Introduction

Welcome to the Zero to $10M ARR Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Morkes, alongside my cohost Alex Turnbull, the founder and CEO of Groove and Helply.

Today, we're sitting down with Adam Robinson, the founder and CEO of Retention and Rb2b.

Adam is a serial entrepreneur who has bootstrapped multiple ventures to multi-million dollar annual recurring revenue.

In 2019, he founded Retention.com, and scaled it to $25M ARR in 5 years, while achieving a $12M run-rate profit.

In 2024, Adam launched RB2B, a tool to help B2B companies identify anonymous website visitors and see their LinkedIn profiles, and scaled it from $0 to $4M ARR in just 10 months.

Before diving into SaaS, Adam spent eight years as a Credit Default Swap Trader at Lehman Brothers. He also built and sold his first company, Robly Email Marketing, for an eight-figure exit.

Beyond his business ventures, Adam lives in Austin, TX, with his wife Helen and two children, Emma and Charlie.

In this episode, we’ll explore Adam’s journey of bootstrapping two successful SaaS companies, his use of a founder brand to drive growth, and how he scaled Retention.com to $25M ARR and RB2B to $4M ARR in record time. Adam, welcome to the show!

Questions

1. You bootstrapped Retention.com to $25M ARR in under five years. Take me back to the beginning. How did it start; where did the idea come from, how much did you invest, and what did the team look like in those early days (from $0 to $1m ARR)?
2. You took Retention.com to 14M ARR with 6 people in 2.5 years. What were the opportunities that you capitalized on during this period that resulted in such fast growth, and how did you take advantage of them?
3. RB2B reached $4M ARR in ten months. Start at the beginning: how did you get started? How much did you invest? What was the composition of your team at launch?
4. What specific strategies or decisions did you apply to Rb2b to grow so quickly, and how did lessons from Retention.com influence this launch?
5. You’ve emphasized the power of a founder brand in driving growth. How did you cultivate your brand, and what specific ways did it impact Retention.com and RB2B’s early traction and scaling efforts?
6. Retention.com helps e-commerce stores identify anonymous visitors, and RB2B does the same for B2B. What challenges did you face adapting the product and strategy to serve two different audiences, and how did you overcome them?
7. Having bootstrapped multiple companies to success, what’s your playbook for balancing profitability with growth, and how do you decide when and where to reinvest for scale?

Outro

That wraps up today’s episode of the Zero to $10M ARR Podcast.

A big thank you to Adam Robinson, founder and CEO of Retention and Rb2b, for sharing his journey and the strategies that helped him bootstrap from zero to $25m ARR.

To learn more about Adam and his companies, visit retention.com and rb2b.com. Adam, thanks again for joining us. And to everyone listening—keep bootstrapping, keep building, and keep scaling.

We’ll see you next time!