$1mm ARR in 16 Weeks | LIVE Event: Getting Unstuck | Clay is worth $500m!!! | RB2B Creator Program

Hey RB2Bers -

This week I had the great pleasure of completing my 3rd bootstrapped trip from $0-$1m ARR (click for live metrics).

Hats off to my incredible teams who made these trips possible.

1/ Robly Email Marketing - January 2014 - May 2015

• Took 17 Months, staff of 25 when we hit it

• Entirely sales-led

• We had a call center to book a $35/mo subscription and did a 1-to-1 manual onboarding (it was a really, really good list)

• Stalled out at $3m ARR, sold to PE in 2020 for $10m

2/ GetEmails (now Retention dot com) - November 2019 - April 2020

• Took 27 weeks, staff of 6 when we hit it

• Did Facebook ads (watch this LinkedIn Live on Shitposting for details), drove a 15min demo, Diana did a thousands of them

• Currently $21.7m ARR, 27% total margin 4.5 years later

3/ RB2B - March 2022 - June 2022

• Took 16 weeks, staff of 5 when we hit it

• Founder-brand driven Inbound-led Outbound (mostly Linkedin)

• Check out our dashboard for up-to-the-minute metrics

My observation:

The longer you do this, the more skilled you become at the craft.

We’re all looking to capture lightning in a bottle.

Each swing you take, you’re closer to it.

Clay Raises $62m at $500m!!!

Wait - WHAT?

I love the Clay team, and this is badass, for many reasons.

They have a killer product, a great team, it’s part of the “new world” tech-stack that is devouring market share in go-to-market.

Cheers. For realz.

But the bootstrapper in me is REQUIRED to make the following comment.

It’s too much money at too high of a valuation.

Now Clay has to sell at $1.5b minimum, assuming they don’t pull an Apollo and raise again there, and up the ante to $3b+ (which I think is likely).

That may happen, but that is a MASSIVE ticket price.

But then again, what they are doing is so revolutionary and disruptive that it might command that type of a strategic multiple premium.

The problem I see is that more often than not, when you have real traction, the system forces you to do this, and years later you are stuck wishing you hadn’t.

My view is that rounds like this dramatically lower the probability-weighted financial outcome to the founders by eliminating options.

What options?

• huge dividends down the road, and

• A lower sale price with higher equity stakes for all involved

But alas, this is just the world we live in. The machine forces it to happen.

And that’s also why it’s rare to be a bootstrapper.

Getting Unstuck: How We Found Product-Market Fit with RB2B

I’m hosting and Santosh is speaking this week.

We’re going to share the journey of how we got stuck, then unstuck again.

We’ll focus on:

- Got stuck w/ Retention.com, which

- Forced us to look for other ways to grow (throwing spaghetti), and

- The incredible discovery processes we ran through LinkedIn

Register here, and add it to your calendar!

The RB2B Creator Program

I love Clay, and I think their Creator program is genius.

Furthermore, we’re seeing LinkedIn UGC from LeadGen agencies and adjacent vendors that involves workflows with RB2B and “new-world” tech stacks crush.

I think it’s time to start a Creator program.

We’ve seen posts like this and this absolutely destroy it.

• We’re seeking our founding members who want to regularly share successful workflows with the LinkedIn community.

• In exchange we will engage with all and put ad spend behind the best.

• We also want to provide visibility and recognition to our creators through our LinkedIn channel, website, and newsletters.

Write back if you’re interested in joining.

Pete will be running the process and is gone for another two weeks, but I want to make a list of top candidates before he gets back.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading.

It means a lot, because I sit here for an hour doing this and I have no idea if anyone makes it to the end or if anyone actually cares about what I’m saying.

Let me know if you like it, or if you think I should be doing something different with this newsletter.

Keep building.

Adam