How GetEmails CEO Adam Robinson grew GetEmails to $7M revenue and 750 customers in 2021.

hey folks my guest today is adam robinson he's building a very cool tool called get emails and he started this after spending 10 years on wall street trading credit default swaps at lehman brothers and started his first startup called robbily email marketing the company was bootstrapped ranked number one in customer satisfaction in 2017 the company distributed mid seven figures and was sold for eight figures his current venture get emails helps e-commerce and publishing customers identify their anonymous web traffic and retarget them over email he launched company in november 2019 and just crossed i'm gonna let him tell the revenue number adam grady at the top yeah sure ready to take us to the top how are you doing okay what's the revenue number what's up uh four million ar that's great okay 66 full-time employees bootstrapped 50 total margin that's incredible 18 months old well 18 okay got it so talk me through the first that's the starter story how did you get your first hundred customers so i had as you as you read in the bio i had an email marketing company that i started called robly email marketing uh that's a very difficult space incredibly challenging but we had a really nice lifestyle business and then attempting to niche i discovered this identity resolution space which is like basically identifying anonymous web traffic and then without the person actually filling out a form we'll pass you a plain text email address add it to your list so you can market to them and whereas you would get like three to five percent of people to fill out a form will get you 40 of your traffic so just an unbelievable email list growth tool it was a feature in robly everybody loved the feature nobody was actually switching to the platform so so we thought hey if they're if they're like downloading these files and uploading them in their email marketing app and they're enduring that horrible experience and like give us a 10 out of 10 on the mps report we need to spin this out connect it to everything and launch the product on its own so ask me a plain text email so i've used tools like it is magic let me just ask the question because i thought my audience will ask the same exact thing which is there's tons of tools like this out there the issue i always have is you get a massive list of company names based on ip addresses it'll say you know someone from sendgrid was on your site for 20 minutes but i don't know what the hell to do with that you're saying we'll give you the person you'll give me the email of the person who was on the site yeah so we connect an anonymous we connect anonymous digital identifiers that are used in the advertising network to rich customer profiles um and yeah like lead forensics for instance does what you're doing what you're talking about but we go a step further it's primarily a b2c tool because all the all the emails are like gmail hotmail um yahoo and stuff like that but we actually give you the person and it's worth 3d uh it can we have some b2b customers but like we're having so much success in the bbc world we're just not focused on it you know what i mean all right so launching 28 uh wait late 2018 it sounds like 2019 2019 okay um scaled nicely so so first one our customers came from your last company which is great how many customers are you adding per month these days so it's kind of like a tale of two businesses there was what we did to get it off the ground and there's what we did what we're doing now so the first i would characterize the first year as uh the facebook year my wife and i did these like outrageous and funny facebook selfie videos then they were like the ads were paying back in a day um they were giving us unbelievable reach it was working incredibly well but nine months in we're like this is the wrong type of customer churns through the roof um even though the ads even those quick payback and allowed us to grow really quickly we noticed that our top ten customers had huge revenue expansion they were paying us between five and thirty thousand dollars a month we need to focus everything on them so end of the year last year uh beginning of this year we did a pivot stopped running ads um it's entirely an outbound sales model and we're bringing on people between like you know two and ten thousand dollars a month now that is just a totally different like the number of customers that we're adding is much lower but like we added 50k mrr in the last 30 days you know what i mean and across how many customers uh i would say probably you know uh 25 to 50. whereas if you if you if you did 50k a year ago it would have been like 500 or something like that you know what i mean a new mrr mrr r got it okay it's a good growth so just to be clear absolutely no dollars on ads right now zero dollars on ads what does the sales team look like if you're doing outbound is there a sales person or what there is one sales person and one person assisting that sales person she's doing it entirely entirely cold email the quote is kind of like bring as much as you can but it's one sales person who brought in 50k mrr last month so she's doing pretty well i mean the reason i'm asking here is because this is like like a pivotal moment for a lot of test companies is the comp that you put on your first sales rep say that again sorry this is a pivotal moment in many sas companies when to bring on your first outside sales higher and what quota how to incentivize them so yeah she's she's she's been there since she's been there since day one and she has a a sort of co-founder incentive structure she's got like shadow equity that her equity percentage grows with our ar so like she just got her equity doubled when we crossed 4 million ar you know that would never yeah that would never work for a sales team but you know my attitude is keep this thing as small as possible i actually want to like sell it to your private equity or something that will actually scale the team like at the end of the day how much equity do you currently still own the business uh we have the same cap structure as the last company because it was a spin out of the last company if that makes sense and the last company i had two co-founders um i own 42 percent of the last company and i on 42 of this one got it and did your wife you said does your wife own any here too my wife does not own any equity she was just a significant contributor to the ad campaign oh got it not a co-founder okay cool yeah not a co-founder i mean i i started the first company like five years before i met her got it got it okay and what's the so so the other two co-founders on the other sort of 60-ish percent or exactly bootstrap no investors okay interest but i'm asking there was no investors at the old company either no no investors why didn't you just why did you buy them out i mean why take them into the new business man that's too long of a story for this podcast but um it was just you know one of them's my brother one of them is my best friend uh there were several ways to handle this and i just thought just rewinding a little bit um i sort of experimented with growth tactics for like three years with the other company's money as it was doing fine you know great lifestyle business something finally works right if i'm the investor in the old company i say you just spent my money for three years trying to to figure this out so you know it's my asset yeah that's kind of the conclusion i came to um and it's really hard to buy somebody out when you're like so excited about the future prospects of this thing like what what would you sell so yeah we we did like 50k mrr in like the first six weeks what would you have sold that equity for well just you know going back to the co story adam i mean they're all are they working currently as hard as you are in the company uh one of them is one of them is not it's like the one that's not like that's the argument of why you would reshuffle the captive thing right i i hear you uh there was one other sort of tricky moment in like 2015 or 16 and i think maybe if that tricky moment hadn't happened i would have been more assertive about it but uh you know but with this one my plan the entire time was to sort of grow it really fast and exit fairly quickly so that also is just you know if i was in this for like 10 years i 100 would push for that um how many customers today uh 750 paying customers 750. okay cool and then um talk to me about churn so churn is a really hard thing to talk about because i explained that facebook ad strategy and like the people were bringing on last year probably had an average of 10 000 unique monthly visitors whereas everybody would bring on now has 300 to 500 000 totally different customer profile i told you better top 10 in turn so looking at it by segments um our top 25 has been around for 75 percent's been around for over a year all the top 10 is huge expansion revenue but like the the bottom churn the the top line churn number just like doesn't even mean anything because it's the whole bible listen we just the whole magazine issue last month was focused on logo churn doesn't mean anything but it doesn't mean anything for the exact reason you just articulated and that's why we use revenue churn which accounts for large contracts that...