(320) GTM 114: Audience-First GTM, Fueling Startup Growth via LinkedIn with Adam Robinson - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3BW6crmB9E

Transcript: (00:00) my first company sold for $10 million 2 weeks before we were giving the business to them one of our Engineers deleted the entire code base we didn't have a backup the starting is really brutal it's like if you've never posted before you post one time you get like four engagements at some point everyone had zero subscribers zero followers zero Revenue zero everything there was a little beef that took place with one of the larger incumbents that you kind of attacked and they attacked you and I watched that and (00:27) I was like wow he must be getting so much signups from this we hadn't even really decided to make the B2B product until we saw how effective this content vehicle was I consider myself in the edutainment business I happen to have a SAS at the end of The Funnel I've gone 0 to one three times totally different motion every single time what can I do to break through the superpower is either you are harnessing this organic social content on your own or you figured out a way to harness it through ugc behind the scenes it was a small (00:59) group of people that doing everything welcome back to the GTM podcast it's your host Scott Barker I want to know how this insane growth actually [Music] [Music] happen it's no secret that AI is revolutionizing the way we work and the B2B sales landscape is no exception meet Upland altify a leading provider of AI enhanced sales Solutions designed to help Revenue teams work smarter large organizations around the world trust altify to overcome sales challenges and simplify complex processes the Salesforce native Suite of sales (01:49) Solutions empowers sellers productivity streamlines workflows and uncovers hidden opportunity all leading to significant Revenue growth learn how altify can maximize your Salesforce investment and transform your Revenue team visit www.up software.com alifi to see altify in action what's going on everyone welcome back to the GTM podcast as always you got Scott Barker here appreciate you lending us your eardrums for the next 45 minutes or so we're going to talk everything go to market and building companies and I got a fantastic guest (02:26) that I've been excited to have on for a while I'm joined by Adam Robinson Adam what's up man welcome Scott I'm excited to be here let's dive into it I've been waiting them for a long time for this one too hell yeah man hell yeah I get a lot of inbound podcasts and like most of them it's like e I've never heard of that before but yours I had I appreciate that we're extremely fortunate to have uh some fantastic guests that uh that make me look good um and I feel like I kind of know you just (02:58) from or I know this background really well just from from all your your LinkedIn videos that's the cool thing about kind of building a brand is you can kind of get to know someone a synchronously which also can be weird I don't know if you ever get this but do you ever go to a conference or you're out and people will feel like they know you more than they do um you know every day it's more so for because for me I didn't write about this stuff until September of last year and what I was trying to do before that (03:32) was you know build audience of Shopify stores basically and it was doing okay at that um but yeah it just kind of exploded and it really like it was this kind of opposite way of doing it like we hadn't even really decided to make the B2B product until we saw how effective this content vehicle was at the same time our whole go to market Mo motion was getting torched in our other business and it became for me I believe like if you have access to a voice that can create organic social media in a group of Target prospects that is truly (04:12) great that they truly want it's like you should create a product for that you know like the the b2c business like it's just proven that that is the most effective and efficient way to sell stuff uh that's why the Kardashians or billionaires uh and that was literally what it was like holy cow like I can like do something special and like it's like very very very efficient um so let's build a product to sell into this yeah you know I mean that feels like it is very much the future of building businesses (04:45) and it used to be like you mentioned more on the B Toc side but it's it's now how you build a software business too it's like we used to build a product and then go search for demand and now you can build demand and then give them exactly what they want in the form of a product which is a pretty big fundamental shift yeah um I think it is so in a way four steps to the Epiphany is this but it's just one to one in a way you know it's like you're building your audience in the Lean Startup (05:21) movement you're building your buyers as you're building your product uh this just like turbocharges it I mean I you know we had in the the five months we were developing this product SOS I did 300 Discovery calls that's like that's that's like I don't know how long it would I don't know if 300 Discovery calls would have been possible without an inbound engine of Engagement that we could then sort of like respond to someone who commented and be like by the way we're thinking about building this (05:52) thing it's different in these ways would you talk to us about it and every one of them was like heck yeah you know they've been like following this sort of rant about the change didn't go to market for so long uh so so yeah I mean I don't know that it's going to be the only way that software gets sold but I think every year that goes by more examples of someone coming along like me and building Affinity around this founder profile and then selling software into it in a very fast and low friction way will be the way that some (06:29) businesses more every year get off the ground just cuz like dude St everything's working against you at the beginning right like and this is like a disproportionate amount of awareness relative to quite frankly the the amount of awareness that you deserve right like and back when we could just send cold email out to get a startup off the ground and like interested parties would engage with that like that was that was like this most incredible hack of all time this predictable re Playbook but like I don't know man nobody I talk to (07:03) can do that anymore right like uh so so yeah it's kind of like you have to look at what's in front of you this is my opinion of Entrepreneurship right like I I've gone zero to one three times totally different motion every single time and it's sort of like what can I do to break through now to me the super power is either you are harnessing this organic social content on your your own or you figured out a way to harness it through ugc and you have this Army of marketers that's doing more than a 50 person (07:41) demand gen team could have right like uh and look product is equally as important like rbb is just it was so disruptive in terms of like what it did in the pricing of it uh but you know magic lightning in a bottle happens when those two interact with each other and the thing I love about it the thing that I think is great for Founders in the future is it's a path to bootstrapping that like what you know when you when you had to hire you know a sales and marketing team of 25 people to do what my LinkedIn brand is (08:13) doing that just required you to raise five million bucks whereas like I have two contractors helping me with it you know what I mean it's like a beautiful I mean I just love these efficient businesses also but like uh it's it's it's just a brand new path that I don't think was necessarily uh it may have been there four or five years ago but it wasn't obvious to many people like you know guom from lless is doing it but like in Russell Brunson but that's like it you know yeah yeah yeah (08:44) you might not need as many of those damn VCS anymore in uh in this in this model it does you know lend itself to more efficient uh growth which is a great path for for some entrepreneurs early stage but by the way like that capital I think just ends up transitioning to Capital that's like like a fund like this fund called sent they only invest in founder owned profitable growing bootstrapped businesses past 15 or 20 million ARR in the intention is not to really give it capital to grow the business it's just (09:19) like here's liquidity you know let's get on a path to exit this thing let's accelerate it with the free cash that you have in our go to market expertise and do it that way and it's just like the numbers change it's like every one of those has to be a 1 to 2x minimum and they're shooting for 3 to five and like I don't know I think that's better for the founders right it's like it's like you know you're getting something right like you're getting liquidity and like you're (09:45) something's gonna happen and you're not just going to be a donut whereas like the VC model is really hard on the founders from an odds perspective totally yeah and just quickly I want to uh for the listeners so if if you haven't flipped on uh LinkedIn recently uh Adam Robinson is the founder and CEO of retention. (10:09) comom also the founder and CEO of R B2B uh has been making just a ridiculous amount of waves on LinkedIn and I like to think you I've been in kind of the LinkedIn ecosystem for for quite a while now and uh it's been really really crazy to see how quickly you've grown traction and you know we're we're explaining that this is a a a potential new way to create demand for for the product and platform that you're You're Building as a Founder but a lot of people try and do this why do you think you and your message resonated at (10:43) this time so I think there's like probably like three main reasons number one is um I was doing it for a year before it was really working and I just stuck with it and then there was one Glimpse in July of last year of what might really work instead of sort of work and then there was an experiment over Labor Day and four posts in a row are absolute bangers and I was like now I know what to do and the long story short of that for me it was like you know I started writing content for effectively myself like it went from (11:23) trying to aggregate an audience of Shopify stores to writing content directly at SAS Revenue leaders about this like cataclysmic problem we were all having but nobody was really acknowledging that like these big bdr teams that we all have might not even work at all anymore you know like you know you could probably reduce the count the head count by 90% and get the same amount of book demos out of them because this the power had shifted back to marketing from that that function um and uh so so it was like skill was part of (11:58) it and then like I identifying this sort of like perfect author to content to platform uh fit you know content Market fit or whatever um and then I think there's these like uh these freedoms that I have being a bootstrapper so so first of all whenever you do anything in marketing in life in whatever like you you you have to you have to be different than what everyone else is or it's just not novel right like down the middle doesn't work you know if you're like oh you know no uh Facebook's going away next year (12:36) whatever or you know we should shut Google down for data proper it's like that's too far out but like somewhere in the middle of like not quite crazy but like definitely not mainstream is like where you have to live and it's got to be related to sort of what you do right so um and then some Freedom that I have that a lot of other people don't most people in SAS do not is I don't have investors so like I'm doing stuff like showing people my financials I'm giv monthly recurring I have a live SAS (13:04) metrics dashboard for rbb published that I sent to my newsletter every single week so like you can see and like the turn's terrible like I'm just not hiding anything right so uh that's amazing content because people um you know most people can't do that they literally ask me how I am able to have the strength to share stuff like that right and and and the answer is because I know how novel it is right uh you know thinking back to five years ago before I started retention. (13:35) comom when I had been stuck at 3 million AR for four years uh which is devastating by the way it's like not a good place to be at all um I was reaching for anything written by anyone farther ahead than me right and this is like part of the reason I have energy to create this content like five years ago I would have lapped up every single word that the current version of me said I would have tried to copy a lot of it which is the wrong move what I should have done is taken these ideas I I should have just like been looking at (14:08) someone like me which was not there and then trying to un try to understand why I was doing what I was doing right because just the thought process behind it uh it's so valuable and it can sort of inspire other decisions and you know sort of standards and all that stuff right so uh long rambling an be different in ways that other people just can't or like can't make themselves sort of do right because that's your you're protected there you know yeah yeah I think uh the world is craving authentic authenticity you know more (14:49) than ever right like that's that's what people want and in the B2B World we're just starved of it you know everything got over marketing IED and like everything was too polished and everything was always good and Rosy and and we didn't hear some of the the trials and tribulations from people so when someone comes around and is like hey I know what you're going through you know that is really gonna resonate and then the other piece I think you've done well is like walk this line of uh call (15:18) controversy right you you have an opinion and you know there was a uh a little beef that took place with one of the larger uh incumbents um that you kind of attacked um and they attacked you and I watched that and I was like wow he must be getting so much signups from this was unbelievable just like the greatest you know when I think back on like pivotal moments in my career literally not just this company like I think that that was one of them like actually getting a cease and assist from them and then having the (15:55) fortitude knowing that I would there was a very good chance I would get sued to like post it on LinkedIn and rewrite what they see sist me for it was crazy I mean the the the amount of activity and like the the it was it was just it went from like people thinking vaguely knowing me as a LinkedIn guy to like really like all of their customers who are going to be our customers in several years like as we sort of drift up market like every SAS does uh every one of them understanding exactly what I did you know um which is just it's magic that it (16:30) could not have happened any other way it was just millions of dollars of free PR you know yeah yeah and it was done in a way that wasn't like malicious too right it was just like here's here's what's happening again it was the authenticity here's what's actually happening right now and here's what's going on and you know having the uh yeah the the fortitude or the the balls I think we can say to just like all right let's throw it on LinkedIn and yeah let's call my lawyer (16:59) make sure we're we're g to be okay see what happens yeah see what happens I love it uh so one of the questions I get all the time or I used to get this more when I was you know more active on on LinkedIn I would I would often you know encourage Founders encourage sellers to like you know spend more time there's like a real opportunity here you're going to get inbound you're going to be able to reach people that you wouldn't be able to normally reach if like you have a decent amount of followers and a (17:29) lot of times people would come back at me and be like okay I get that it works for you because you know for a large portion of my career I was like selling it to revenue leaders or or now it's important to get in front of Founders and like those people live on LinkedIn I'm selling to Farmers I'm in agriculture Tech or I am selling into uh insurance and it doesn't make sense for me is is there a way to do what you have done in outside of software and revenue leaders do you still think there's an (18:05) opportunity and and how would you what advice would you give those folks so a I think more people are coming on to LinkedIn every day so you know if you just look at Industries like yes some of if the people are not on LinkedIn at all like it's you are right it's going to be very hard to generate leads on LinkedIn that being said uh there are a lot of other Mission critical parts to your business recruiting Partnerships investors like whatever like all of these people are on LinkedIn and you cannot do what I'm doing which I (18:48) would consider a completely Allin effort and you can give some time to it and and it will create this automated trust building machine for you in those Department departments and you get inbound in those departments which is super valuable right like if you don't have to sell candidates and you can get them opting into work with you because of you know two hours a week you spend basically like extoling like the virtues of your company and your mission and your values and like your vision for everything like everybody's going to (19:23) check that out and skim it who has any you know who's checking you out for anything anything right like um so it can be incredibly valuable there I think like the amount of industries that you can actually use to generate leads for is probably increasing you know due to just how they're running the platform now um but you know I just keep thinking back to Russell Brunson like there's what you're doing today and there's what you're probably doing in 10 years and if you can develop a voice on (19:57) organic social media and understand what it takes to create good content kind of in any Niche right like I think that I could like you know maybe not be as prolific as sass but like I could go like I just know what good content is now you know I think I could like accept the challenge and like go make content for another Niche somewhere and probably do much better than someone who hadn't had the type of success that I had with SAS people yet so if you can develop your organic social voice your thought leadership voice in (20:30) general and these are words stolen out of Russell brunson's mouth if you get to the point where people are willing to pay you for advice you are one of the most powerful people in the world like it may not be for you're selling to Farmers business like it may lead somewhere else but like there is just no question in my mind from watching what's happening to me watching what happened to the Kardashians like this machine is set up to do that right like like so it's hard to like you know every founder is entirely focused on their (21:06) business like it's hard to say like there's this thing Beyond because I I heard it two years ago I was like I don't care about that like now I definitely do it's like there's something beyond the current business that you're working on and that's what this is for you know it's very hard as Allin as startup Founders get to acknowledge that right it may apply to your current business someday but it will definitely apply to whatever you you do next right this this attention Arbitrage thing is (21:37) super real I consider myself in the edutainment business I happen to have a sass at the end of The Funnel I could have a lot of things at the end of this funnel you know it happens to be a sass right now it's probably going to be some other stuff in the next five years you know um I mean I love it I I think of even just like my own person Journey like originally starting on LinkedIn and then throwing up a substack just cuz like I was bored during the pandemic and like wanted to write about some stuff and (22:09) where you know I started I was selling like digital asset management software which was like not a buyer that cared about the Sal stuff that I was writing about back in the day but now you know you fast forward and when you look back like probably wouldn't have got the job at sales hacker had I not had some of that brand then the Outreach acquisition wouldn't happen I wouldn't have been able to build the programs that I built at Outreach because they were largely like ecosystem L growth programs which I (22:38) had only could do because of my experience in the network that I had and now transitioning to VC like I hear all these other you know Venture partners and great great investors struggling to they like find a company and then they can't get to the founder well I can just like send a LinkedIn message and it's like so incredibly easy you can talk to anybody you want yeah anybody at any time um totally and I feel the same way it's like all of a sudden I have this magic where like anybody who spends time (23:10) on LinkedIn I know that I can talk to them you know for whatever reason whether you want to learn something whether it's a commercial discussion anything like it's been such a superpower Beyond any like money I've made from is like just the learning of like wow like the C from this company will like just chat with me for 30 minutes just like shoot the [ __ ] like it's it's wild um the the kind of Cycles you can get in of of Rapid learning and you know once you build relationships people like to do (23:44) business with people they know and like and trust and oftentimes it does turn into a a commercial relationship um so there's a lot of people that are waking up I think to this trend partly because the way we've been going to Market is like fundamentally breaking down you know you you mentioned response rates are are just abysmal and and there's like who's clicking on like LinkedIn ads and like just a lot of things that worked didn't work no one's downloading your your case study you know very few people are coming to your (24:18) at least your traditional webinar I think there is like these digital live events that are getting better um but what do you say to Founders actually ask this question first do you like creating content do you enjoy that part of running your business uh so it definitely feels like work to me you know what I mean it's not like oh I'm going like the 14-year-old M gets to go to like the amusement park right every day it's like uh I I really feel and by the way I have a two-year-old and and a new kid on the (24:55) way and I I'm the CEO of two SAS startups right like so uh I I'm very uh serious about like the time borders it's like 8:00 am to 5:30 Monday through Friday that is work and then the rest of it is family uh and there's just not much else which is weird because like I was single till I was 40 so it's like the other the time is just so different now um and it definitely is uh you know I feel many times that there's just like I have to write so much like in the amount of time that I have um because (25:32) well my life is basically like you know Mondays are all internal meetings related to both the companies and then the rest of the week is this kind of stuff and it's like some of it is trying to make link in the best edutainment channel that there is and then the rest of it are I'm doing stuff like this like I do probably you know in a week that I'm here I do 10 guest Slots of people's podcasts related to go to market I've basically told the entire Market I'm like I will come on your show if you (26:01) invite me so hit me up uh and you know it's this crazy enviable position where they want my audience so I can do it inbound whereas like a year and a half ago I had to like hire lemon pie and like they had to do it right and uh so and my view on that by the way is like there's these like incredibly compounding exponential benefits to this uh you know reaching out to people's one of them when you get in the point where you have a bigger audience than everyone else they want you on their show they're (26:30) going to distribute it for you and to me this is like a prospect dinner that I did not have to go to and really Prospect dinners are hard for me because like I feel guilty about not remembering people's names and it's just like a lot it's just like a very draining experience most of the time I'm sober you know I don't drink and like it's just uh it's an exhausting experience whereas like this is great it's like talking to one person about what I'm doing with my life is like super easy (26:56) for me so uh you know if a hundred people listen to this podcast oh my God that is a smashing success if I'm on a show and 10 people listen to it and make it like half an hour 45 minutes in like they're checking out rbtb.com if they hadn't already heard of it right so and this is kind of my view of why this works so well it's like the way people were getting software companies off the ground like we launched chars in 2019 and like uh since predictable revenue is the whole just finding people on (27:27) LinkedIn and through cold email and just hitting him up and like stating the value proposition was a hack it shouldn't have been that easy you know but that was actually a demand creation mechanism I believe that those days are gone they're over if that still works for some people I think it's on its way out and and you should plan for a future where that's impossible and to me this is demand creation it's cross-pollinating audiences with people who have audiences who are your prospects so why is the (28:02) only reason they're going to have you on their show if you got an audience too right like like that's it and and like I just think that you know it's a I couldn't imagine if I were VC backed and I were like you know walking into an investor meeting and be like okay I want to disrupt this space with an underpriced freemium offering and I want to spend four days a week creating founder brand content and I'm not sure when it will start working right like it's just not something that you can do with might (28:34) have to double click on that slide yeah with like with like money backing you but like in a way that's great because no one else is doing it but like to me it makes a ton of sense why it works right it's like I'm creating stuff that's so uh it's just so interesting for people who would buy what I'm selling and then I've aggregated an audience to go tell that story 10 times a week in front of other people who are also trying to build the sort of same audience who are attracting different people it's just very simple (29:08) to me yeah but you can't measure it which is like another thing I write about it's like nothing that I spend my time on I can like delineate signups from you know it's like oh signups dipped by a 100 this week do you have any idea why I'm like nope did the same thing I did last week you know yeah yeah now it's super interesting the the the swap of value that can be created when you have media assets and you can swap that for other things it's not just exposure like I think of let's say you (29:38) were you know wanting to get more into the Salesforce ecosystem well Salesforce has a billion Partners they don't care about your little SAS company but if you build an audience because they know how valuable you know salesforce's brand is so they can't just like Leverage that out to everyone but if you have a startup that has a huge audience is Salesforce marketing team going to pay attention and be like oh actually we should do some co-marketing with Adam um it's almost like who cares about the (30:10) software let's like Leverage that audience and then all of a sudden you're in this ecosystem with a brand that is light years ahead of yours but you have a a an audience and a point of view that they're willing to swap that value for yeah it's I haven't even explored that yet but you just it's now in my subconscious as a possibility thank you it is it for it for sure is definitely like Shopify ecosystem I used to think of that like you know at Outreach when we were we were smaller like okay we we (30:41) want these aspirational Partners but why do they want us like they don't care about us like everyone wants to partner with the people that are ahead of them but they don't want to partner with you they want to partner with the people ahead of them so there's ways you can you can even the playing field and I think media is an incredible way to to to leverage that um but um a quick pause to hear from our partner vanta we've all been there you know your deal is almost closed and all that's left is (31:09) the security review but when it comes to those lengthy security questionnaires the endless back and forth between you your security team and the customer can often cause deals to stall out leaving your deal at risk and dollars on the table with vanta questionnaire automation go to market teams can complete Security reviews up to five times f faster helping you close deals in less time than ever over 8,000 global companies like Zoom info smart recruiters and noou use vanta to streamline security questionnaires and (31:39) close deals faster experience questionnaire automation with a self-guided product tour no signups required atv.com GTM now that's V n.com GTM man so LinkedIn is huge we like to speak through kind of stories and I would love to hear sort of beyond the one we talked about what is one of the most impactful stories that you've gone through building these last two startups was there a moment that was like oh [ __ ] like we got this now there were a lot of oh [ __ ] this is a disaster we like those too we like those (32:27) too yeah so so uh by the way like I think these stories are like so amazing and like they just don't get documented and they don't get shared So like um I created a docu Series last year and it's super high quality it's called billion dollar challenge it's on my YouTube channel retention Adam so like check that out and yeah I'm I'm making uh so like the problem with those on LinkedIn is linkedin's not a sequential platform so like you'd get served episode 13 without having the background on the 12 so now (33:00) we're making Standalone episodes of this and like sort of mix so it's about kind of RB Tob right now it was about retention oncom last year and then there we're also telling these like really uh crazy stories of just the journey so like one we had my first company sold for $10 million we've been working on the deal for six months and I am not kidding you this sounds so weird even saying this two weeks before we were giving the business to them and receiving the wire uh one of our Engineers deleted the entire code base (33:36) and we didn't have a backup shut up so so like for 24 hours I was like I thought that we were gonna have to like go to our banker and be like there's no company W and yeah it's weird this Amazon thing where like it was like if you uh hit stop then it was bad if you hit restart it was good and they were right next to each other and he like turned two of the four nodes off on stop and it was just gone and then to you know Pennywise pound foolish my CTO was rewriting the backup as it was deleting so there wasn't a complete backup and (34:15) the backup file company basically was like we've never seen this before no one's been this stupid like what do you mean you like deleted with in the middle he's you know so they in the middle of an acquisition yeah they spent 12 hours digging through the backup file and eventually got 98% of the site back but like for 12 hours I was walking around Austin with my dog just like trying to internalize this loss which was just so awful right it's like oh it's only money but that's not what it is it's like the (34:43) whole past seven years of your life um so like stories like that like I'm sort of telling a lot right uh and and I think it's great we we did one we dropped one last week that was about this experience that I had at a trade show where we'd spent like a year not doing it the right way not doing it the customer Discovery four steps Epiphany way but like we thought that improving the email marketing platform that we sold and creating this V2 which was like not even feature parody but like closer to feature parody with the other problem (35:17) uh Platforms in the market and then going after this segment of the market that you know we sort of thought this other vendor was leaving we thought this was pulled a big spent like you know we hired six engine years to do it spend a year on it and then we show up at this trade show and we're trying to pitch people this product and it's just you know eyes glazed over like really sophisticated stunt we were talking to a ton of people but like there was once they realized what we were talking about it was just like I do (35:46) not care I do not have I have that problem solved like blah blah blah so like literally rock bottom of my journey was like laying in this bed with my wife that night having spent all this money money and wasted another year of being stuck and looking over and being like no one cares like no one cares about this at all like we're screwed but like maybe like a month or two earlier I had heard that it was possible to resolve an anonymous website visitor to a deliverable email address I'd heard this I had no idea how to do (36:19) it but I was like you know what I'm gonna make something of this second day so eyes glaz over second day and I'd be like by the way what if I could give you email addresses of people who were on your site but didn't fill out a form would you care about that and then it was like boom both intenna up questions like where do I buy that right like how do I and by the way I had no idea even it's not even that that we started building it like I had no idea how to even do it technically I just heard that (36:47) it's possible so the signal was so strong that it started this like rabbit hole digging that like led us to these few people that sort of knew how that weird part of the internet worked we figured out how to White Label somebody then we figured out how to like make it our own and that was now what retention. (37:05) comom is uh and and and like that indication like was kind of how it always went like we launched the product it was called get emails the first month we spent $5,000 on ads and got 10K mrr just doing Facebook ads it's crazy um super high turn customers you know I don't know if you could run Facebook ads and make a sass work but like it was this weird dynamic of like there was like a high ticket plg that we had so like we get a 100 bad customers and some whale would come in and pay five grand and pay the ads back but um it it was (37:42) just the turning point it was like rock bottom and then like so much optimism because of this one sentence I was saying you know which i' never felt before like I never had anything I didn't I think my my biggest take away of the story is like I did not even have it to sell right like it it was like the the the the whole journey started with just this searing searingly clear oneliner and then just watching people's faces react to it you know and kind of similar story with the B2B thing it's like when we (38:17) started talking to people about person level website visitor identity in the very beginning they're like I already have that but they were talking about clearbit or whatever you know the company level and they like no it's different in this way like oh is that for sale like like where can I like uh yes I want to know that information where can I get it you know um that was my first reaction uh when I when I heard about it that was J I was like what and then it was like is this legal like can we can we do this yeah (38:46) that that is the first question everybody's had and the answer is yes but only in the US um sadly you know and we'll see how long I think we got another decade some people think it's way less than that I love betting against massive regulatory change like that you know it's sort of like we we may not be able to sell this business for a lot but like a lot of cash can be made in the uh in the meantime you know yeah and I think it regulation follows like consumer Behavior too you know like I think everyone got freaked out about (39:20) like these overly customized you know ads that get served to you on like Instagram and like our phones you know listening to us and all this stuff but then people also were like but these are pretty good I actually do want this matcha tea that I'm getting served up and like this is kind of great so I'm gonna stop complaining so if we do get to this point where we're able to everyone wants their problem solved if we're able to leverage this to solve people's problems quicker and get to them where they they want to go like are (39:52) we going to block that you know um so it'll be interesting to see yeah my concern is that like The Regulators operate so slowly that like they're still their interpretation of reality and just the way that politics works is like what they were being told five years ago and then it got put in their cue five years ago as we need to end all web retargeting and cross site tracking period I've heard that that's what they're trying to do it's like there's this big antitrust thing they're working (40:24) through the next few years and then that's what they're going to try to do and I'm just like so curious whether that is even remotely on people's minds now right like I get [ __ ] there's this guy Clark Baron who loves to just beat me up on LinkedIn about like I don't care about privacy or whatever and he loves to say that I don't think other people care about privacy which is not what I say I'm like I don't think that someone who is 20 years old now would listen to you talking to me about the problem that you (40:54) have with myuct in my stance on privacy and even understand what you're worried about right and he's like well you know everybody there's regulation going through I'm like he's like what how do you explain that Gartner says people care I'm like these people are like 65 years old right like I hate to say this but like girls in sixth grade are sending nudes to like 10 different guys at once like if you think that person cares about privacy you are wrong right like they don't they're sending (41:27) nude photos of themselves as 14y olds to to be shared to the world right like it is just a different and that's a horrible thing to say again but like that's what's happening right now right it's like a these the issues that people are concerned right with right now are just not going to be issues in 20 years right there may be laws that that are in place but like I don't know yeah I think the only thing people uh value more than privacy is efficiency and speed and we've been making that (42:04) trade since the Advent of the internet if it's faster more efficient my problems get solved whether it's Uber eat serving me up something or jumping in an Uber to get me somewhere faster I will make the Privacy trade all day long for for Speed and we'll continue to to make that that trade and and I'm sure we'll have new privacy Tech that will allow us to live in both worlds um if you want to stop it you'll be able to stop it yeah exactly you know that's what that's what the legislation should (42:37) be and that's people think they want to stop it and then they'll have an experience on the internet and be like this is so [ __ ] annoying I got to log in here I got to log in there it's not talking to each other and they'll retract yeah the pain of the password thing now could you imagine if like that was the pain of trying to like navigate web experience you had to like figure out how to undo this stuff that you did uh yeah I just you know speed for proficiency and it's like look they so (43:08) another interesting story is when I started get emails there was 100% conviction that third party cookies were going to go away in 18 months which was how the entire product worked but I was so down and out that I was like whatever we'll make a couple million bucks and then I'll just use that to maybe build something else that was almost 5 years ago every year it's they're going to start phasing out in 12 months I heard that every single year literally like you'd read the blog post and your (43:41) stomach would hit the floor right and then somewhere in the middle we figured out how to do it not entirely depending on third party cookies if they went away they would have adversely affected the accuracy a little bit but like it still would have worked um and then lo and behold two months ago nope no third party cookies being removed by Chrome like why I think it's back it's like this is how the economic exchange of the internet works right and like it's tough to pull out third party cookies because like that's (44:14) how people show ads outside of Facebook right like that that is how you know cross brow Cross website tracking works and and like you know I think you know if you're trying to get rid of web retargeting in general because of some you know people not like liking shoes following them around five years ago when retargeting first started happening like that is a fundamental underpinning of the economic engine of the internet and it's just going to destroy everything like that's my personal opinion oh and by the way like it's a (44:50) significant part of trillion dollar companies businesses so good luck getting rid of it right like they got pretty good lawyers you know yeah um I feel like yeah I think that's just the the swap of value that's been happening since the Advent of the internet you give us your your data and we will help you solve your problems faster and when you give data there is some privacy privacy risk but that that trade is not not going anywhere um all right I want to go quickly to a a Founder question because this one's (45:20) ridiculously relevant and I uh I asked the question beforehand if you enjoy it for this uh specific question question is my team wants me to post on LinkedIn but I start and then get super busy and it always fa falls to the Wayside because frankly I just don't enjoy it how can I build up the habit and is it worth it I think I know that the part to uh part two of that one it definitely has been worth it in your experience but how can you build up the habit and make it a priority when you're you're running a company you got a (45:52) billion things to do yeah I I think this is just um man my my answer would be the same as like I hate going to the gym like how do I make myself do it right like I you know hate uh the fact that I'm like uh just got the verdict back that like I'm diabetes like proned or whatever and I got to cut my sugar intake right like you just have to build the habit and and with every habit that I've ever ever built uh it has gotten easier in with time I had a ghost rider for nine months that's a great way I think to (46:36) start just do it for like 90 days and watch how they write and see if you can feel some of the benefits of coming alive on the platform accruing to you in terms of inbound for Stuff unrelated to direct deals which probably won't happen but like you know you'll start getting hit up by investors like people will start saying like oh like you know cool Journey you're on or whatever you know I'd like to join your team stuff like that um so yeah you can in with with pretty lightweight you know commitment (47:15) get someone to write for you and you can also see how they write which like there's kind of a way to write on LinkedIn um and then you know when I switched to Alec my current guy he was like way more expensive but he doesn't write for you and I was dumb Ed by that I was like what am I paying you for and it's like uh you know you're paying to be the best in the game but like you're the one writing which is like uh ultimately I think it's a much more valuable skill you know but look you would have to buy into (47:49) this okay if you're like me and you're selling to go to market people and you're like you you were selling Revenue leaders like just make yourself right if you're selling to Farmers you really have to buy into this idea that there is something beyond your current company and like much more value to finding your voice through thought leadership in your future beyond what you're currently doing that's worth committing to you know uh it it makes sense to give some attention to creating this inbound trust building machine or (48:28) automated trust building machine for yourself and your company it's hard to explain to somebody what those benefits are until you sort of see feel them you know um fortunately for me it was enough to keep me interested and like kind of not kind of completely obsessed and then now I'm getting so much back from it I'd be crazy to not try to like you know keep doing as much of as I can possibly do right so um but yeah you are right it sucks it's a muscle you have to develop you know everyone hates (49:03) it right like especially if you have other stuff to do like in the beginning um yeah yeah I think that's an important uh call out I think there's this wrong uh perception that you know everyone who's creating content on LinkedIn is just like this this extrovert and they love the attention and they love to like this is like what they love to do and it's just just not true you know there's so many times I'll have to like force myself or my VP marketing will be like hey you haven't like posted anything like you got like (49:36) let's let's do something and it is a muscle um it's great books The Power of Habit is a great book if H people haven't read that Atomic habits just basically the fundamentals of of building a habit also happy you brought up uh ghost writing because that's getting more and more common for me I I feel like I can always tell when someone Mak to transition to a a ghost writer quick quick thoughts on that I just want to double click like so it sounds like yes it's a great way to learn a new (50:08) muscle keep yourself accountable but ultimately it's going to be the most effective coming directly from from you is that kind of your take I don't think there's any way that a Ghost Rider could write as profoundly as you I'm saying if your problem which by the way I had is like I'm just not willing to spend time doing this without understanding the game at all right like Dave Gart in his brand book founder brand is like put time in your calendar and just start tweeting I was like I know what I'm good (50:45) at and like what I'm good at today product and marketing I am so much better than when I started as an entrepreneur 12 years ago it is incomparable I'm playing in the pros now and I was playing tball then and it wasn't obvious to me at that time it is very obvious to me now I'm not going to just start tweeting against LeBron James somebody knows that game and it's not me right so it's like that was my biggest problem it's like I'm not as a complete novice going to just start firing so like that's what a (51:16) go Ghost Rider helped me with it's like explain to me why stuff works right like what are what are possible things that might work for me right right like but it will never be dialed there there's just no question about it it's just you know can you get the reason I think it's a decent idea is like can you get a presence going that shows you a light in the distance that inspires you enough to where you're thinking okay if I really went at this like there could be some pretty massive you know payoff (51:54) out there in the future because that's kind of where you need to get to right like the starting is really it's hard um it's so dude it's brutal it's like if you've never posted before you post one time you get like four engagement and I'm getting 1600 right and you're like what is that guy doing that I'm not doing it's like well I've done a lot right like a massive commitment to this yeah yeah but like you have to keep in mind right like everyone at some point everyone had zero subscribers zero (52:24) followers zero Revenue zero everything we were all zero we all another quote about this which I love is the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago the second best time is today I like it yeah right yeah yeah I think there there is a lot of people are like oh I missed that wave it's like too late now and it's like no this is It's only just beginning it will get harder but it is only just beginning like that is for sure when you can count the number of people who have had founder Le sass on one hand end this is only just (52:58) beginning yeah yeah I used to think of it in the early days and I I've said this a few times but I would look at it like I was building these little beacons that I could just litter all over the place every piece of content was this little Beacon and these beacons if I was saying something that was true to me and how I actually felt then over time interesting problems and interesting people would start you know coming around that Beacon and there's stuff that I've written five years years ago that still people will like Ping me on (53:29) and like no one cared back then but now you know people people find it resonate with it so it's amazing yeah it's one of the crazy powers of the internet that only people who publish content understand and people who do not look at it and they're like I don't have time for that yeah you know like like that's just what it is right like yeah we are not and and that's like one of the it's like if I'm looking at myself 12 years ago versus now I would look at me now and I'd be be like that guy's an (53:57) egomaniac you know he's he's uh basically doing this to get famous like he's an idiot like this is not the fastest way to grow a company like whatever right let me tell you what I would not be doing if it were not like super directly affecting so like I just view you know being a startup founder as like you find the maximum point of Leverage and you go as hard as possible at it until you like are sort of maxed out and then you find the next maximum point of Leverage for me this is a hundred times more leverage than (54:31) anything else I got going on in either of my companies 100 times no question about it you know um I think the argument is about this you know will you have this perfect alignment like we'll see what happens when we start going into other spaces right like uh no doubt it won't be it will be it won't be as effective but like I don't know I think I think some of the skill carries over like some of the same you know principles that need to be applied to like you know let's say we target agencies instead of SAS right (55:04) like I I I don't know that it's going to be very hard for me to like create good content for them I think I'll be able to do it you know but only because I can do it for for SAS right like yeah all the the same fundamentals uh apply across across everything um awesome man well this has been a really really awesome discussion appreciate you you hanging out and you've certainly uh inspired me to go uh get my ass on LinkedIn I don't think I've done a post in a little while I'm glad yeah um but I I always ask (55:39) these final two questions as as we wrap up they are intentionally bag so you can take them any way you want you can reiterate something we already talked about um first question is what is one widely held belief that most Founders or Revenue leaders believe to be true that you think it's [ __ ] or no longer serving us so I think there is a belief that Venture Capital if you're under 10 million ARR will accelerate your growth I think that that is not true I think that what accelerates your growth is making your customers (56:17) happier I really believe that I think that Venture Capital actually slows you down because you like go hire a bunch of people management layers most of the time you don't know what you're doing and it's it's actually friction whereas you think in it's sold to you that it will help you speed up I think it can help you speed up later I don't think it helps before a lot of AR like 10 million yeah Capital certainly not the answer in and of itself you know if you don't have a very clear path with what you're going (56:48) to do with that capital and and how you're going to leverage it for growth for sure it's just it's just noise and complexity sometimes even when you do it slows you down you know because like you think you know what you should do with it and then you start doing it and man it's like you're looking back and you're like man when we were seven people and not 22 like we were moving so fast we were iterating so fast we were just doing everything so much better and so much faster than now right uh so you know but (57:27) yeah that's a very complex answer also it's like every situation is so different right yeah so we could probably wrestle with that one for uh a full hour I I certainly have seen both sides what I will say and 100% agree on is capital is never the answer right like if you are hitting a wall and you think that VC money is going to magically remove that wall that is not that is not that is not the use of VC no but I think people try to for that right like yeah yeah it's not uh it's not a bomb for the wall the answer is almost (58:03) always creativity and and action and then you can accelerate some of the things that are are working it's kind of what you said right like when you find those pockets of 10 to 100x leverage and there's a lot of meat on that bone still can you use Capital to increase the advantage that you're already uh have in front of you like it um final question everyone's looking for silver bullets now more than ever uh we can hear from from your journey that you've experimented pretty much tried it all which I love um but (58:41) what is one go to market tactic or strategy uh we'll say apart from LinkedIn because we we hit on that quite a bit um that is actively working right now either for retention or R B2B uh uh so um we have a ugc motion that's working incredibly well it's lead gen agencies they post about they post on LinkedIn to grow businesses and um yeah I know uh they post on LinkedIn to grow businesses and um you know we've harnessed that we've given them good content to uh to grow with you know so so yeah that's the (59:21) one I love it ugc huge uh huge Green Field for for B2B companies well Adam you're the man thanks for for taking the time appreciate you we'll put uh that video series in the show notes go follow along follow this man on LinkedIn he's doing really cool stuff and listeners you know I say it every week but listening is one thing executing something totally different hopefully we gave you some ideas uh and some inspiration to uh go apply to your own business and uh we'll see you next week oh