RB2B hit 500k ARR in 10 weeks!!! PLUS Santosh LIVE next Tuesday ...

Hey RB2Bers!

It’s been a big week … lots to cover here.

Santosh is LIVE Next Tuesday - MECHANICS OF GROWTH

Santosh has been instrumental in laying down the building blocks of ZoomInfo, Apollo.io, Luscha, and many other unicorns.

Look at his LinkedIn.

He’s speaking on Tuesday about the Mechanics of Growth.

He presented this to us during the first executive offsite we had with him on the team.

It was the most inspiring thing I have ever heard.

Don’t miss it.

It’s Tuesday, 3pm EST, 12pm PST.

Register here.

RB2B + Clay - RECORDING OF LAST WEEK’S EVENT

I have received a ridiculous amount of positive feedback about Patrick’s presentation and my passive aggressiveness towards people who would not mute themselves.

The “Sneezer” in particular.

I’ve been asked for the recording many times.

Here it is. 

(the title was Hyper-Personalized Multi-Channel Fully Automated Warm Outbound)

Now to the fun stuff.

“How to Make Outbound Work in 2024” Live event w/ Jason Bay (and me)

We’re going to dive in w/ very qualified people who think I’m wrong about everything I say about Inbound-Led Outbound and Outbound being dead in a panel …

It should be really fun, and they will probably roast me.

Here’s a signup link.

RB2B HIT $500K ARR 10 WEEKS POST LAUNCH!!!

The thing that’s crazy about this is that we do not yet have two of the three key features we plan to charge for, nor do we have a salesperson to explain to people who already know how to book demos what plays they should be running.

Our “Big 3” Free-to-Paid Feature Set:

• HubSpot Integration (DONE)

• Credit System (Next week)

• ICP Filtering (We need a few weeks … we have to switch to our own data asset before we can do this effectively)

Our first salesperson - Ilija - is starting July 1.

We’re going to start with a two-touch sales motion.

• Segment people who already know how to book a demo

• Show them what they should be doing, connect Ilija to their rep

• We stay on top of the customers rep, answer questions

• Demo gets booked, we make a great offer

I could be very wrong but my sense is this could work very well.

Now on to the metrics.

Here’s the revenue and customer breakdown.

We had a few beta customers paying us for a pixel and a spreadsheet, but launched our UI, marketing website, and freemium model March 1.

Our top-of-funnel continues to be very strong, with 1,872 new free users this month as of May 23.

I wrote a LinkedIn post about my four biggest mistakes so far, which got some great engagement.

Feel free to join the comments here.

Here is the LinkedIn Post:

Only 10 weeks after launch, RB2B has officially hit $500k ARR. Here are the 4 biggest mistakes I've made so far, why only 1.3% of users have converted to paid, and how we're going to fix it:

1. I got our pricing model totally wrong.

My thought was that if we gave the leads away and pushed to Slack for free, people who found them valuable would self-serve their way to $495 for integrations and the business would be low-churn.

It turns out that:

- You can parse the Slack block with Zapier

- There was too much value in FREE, not enough in PAID

- $495 is too much for the little guy

- The big guy needs an ICP filter (coming)

We’re going to push out lower pricing next week that caps the free plan so that the top 15-20% of people are forced to pay.

Thank you LinkedIn for all of your wisdom and comments on this subject.

2. I thought we could run a PLG with no sales.

We can help anyone who already knows how to book an outbound demo if we quickly explain best practices and connect with the rep who will be working the leads. Best practices aren’t intuitive and people don’t want to read documentation.

Answer: lightning-fast, two-touch sales motion.

3. We’re not getting anything back from our free users.

My good friend Stuart Chaney has told me over and over again “every user is some type of currency, either money, or something else”. We believe our users can help us with reviews, UGC, and referrals, but as of right now on 6,300+ users we have only 52 G2 reviews, under 10 pieces of UGC, and we don’t have a referral program. Improving this activation is a top priority.

4. We didn’t start a LIVE Weekly Event event until two weeks ago

Thanks to Chris Walker for encouraging me to start a weekly live event. We call it the Inbound-Led Outbound Workshop, there’s new content every week, and it’s Tuesdays at 3pm EST/12pm PST on LinkedIn Live and Zoom. We value seeing you and hearing your questions, and wish we had started sooner.

TAKEAWAY:

This is my third time launching a startup from zero.

The model already looks totally different than what I thought.

And it’s only been 10 weeks!

One thing I keep learning is that no matter how much experience I get…

Most of my basic assumptions continue to be completely wrong.

I think I pivot quicker now than I used to, but I also have a new secret weapon...

My amazing LinkedIn community tells me in real-time when I’m messing up, and even how to fix it!

Just letting you know that I’m going to keep it coming…

Because this is the single most valuable conversation I’ve ever had.

Thank you, LinkedIn community.

Keep building.

That’s all for this week.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for being an RB2Ber.

I can’t wait to see what next week brings in the world of Inbound-Led Outbound!

Adam