Bonus Episode: From Wall Street to Silicon Valley with Adam Robinson
Adam Robinson is the CEO and founder of Retention.com, an industry-leading Shopify Ecommerce solution for increasing cart abandonment revenue.
Adam bootstrapped Retention.com to 14M ARR with 6 people in 2.5 years, and is on the road to reaching 50M ARR by 2024.
Retention.com delivers innovative customer growth solutions for e-commerce brands to monetize their first-party audience, successfully generating over $1bn in retail sales for Shopify stores since its inception in early 2020.
Before starting Retention.com, Adam founded, bootstrapped and sold Robly Email Marketing, a marketing automation SaaS, for 8 figures to private equity in 2021.
Adam is on a mission to support startup founders by sharing lessons learned from his entrepreneurial journey through his weekly podcast “10 years in the Making”, and posts content twice-daily on LinkedIn.
When he’s not busy building a unicorn startup in public, he’s spending time with his wife, Helen, newborn daughter, Emma, and dog Bonnie in Austin, TX.
To learn more, visit: https://honestecommerce.com
Resources:
- Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
- Watch the video episode to see what Adam is sharing on his screen
- Connect with Adam linkedin.com/in/retentionadam
- Shoot Adam an email if you have questions adam@retention.com
- Follow Adam on Twitter @retentionadam
- Quickly and easily grow your email list and boost your shopping cart abandonment revenue with retention marketing solutions retention.com
Transcript
Adam Robinson
You just don't know what you don't know until you start trying to do it.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to a bonus episode of honesty commerce.
Today, I'm bringing to you the CEO and founder of Retention.com, an industry leading Shopify Ecommerce solution for increasing cart abandonment revenue.
Adam Robinson, welcome to the show.
Adam Robinson
Thank you for having me. I'm just overjoyed to be here.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Yeah. We've talked about it at least 2 or 3 times before this. Now you're here. For those listeners out there, you guys [definitely have] a little bit of clout behind you these days.
But if I just woke up from a coma or I literally live under a rock, what is Retention.com and why is everybody talking about it?
Adam Robinson
Well, our core technology is somewhat magical to someone who hears it for the first time. Here's why.
The core technology --which has a bunch of applications which we'll talk about-- but someone can hit your website and without them filling out a form or taking any other action, they can leave, and we know who they are. And we can get a highly deliverable email address for 40% of them.
That alone (laughs) all sorts of questions come about. But...
Chase Clymer
I know we're gonna get into it.
Adam Robinson
Totally. But yeah, people are talking about it because probably --it's about six months ago-- we really honed in on…
We realized that bigger Shopify stores --so call it like 100,000 - 150,000 unique web sessions per month-- They were... They all crushed it on this. Just did incredibly well.
At the same time, we built a bunch of bottom of the funnel products with this core technology that were all for Ecommerce. And it has caught fire. It's just really...
It's a quick and light implementation, and it drives ROI very quickly. That's just like music to the Shopify owners ears, right? It's like, "Tell me more."
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Well, let's just get it out of the way up top...
Adam Robinson
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
...because I know some people are like, "Alright, you're getting emails, but they didn't opt in. Hold on. That's got to be wrong. Right, Adam?"
Adam Robinson
Well, it's up for you to decide whether it's wrong. What I'm telling you is it's legal...
Chase Clymer
Yep.
Adam Robinson
...in the US. This is not for the US. This is not... Sorry. This is not for Europe. It's not for Canada.
Our IPs are ring-fenced. Every email address has a US postal address. It's a US-only technology.
So the next thing that pops into people's heads is “Well, what about this CCPA/CPRA stuff? I thought that was just like GDPR?"
There's one critical distinction between Europe and here. The US has the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which is opt out. That's a misunderstanding of the market. Europe doesn't have that. That's a federal level law.
So California came in and made email opt in, they would get sued under federal law. So the difference between GDPR and CCPA is opt out, not opt in.
So if you really want to be careful, --the same thing you have to do for GDPR which is like cookie collection-- just make sure to show that to everybody.
And we can give you a couple lines to put in the descriptor of what people are accepting cookies to do.
And they will literally be asking you... They will be asking you to perform this to them.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Yeah. So we got that out of the way. I know that's the number one question you get asked. I watched you speak in Austin at the Triple Whale event that they had and it was...
Adam Robinson
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
...hilarious because any question is what Adam says. And he goes "First question, is it illegal?"
You just answered the question before asking it like calling on anyone. And I thought that was brilliant.
Yeah, the elephant in the room.
Adam Robinson
I know it's coming. "How is it legal? How does it work? What do I send?" That was every single person's [question] because like what...
So another thing that I would say, we have lots of large brands on this: Dr. Squatch, Warby Parker, BlendJet, Tonal, Penske Media... These people have legal departments.
We've never not made it through a legal department because it's legal.
Some brands have an ethical [stance] like Nike wouldn't do this because they don't want to take...
They have so much to lose from a PR standpoint for doing things that are viewed possibly as sort of an aggressive stance on privacy. So yeah. I like front-running the question.
It's like, there is no way you can describe this. This just feels as though it is illegal when it's described.
But then people very quickly understand, "Oh. A, that makes sense. And B, there's no way those large brands would be doing it for we're not legal." So then it's like, "Alright..."
Chase Clymer
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Adam Robinson
"...how do I use it? That sounds amazing. I gotta... How do I get involved?"
Chase Clymer
That's why I posed the question I had specifically used, "Is it wrong?" And you answered brilliantly.
Well, that's for you to decide. So this is a brand to...
You, as an owner of a brand or the marketing and you take it...
You make it...
Yeah, this has got to be something you guys decide whether or not you want to do this. Right?
Adam Robinson
So... And I want to...
So I was onstage with Cody Griffin --he is the VP of Marketing at Dr. Squatch-- at Grow LA. And I asked him, "What hesitations did you have?"
And one of the hesitations was basically like, "Is it right or wrong?" I think very closely that most people align with "Is it within my brand's values?"
Chase Clymer
Mm-hmm.
Adam Robinson
Right? So he's like, "The way that we thought about it was basically this."
He's like, "We thought about the inbox of someone who would actually be receiving this. There's so much nonsense in there."
And actually, an unbelievable amount of intent has been reached if you're making it down the funnel of one of these websites, right?
Chase Clymer
Mm-hmm.
Adam Robinson
If someone got an email 15 seconds later after showing that amount of intent to a brand, it's probably actually a more relevant communication than 98% of the other stuff that's in their inbox.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Adam Robinson
You know what I mean? That's the way they looked at it. I was like, "Wow, that I hadn't thought about that." But...
Chase Clymer
I'm stealing that. Watch it pop up on our marketing pages.
Adam Robinson
Yeah, exactly. It's like, this used to be a talk track for me. (laughs)
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. Alright, so let's go back in time. I love hearing the journey to the story.
How did you end up here? What was going on?
One, the technology sounds kind of wild. How did this evolve?
Adam Robinson
Oh man. I'll give you like 60 seconds on what I did right when I graduated college. So I'm 42. I'm kind of an old dog in many ways. I graduated college in 2003. At that time, tech didn't really...
We were coming off this tech bubble. And that blew up in '99. And I grew up in Texas. And if you wanted to make money, you went and worked either for a consulting firm or an investment bank.
So I got a job trading credit default swaps at Lehman Brothers. These are words that if you were around in 2008, it's like, it was in the news every day.
They made a movie out of the job that I had called The Big Short.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, great movie. Great movie.
Adam Robinson
It's crazy. So great job.
So anyway, I did that. And when I showed up in New York, I moved into this apartment. And the guys that I moved in with started Vimeo, the video sharing website, in my fucking apartment.
So I watched that blossom and I watched these guys' lives. And the whole time, I was putting a tie on and waking up at 5 in the morning and going into the trading floor every day.
I was like, "Man, I think that I want to be in tech." So the crisis happened. And the market that I was working in got regulated out of existence more or less, right?
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Adam Robinson
And I was like, "Man, this kind of sucks." I saved up some money. I'm like, instead of... I didn't go to business school.
I was like, "Instead of going to business school, I think I'm gonna take my savings and try to start a tech startup."
What does that even mean? The entrepreneurial culture was... This was like 2011. So it was definitely more robust than 10 years prior but nothing like...
Chase Clymer
You didn't have all the YC blogs.
Adam Robinson
Yeah. And there was no knowledge...
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Adam Robinson
....as far as I could tell. There is this great blog by David Skok called The SaaS Blog which I learned a lot from. Way too late, unfortunately.
Jason Lemkin started blogging around 2014-2015. The SaaStr blog. But it was hard. And everybody's path is different. I don't know how you...
You just don't know what you don't know until you start trying to do it. And then I think even when you're trying, you think you know so much more than you know.
And then maybe a year in you realize how fucked you are. And then it slowly builds up over time to where you're so self-confidence drops like a rock.
And then like over the next 15 years...
Chase Clymer
Adam Robinson
Yes, it slowly builds up.
So somehow, this horrible journey of trying to transfer my [career], to try to change everything from being a Wall Street guy to a tech guy ended up with me having this company that was like Klaviyo, like an email newsletter app.
The problem was, the way we got customers was...
We were skimming bread crumbs off the table from Constant Contact. We built an app that was at a good value proposition for like, 1% of their users. They're big.
But anyway, got this lifestyle business up and running. And that's what I thought I wanted, because I was reading 4-hour workweek and 37signals is where you work.
To try to explain to someone before this COVID thing happened, before remote work....
9 years into being a credit volatile trader and wearing a tie every day and going to a high rise in Times Square, the impossibility of, let's say, living in Aspen for a winter and working from there.
It was so far beyond a dream for me to be able to do other things besides live in Manhattan and go back and forth on the subway and spend all day in a high rise. That is really what I thought I wanted. And I got it and it was great.
But the problem with that product is the customer service...
The customers were very happy, it was just impossible for me to acquire customers because the space was so competitive.
MailChimp is such a dominant brand. It wasn't an app for Ecommerce. Even if it was, Klaviyo would have kicked our ass because they just.... Those guys had already kind of done it before. So very quickly...
There's only so long you can sit there with a flat no matter what. Stasis is very unsatisfying. You need to be growing in some way as a person. And for me, professional growth is very important.
So I started trying to do things that MailChimp wasn't doing to grow this email marketing business.
2 years in a row, I did two huge swings. It just didn't work at all. I tried to make an up-market MailChimp, it didn't work. 10 people were already doing it. I didn't realize it.
I tried to take over this authorized local expert program that Constant Contact had cut, it didn't work. Ended up getting sued. Horrible.
And then sometime in the middle of all that when it was just stuck in I was like very comfortable but slightly dissatisfied in this lifestyle business stage, I had heard that this was possible.
This core technology of someone hits your website, and they leave, and you can get an email from that person, without them filling out a form.
Having owned an email marketing app, I was like, "If I could do that, I could literally sell that to anyone with a website on the internet. No question." Because I know that the biggest problem...
Who doesn't want a bigger email list? Who wouldn't want emails from people on their website?
Again, maybe Nike wouldn't. Everybody else in the world would.
Chase Clymer
Mm-hmm.
Adam Robinson
Right? And then I found out it was legal. I was like, "Why is no one doing this?" (laughs)
And it turns out a few people were kind of trying to do it, but they were data companies and they weren't SaaS companies, and they certainly weren't SMB SaaS companies.
I think, what you have to be is a product person to make a good user experience for SMB SaaS.
It's so much better of a product and you have to be when you sell to bigger people, because they don't care.
They're getting value from other places that are more sophisticated. SMB, it's literally like, "If it doesn't..."
There is no room for...
It's like, "You have to direct them to doing what you want them to do with no words. Just buttons and pictures or whatever."
And it has to work perfectly. It has to deliver value instantly or they'll cancel, right? So having that training from the last product because that...
The customer of that last product was like a baby boomer, non-Ecommerce, weren't making money in emails... It's just a very hard customer to build for. And then it was like...
I was just looking at this landscape. There were like 2 or 3 companies that were data companies that were offering this product.
I'm like, "Man, if I could make this easy to use and a beautiful experience and connect it to everything, I literally think everybody would use it." Everybody, below a certain point.
At the time, when we launched, which was 3 and a half years ago, I would have told you "Mid-Market."
Once you've gotten to 500 million in revenue, probably you wouldn't touch it. But below that... Or maybe a couple hundred.
Since then, I have learned that the idea is very enticing for everyone. It's actually more enticing if people need help. But the problem is, it doesn't work for you if you need help.
It works for you if you're crushing it.
Chase Clymer
Mm-hmm.
Adam Robinson
And ultimately you could sell to the people that need help, but they'll churn. And the problem is the only way you grow a SaaS company is by having zero churn basically.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Adam Robinson
So this has landed us in this very narrow sliver of the Shopify universe, which is probably like 25,000 stores, which have probably somewhere between three or $4 million revenue and whatever they top out at.
There's some crazy cases in fashion or whatever. But let's say $3 million or $4 million to $50 million or maybe $100 million or something like that.
And we have these 2 products that absolutely make money for these people. One is the basic list growth product, which we can implement in a super safe way that...
You just can't believe how well it works. It's like this feels like it's cheating.
And then part of what we do is try to evangelize people to set up more flows, because we find most people just have a cart abandonment set up.
Checkout, of course because Klaviyo makes you cart abandonment, and then maybe it's like 50% of people have a product abandonment setup.
Get them to set that up, get them set up price drop, back in stock...
And then this technology, which identifies people who hit your website who are not authenticated or logged in... So they're not... For these...
For an abandoned cart, for instance, the big problem the bottom of the funnel solves --which people do not know-- is abandoned carts only get sent to people who are logged in.
Who's logged in to your store? Nobody. No one is logged into your store. Almost no one.
Probably 15% of people who are bailing on a cart are actually logged in. Which is crazy, because that flow is amazing if you just look at the number.
"Wow, this is printing money for me." It's like, "Well think about it printing 8 times as much money." So that's what our tech does.
And it expands into 2 audiences.
One is the people who are on your list, but on a different device, which is like they bought something under desktop, they're on their phone, we can hit them.
And for those people --if you have a double opt-in cell phone number-- we can hit attentive first, and have them send one text, which is magic. And then go to Klaviyo flow.
And then the other audience is the audience of our coverage network. Every email we have has a third party opt-in from a publisher where they have gathered consent for these people to receive offers that are not from that side.
So this whole world exists. Lead gen or whatever you want to call it. Lead gen, co-reg...
So we have the opt-ins and we can enable you to send cart abandonment and it's people that aren't on your list.
It's beautiful. Who doesn't want that?
Chase Clymer
Oh yeah. It's a very, very interesting product. We've got a few clients that are looking into it right now. And it is just... Your guys’... Some of your...
Your claims are definitely wild, right? They're bordering on too good to be true.
Adam Robinson
So I want to qualify the claims. So the way our pricing works...
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Adam Robinson
...is we have an unlimited deal. That's $5,000 a month.
The way that all of this tech works is the bigger you are and the more money you're already making, it just gets amplified by a constant percentage, right?
Chase Clymer
Yep.
Adam Robinson
So an easy way to think about it is... Can I share a screen on this?
Chase Clymer
You can. And the people that are listening will now have to go and watch the YouTube video to see what you are showing.
Adam Robinson
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
But we'll have to… We'll talk through it out loud. We’ll be very descriptive.
Adam Robinson
Yeah. So this is one flow. This is not the top of the funnel. People make the most money on top of the funnel. And this is 30 days in, right?
Chase Clymer
Mm-hmm.
Adam Robinson
When you plug this in, it will amplify the money you're making on your cart abandonment by at least 50%.
So it's like the conversion rates are not quite as high, but it's not atrocious. It's like maybe we're...
Maybe the conversion rate is half or something like that. But the conversion rate in your abandoned cart was already unbelievable compared to any other communication.
Chase Clymer
Yep.
Adam Robinson
So the total cart revenue goes up. And this is like from second one. So these are... This is not... The claim...
I wanted to say the claim for Dr. Squatch is unbelievable because he's paying this fixed price in the first 90 days, we make him a couple million dollars, and he's not paying very much.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Adam Robinson
Right? That's not...
We're not gonna be able to make people a couple of million dollars who were not already in the position to make multiples of that during that time.
Chase Clymer
For people that are listening, what we're looking at here is what I'm assuming is a part of a deck.
He's got 3 different examples here. The first one being DIFF Eyewear. And I guess what you're saying is after 30 days...
Adam Robinson
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
...the difference between their cart abandonment before they implemented Retention.com and after retention.com. So this first example...
They've got brand names here, too. So Diff Eyewear...
Adam Robinson
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
...without Retention, they were doing about $50,000 in the trailing 30 days in abandoned cart revenue.
And then they implemented Retention.com and then they're doing $80,000. That's a 51% lift.
Adam Robinson
Yep.
Chase Clymer
The next example here is Cuts Clothing...
Adam Robinson
And by the way, I just want to stop you real quick. That's one out of four things that we're doing for them.
This is just to visualize the type of amplification that you'll get in every flow.
Chase Clymer
So this is just the abandoned cart flow.
Adam Robinson
This is just abandoned cart.
Chase Clymer
Okay.
Adam Robinson
These guys, if you looked at the money they had made on the emails, it's way higher.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Your guys' products will help.
Adam Robinson
No, it's crazy. It's crazy.
So I just wanted to show you. It's like the big stores are going to absolutely crush. If this number without Retention.com was $50, then we would probably only lifted to $75 and it wouldn't be worth anyone's time.
This is my point in all this.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, absolutely.
Adam Robinson
So I wanted to give a visual example of the type... This is what to expect: It's going to be somewhere between 50% on every flow and a few 100%.
Chase Clymer
Exactly. Yeah. So Cuts Clothing was 33 without Retention. $33,000. And then with Retention on just the abandoned cart flow. They're up at $58,000.
For the smaller merchants out there, they've got a great example here of the abandoned cart was about $7500 bucks. So $7.5k. And then they got it up to $32k. So that's a wild...
On the percentage lift, that's a wild one. You're seeing greater gains with larger audiences on some of the bigger brands.
Adam Robinson
Yeah, there you go.
Chase Clymer
That's fantastic. So that actually brings up a great question. How big does my brand need to be? What's the measuring stick to where this would make sense for me?
Adam Robinson
Yeah, we're honing in on how to actually articulate that. I think, minimum 50,000 US unique sessions per month. Think minimum $3 million in revenue?
Chase Clymer
Yep.
Adam Robinson
And then once you get to $5 million and $10 million, it's probably going to start working very, very well at revenue.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Adam Robinson
Up to 150 sessions, like 150,000 sessions, we will crush it.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Adam Robinson
And then above that... We like [ii if] somebody shows up with a million uniques. And we're just like, "Oh my god, this is the best day of my life.They're literally gonna be sending us champagne and baby gifts and stuff."
Chase Clymer
Awesome. So what if I'm interested in this? What's the next step? What do I do?
Adam Robinson
So I would just go to retention.com. www.retention.com. Book a demo and talk to one of our salespeople.
If you have any questions, you can email me adam@retention.com. I will respond.
I got a LinkedIn presence. retentionadam is my handle.
I'm starting to tweet a little bit. @retentionadam, also the handle.
But yeah, I would say if you're just like, "This is for me." Go book a demo. If you have any questions, just hit me up and let me know what they are.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Adam, is there anything I didn't ask you about that I should have asked you about before I let you go.
Adam Robinson
I don't think so. I think we covered most of all we needed to cover.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Everybody, go check out the product. It's pretty cool and see if it's something that your brand wants to give a go.
Adam Robinson
Rock and roll.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
You can subscribe to the newsletter at honestecommerce.com to get each episode delivered right to your inbox.
If you're enjoying this content, consider leaving a review on iTunes, that really helps us out.
Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.
Until next time!
Transcript
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