other ways, and like, I'm spending, you know, $250,000 extra on like this seemingly indulgent thing about myself, right? Like, that is not in any way quantifiable the way that the LinkedIn thing is. The LinkedIn thing, you're like, oh, that's working. There's a lot of post engagement; there's a lot of whatever. And then the talking heads are, you know, they're cheap, and in my opinion, they work. But like, this other stuff is really expensive. So, it's even—I am fighting the battle of like, what is coming from the dollars, you know?

But like, when you just look at what's happening on that barometrics chart that I dropped in, it's like, okay, this is probably all from the founder brand because where else are people getting awareness from? So like, let's go at it even harder, right? Like, and let's... you know, I want to have like, maybe a third of the budget every year being wildly experimental stuff that is not going to be obviously working, and like two-thirds of it that is. So, that’s kind of the way that I'm approaching it. Like, I'm going to, like, try to start a YouTube channel next year, for instance, and probably spend $250,000 on that, like working with the best YouTube people or whatever, you know?

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Adam Kitchen:

And we're going to come on to that, and obviously you've got a head start because you've got those wood slap panels, same here as well, and we know that increases the reach by 20% of any LinkedIn post. There are prerequisites, but it’s interesting to hear you talk about the billion-dollar channel challenge because I personally love that. And I remember waiting for those episodes, and as soon as those episodes went out, I would share them with all our team, and we thought it was amazing content. But when you came out and said you had the same, at least, viewing metrics or better on the talking head videos... but for me, it's the differentiation factor on those videos. I do watch your talking head videos, but I'm super intrigued by the insight into your personal life and how it was scripted. So, I know it's obviously probably a massively higher investment, but it's also a bit of an MO because who’s going to be able to compete with you on this? No one’s going to.

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Adam Robinson:

That’s why I hired them. And then, you know, that was actually kind of a disaster. So, for the last six months, nothing has come out like that. We ended it at the end of last year. They’ve been full-time, and the plan was... so my audience was on LinkedIn. That show, it doesn't work on LinkedIn because LinkedIn is not a sequential platform. It’s not like Twitter, where, like, you’re going to get today’s tweet rather than yesterday’s tweet. It’s like, they’re going to show somebody episode 13 who hasn't seen episode one and who has no idea who I am, right? So, my idea was I would hire her because people were saying stuff like you were saying, and I was gonna make two episodic shows on the DTC side and the Retention.com side. One about Kyle, and then one about our customers. And then for me, my original idea was like, I just want to be like 60 seconds per day, but deep storytelling, wildly revealing of this RBTB journey in some crazy way, right? So that was the idea.

Then, like six months into it, you know, we've paid these people $200,000, and literally, there hasn't been a single thing produced. And the whole time, I've been like, they need time, they need time, they need time. And really, what happened was they were doing a lot of admin work around the talking head stuff for me, and they couldn’t work with our DTC team. Like, they just operate in a way where the amount of planning that something like that takes doesn't work, you know? So, kind of fixed it, but that was exactly my thing. I was like, I have this person that I work with incredibly well, and then I just... the quality of the comments that I was getting back made me think that I have a superpower that no one else does. It's not insanely expensive, right? I mean, I think for the rest of the year, you know, I just burned the dough on the experiment until now, to a large extent.

But like, for the rest of the year, it's going to be like five or six grand for each episode of one of these very high—like I put out one two weeks ago, I'm not sure if you saw it on my LinkedIn journey—very high-quality, 8 to 10-minute video asset. And then they’re actually going to repurpose some of last year’s billion-dollar challenge episodes and change the story slightly so that they are standalone. And then this year's billion-dollar challenge season will be all standalone episodes, kind of like a Black Mirror episode where it’s like, you don't need to know what happened in the last one to, like, know about the next one. So yeah, and my audience is a lot better and a lot more thirsty for that kind of stuff from me too. So like, I’m really dying to see in six months how this all played out, you know?

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Adam Kitchen:

Absolutely, yeah. And I think you're ahead of the curve on that. I think going back to a point you said, it's contextual based on the platform. So, the talking head videos—they are great on LinkedIn because that's what the audience wants. I would love to see you go deep on YouTube with the billion-dollar challenge, and I know you were going to come onto YouTube and what your strategy is there. But if you listen to the biggest creators on those platforms, well, it’s actually normal for them to spend $5,000 to $10,000 per video because obviously, you have the impressions to justify that. But that would completely warrant the investment that you're making in it. So, I think I agree with you; it just has to be contextual based on the platform.

We sort of covered video content, which was the next question really, and why to pursue that. And I want to come on to how you're ideating and spending time to come up with these ideas because, for me, just looking at that example before you... by far one of the most innovative people when it comes to creating new content. Do you have a formulaic way or period of time where you're sitting down, for example, on a Sunday evening and then saying, "Okay, here's what I want to post about. Like, these are some frameworks." Just walk me through how you're thinking about creating content for LinkedIn as well as just your long-term vision as well.

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Adam Robinson:

Yeah, so question number one is about ideation. I work with Alec Paul, who’s very expensive, but he’s like kind of like the creative director of this operation. He doesn't write for you, which kind of bothered me in the beginning. It’s like, I'm paying you all this money, and you're not even going to write this? Like, are you joking? Because my last guy sort of did. And he’s like, "It’s not going to do the same thing if I write it. Like, you know, there's just some magic about the real words of the guy coming from the person in that position," like whatever.

So, uh, and then when it comes down to being innovative, I just have this view of marketing in everything. It’s like, if you are more of the same, that's never going to work. Like, you have to come up with some angle that cuts through, and like, what is that? It's like there’s mainstream, then there’s crazy, and you got to kind of be in the middle of that. That’s like kind of crazy, but like, not so crazy you get written off, you know? And I think there’s, there’s you—whenever whatever your opportunity is in life, I think it really benefits you to look at it and say, well, what can I do that other people can't do and why? Like, Tim Ferris has a way of saying this; it’s like, what rules are people obeying that they don’t need to be obeying?

People obey the rule of, "I'm not going to share my financials." Well, on social media, if you do that, that just crushes. So, like, I knew that. I’d, like, watch Nathan Barry and all the attention he got for ConvertKit for, like, making one of these barometrics dashboards. So, I make one, I promote it all the time because that’s the most memorable part of ConvertKit for tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, right? And it will be the most memorable part of RB2B for tens of thousands of entrepreneurs. It’s an attention game. How do you get mind share of people, right? Like, some dude who just posted this, like, he’s posting his shitty churn, you know? But the thing is still growing at 130%. It’s like, I’ve been around for five years; I’m at a million ARR, and this guy’s at 1.4, and he launched 16 weeks ago. Like, what is he doing? I’m going to go learn more, right? And then they go to my LinkedIn, and I’m talking about it, right? It’s just like... like, I just think it’s like, relative to other content out there, it is an amaz... like, I know because five years ago, I would have killed for this. Killed.

To see Nathan Barry’s ConvertKit dashboard, then be able to go to his LinkedIn and see why he was doing what he was doing and what was working for him, he could have charged... I mean, he could have charged me tens of thousands of dollars for like a membership to that, right? So, like, doing it for free... like, I’m not surprised that it’s crushing, right? So, uh, in a lot of ways, you know, I am making stuff for that old version of myself at this point, right? You know? And I think this guy Russell Brunson... like, everybody should read Expert Secrets. Like, I just finished rereading it. It’s all about how no matter what you're selling—in this case, we’re talking about SaaS, I think, mostly, maybe agencies—if you can get to a position in an ecosystem where people are willing to pay for your actual advice, the game is won.

Like, you're no longer competing... so like, my idea is like, I have this deep conviction that the system is set up to not allow people to bootstrap to 10 million ARR. But if they were just a little more disciplined and were comfortable with it taking a little bit longer, 10 million ARR for a SaaS company, getting there in a lean way—it is freedom. It is your life. Your financial problems are over, right? Because you could turn around and sell that business for $40 million that day. You could hire a CEO to go run it. You could work 100 hours a week if you want to; you could work one hour a week if you want to. You could stay super lean for five more years and pay yourself $5 million a year at that point. Like, you could do a unicorn if you want to, but at that point, you could raise $100 million and really do it because, like, you figured out your acquisition metrics so dialed in. The discipline that you get when you go through that, and the judiciousness about, like, the trade-offs of go-to-market and everything...

I don't hear anyone speaking about this because the problem is, like, the one to three entrepreneur, it is a state of desperation. So, like, zero, who cares? You don’t have anything. You get to one, you're like, this is awesome. You get to two, you’re like... if you get stuck at two, you're like, man, like, I may spend 10 years on this and still be at two, and then have to go get a job when I'm 50, and like, get to... like, my wife might leave, right? It’s like very desperate, right? And then when you finally break out and get to five, after being in that desperate state for years, the world comes to you and says, if you sign this piece of paper and take my $7 million, you personally... you're not allowed to have it, but you personally are worth 30 million bucks, you know what I mean? It’s like a head job. So, of course, you take it, right? Because, like, you're rich now, but you're not, you know? But they make you think you are, but like, whatever.

So, this message is not out there, right? Like, and I believe that with founders, they should think this way, right? And like, I think that, like, I can make almost like a religion around this 10-million vision, you know, like, with the type of content I'm making and how I'm doing this. And like, you know, at the same time, there’s this radical shift in go-to-market getting so much harder. And I very clearly have the playbook. I mean, I'm showing you the scoreboard, right? So, if you are in that position, I could sell anything to these people, right? Like, it’s not even about—it’s like, it’s like my competitors, whatever, like Warmly, Leadfeeder, like, they’re like, oh, we'll resolve two more percent, and we’re $3 cheaper, and we have, like, a whatever. It’s like, people will buy RB2B if I’m... if that is what I'm communicating. They’re buying path to freedom, right? Like, it’s so different. And that's what Russell was selling. Like, he was selling his brain, you know? He was selling a way of life, right?

So, I'm so deeply interested in this because social media is set up to do that, right? It is set up to aggregate community around ideas. Um, and yeah, man, this is what I think the future is, you know? I have perfect alignment with, like, who I am and my audience and everything else, but like, that’s what everybody will have eventually. If you start posting today, in five years, you will have the opportunity to do what I'm doing. Like, you will have aggregated... so it may be a different product than you're selling right now, but like, by reporting what you're doing and finding your voice, eventually, that audience... you're going to be able to launch a product into that. I mean, we see it on DTC, right? Like, that’s all they [ __ ] do, you know?

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Adam Kitchen:

Exactly. So, you're just basically leaning into your offense itself more and more, and then it’s just compounding and adding more value. It’s interesting how you frame that part because, as you said, the more bold you are, and then you start to get traction, it just sort of incentivizes you to reveal more and more. And I think going back to like one of the things we spoke about at the beginning, for me, it's a travesty you have these super intelligent founders, but they're scared to post something on LinkedIn. Because for me, it’s a huge loss for the world that they’re not sharing insight into all this intelligence and knowledge that they've gained. But like you said, I think that’s becoming a huge differentiating factor and something you need to do with this go-to-market play.

We’re going to come back onto this content-market fit thing to finish in a second, but just talk to me a little bit about—you've conquered LinkedIn now. You made a post about YouTube the other day. What have you... have you spoken to anyone so far? Like, what are you thinking in terms of strategy? Because you mentioned that it’s obvious, right? Like, each of the channels needs different types of content. How are you going to approach that? And I guess you’ll be having to go through that phase, right, of justifying the mental commitment, knowing that it might take a prolonged period of time to build a fraction.

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Adam Robinson:

Yeah, so my LinkedIn... I spoke to like eight or 10 YouTube consultants, and the conclusion that I came to is that my LinkedIn presence is not even optimized yet. It seems awesome, but like, I'm not posting every day. Like, I wasn’t running thought leadership ads until a couple of weeks ago. Like, you know, we’re doing this live community event. Like, we don’t know how to run a show. We don’t know how to promote it. Like, we, you know... I think there’s kind of this info product angle to this, which I think is far more valuable than YouTube. I think YouTube becomes more valuable once that’s a part of this, but like, that’s like a higher priority. So, there are like so many other things to optimize—A, things that I'm doing, and B, things that I think would make—like, just information assets that I think would make what we’re doing even more valuable and move faster.

So, it got deprioritized until January 1 at the earliest. Um, what I would be looking to get... so like, fundamentally, I think I've had this shift where I realize... I believe that the industry that I'm in is edutainment. I happen to have a SaaS at the end of the funnel, right? But what I'm really, really doing well right now is edutainment. So it’s like, how do you grow the entertainment brand? It’s like, well, do another channel, right? So then it, like I said before, just comes down to like, well, is this channel optimized first? And like, I just want to get to the point where anybody would look at the operation that we're running right now, they’d be like, that is incredible—or at least I would. Because if you're looking from the outside and you don’t have it, you're probably thinking it’s incredible. But like, there's just so much optimization that can even go on.

And then, you know, what am I hoping to get out of YouTube? I think it really depends on what... like, I'm hoping to have a sales motion that’s similar to what Russell Brunson did, where it's like one to many, actually me selling, I’m evangelizing this movement. The close is like information and tools related to the movement, plus you get the SaaS for free for a year. I'm just going to see if I can do that, you know? If that works, then the purpose of YouTube is totally different than if it doesn't work. If that works, then it’s like drive people to that event, right? If that doesn't work, then it's like, kind of like, get me the SaaS founders before they've matured enough to LinkedIn and make me know, liked, and trusted among them as like the source of how to go zero to one, you know? And then once they're at one, they kind of jump over to LinkedIn, and they're like trying to prospect serious people and stuff like that. And then that’s where it really gets good for our product, you know?

So, yeah, those are kind of the two ways I'm thinking about it, you know?

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Adam Kitchen:

Interesting. We’re going to come back onto the leveraging your personal brands on those types of info products. I want to finish on that one because I think it’s really interesting. But going back to one of the things that we spoke about in the beginning—what is your message to all those founders (doesn’t necessarily have to be B2B) who have a reputation to start posting because they're stuck in that cycle of, well, I don't want to post for three months and not get any return on it? So, I guess my question is, how can they shorten the gap to content-market fit, as you call it? Because for a lot of people, 12 months is just unjustifiable for them. And maybe your response to that is, well, tough [ __ ], you know? That’s just how long it takes. But is there any way, in your opinion, that you can close that gap to try and create those instantaneous feedback loops?

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Adam Robinson:

So, what I would do if I had zero followers on LinkedIn and I had a SaaS, and I thought that I wanted to explore this... first of all, the amount of urgency that I would have is if I were selling into go-to-market people for SaaS or recruiters. If I were selling into people who do their jobs on LinkedIn, I would pursue this with reckless abandon. That is my advice. Right? There are tons of benefits, if that’s not you, to still creating a presence on LinkedIn, but like, it is the opportunity of a century right now if the people you're selling to live on the platform, right?

So, I wouldn’t just start posting. I would hire a ghostwriter and watch how someone writes who writes for LinkedIn and tries to take your ideas and contextualize them for the platform. I would also study people like me, Chris Walker, this guy Nigel Thomas—he uses templates really well. I love Walker’s headlines, you know? I like how he writes posts. Like, I do some stuff pretty differently than him. Like, see these people. You know, look at Sam Jacobs. These people have developed deep community on real thought leadership to try to understand why they are writing what they’re writing, you know? So, first step is like, just get somebody writing like basic ideas tangential to your world, right? And see what they’re doing.

And then if you have posted zero times on LinkedIn, you will probably start getting, you know, maybe not demos, but like inbound unrelated to actual business, which is interesting. So, like, people start saying, like, "I like... I want to work for your company," right? Like, you know, I get five a day of people that are just like, "This is my resume. I'll do anything you want me to do," like, five a day at least. And that’s not an exaggeration, but it starts pretty early on. People will start taking your brand more seriously in your ecosystem. You know, you'll have agencies who want to learn about you, like all this stuff. So, um, so that... I think if that kindles a fire, which it did in me, to like... like, I just saw how powerful it could be.

And I was also in this, like, DTC world seeing how the ability to harness this UGC, this organic social content, was just allowing people to crush. My favorite story is this guy, Joliee, the showerhead company—three full-time employees, $50 million run rate in like 18 months. Why? How? Because for virtually no money, they were able to harness... they were able to get 30,000 pieces of UGC created by, like, kind of aspiring influencers on TikTok, uh, over the course of 2023. So, um, you know that it’s like... it's going to take a while. You know, there’s no real shortcuts. You can do some, like, tricks to get your audience growing a little bit in the beginning, but like, you know, if you asked me, how do I blow the doors off like RB2B? I would say, this is my third startup with the same co-founders, and we’re really good at this. And by the way, we tried something last year that did not work at all, right?

And like before Get Emails, which is now Retention.com, we tried two other things—huge swings that did not work at all. But like, every day that goes by, my understanding of what will likely work with potential upside is much better and much deeper, and I feel like I understand why it might work, right? Like, I totally get why RB2B is working, you know? Retention.com confuses me because like, there’s only one way we’re getting customers. It's in the field. It’s account lists, 1,500. Like, we’re trying to, like, get our network of people who kind of are affiliates for us and influencers to introduce us to these people, and it, like, requires creating an event worth going to, right? And we’re so good at it that the CAC payback’s decent, but like, it’s hard, and there's like nothing else that works. And they’re like, "Oh, can we try demand gen?" I'm like, well, you can try demand gen, but like, if you run ads to this list, nothing’s going to happen. It’s like, not enough people, right?

They're like, "Well, we’re going to send these people neon signs that say ‘We’re in a retention era.’" I'm like, good luck with that, you know? Like, awesome. Keep trying, you know? Like, keep the spirit alive. But like, um, yeah, man, things are just, like, hard out there right now. Like, cold emailing from the Philippines, which was our lifeblood until $15 million ARR, just doesn’t seem to work for us anymore. And I think a lot of people are feeling the same. So, um, so yeah, all that is to say, if you get to the point where you have the magic of creating organic social content for a given audience, you have the power to go to market more efficiently than anyone else. 100%. But that takes time, right? Like, behind every overnight success is 10 years in the making, right? I'm not saying it’s gonna take 10 years, but like, you know?

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Adam Kitchen:

Yep, so essentially, it just boils down to deciding whether you're in for the long term or you're not going to do it. I would be very curious to know—you mentioned like that diminishing returns of outbound, and this is something that we've experienced with our agency and pretty much every agency, so it's not just SaaS as well. Have you seen any increase in effectiveness, like putting content behind some of those direct response channels? Because I know that if I get an email—let’s say a cold email—from Retention.com, Adam Robinson, I'm going to open it because I know who you are. Have you experimented with any type of strategy on the outbound front that can get open content?

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Adam Robinson:

So, like, outbound for... you know, outbound for RB2B is coming from me with, like, these sketchy domains. The offer is killer, and people recognize me, so it's working. But they might have signed up anyway because it's free, you know what I mean? It's like really hard to... like, it’s the classic thing of like, were you just getting in the way of something that happened anyway, or did that outbound actually work, right? So, it’s hard to say, but like, it’s working, but it’s got all that other stuff. I think what, um, what you're saying is, like, the thing that determines how an email does more than anything else is who sent it. So, like, the other benefit of, you know, creating these massive profiles is that people think it’s like your friend is emailing you, you know?

Um, and the whole motion that Alec and his partner do, which I tried to get going for eCommerce, was great content, inbound connection request, accept, ICP, shoot them a message that says, "What caught your attention?" Wait for 60 days, because once that happens, they get served your content. 60 days later, you're a celebrity to them. Then you're like, "Yo, you want to hop on the phone and, like, talk about this?" Whatever. And they're like, "Yeah!" You know? So, like, to some extent, that is also happening with email, but like, not as directly because, like, you know, you start that process when you accept their connection request on LinkedIn. It’s like undeniable that like your content will get prioritized.

But like, with cold email, yeah, like if you're kind of like... you know, a cold email effort from me into SaaS founders is going to do a lot better than a cold email from me into, you know, developers at government agencies who are like building space tech, right? They’re not going to... they’re not going to open the email.

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Adam Kitchen:

Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to finish on something that you touched on a couple of times that I'm super intrigued by, and this is something that I had good success with as well pivoting from the agency. And you talked about info products and using your audience as leverage that way. What are you thinking about? Is this just a course play or a community? Because you've got a lot of power at your hands, right? Like, you have something close to 100K followers, a crazy audience actively engaged with you. There are lots of strings you can pull with that, so I’d love to just know what you're thinking about.

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Adam Robinson:

Yeah, so what Russell Brunson did was he sold... he had the perfect presentation, which was like a Tony Robbins motivational speech about growing your business. The key was funnels, and then at the end of the close, it was like a value stack of 10 to 1 value that was, "Here is how you do this—info products and tools related to it, templates, and like whatever else, and I’ll give you the ClickFunnels app for free for a year." Right? I think there’s a play for us and me there that’s like, you know, zero to one impossible, one to 10 improbable, 10 to 100 inevitable. It’s like, dude, you got to get to 10. I can get... you know, go-to-market's impossible, I can show you how to do this, right? The only thing separating you from me is what I know. Here is everything I know—some value stack that’s like well over the price of, you know, RB2B for a year. I’ll throw in RB2B, it’s $997, you know? Have at it.

And so, and I want to even, like, add a community—like a paid community element. It’s like, I want to undercut, I want to discount our software, undercut information marketing, and be the best source of it because we're still in the game, right? Like, none of these other info product guys are actually building SaaS companies, and like, I am. Like, I know what it’s like to do demand gen in 2024, right? Like, I’m doing it. Uh, so like, undercutting all three—it’s like, discount the software, undercut info products, and then undercut, like, this community service, um, and bundle all of that. Like, I think that has the opportunity to be in a high-churn product category with an ultra-high churn buyer persona, actually a low-churn offering, because a lot of people want one of those things, many people want all three, you know?

Um, that's what Russ was kind of doing, and that’s... but, but I think you have to be at the exact right place and time to make that happen. And I see a lot of parallels between where I am right now and where he was in 2017. So that’s going to be the attempt. Again, like, eight weeks into RBTB, we had 3,000 free customers and 13 paying because everything was wrong about what I thought. Like, I thought people were going to buy this $495 plan by pushing a button or whatever. Um, wasn't the case. This could be totally wrong, what I’m saying right now. But like, I understand why it worked for him, and I see a lot of similarity between right now, how hot this product is, how hot his product was, like, you know, whatever. So, that’s how I'm thinking about it.

Um, I think the format has to be a bit different. Like, a lot of people are in the live event game. You can’t really just do the same webinar over and over every week and drive new people, like you could back then. It’s just different. So, you know, we’ll see. I think there's something there, though.

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Adam Kitchen:

Absolutely.

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Adam Robinson:

Yeah.

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Adam Kitchen:

Fascinating. We'll give you some more time to dwell on that. Well, look, man, it’s coming up to time. Um, obviously, it’s fairly straightforward how people can get in contact with you. I'll drop your LinkedIn and a link to RB2B in the chat, but I want to finish and ask you, who would be a great person for me to speak to next? And also, for the audience, who should they study? Who do you think really nails content creation?

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Adam Robinson:

I mean, I think Chris Walker’s great. Dave Gerhardt’s really making a push. Um, yeah, those are kind of the two I look at. Sam Jacobs would be really good too. Any of those guys are going to have a really good... they’ll talk to you too. They’re kind of in the same game I am. They love the guest spots, you know? We all do, especially around this topic.

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Adam Kitchen:

Perfect. Well, I appreciate your time, Adam. I will drop the links in the chat, as I said, but massively appreciate it. Thanks for coming on, and speak to you soon.

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Adam Robinson:

All right, thank you very much, Adam.

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