#157: Brand | Creating Irresistible LinkedIn Posts, Creating Real-Time Feedback Loops, and What It Means To Be Authentic with Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com

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One, two, three, four. Exit. Exit.

Exit. Yeah, man. Thanks for, thanks for being on. I. I'm glad we, we met a couple weeks ago for real life in, in Brooklyn.

Who knows where that was? It was, it was like in another time, in another place.

I sat, I sat like in the front row for presentation and you shouted me out, which is pretty cool.

Yeah, I had to get you off your phone, though. I was like, you're like texting somebody. I'm like, I'm like, dave, look at the slide.

They were texting me. They said, you got to come to the back, you're next. And I was like, no, I want to sit up here for a minute. So you've basically found this power alley with LinkedIn and it's been a big growth lever for you, for your business. And I want to unpack some of that today. But actually I want to start with something that I saw you write maybe yesterday or this morning, maybe this today. Are you doing a first of your first live event this afternoon?

First live event. Thank Chris Walker for that one.

Can you share that story, share what he does, why you think it's a good idea, what you're doing and where it fits?

Yeah. So, like, I think Chris believes a lot of the things that I believe about this founder brand stuff. He feels that being super authentic and uncopyable is like kind of a North Star of his, which is why he used video. He was like, I was writing these text posts and then I'd see people sort of rework the text posts and he's like, you know what if I'm filming myself from two different directions? Like, literally you can't copy that. Right. So it's just better than the Whatever.

Seems like he only posts videos now.

Yep. So the motion that he has, which is kind of answering this question also. So anyway, I was kind of gloating to him and Andy Muborn about how I was so amazed. Like, I sort of had this idea for what RB2B's motion would be and it was just wrong for, like a weird, nuanced region. Like, my plan was to, like, give leads away for free.

Wait, can you explain, since you're going to talk about. Can you explain RB2B for people? Because they'll be like, R B2B.

Yeah, exactly. Sorry.

So it's one of the products that you built, right?

Right. Someone hits your site, they leave, they don't do anything else. We can resolve it to a LinkedIn profile and push it to Slack. And it's free. Like, we're doing a big freemium offer. Like, we were just talking about mailchimp earlier. So my, like, Churn is like the biggest enemy in these SaaS companies. My current company has always been High Churn. I thought that we had solved it 18 months ago by honing in on an ICP. It turns out it only solves it by like 20%. It's still ridiculously high Churn. I'm sure you've worked at some companies that are that way. Also, the problem is, unbeknownst to me, which I just learned from talking to a bunch of investors and just the experience of the last 18 months, there are high Churn product categories that no matter what you do, they're going to remain High Churn. You can bolt on other products and try to get bundles or whatever, but, like, at its core, if it is not a system of record or completely Indispensable. And there's people that can come in and turn it off. People are going to come in and turn it off.

Yeah. So for context, your main business is a company called retention.com, which is 22 million ARR. Probably more than that. Now, you started another product which is called RB2B. That's the freemium offer. And you are a serial entrepreneur founder and used to really only write about E commerce. And now you kind of shifted to focus on B2B. And that's why we're connected and that's why you're on this podcast. It's interesting you said that about the category. So you're trying to get out of that category or are you saying, like.

You just so what? I was. So the. So let's say a CRM is the lowest churn thing there is.

Yeah.

Right. The other side of that would be selling someone leads and trying to make it a SaaS. There's nothing higher churn than someone's ability to interpret whether or not leads are worth the amount of SaaS they're paying for and then either canceling it or not. Right. So, like, in an effort to try to make what is an intrinsically super high churn business low churn, my idea was give the leads away for free and just charge for like a really sophisticated integration, which is like a workflow. Which a workflow is somewhere in the middle. It's like a substantially less, you know. Anyway, the fundamental problem was, which I didn't know about, is when you push something into Slack with no code, you can parse that Slack block in Zapier for like, you know, a quarter of a cent per per record and throw it anywhere you want. So, like, there's this huge problem of like a massive amount of value in the free tier. And no matter what I even proposed to people, there was this weird willingness to pay before that they signed up and then they were so enamored by the free version that I couldn't even have a paid conversation with them after.

That if the free product was too good.

Yeah, there was just. But interestingly, I was having this conversation in real time with LinkedIn and people were giving me the vocabulary to articulate and understand this. And so I was kind of talking to Andy and Chris. I'm like, dude, like, so now what we think the move is is accept the fact that it's a high churn business segment. People on the way in that we think are high value, basically cap leads. So we are selling leads as SaaS. But, you know, have a quick two touch sales motion for people that we are 99% certain we'll book a demo in four weeks and get them on a paid plan. So that's going to be high churn, but like that's going to be a super fast ramp. Just based on businesses I built in the past with the type of funnel we have. It's going to be great. LinkedIn literally got me there, which I was just so like, LinkedIn got me all of the trialers, it got me like thousands of waitlist customers, it got me like hundreds of discovery calls. And I'm telling Andy Muborn, who's another LinkedIn guy, and Chris, I'm like, I'm just amazed by like, you know, my favorite book for starting startups is Four Steps to the Epiphany. And the basic idea of Four Steps to the Epiphany is most people want to just build their product and they want to launch it and then they want to go sell the idea. With Four Steps to the Epiphany is tech is so hard and your intuition is often so bad with what you think will work that if you are not validating and possibly even collecting money from people as you're building the tech, odds are by the time you get to where the tech's done and you try to launch it, you're not going to have any buyers. So it's a dramatically risk reducing experience if you have one person building and one person actually forming the customers along the way. This was that times a thousand. Like I just could not believe with this. So like with the founder brand content that I was creating and how I was articulating these problems that are experienced by revenue leaders in this market, in the authority that was building the respect for me and us and what we were doing and like how transparent I was being about my own SaaS and my own problems. We could get anybody on the phone, like it was unbelievable. Had thousands of people on a waitlist before we started. And then as we launched, I'm like making posts about like, I literally was thinking people would like see the slack block be like, oh like all I got to do is pay 495 to like push these to outreach or whatever done. Not one person did that. Like not even a single person out of we've had 6,000 signups. Did what I thought that everyone was going to do, right? And I'm kind of blogging about this in real time and hundreds of people would write back with their suggestions about what I should do, you know, and I was Just like, how incredible is this? Like, a couple of people commented in the comments, they're like, this is the best execution of marketing and product I've ever seen in my life. Also, like, you're getting real time feedback. And then there's these founders who are like, I don't understand how you can write that because you're just admitting that, like, what you're doing is not working at all, you know? So anyway, I was gloating about this to Chris and Andy Newborn, and Chris is like, dude, like, LinkedIn feedback loop is unbelievable. It's so short, it's so fast. But, like, the best feedback for me is this weekly event that I do. It gets 50 to 200 people every week. I put it on my podcast afterwards. He's like, it's so good for getting the temperature of the market, what people are really struggling with. He's like, I test out my market messaging with this group of people every week. And like, you know, it helps me refine that since, like, so much for him is just, this is all his top of the funnel, right?

And when he talks about that or how do you see, is it the 50 to 200 people that go to. He's had me as a guest on them. They're great. But do you think it's like, I'm trying to give practical advice for other people? Is it the comments in the chat? Like, he might share something and then people are in the chat saying, yes. Oh, I've been stuck on this. Is it that? Is it that where that feedback loop kicks in?

You think so? He's like, I do a 10 to 30 minute monologue typically, or he'll have somebody on like, you. I watched that episode, by the way. It was really good. And he's like, afterwards I just open it up for questions and the real value is in people just whatever they're asking about. And then by the way, that turns every single One of his LinkedIn posts is either a question that someone asks him during one of these interviews, or he does guest slots on other podcasts, gets it recorded, and then he has a team slicing short form up by idea, and he writes his text post. So it's doing so much for him. He's so much more efficient than I am.

Like, so what's the topic of your live event and what audience is this for?

Yeah, so like, I'm trying to like, talk about inbound, LED outbound as like this thing that I'm experimenting with in terms of a go to market motion. And the story is kind of like 18 months ago, I had two BDRs and it was sort of working. And then I hired 10. And then the 10 BDRs were booking the same amount of demos as the two BDRs. I think that happened to a lot of people last year. And then we like, shrunk the staff again and it started working. It's like, there's a lot of reasons why outbound is getting harder. And really what you need to scale is the demand creation and not necessarily the demand capture, which is kind of what these BDRs, I think, are relegated to now. So I'm describing that entire way of doing things as inbound, let outbound. And like, what does it mean for me? It's like, well, LinkedIn is perfect because I'm selling into people. It's the magic alignment between me being my ICP and my ICP living on LinkedIn. And it's an incredible awareness generator for me and for us. Then the other thing that I'm doing is I was on nine podcasts last week. I'm trying to be on every single guest slot that I possibly can because I don't know what kind of listenership you have. I'm sure it's great, but like, the people who are listening to this are like, fanatical. They're so devoted, and it's like I get elevated in their mind just because I'm talking to you. It's like, even if 50 people listen to one of these nine podcasts that I did last year for an hour, it's totally worth it because that's also creating the initial demand that might bring somebody back to our website, which then we can, you know, sort of use our own tech to identify them and try to bring them back again and like, whatever. That's the idea.

All right, and so this is a live event and you're going to. Is this for our. The live event is for our B2B.

Exactly. It's for. Okay, you know, and I think it's the camps that I've found are interested in this tech. It's like demand generation marketers, founders who are effectively doing that job for themselves, trying to solve the outbound problem and then lead gen agencies. That's like the three main pockets of people that when I'm like, this is what I do, they're like, I'm ready to drop everything and try it.

I think it'll be two and a half years ago since I wrote that book, And I think LinkedIn has become even bigger. And I think, especially if you're a founder in B2B, it is the channel. And I think you're a perfect example of that. You have close to 80,000 followers. But it's not even the followers. It's like if you look at the post, the level of engagement and the comments you get on your post, that is the advantage. And then you'll have this feedback loop that you're going to create. Like, and so you're going to go do this event, right? And this is what I talk about all the time, is how we. We've turned, basically turned my LinkedIn following into a business with Exit 5. That was the whole strategy. But you write on LinkedIn, you get feedback. Now you have ideas for other things. Oh, this topic would be great to do an event about. Or this would be a podcast episode. Man, that podcast episod. So we did with Adam on X, Y and Z topic was really popular. Oh, we're doing an event in three months. Like, who should we have speak at that event? It's going to be Adam. And so I'm not like, trained up in marketing as demand Gen or ABM or even product marketing. I'm good at two things. I'm good at copywriting and storytelling, and I'm good at content and social media and like, building an audience. And that's basically, I don't really have any, like, frameworks and playbooks. I know how to write online, get and hold attention. I know how to use the feedback loop. I know how to basically take ideas and be like a tastemaker for which content we should go and create. And I like talking to people like you because I think this is a skill that I'm not able to articulate for like a secret ingredient that you can use to be good at marketing. And we've talked about it a little bit on this podcast, but I like to do like, specific episodes on, on LinkedIn because I think still people are sleeping on it. Devin Reed, who's a friend of mine, he runs content at Clary, he wrote a post the other day about how like a year ago the CEO at Clary, like, didn't do anything on LinkedIn and now he's been writing on LinkedIn and they've grown like 12 million impressions, some absurd number in revenue and pipeline. And I just commented on that and I was like, damn, imagine if your CEO didn't have time to play around on LinkedIn because there is this narrative out there. Sometimes it's like, well, the founder CEO doesn't have time. Or like, I love my other favorite narrative. Like, there's so many people out there who are doing good work that are not showing up on LinkedIn like I'm sure there are. But there's an advantage if you can write. And I think what you've done is you have taken this. Like, I'm gonna stand out by being transparent. I'm not gonna give two Fs about what people say or think about me. I'm gonna share my journey, I'm gonna try a bunch of stuff. I'm gonna be transparent and I'm gonna use that. And it's worked perfectly to help you grow the business now.

Yes. And by the way, I'm the CEO of two startups, right? Like, one of them has 60 people and the other one has five and is eight weeks old, which in many ways is even more challenging, you know, So I really do believe. And look, I'm trying to get more efficient at it. I'm trying to get more out of what we're doing, all that stuff. But like you said, if you're in B2B and you can actually figure this out, there just can't be a better channel than it. Right? Like, I see what it's doing for. It's incredible what it's doing. And this is like, it gets into, like, it's like, well, what's incredible about it? It's like I can now walk into an event, like, golden hour, and I just stand there and I'm sure this happens to you too. I just stand there in groups of two. People will come up and be like, man, love your stuff. Like, so awesome. Like, you know, sort of like, whatever the current. It's like that post last week. Oh my God, Like, I had just put out this monthly update where I was like, we're down four months in a row and we just were down 2.3%. I don't know when this is going to end. It's terrible. This is like the worst thing I've ever written. But it suc. Know, whatever. And people are just like, wow, dude, like, how'd you write that?

Like, so brave of you.

Yeah, exactly. But, like, they don't even say their names when they come up and say hi, right? Like, they feel like I am their friend. And that may sound shallow and narcissistic as a desire to create or whatever, but like, that to me is the power of this thing. It's like I am scaling in this universe. The group of people that literally feels like they're friends with me as I'm rolling this other thing out. And all of the stuff you said about my content, basically, I'd never done it until I read your book and decided that it was time. And it's like, well, what it's like with any marketing. It's like, well, how am I going to stand out? Because otherwise I'm just. No one's going to care about any of this stuff. And that was what I decided I could do. Right.

Like, it's unbelievable. I mean, I've felt this from a business standpoint since like 2016 of working at Drift, where people reacted that way. And that was the eye opening thing for me. We used to joke about. We had this podcast called Seeking Wisdom, and we used to joke about it. David, who's the CEO and founder, I was kind of like the young, up and coming person. He was a seasoned entrepreneur. We kind of had two different tales that we were telling. I was. I would kind of play host to get the good stories out of him, but we would get. People come up to us and be like, I love the podcast or can I take a picture? And we'd be like, wait, what? Yeah, this is crazy. And it creates such a. You create this audience of, like, super fans and people who actually know you. And some of them will buy your product. Most of them don't. And that's actually totally fine because they will spread your message and evangelize your thing. And I'm feeling that again with Exit 5 now. And what's crazy is that golden hour event that I saw you at. I hadn't traveled for work in like four or five years, and I had to like, take a nap for like six days after that because, like, I. And I almost quit this business twice. I just was like, I don't want to build in this space. I want to go write poetry in the mountains or something, you know? And I left that event with so much energy because it just was like a slap in the face, like, so many people. And I say this with no ego at all. Just like, I went in there and so many people were like, dave, dg, what's up? Can we hang out? Who? Take a picture. I talked to. Hey, that thing that you wrote. And I was like, wait, this many people? Like, it just. I hadn't felt that in person in so long. I was like, this many people know who I am and what I'm doing because I write on LinkedIn. That is crazy. And so it would be silly of me to not build something in this space. And it does create the advantage. However, you're really good at this. And I Think that there is a lot of advice from like kind of online digital writing. That whole digital writing crew who loves to tell you just write online and the future will unlock for you. Like yeah, not really because anyone can write online. Like you have to have something to say and you're a good example of that. You're sharing transparently. Like, can you maybe talk about what your content strategy is? Let's get into the nitty gritty of like.

Yes.

What did you start writing about? How do you write? And I want to know everything from like, do you post, do you comment? You talk to some of it in your. In that talk. But I want to like on. People love that. Like do you schedule posts? How do you comment? How do you come up with topics? You've done some crazy stuff like doing a documentary. I want to. Let's start at the beginning and talk about first. How did you decide what to write about and what level of transparent to be?

Yeah, so like I was willing to be very transparent about what was going on in my business and my financials because I felt like I was bootstrapped. It was kind of remarkable at the time I started writing we were 12 million AR and had six people. So like I had noticed that just saying that and saying nothing else. People were like, holy crap.

Yeah, I'm not, hey look, I'm not a big math guy, but that's $2 million per employee. That's a good benchmark, right?

Yeah. So like. But that kind of got me thinking. It's like, okay. And one of my friends was like, well it's just because everyone else makes less money and has more employees, you know, so like. But then we hired a bunch of people. Now it's, you know, 22 million, whatever.

Do you think you had the confidence to share those things because you are bootstrapped. Like it is your business. There's no. I. I do feel like in the venture back world there's so much like we don't want anybody to know what our actual revenue is because that's how you show the cards to VCs for future rounds. And is there something in there?

I think absolutely a lot of what I do, I mean I didn't want this to be about 6 cents at all. But like I don't think a venture backed company could have done that back to them. It's gotta be some wild man that doesn't care. Maybe they could have. Maybe somebody would have. I don't know. So here's what I think. I think so long as everything is Great. You have a lot of rope to hang yourself with if you're venture backed or private equity backed. The second something goes wrong.

It's very true.

Yeah. The second it's not absolutely perfect and it is like one inch away from what you promised them. I don't even care if they don't have control of your company. Like, from what I understand, it starts being this enormous psychological pressure from someone that believes they understand your business because they are rich and probably got that way some completely different way than your business. And it just, they make you feel bad about everything you're doing. So I think it would very quickly whether or not it was an explicit directive to stop being so transparent, I think they would belittle you into stopping this. Like, last month would have been a great example. It's like if I would have gone to some investors and been like, I'm about to put out a very long post about how we've been down four months in a row and we're down 2.3% as much. Like, what is the possible upside that you're going to get from that? Right. Like, why in a million years would you put that out for everyone?

Yeah.

And by the way, it was terrible to put out. But like, the only reason I put it out was because I'm committed to doing it at this point. And I know, I've just been told by so many founders, I love that you keep it real. Everyone is hurting right now in SaaS. No one else is saying that they are. Right. Like, yeah, there's not a single other brand that is just like, I am getting my teeth kicked in at this moment. And here is literally the path that like, here's how bad it is.

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Like memes and jokes. And it's almost like, you know, the best comedians are the ones who just say the most, like relatable stories from daily life. You know, so I'm pumping my gas and you're like, yes. And that's what makes it funny. It's like that's what's relatable. It's like, wow, this Guy is the CEO of a 20 million dollar SaaS company and he's talking about how he's having a really hard time right now. Like, shoot, nobody's doing that. And we don't even have to argue the pros and cons of bootstrapping and venture capital. I'm just talking about from like a attention standpoint, if you're going to play the game on LinkedIn you're most likely not going to be able to say anything in the other camp. Here you are kind of exposing everything that you're doing. It's a way to help people separate the signal from the noise, right?

Totally. Number one, you just have to be different. I think when you're thinking about what your content strategy is going to be like, you can't copy me because I've already done it. Right.

And actually so a lot of people that are listening will work at venture backed companies. And so like we're not railing on that. I just think what the lesson that I would take from this is. Oh, if that's you and you're not willing to share transparent stuff about metrics and financials, then you can't just come with vanilla content. What's your angle gonna be? Is that how you would think about that?

Exactly.

Okay.

Like what separates you from the sea of everybody else's content out there? Because if you really want this to work, it has to break through in some way. You have to offer something that nobody else is. And that's, I think, the difference between okay and great. And by the way, like okay is fine for a lot of things. Like you can be okay at this game and it can serve the purpose of when you're trying to hire someone, somebody does research on you, they look at this, they can see what you care about, what it's like working at your shop or whatever, that's still enormously valuable. It's just not going to be this gigantic electromagnet pulling people in from your target audience. Right. This any marketing, by the way, it's not just LinkedIn. It's like if you are not different, it's not going to work. It's just not okay.

So lesson number one, be, be different. Have something to say.

Exactly.

Now let's talk about how do you turn those crazy founder thoughts about being different into actual writing? This is where I hear from a lot of founders or people that work with founders, this is where things break down. Like they got all the thoughts, but how do I actually turn them into writing?

So I can send you my golden hour slides which I think are insightful to just flip through in general, which tells this whole journey. But like long story short, for me to hit what Devin Reed calls content market fit, it took 12 months. And my starting point, which I would actually recommend is I worked with a ghostwriter and I think the advantage of working with a ghostwriter is like if you were like a marketer and you were to go to your CEO and be like, you need to post on LinkedIn. You would get two types of objections. One is I don't want to be famous, which I would call bullshit on, because you're not actually going to be famous. And there is nothing more effective for the growth of every part of your business than you being famous in this small world. Then the second set of objections are things along the lines of, I don't have time to do this, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't want to get on that treadmill, I don't, I don't know. Right. So the ghostwriter knocks out all of the second type of objections and it doesn't require a lot from the CEO. If you are good at articulating what your perspective can be and how you can actually be different, you can actually look, there's some structural things about LinkedIn that are different from other social media platforms.

Like, can you talk about how you worked with this ghostwriter specifically?

So, yeah, in the beginning, which is the path that I recommend taking, it was like maybe like an hour or two of idea generation type conversations and like coming up with a content calendar to post every day divided into certain topics. Right.

Well, were they like interviewing you? How were those, how are they getting content from you?

More or less. It was like a two way conversation of like, okay, so like last week we kind of talked about this stuff, like, what do you think about this, this or this? And you know, half of it was work in public, so it was me coming. Like, we're experimenting with this stuff. We're hiring a bunch of people like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, what do you think about this.

This and this and would you meet with this person every like once a.

Week at least maybe so like already.

That'S just a great. And I'm repeating this back because I think even if you don't hire a ghostwriter, marketers that listen to this, you could do this in house with your founder, with founder or key exec or whatever. Like, we got a 30 minute meeting on the calendar. I've done this in the past with founders. But what I think is great is you kind of already had this theme which is like, you weren't like, let's think of quotes that I like and like inspirational sayings. You're like, no, basically I'm just gonna. This is almost like a live blog of us building this company. And then the content there becomes easier than trying to think of something witty to say, Right?

Yep. So I heard another example that I just think is so helpful. I was just like, yes. So I was talking to the CEO of this company called Aligned. They're like a sales. I don't know exactly what with. It was some kind of PLG sales tech and he's actually had a couple posts do really well and he's been every part of the sales. Org adventure backed startups before. So he's like, I've realized that work in public for me is talking about when I was VP sales at my last company and all of the weird pain that I was experiencing then. And he's like, this is venture backed. I'm not going to do what you're doing, but I can do something very similar to what you're doing. But just talking about my last life because the problems are basically the same now, right? Like a VP Sales struggles with VP sales issues and by the way, that's who they're selling to. So that's like an interesting idea if your first response is, well, I just can't work in public because my investors won't let me. It's like, well, is there some tie to your target market and ideal customer profile that relates to past experience that you can work in public? As of five years ago, Yeah.

I mean that was like the whole thing that I wrote about in the book, which is like just inherently as a founder of this company, you most likely didn't just start this company because you're like sitting at a bar and you're like, ooh, I have a plan to get rich. Let's start a niche B2B technology startup. It's like, right. You know, usually you have some background. Like I always use the example of Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom. He was some like lead engineer or something in at WebEx, right? And like they helped create WebEx. And so it was a natural extension to go and create Zoom. And so most cases, like in the Drift example, David, our CEO, he had started five, like three or four other Martech companies and Drift was his fifth. And so it's like, let's talk about all of the lessons you've learned building these types of companies. And you don't have to share financials or metrics to do that, right?

Totally. But it's what you said in the very beginning, it's teasing out that perspective that is unique, right? That's super unique to Dave Cancel. The fact that he like was basically the architect of HubSpot and was on that whole journey. And you know, I mean, I would read every single word that guy wrote because I want to Be him someday. I mean, that's just the reality of it.

And also the ghostwriter, and it's interesting to hear you say, like, start with the ghostwriter. I haven't had that epiphany, but I can understand now, and I agree with it. It's almost like you've never worked out. You hire a personal trainer to, like, teach you what exercises to do, and then, like, eventually you can go and do it. You're like, actually, I don't. I don't need this person anymore. Like, I got the stuff in my house. I can do this myself. Right?

Yeah. Because there's, like, certain. I mean, look, whenever I say this, people, like, send me the templates. But, like, there's certain templates that, like, when you're learning LinkedIn, if you adhere to those templates versus just rambling, it's going to do way better in the template. If you study people's hooks. Like, there's a type of hook that typically does quite well on LinkedIn. Right? So, like, a ghostwriter should understand some of that. So you can, like, work with them for a few months and then I think, see if you get the content bug. Right. Like, the way you're going to absolutely crush is if you make this your life. That's just the same with anything. There's no shortcut. That's just the sad reality of success.

Here's a good hook. Two weeks ago, Scott, you wrote this hook two days ago. Two weeks ago, Scott lease told me outbound sales as we know it is dead. Here's why Scott thinks he's only got three to four years left as a sales consultant and what the future of B2B sales looks like.

Yeah, Nice cliffhanger, too, with the future. Yeah. LinkedIn loves, like, definitive stuff. Like, you know, the golden age of SaaS is over. Like, you know, like, 99% of startups think they should, you know, whatever. They're wrong.

Like, yeah, the amount of times I've said, like, here's my favorite marketing tactic, and it's like, I got a hundred things in that list.

Yeah, yeah, look, I didn't start actually writing my own stuff until nine months in, and it was really hard. That's another reason why I think dealing with a ghostwriter is an okay idea. In the beginning, if the CEOs like, no, I'm not going to do it, it's like, well, if you're in the B2B space and he's saying, no, propose, are you willing to work with a ghostwriter for three months and spend One hour a week with them to just see if you can start seeing the benefit of this. Because a lot of people that do. I hear people say, I don't know exactly what this is doing for me, but it's doing something and I like it. And that's like, the start of getting the bug to where. I mean, now it's so crazy for me that I'm just like, man, how do I go even deeper into this? Right? Like, I'm already as deep as I can get, and it's like, I'm just looking for, like, another layer to pull back because I'm like, I've never seen a tool as powerful as this.

Do you think you were successful, though? Like, obviously, you. You have good content. You have a way of writing. You mentioned this earlier, which I don't want to, like, sleep on for people. It basically took you 12 months to figure out what to do. Should people just accept? Like, did you have a reason why? Like, did you know, like, hey, I think this can be a lever for our business. I'm just going to do it and I'm going to shut up and not care about it for 12 months. Like, how do you get people to swallow that pill that this is going to take time? Because I do feel like, like anything, if you do something for three to four months and it's not working, you just want to stop doing it.

It's hard. Yeah. So, like, providing some context on my journey is helpful to answer this question. So in the beginning, after reading your book and talking to some other people, I was like, okay, I have an awareness problem in the Shopify market that I'm trying to sell into. We have very low penetration and no competition. What is the quickest way to spread awareness? It has to be building a personal social media profile these days rather than a business. Right. And then it was like, okay, what platform? And the actual founders were kind of more on Twitter. But Twitter's so much more competitive as a platform in terms of the balance of content creators versus consumers than LinkedIn. There's, like, a deficit of content creation relative to the active users on LinkedIn. And so kind of what I bought into was like, all right, so the founders may not be on here. The ecosystem definitely is. And I'll do Twitter eventually, but I'll start with the initial audience, maybe try to get, like 10 or 20,000 followers on LinkedIn, and then go try to slay the Twitter beast, which will be much harder. So that was why I started LinkedIn. It wasn't like it wasn't working. It just wasn't doing what it is now, which is perfect content audience fit or whatever it's called Content market fit, the Devin Re term. So it was doing some of this stuff that I was talking about. The thing that it never did was like reliably source real business. Meaning like it wasn't booking us sales demos in the E Comm world. But I think that's because the E comm founders were not living on LinkedIn. Whereas like now it's like there's a linear connection between the amount of impressions we get in a week and the amount of signups for RB2B that we have. It's like a very easy thing to see and say that that's entirely responsible for that.

But it's interesting because it's like the way to grow impressions is to not actively promote your product.

Yeah.

Like for example, if you look at all of your posts from the last couple weeks. Right. The one with the least engagement. Do you know what your post the least engagement is? If you had to guess, I think.

It'S probably the one I put out yesterday on the event. Trying to promote my event.

Exactly.

Because they're promoting it right right now.

However, there is a weird. I do notice a weird thing. Like if I promote the Exit 5 newsletter, I might get like 6 comments on that post, which is not very many comments or post of mine. But if I go look in like my HubSpot analytics, I'll see 200 new email subscribers that day. And so I feel like people are seeing it and it's like a prompt for them to go do it. Now if I only posted that though, it wouldn't be able to drive any results. So I don't have any doubt that you drove hundreds of signups from that post. But my point is like, it's hard for people to think about in the marketing strategy of the business when you have goals and stuff because they want like we want more. It's like, okay, well if we grow impressions from Adam's account, we're going to grow more signups. So how do we get more people to sign up for the product? Well, let's talk about the product more. It's actually a no. You have to do the more top of the funnel things that just lead to overall more awareness for Adam, more awareness for our B2B is eventually going to drive more people back to our website. And it's just not very like linear step by step. Right.

And all impressions are not created the same either. Like, I can write about certain Things that will get far more impressions, far more likes. But the people who are commenting are of a lower direct connection to people who would be high value prospects for our company than if I write about another subject. For example, something like that Scott Lease post that's going to get a lot of AES and sales leaders commenting. They're the ultimate users of this tech, but they're not the discoverers and the buyers. Some marketing title typically is. Does that make sense? Like salespeople are not looking for RB2B. Like if anything they're like I don't need another new tech that like you think works because you're in some CMO community and they're saying it does and you're going to like jam it down my throat and give me goals on the back of it. Like I'm. I would rather just use my Apollo list. Right. Like. But salespeople are I believe the largest cumulative group of people that are actually doing their jobs on LinkedIn. So it gets the highest engagement. And it's not like it's totally unrelated because it like is B2B SaaS and it's good to have awareness in that, in that universe. But like if I write about ABM and like the shortcomings of demand base for instance I will get much lower impressions, lower likes. But the quality of the people commenting as it pertains to future high value user of our business is night and day.

Yeah. Are you going to get a demand based lawsuit also? Are you trying to get one from them also?

No, I'm. Yeah, I'm friends with their CRO. Not yet. It's just so helpful when these people suit. Like I knew you knew. Like it's like some of these people commenting, they're like oh like this is whatever. I'm like there is not. It's like if you've ever started something from zero, you immediately recognize the opportunity of someone serving you a cease and desist. Who's like a dream competitor. Right. Like I'm not even worthy of being competition to them. They didn't even send me a season assist for this reason. But then I can say back it's because they're scared. You know what I mean? Like, like running this Damon Goliath.

Yeah, there's just little opera. I don't think that stuff is fun. Like people get so mad about it. This is like what's fun. We're all just playing a game here. There was one time at Saster I had Jason on the podcast last week. I should have mentioned this, but they Asked me to leave because I wasn't even doing anything. I, I wasn't even being a jerk. I was like filming it. We decided to not spend on a booth and not do anything. And I just did interviews. Like I'd walked around the floor and I just did interviews and we had a camera crew and they didn't like that so much. And David like tweeted out, like, I just got a text from Dave Garrett. He's been kicked out of Zester. And it's like people pick that up and it like, it like went mini viral. It's like you, you gotta, you gotta look for those opportunities. And like, I don't know if it's in the laws of power or the laws of startup marketing, but any opportunity to punch up, like, you never want to punch down, but if you can punch up and take every advantage that you can get, like if we saw a bigger company steal our messaging and we could screenshot that and show that they saw it. Like, you, you do this, you. You say, oh, so and so from so and so company signed up for our product. Like, that stuff is great.

It's fine. Yeah, totally. I mean, you asked me about what it actually looks like now. Right. So now I write everything and I'm trying to do videos for a lot of it.

So where do you write?

At this desk. But sitting?

No, like, like, do you schedule? Do you like, write in a Google Doc and then copy and paste it and schedule it into LinkedIn? What's that? What do you do?

I use a consultant who works with other B2B founders named Alec Paul. He's very expensive and he's got a long wait list. But feel free to email me and I'll introduce you so you can join it if you want. So my Mondays are crushing. It's like all of my internal meetings, it's nonstop. I don't even get a lunch break. It's terrible. One of those meetings is an idea generation meeting. That's one hour with Alec and then there's a half hour meeting that is related to Inbound that is occurring off of my profile. Does that make sense? It's like a deeply integrated sales motion at this point. Like anybody that we want to talk to, we use my LinkedIn profile to talk to them.

Yep.

Before, during, or after they start using product. So Tuesdays, I have now mostly achieved an empty schedule, except for other podcasts and now my own event. So that I try to dedicate to writing the three or four posts that I'm going to write before I'D made this divide. It kind of was crushing because like, all my days were stacked and I was like, man, it's Thursday night. I haven't read three posts yet. When am I going to do it? But having this wide open Tuesday feels really good to me. I feel like you kind of need space to write well or whatever. And then I have a one hour video shoot that is either video related to. It's just this. It's like me and Christy, our film girl. It's either talking heads related to the posts I wrote or we're going to make a another season of the docu series in the fall. So she's already, she's building content so that we can put out, you know, five, 10 episodes of like what launching RBDB was.

Do you use a scheduler?

So what Alec, the purpose he serves is sort of channels the ideas, how he views properly, makes sure the hook is perfect. Because this was like one of the things that was bothering me about my ghostwriter. It's like at the end of the day, you're a customer of an agency. So like getting great work out of most agencies is very hard. But Alec, his role is like, make sure the hook is perfect, make sure the post is perfectly edited, make sure the close is wonderful or whatever. And then he posts it. He actually does the posting. So I write in a Google Doc that is now 150 pages long. I just like push the post down and then he goes, edits it, you know, puts it in LinkedIn.

So if you put. Yeah, I sometimes I just write and I'm like, ah, the hook wasn't great, but whatever. But he, the reason you hire him and work with him is because basically that it ensures that every post is gonna, no matter what you're writing about, there's gonna be a proper format, a proper hook.

Yes. And he has a partner that does this. They do this sales motion together. Does that make sense? There's like a semi automated. Yeah, I got it messaging thing in my inbox that they run.

So basically you're searching for interesting ICP ish people that have commented or engaged on their posts on your posts and will trigger some type of like, hey, thanks for the comment. By the way. Did you know that we can blah, blah, blah, dm, like DM Funnel flow. Yeah. Cool.

Yep.

Do you have any idea how much revenue that's generated so far?

Well, I mean the issue is we don't have the features built yet to monetize our B2B. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's at 28K mrr or something. So 300.

Wait, so you're doing this play for the free product? So it's to get people to sign up. Oh, cool.

Exactly. Very soon it will be free for like 80% of the world and like, you know, 20%.

Yeah.

Probably half of them will try to, like, charge.

So is your LinkedIn like a mess? Like, if you just log in right now, you just have like a 600 messages. Like, can you still use it personally?

Yeah, because they run a folder that's different than my personal folder. Does that make sense? They've got all of their activities in my other. And they keep my focus folder pretty clean.

Do you have two folders in the LinkedIn inbox?

Yeah, you can have a different folder that they pull all of their activity.

Into that doesn't exist. Yeah, you can create a new folder. Other.

I mean, maybe I just. Do you have other focused?

I have other.

That's like, okay, so they run their business out of the other and then my stuff is in focus. But, like, if I go into my connection request, they only want to accept people. And we haven't even gone through and accepted the connection requests of the ICP visitors yet because it takes them a ton of time. But I've got like 8,000 pending connection requests.

Yeah.

You know, but I'm having a great time with this, the thing I'm interested in. And I'm wondering if you ever felt this is in talking to Scott Leese, who you read that hook from.

Sure.

He was like, you're super excited about this, but you've only been doing it for, whatever, a year or something like that. He's like, I've been at it for 10 years. He's like, I feel the weight of having to write these posts. He's like, it's real.

It's like, well, you don't have to. He doesn't have to do it. No one's telling. No one's making it.

He's like, it's the only thing that keeps my little consulting business going. He's like, there's no other source of.

Yeah.

Awareness.

I mean, then that's the game. Then, like, that he's playing. And I'm not even saying this in a negative way, like, if that's your funnel, like, there are definitely other ways to build. I think it's just like anything. I think it's a tactic. There are lots of other ways. It might be the most effective and you might have to lay them all out. But, yeah, it's like anything it's like, if that becomes the golden go, like, if you're so tied to that channel and that channel goes away, it could go away because, like, LinkedIn takes it away or you stop being interested in it.

Yeah.

And then you're like, then I gotta find a new channel. And, you know, that is what it is. So for me, I was definitely in like a two year rut, maybe two, three years rut. So, like, when I was at Drift, it was Perfect because our ICP was marketers. They were all on LinkedIn. I could write about what we were doing. People liked our marketing and our brand. It worked really well. Then I went to Privy. Privy was in the E commerce space. And so even though it was a SaaS company, like, that world was more on Twitter. And like, I just, I kind of hit a plateau. And then like, I just kind of talked about like, what I was doing as a cmo, but like, we only had six people on the team and it was during COVID and they cut like a million dollars of the budget. And so, like, not that much interesting stuff was happening. And so I didn't have much to write about then I was like a solo consultant, solopreneur. And I started writing about that. But it didn't really hit. When I committed to Exit 5, I went back all in on LinkedIn and like, I still had like a hundred thousand followers or whatever. But then my growth has like been back because now I'm like, it's purposeful again. And so I think whether you're you or Scott or me or whoever, I think it's like, it will work if you see where it fits in the business. So one of the reasons yours is working so well right now is because you're fired up about the businesses you're working on. You see very clearly how like, LinkedIn will work to grow that funnel. If you ended up selling like T shirts in six months from now, then that it might not be the best channel. But for me, like, I'm like, oh, yeah, now I have this megaphone. I have 165,000 followers on LinkedIn and I get to talk about Exit 5. And it is related to this audience. And so it does work. But I haven't had any luck with Twitter.

Twitter.

I might even just delete it. It's just like possess pool for me. I just tweet some random stuff sometimes. But LinkedIn is definitely where it's at.

Yeah.

So, all right, you gotta go. I gotta go. I'm doing a rare thing today. I'm Recording three podcasts back to back to back.

Nice.

And so I'm gonna go talk to this woman, Jen Herman, who is great at Instagram for B2B. So we talked about LinkedIn with you, but anyway, go find Adam on LinkedIn. You'll see him stirring the pot over there on LinkedIn. He's Adam Robinson on LinkedIn. Follow his stuff, connect with him, check out his stuff. I think you've done a great job and I've, I've enjoyed getting to know you. I'm sure we'll hang out. Maybe I'll find a way to make a trip to Austin and there's a. There's a good crew down there. Okay.

I'll take you out on the boat. Okay.

Sounds amazing. All right, Adam, good to see you, man. Good luck with your event later today. I'll see you, buddy.

Exit.

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