The Ledger
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Robinson: Successful founders should take millions yearly instead of awaiting exits
“If you create a successful startup I believe that you should make millions of dollars every year, and not just be waiting for this maybe exit, or like maybe secondary, that maybe will happen, but maybe will not, probably will not.”
6sense demanded a 3x price increase six months before contract expiration
“It's six months before the contract expires. They're like, we're gonna triple your price and hang up the phone.”
Zero-MRR startups can run outrageous marketing because they lack a brand
“You don't have a brand when you're zero MRR. Like, you can do outrageous things with zero consequence, as far as I can tell. Like, The worst thing that happens is you just start over and everyone forgot what you were doing in the first place.”
Robinson paid himself $4 million from Retention.com last year
“I paid myself four million dollars last year”
Programmatic advertising will dominate the recruitment ad market within five years
“Programmatic is going to own that market in five years. And it's companies like ours and ICIMS and others that are going to help customers do that.”
Jasper AI scaled to $50M ARR in 12 months with six employees
“Zero to fifty million ARR with like an island of six people in 12 months.”
Publicizing a competitor's cease-and-desist is the ultimate startup PR play
“This is the single greatest PR opportunity for a company that is three weeks old. That has ever existed in the history of the world. Because I'll go from a LinkedIn guy to every single Sixth Sense customer knowing exactly what we do at RBDB.”
RB2B experiences brutal 10% monthly churn and a nine-month customer LTV
“Like, 10% a month. It's, we just had an agency, like, cancel 80 accounts and put them under one account, so it looks like it's even worse than 10% a month, but like, it's like a nine month LTV.”
Clearbit Reveal solved massive churn by expanding usage across multiple departments
“So I talked to the Clearbit team, the Clearbit reveal team. They said churn was a disaster for that product, and the only thing they could do to lower churn was get other people using other products in other departments.”
Bootstrapped startups retain options when stuck, unlike VC-backed competitors
“When you're bootstrapped and you're trying to run a profitable business, when you get stuck, you have options. And a lot of times, if you're raising VC, you just don't.”
Robinson: Retention.com scaled to $12M ARR with six people
“We actually got to twelve million with six people.”
Robinson: Systems of record retain customers, while lead-gen SaaS suffers high churn
“One thing that I just didn't get before, like, kind of a year and a half ago, is that there are product categories within SaaS that are just intrinsically higher churn than other product categories in SaaS, especially in MarTech. So, the golden goose in MarTec…”
Robinson: Franchise businesses have sub-5% 5-year attrition versus 60% for regular SMBs
“These companies go out of business, 60% every five years. However in the franchise industry, that five year attrition rate is sub five percent. So they don't go out of business. They just resell the location.”
Retention.com reached $12M ARR with six employees before reinvesting all profits
“We were twelve million ARR with six people, and I basically just took all the free cash and put it into trying to create what I viewed as, like, the unicorn company, and, like, honed it in an ICP, thinking it was gonna, like, completely solve this term problem…”
Robinson: Data Businesses Scale to Better Margins Than Traditional SaaS
“The margins, I think, are typically better than SAS as you keep scaling. You know, you kind of have this, like, wonderful quality where you compile a lot of data at SAS margins, and then You don't really have to increase the spend on that data if you do it the…”
Retention.com expects to generate $11 million in net profit in 2024
“It's making eleven million dollars of profit this year, so it's exciting for the founders.”
Teams naturally favor fast-growing early products over stagnant, highly profitable cash cows
“The weird thing about human psychology is that even if something is making you eleven million dollars, if it's not growing, the thing that's growing from one to two is more exciting.”
Retention.com accounts for 85% of company revenue and 120% of profit
“It's 85% of our revenue. It's a 120% of our profit right now.”
ClickFunnels scaled to hundreds of millions while Leadpages stalled at $17M
“He was able to grow that business, which was not that dissimilar from Leadpages to, like, several hundred million Leadpages, because of churn, stalled out at 17.”
Robinson: Retention.com grew to $22M ARR bootstrapped in four years
“I've been on this entrepreneurial journey for 11 years, and I started this company that's now twenty-two million ARR four years ago, and before that, I was stuck at three million ARR for four years.”
Robinson: Jasper AI grew from $100 to $50M ARR in one year
“And from January of one year to January of next year, they went from 100 dollars to fifty million ARR.”
Robinson spends $50,000 monthly on LinkedIn audience and video production
“Like, the consultant I use is, 12,500 dollars a month, but we're using it for four people. It's an integral part of our PLG, so I'm paying somebody who works with him 15 grand to manage outbound communication off of my profile, and set meetings, and move peopl…”
Robinson: Modern customer discovery means building an audience before launch
“Customer discovery is building an audience either before or while you build the product, and I believe that this mechanism allows you to do the modern day four steps of the epiphany.”
Robinson: GetEmails operates at a 50% profit margin with six employees
“Okay, and six, six full-time employees bootstrapped, 50% total margin.”
Robinson: GetEmails connects ad-network identifiers to consumer profiles to reveal visitor emails
“We connect anonymous digital identifiers that are used in the advertising network to rich customer profiles. And yeah, like lead forensics, for instance, does what you're doing, what you're talking about, but we go a step farther. It's primarily a B to C tool …”
Robinson plans to keep GetEmails lean and sell to private equity
“My attitude is keep this thing as small as possible. I actually want to like sell it to a private equity or something that will actually scale the team.”
Robinson: GetEmails' monthly revenue churn is in the single digits
“I mean, I'm not going to give an exact number, but it's single digits.”
Robinson: GetEmails pays monthly cash dividends to employees via shadow equity
“At the end of every month, if you have one percent shadow equity, I just write him a check for one percent. It comes out of the next month's expenses, if that makes sense.”
Robinson: GetEmails distributes 100% of excess cash flow above $250k reserve
“So like we built up to that point and then now it's a one to one with the cash flow we generate.”
Robinson: GetEmails unlikely to sell for $15M-$20M cash
“Probably not for 15 or 20. I just think it's grown so fast that, that there's somebody out there who likes it for more than that.”
Multi-location SMBs require distinct tech stacks due to separate LLC structures
“And what's different in our markets and the reason why it's you know, tough, tough to get into this space is because those four locations are typically operated as four independent LLCs. With four different ownership structures. Maybe owned by a common holding…”
Hireology expects to surpass 100% net revenue retention by late 2019
“And in fact, we expect to do that by the end of next year.”
Selling complete product bundles upfront increases churn if features go unused
“What we've learned over the years is even if we have the opportunity to sell a customer, everything we probably shouldn't because they're going to churn if they're paying for stuff they don't use or see the value.”
Robinson: Labor laws block corporate HR software in decentralized franchise networks
“The nuance of this business and why we largely have this market to ourselves is because the traditional HR tech vendor sells to what they expect to be a centralized role specific HR team at corporate, but in these decentralized networks, that doesn't exist. An…”
Robinson: Hireology achieves 7-8 month CAC payback and 7-10x LTV:CAC
“Well, what I'll tell you is that we're able to get payback in a customer in about seven to eight months. So, you know, we're able to do that and we're able to, you know, to get somewhere between seven and 10, depending on the industry vertical you know, ratio …”
Owner-operators buy software faster than corporate enterprises due to personal stakes
“We want to sell to owners whose names on the sign or whose personal balance sheet is invested in the business because if they see value, they buy as opposed to corporate where the decisions to buy or not to buy are often based on factors that have nothing to d…”
Hireology competitors ignore 7 million US employers to target top 50,000
“The folks who were compared to in our industry sell to the top 50,000 employers in the U S but there's seven million employers in the U S nobody's talking to.”
Robinson: Retention.com suffered roughly 60% gross annual churn
“Now we're pivoting to B to B, and, like, really the reason why is, and why I say I'm stuck again, is this unbelievably high-churn paradigm, and I'm talking, like, 60% gross per year”
Robinson owns 42% of GetEmails and his previous company
“I own 42% of the last company and I own 42% of this one.”
Robinson: GetEmails reached $50k MRR in its first six weeks
“We did like 50 K MRR in like the first six weeks.”
Robinson: New GetEmails customers average 300k to 500k monthly unique visitors
“The people who were bringing on last year probably had an average of 10,000 unique monthly visitors, whereas everybody we're bringing on now has 300 to 500,000.”
Robinson: 75% of GetEmails' top 25 customers have stayed over a year
“So looking at it by segments our top 25 has been around for 75% has been around for over a year.”