He Makes $22M/Year with 2 Websites

Here is a brief summary of the key points from the transcript: - Adam started his first company in 2014 after being inspired by his college roommates who founded Vimeo. His first company took 18 months to build and had lots of problems. - His second company struggled to gain traction for years. He tried reinventing the product but it still didn't work. At rock bottom, he realized he needed a new idea. - He came up with the idea for his current company Retention.com after realizing he could get anonymous website visitors' email addresses. He launched a minimum viable product in just 6-8 weeks and got 10k MRR from a $5k Facebook ad spend. - Key lessons: validate demand before building, talk to customers, focus on one thing, build a personal brand, hire slowly and fire fast. - He stresses starting with a strong value proposition first before building anything. Cites examples like the founder who got checks from his pitch deck before building the product. - He doesn't think he's a genius, just that with enough experiments you eventually find something that works. He was inspired seeing the founders of Jasper.ai build a unicorn in 12 months. - His key advice: Keep experimenting and rolling the dice. Getting stuck and unstuck is part of the journey. Focus on finding your voice and building your personal brand.

Speaker A: Adam bootstrapped his business to $20 million in annual revenue after his last company failed to get traction. But even more impressive is that he grew it to a million bucks in just 16 weeks with a simple offer in a minimum budget.

Speaker B: Like, I just think spending as little money as possible, like, operating with as few tools as you can. I love this concept. It's like, if you have that $100 million offer or word of mouth or product market fit, like, I think it's all the same thing. If you have that, almost anything you do will work. If you do not have that, nothing you do will work.

Speaker A: But he'll be the first to admit that it wasn't always easy. In fact, he made tons of mistakes and setbacks along the way.

Speaker B: But it was, like, really brutal, man. It was like I burnt through every dollar that I had saved. The second they found out what it actually was that we were trying to sell, eyes glazed over. It's like it was a waste of time. No one cared. Spent a million dollars of salaries making this thing. I don't know what we're gonna. You know, I don't know what we're gonna do.

Speaker A: Until he realized he wasn't thinking big enough.

Speaker B: Let me tell you something really interesting. We are not geniuses. The way that I view this game, with every new stab you take, you're, like, accruing lotto tickets. Six weeks of building, maybe eight max. In November, we spent five grand on Facebook ads and got ten k of monthly recurring revenue on a website that literally the back end took. Took eight weeks. You know what I'd really do? I wouldn't start. I would try to sell.

Speaker A: This is the story of Adam Robinson, who was fired from his last job and decided to take a swing at entrepreneurship. After struggling for years, his most recent business exploded to over $20 million in annual revenue. In this interview, he shares everything he's learned building his online businesses, and exactly what he would do today if starting over from scratch. Let's dive in. Here you are, founder of this 20 plus million dollar company. And today we're going to dig into some of the behind the scenes of how you got there. But I want to back up, like, when did you get into this, starting companies and entrepreneurship?

Speaker B: I started my first company. I launched the first product in January 2014. So I'm like, almost eleven years in. I would say ten and a half years in at this point. And it has not been a straight lineup at all.

Speaker A: You talk very publicly on your LinkedIn. You have some of these videos that go viral, but let's maybe back up to, initially, your first business. I think you sold it for eight figures. How did you get into that? And what did you learn from that business that you're applying to the next ones?

Speaker B: Unlike a lot of successful entrepreneurs that I've seen, like, I, what I did before that was I was, I was a Wall street trader. I worked at Lehman Brothers and traded credit default swaps for like, ten years. And what inspired me to go try to do that, like, become an entrepreneur, is the first day I ended up in Manhattan. I walk into my apartment and my roommate literally is like, on Dreamweaver, this app that you used to use to make web pages, he's making this baby blue homepage that says Vimeo across the top. And, like, I'm living with these guys. You know, I watched that happen over so many years. You know, I didn't even have vocabulary for it at the time. But, like, now I know. It was like, watching them build something with, like, these, like, fun and interesting people was just so much more fulfilling than trading, which is like, every day's a new day, every year's a new year. It's just all about extracting money out of the system for yourself, and there's not a creative aspect to it.

Speaker A: So you saw that that planted the first seed of, oh, maybe I could do this business thing. And then what was, you tried one thing and it automatically worked and easy to easily, or what?

Speaker B: I mean, I wish. I basically had a really good year and then a really bad year, and I got fired. And then at the time that I got fired, there weren't really, like, other jobs. The market was contracting. It's just a really bad environment. As dumb as this sounds, I was like, I want to start a startup in this apartment like they did ten years ago. It just, like, looks so cool. And it started this journey, and I wasn't spending time with qualified people who were starting other startups. I was spending time with other people like me who had no idea what they were doing trying to start other startups.

Speaker A: I love the idea when even before retention.com started, now it's 20 plus million dollar AR company. You had this idea of what you thought it would be. You validated it before. Can you talk about how you just mocked it up and, like, do you know how to code?

Speaker B: No. No. So, like, probably one of the things that, like, makes me, I don't know, proud's the right word, but, like, makes me feel validated as an entrepreneur is like, the time it took us to build my first product, right? Robley. So Robley was 18 months. All sorts of problems. We built way too much. We spoke to no one while we were building it. It's a miracle that that business worked. After we basically saw that people were willing to use the identity feature in Roblie, download the file and put it in Klaviyo and told us it was awesome. I was like, okay, I don't want to detract any resources from the mothership that is paying the bills. I don't want people to squirrel. I am just going to go mock this up and snag it, which is like Photoshop for dummies. Go on upwork, find somebody to design the Photoshop psds, which is like pre figma, I guess, and then get somebody to build the HTML. And then just when I get all that, give it to my CTO. Six weeks of building, maybe eight max. Launched it on November 9. And then in November we spent five grand on Facebook ads and got ten k of monthly recurring revenue on a website that literally the backend took eight weeks.

Speaker A: You know, that's insane.

Speaker B: It's like you accrue these skills. What did we do to launch it? Like the first on the retention.com YouTube page, you can go like almost near the bottom and see there's a video called the OG. Get emails. Vidhenne. I watched digitalmarketers.com quote s course on how to create a video sales letter. I literally took their script framework and just like filled in, get emails, value points and objections to overcome. Went on upwork, found this girl, romina to make word art. I recorded my voice on my iPhone reading the script, got some music, she made some animation, and like, that was the ad. $1,000 and it crushed. I love this concept. I think it's so true. If you have that, you can call whatever you want, $100 million offer or word of mouth or product market fit. Like, I think it's all the same thing. If you have that, almost anything you do will work. If you do not have that, almost nothing you do will work. My original vision was like, I would sit atop these four or five investments that I had, which, by the way, the other four went to zero and kind of actively manage them or whatever. It was the stupidest thing in the world. Now, what I thought then was, you could do that. What I think now is the more you can focus on one thing. You know, Elon can focus on a few things like the rest of us. It's like, you're lucky if you can focus on one thing. And if you can get a team to focus on it, like, that's a true gift. So that's kind of how it was. The one thing I was working on that worked. And then instead of some other person being the CEO of it, I just ended up being the CEO of it. But it was like really brutal, man. I got super resourceful. I was like, renting my apartment out, Airbnb events, like, whatever, just trying to keep my expenses as low as possible to make it work. There was one thing that got you to like a few million ARR, but it was only competitive in that channel, and it's not in the rest of the world. It's lack of product market fit, and nothing you do works. You listen to all of this stuff everyone else is doing that is working and you try it and it doesn't work. And that's the situation. So, yeah, I just, like, three years in a row, I was just banging my head against the wall doing small and big experiments. And then in the fourth year, I had heard of this technology where you could get an anonymous website visitor, the email address of that person, even if they didn't fill out a form. And being in the email business, I was like, man, if I could do that, I could sell it to anybody with a website. I know it, I'm positive. No idea how. Finally figured out how to do it and then, ah, now we have something that can grow this email marketing tool past 3 million arrival launch this feature. People would sign up for the email tool, use the feature, put it in Klaviyo and say it was awesome. So, like, it was very clear that, like, people wanted that and they didn't want the rest of it. Luckily, we were able to sell that email marketing tool to this roll up that, like, wanted to, like, see what it was like to run one of those companies inside of their business, which is a miracle. And then, you know, now that company is retention.com, 22 million ARR.

Speaker A: You know, ultimately the game here is try a bunch of things, find the one that's working, double down on the. On the thing that's working. Was there a particular rock bottom moment or sort of time in your life when you were doing this thing that in maybe your second business that wasn't working and you're like, how do I find something that works?

Speaker B: Yeah. So rock bottom was one night and it was like sometime in late February in 2018. Basically what we had done is one of the attempts to get Robley growing again was we basically created a v, two of it. We tried to make it to where it was, like, more advanced than this vendor called Mailchimp, spent a year on it, built a whole new software, and, like, we were super excited about this, but I now know what I did wrong. Like, we didn't speak to anybody, what we were building it. We just assumed that we would be able to find these people who were, like, magically above Mailchimp and needed this. Spent a year building it, went to this trade show, pulled this big stunt. Hilariously. Like, I hired a bunch of. So, like, we were trying to go after people with big email lists, and this market of Internet marketers was all male. So, like, I hired a bunch of models, and I had them walking around to people saying, how big is your list? Right? Like, so this stump is great. And it goes talking to literally everybody. By the end of the first day, dude, it's like, you start talking, and, like, the second they found out what it actually was that we were trying to sell, eyes glazed over. It's like, how do I stop talking? You want my business card? Great. Will you go away? All right. Like, they, like, it was a waste of time. No one cared. And then I vividly remember being in this Airbnb with my wife and, like, all of these, like, girls who we hired who are, like, drunk and making a bunch of noise, and I'm just like, what are we doing? Like, no one cares about what I spent my last year on. Spent a million dollars of salaries making this thing. I don't know what we're gonna. You know, I don't know what we're gonna do.

Speaker A: But back at that moment, the thing you were trying to sell wasn't working, and you're like, oh, what about this other thing? Had you done that before?

Speaker B: No.

Speaker A: Like, did you have any indication that you could build this, or you were just strictly finding a man?

Speaker B: I had no idea how to do it, by the way, this is, like, how you. I think you should do things. You know, like, one of my favorite books, which everyone should read, is Alex Hermozi's $100 million offers. I think it's underplayed in SaaS. I think people think about SaaS as, like, solutions and, like, you know, all of this, like, fancy technology. But, like, at the end of the day, in my opinion, what $100 million offer is in SaaS is. It's your one sentence description, and it should make someone who you're talking to feel stupid to not do it. And if you can formulate that from day one, like, before you have any product, before you have anything it's going to facilitate every single conversation you have the entire way. Right? You need to do this product discovery and you need to get people to talk to you. It's so hard to get people to talk to you now. If you don't have something that punches them in the face, is that obvious? Then you're not even going to be able to get to the first part before you should even start building your product to figure out if you should build it.

Speaker A: So maybe even to reverse engineer that. If everything that you had went away today or you were to go back to starting from scratch, would you maybe come up with ten different value, single sentence value offers and go to a conference and be like, how about this? And just see what lands with people before dedicating any resources to actually the feasibility.

Speaker B: Totally. I think the best entrepreneurs in some way or another, they have done that, whether they realize it or not. My favorite story about this is this guy, Wiley Sorelli, who sold a company to constant contact, who is in our space after like 18 months. And what he did. So he was the first salesperson at seamless, and then he went and started a company after they got, like, really big. What he did was he walked around to restaurants with a pitch deck and he changed the slides of the pitch deck until he had people handing him dollar 750 checks from the pitch deck about his software. Right? Incredible.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's the punch in the face.

Speaker B: Yeah. And like, and like, he's like, and then when I got the checks, and when I could get one check a day, he's like, then we started building it, you know?

Speaker A: Right, right.

Speaker B: But he's like, they'd hand me the check and I'd be like, amazing. I don't have this yet, but when I do, you're going to be the first customer to have it.

Speaker A: And then when you zoom out on that and play any of these pasts out of hard business versus easy business, like, what does that look like?

Speaker B: The ones that start hard, stay hard. The ones that start easy, stay easy. And I think that's just like a really good representation of product market fit. Which reminds me of an even better story about this. This guy, Matt Meeker had a great Dane, and he lives in Manhattan, and there were no toys being sold at these tiny pet shops that the great Dane didn't just immediately destroy. So he's like, this sucks. He makes a Photoshop representation of a website with a box of toys, five big toys for a big dog. Walks around Washington Square Park. Dog park, shows them his phone, and he's like, would you pay $29 a month for this? Five new toys every month for your. Great. Danny won't destroy him. When they said yes, he put a square thing in his phone, swiped their credit cards, got 50 purchases based on a Photoshop doc without even a website before they did anything else.

Speaker A: Whoa.

Speaker B: And they're publicly traded. New York Stock Exchange. That is a story that every entrepreneur should hold on to because it's like, it's just so hard. Your intuition is a very poor indicator of market viability.

Speaker A: What would be your advice to somebody who is like, how do I think of this idea? Obviously, you want to talk to a bunch of people, invalidate the demand, but how would you think of these problems? Would you just sit down and just write ten things a day, 100 things a day, or.

Speaker B: I think my position on it is like, you're going a certain way. I think what you try to do as an entrepreneur, if you're going a certain way is you, like, kind of, like, can't see, but you're feeling these tangential areas, trying to, like, find something that feels like a diamond, but, like, you don't know if it's a diamond or not, and you pull it out and it's a rock. You know what I mean? Like, it's just, you always have to be throwing spaghetti against the wall. I think you always have to have your antenna up for, like, interesting ideas or, like, you know, something I love is, like, something that's being done in one way over here that you could, like, do over here.

Speaker A: Any examples of that that come top mind?

Speaker B: I was sharing offices with the Jasper AI team, and this was before Jasper AI. They were also some two and a half millionaire or schmucks at the time, and they had spent 18 months trying to build this personalization software that when they launched it, no one bought. They had an expensive office. They went where y combinator raised $2 million. They'd spent all of their money, and at the end of 2020, they were just like, dude, like, we have three weeks of cash left. Like, we don't even know what we're gonna do here. We're trying to get out of this office. We gotta fire everybody. So they did all that. They fired everyone. They got someone to sublease their office. And at the time, I was like, dave, like, I think there's a pretty cool opportunity in, like, being the distribution vehicle for these, like, this tech which, like, is being used in some ways, but, like, not every way, and, like, just going to these guys and seeing if they'll give you SaaS margins to like sell their stuff basically, you know, because that was kind of how I interpreted my business. He's like, yeah, that does sound pretty cool. And he's like, I think I got one. OpenAI has got this thing and they're like giving us nine months of unlimited, sorry, of the exclusive use case, the long form blogger access to this model they have called GPT-3 or whatever. Then he sends me this stripe receipt and he's like, got the idea seven days ago, first customer today. Hopefully this is my get emails, because get emails was actually farther along than either Robley or his company. So literally that idea, he's like success to me is where you're at. And then dude, like zero to 50 million ar. I sat there and watched it from, I was in a conference room on one side by myself. They'd fired everybody and they put these six desks in an island and they were on the other side of this office on Braso Street. I watched those dudes from Maryland take this company from zero to 50 million ARR in twelve months, faster than any company ever in the history of SaaS. You know what I really do? I wouldn't start a SaaS if I were the first time. I would try to sell something else, maybe info or get a job for as much. People hate hearing this. Go work for a SaaS company, a good one, and get really good skills in either product or some type of marketing or sales or engineering. Like, see if you can start to understand why certain products that are being built either take off or do not. See if you can understand why the product team thinks it's an interesting idea to build it. All of those skills you have to learn some way. And if you learn them on someone else's nickel, that's just, I mean, in my opinion, that's just like a much better way to go. And then you're in this position wherever I if you really get some skill, you can go out on your own and you can start doing some fractional work to pay your bills. While you're trying to figure out what this SaaS is that you're going to start a consulting firm is much easier to execute than subscription software.

Speaker A: It's super hard and it helps when you have built, say, a powerful personal brand and are just sharing what, you know, people are bought in to Adam, probably more so than to any of the products. But that's a powerful thing that you could carry through anything else that you.

Speaker B: Do in your career, 100%.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And that is the other thing that I would be doing if I were just starting out, I would be posting on social media every single day on some channel, trying to understand what is good content. I don't even think it matters what channel you picked. I don't even think it needs to be related to the business you're working on. It would be very, very helpful if it was. But if you can find your voice, it will help either that business or some other business someday, and it will open up doors that you never even dreamed about. If you have a very. If you have a strong presence on social media, you can talk to anybody that you want to. I can talk to anybody I want to in b two b, because I'm like the LinkedIn B two B guy.

Speaker A: Can you talk about what are some mistakes that a lot of entrepreneurs get wrong when they're trying to build a business? And what have you done to stay scrappy?

Speaker B: I think it's very easy to get too many steps ahead in a lot of like, kind of like tools or like equipment or like, whatever. This isn't as much post Covid, but pre Covid. I feel like if you started a business, you felt like you needed to have an office or like you weren't real, which is absurd. I mean, it's just such a crazy idea that you wouldn't, like, work at home. It just seems so stupid to say now, but, like, that was a real deal back then. And I remember, you know, I like, read some books on content marketing in like, 2011, and I bought two Sony, like the a seven equivalent cameras to like, go film myself. Doing what? Like, I don't know, used them once, you know, and I always tell people it's like they think they need to form an LLC or whatever, like a company. It's like, okay, a year after you make your first dollar, if you're still making money, go form your company, right? Like, don't. It's just like, don't waste your time until then. Like, I just think spending as little money as possible, like operating with as few tools as you can. The example that I love is get emails, which is now retention.com. diana, who did all of the sales and is my co founder. She ran sales with her sales assistant Alice out of a Google spreadsheet until we hit 10 million ARR in the first CRM. We bought with Salesforce, like 15 demos a day. We had over 1500 paying customers. So imagine how many demos that was. It was all out of a Google sheet, which is free. They would color code. It was just a beautiful system, nothing novel about it. She wrote a post about it, and everyone's asking for the spreadsheet. It's like, it's not the spreadsheet. It's like the fact that they had the discipline to like, you know, run it that way for so long.

Speaker A: Okay. And then maybe like, the secret to word of mouth is the product market fit. How do you look at that?

Speaker B: So if you have this, like core offer or product or whatever you want to call it, that is just so good that people talk about it, right? Like, there are a thousand things you can do to speed that up. And almost in my experience, having been on both sides of this, like almost anything that you do will work. And it's just like trying to figure out within all of those things what's my maximum point of leverage that I can push on the hardest until I max it out and then go do something else. Like, that's my interpretation of what it means to, like, successfully market a startup like that. For me right now with RBDB, it's like LinkedIn, maximum point of leverage. Trying to push it as hard as possible from as many ways as I can. I'll get maxed out at some point and then I got to figure out what else I can do. Right? Like, so with word of mouth, kind of. You listen to guys like me who are saying that I'm doing these things to grow my business. And if you have it, those things will probably work. If you don't and your product is not good enough for whoever you're selling it to to just like, tell people about on their own without you encouraging them, you know, nothing you do is.

Speaker A: Going to work in terms of just finding the things that work and doubling down on those. What are some other underpriced channels that you have found working for you right now?

Speaker B: Well, I think it depends on the business. But look, our maximum points of leverage on RB two, it's like very obvious to me. It's like the LinkedIn thing is just, it's like, how do we get more LinkedIn impressions? Everybody needs to post one, post more per week. We're going to do some thought leadership ads. We just want to grow the impressions, like double. We also have this amazing ugc thing where there's this company called Clay. They have a whole legion agency community that they call Clay creators. RB two B fits in so well to all of the workflows that Clay does that they're now just RB two B creators, too. So we are cultivating the same kind of tiered ecosystem of creators and we're trying to motivate them to post on an ongoing basis by giving them visibility through all the channels that we have to create visibility. I mean, those are the, those are the obvious ones for us.

Speaker A: And how do you think about like hiring and firing?

Speaker B: My favorite saying related to hiring and firing is hire unreasonably slow, fire unreasonably fast in terms of firing fast. It's just, there's an old saying, it's like, I've never regretted letting someone go. I've only regretted not letting them go sooner. There's just a tremendous relief that comes from letting go of someone when it's not working.

Speaker A: We talked a little bit about the Jasper guys of like, you're like, yeah, they were. I think in another interview I've heard you say like they were schmucks just like me. And so I want to capture at some point, I guess, how do you look at that? Do you look at yourself as is like recording still? Yeah, it's working.

Speaker B: Yeah. So like, here's a really good example of the effect being around that. The Twitch tv founder, this guy Justin whoever he did an interview for, I need to go find it. But it was like how it was built or something like that. And like they went through this whole story and long story short, they had this cash flowing business that was not exciting. They focused on 1% of their users, which were the gamers. A year later it got bought for a billion dollars and the host was like, don't you think you won the lottery? And he was like, let me tell you something really interesting. My brother lives downstairs in my house in San Francisco and he just sold his company for a billion dollars to Ford. It's called cruise, self driving, whatever. And he's like, we are not geniuses. There is no way that probabilistically both of us should have been able to sell businesses for a billion dollars. But he's like, the way that I view this game is that with every new stab you take, you're like accruing lotto tickets. And I heard that. And at the time when I was stuck at 3 million ARR, I'm like, oh, that's cool for them. They live in San Francisco, you know, I don't like, whatever. But man, there is something so real about sitting across an office with the same struggle as some guys who did not go to Stanford, who do not live in San Francisco, who are like from Maryland, like just trying the same stuff, you know, like every day, day in, day out, the same grind. And then you watch them literally create a unicorn in twelve months, and it's like, I think I can do that, too. You know? Like, there's just. It's so palpable, right? Like, it just became so real for me. And before that happened, call it what you want to call it, normal guy shmup. Like, whatever, right? Like. Like I was just some guy trying to make it happen. Like, very much so. To a large extent, I think that I still am right? Like, it's just strangely, the thing that's the most different for me now is just how much I'm getting back from what I put in. But everything else kind of feels the same.

Speaker A: I've heard you talk about the impact of people on your team. Can you talk about the impact of finding great people to work with?

Speaker B: Again, back to hormozy. Like, this is my perception of this whole game. He ends $100 million leads with this story about a game of dice. He's like, business is like a game of dice. Everyone is handed this die when they start. The die is multi sided. Everyone has a different number of sides. There's sides that are red and sides that are green. And the whole game is like, you roll that die, and if it hits a green side, one of the red sides turns greenhouse. If it hits a red side, a red side, you just get to roll again. Everyone's got a different amount of sides. Everyone starts with a different mix of red and green. But if you keep rolling, eventually you're going to be in the position where you're hitting green almost every time. That's kind of like what it is with great people. If you keep at it long enough and you develop enough credibility and you're doing. You have. You're working on interesting enough things. Like, over time, the level of talent that you're working with is going to just get really, really good. If you just look at the overall average of the people we have [email protected]. now versus my first company, it's just not. It doesn't even resemble the staff that I had then. Cause, like, who was I? Right? You know what I mean?

Speaker A: Like, it also seems like, judging by just talking to you, you have these really good, like, portable stories and anecdotes, and it seems like you read a lot as well. Have there been any books in particular that have been most impactful for you?

Speaker B: This was incredibly rework and remote by the 37 signal skies. Incredibly impactful both then and now. I think if you read this, you should combine it with reading the Y combinator blog. I'm like some of both of these, I agree with so much of what the Y combinator blog says, but I agree with so much of what these guys say. And they're just extolling the virtues of bootstrapping, basically, and the beauty of small and a lot of concepts that it's very easy to, you know, in the media machine that we all live in and the sort of like capital machine that we all live in, it's, you know, it's kind of like, this is like a buddhist approach to, like, business in a lot of ways. I feel like now the best book if you want to start a software business by far, if you can just read this. I read it every time I start a company. And as I'm starting it probably several times, I haven't actually made it in the stage. My company's at past about half because the back half is how you scale up to hundreds of millions of ARR. But the beginning is so, so good. It reads like a textbook. It's super dense. Sell at the very least as you're building at best, before you even start. And then you have to have the discipline, if you're not getting the correct feedback back, to just go back to the beginning. Scrap what you've built, start over, brand new product hypothesis. Go find customers as you're building. I would read this one.

Speaker A: A lot of people probably watching this might be like, oh, I should be making content, or maybe they're trying, but it gets like seven views. What would you tell that version of Adam or somebody watching this?

Speaker B: When you start? The purpose is not to get engagement or to book demos or to, like, get a bunch of followers. The purpose is to start your journey to finding your voice. Because the second you do, the world's at your fingertips. You have to start, right? Like, if that's going to be where you end, you have to start at zero. You started zero. I started at zero. Isaac started zero. Everybody started zero. I love this quote, too. The best time to plan a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today, right? Like, the purpose of posting is not so that you'll get engagement today. It's so that you will find your voice years from now.

Speaker A: And your voice is comprised of things you're actively doing, experimenting, books you've read, people you've met, your life experiences who have been some of the most impactful. Either people you have met or just people you have learned from along the way.

Speaker B: You know, recently I'm kind of obsessed with Russell Brunson because, like, I watched him grow SaaS through what I viewed as an edutainment business. You know, he had this clickfunnels product, but really what he was selling people was access to his brain and building funnels through information and community. Right? Like, I'm obsessed with this idea now because it's like, if what you're selling is helping people grow their businesses, really, like, not just software features, like, the people who are competing with you are competing on your software features, and it's just so much bigger of a vision. You know, he's a big one. A business book that I love, which is like, so amp it up is probably my favorite business book, but I think it really starts applying when you get, you know, 10 million, when you get a bunch of employees. It's like, I love running organizations. In the beginning, super lean to where there's no slack, but, like, eventually you will have slack in your organization just because that's what happens. Amp it up is all about how you can just get more out of yourself and your organization, and you can have higher standards and people can ship stuff faster and people can do it better and, you know, whatever. It's like, this guy's just incredibly inspirational in his expectations, in his pursuit of excellence, let's put it that way.

Speaker A: Maybe somebody watching this is at a job that they don't like or maybe has started to try to grow their business, is getting stuck. You have maybe been in both of those positions. What would you tell that person who is just like, wants to get this 20 million ARR business or even a 3 million ARR business, but is just feeling stuck?

Speaker B: So, look, being stuck, this is my deep belief. As deep a belief as the word of mouth thing, right? Being stuck is part of the journey. It's just going to happen to you. I've been stuck five times. I was stuck six months ago. I started this new company. It's what got me unstuck, my experience as an entrepreneur. And, like, I think a lot of the people that I know, it's just getting stuck and getting unstuck again. It's just part of the game. You just have to accept it as reality and, like, keep throwing spaghetti against the wall. Like, it's all about just this mindset of continuing to experiment in those experiments. Out of every five you do, you know, the longer you, it might be zero that work in the beginning, but, like, pretty soon you're going to be batting, you know, one or two out of five on these experiments and things that actually unlock meaningful growth. So you just gotta keep going gotta keep building. I mean, that's the only advice that I have. It's like, just keep experimenting, keep honing your skills, keep getting better, and that's it.

Speaker A: Keep rolling the dice, baby. Adam, this has been amazing. Where can people find you and learn more about your story?

Speaker B: Most of what I do is on LinkedIn. Just search Adam Robinson, RB. Tworetention.com. dot check out rbdb.com, the website. It's dope. And you could email me adamatension.com. i'll respond.

Speaker A: Amazing. Thanks so much, dude.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Cool.