Hi, it’s Melissa, and welcome (back) to “your founder next door“, a weekly publication on the strategies and stories behind building a company without an abundance of resources and friends in high places. No BS, just straight-up truth bombs.
The guy I'd written off 🙄
For the longest time, I found Adam Robinson annoying.
I didn't know him. I'd just seen the posts. Revenue numbers, another company launched, another thing working. It read like a guy who really loves talking about himself, and it made building a company look way too easy.
I thought, this stuff isn’t real.
Then a few months ago I went on his live show, Unf*ck Your Startup, and got to talk to him as a person instead of a feed. He was great to talk to, pretty chill, and nothing like the version I'd built in my head.
Around the same time I found his free LinkedIn course on YouTube and watched it to get a refresher. It was good. It’s right here if you’re interested.
I invited him on ProfitLed, of course. Who better to interview than one of the loudest voices in bootstrapping?
Then we recorded, and I got the stories behind the posts. I came out of that hour respecting him as much as the best founders I know.
My conversation with Adam on ProfitLed 🎙️
Adam grew up in suburban Houston, where the coolest dads were orthopedic surgeons. One of them had a Porsche, a nice house, and a permanent smile. What Adam wanted the most wasn’t the car. It was this thing the doctor said: I would do this even if I wasn't getting paid.
His dad was a trader who made it clear he was only in it to pay for his kids' colleges, and the second that was done, he was out. That was the model Adam grew up with.
He went to Rice, got rejected from every internship he applied for, and got in the back door at Lehman Brothers through a contact of his brother's (his words, though he says it was never confirmed). He spent years as a credit default swap trader and made millions in his 20s.
Meanwhile his roommates started Vimeo in their apartment, and he watched them build it while he put on a tie at 6am. He wanted what they had badly, because it looked like they loved it.
He left eventually, with a couple million dollars of his own money and, in his words, an enormous amount of false confidence.
Then came Robly, the email company he built with his brother. They each said they'd put in $300k. It turned into $1m each, handed over $50k at a time, with his brother having to ask his wife every month whether they could do it again. Adam said it was a terrible period.
They brute forced it to $3m ARR off a sales team running out of Adam's apartment. Revenue was stuck and he had to put 27 of his 35 people in a room and tell them they no longer had a job.
Robly was profitable after that, with seven people and flat revenue, and a customer count shrinking by a percent a month for two and a half years while he sat there thinking this thing is going to die.
What saved him was one feature inside Robly everybody kept asking for. They spun it out, it became GetEmails, which became Retention.com. He knew almost instantly that it was going to be 10x the business Robly would ever be.
Today Retention.com, RB2B and a brand new company called Moltsets all run on the same data asset. $35m ARR, 32 people, run out of Aspen while Adam’s wife gets to be a full time artist.
That doctor said he'd do the job even if nobody paid him. Thirty years later, Adam is that guy.
There's a lot more in our conversation…
Like why he spent years thinking it was all a sales game before realizing that product is everything. How badly he underestimated the work it takes to make an obvious idea function. And how for every one thing that worked, he spent long stretches on five that didn't.
"It's so hard" 😳
He said that many times in our hour together. It's just so hard.
You will not find that sentence on his LinkedIn. He’s not hiding anything, it’s just not what he talks about.
We get the wins, and we fill in the backstory ourselves. Usually with something that looks a lot like it must have been easier for them.
Earned, not given 💪
Adam said people tell him it’s disingenuous to talk about bootstrapping when he’s launching a company on top of a business with $15m a year in profit.
He only gets to have that because of everything that came before it. The work it took to get into Rice. Then onto a trading floor, where he did well enough to walk away with the money to fund a company of his own. Five things that didn’t work for every one that did. A million dollars of that money into Robly. Two mass layoffs, seven years apart. He calls those two days the worst moments of his career.
What he’s built over ten years isn’t just four companies. It’s a platform the next company gets launched from. Shared data, shared legal, shared team, an audience that already trusts him. Of course the fourth one looks easy. The first one is what paid for it.
It’s easy to say you could only do that because you have this. He only has this because he did all of that.
He says he got lucky too. I don’t know if I believe in luck as much as I believe in preparation meeting opportunity.
I wrote about luck here: Lucky people create their own opportunities
What I got wrong 🙃
I made the same mistake a lot of us make. I read the internet and believed it, and decided building a company was easier than it is.
Somewhere in the last couple of years I took my eye off my own ball, and I’m living the consequences of that now. I started measuring my company against a highlight reel and kept waiting for my version to get as easy as theirs looked. I didn’t work as hard as I should have, because I didn’t think I needed to.
I know now that none of it is easy. It wasn’t easy for Adam either, no matter how he makes it look.
Take the inspiration, because it’s real and it should motivate you. Just remember you’re looking at someone’s tenth year, not their first.
The people who make it look the easiest are usually the ones working the hardest.
To hear my full conversation with Adam, tune into this episode of ProfitLed here: Apple, Spotify, YouTube
Find Adam on LinkedIn.
Till next time,
— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️
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