Adam Robinson

CEO MoltSets, RB2B, and @retentiondotcom | MoltSets: Unlimited Contact Data APIs for AI Agents $27/mo | RB2B: Person-Level Website Visitor Identity

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

$10M ARR is the FU MONEY of SaaS.

At $10M ARR bootstrapped, you and your co-founder clear $1M+/year in salary and dividends easily.

You can sell instantly for $30-40M. There are hundreds of EBITDA buyers at this level vs. a handful at $1B valuations.

From here, you can do whatever you want.

Hire a CEO and work 1 hour/week. Grind 100 hours if that's your thing. Raise $50M from a position of strength. Scale to $25M ARR with 25 people and pay yourself $10-15M/year.

Most companies never get here because VCs show up early with decacorn dreams and money you don't need.

That capital interferes with the one thing that makes you great: product-market fit.

Bootstrapping to $10M ARR is easier and less risky than creating a VC-backed unicorn, with a far higher probability-weighted outcome.

If you can find PMF and use customer money to get to $10M, you can do anything you want with your life.

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

Bending Spoons could run https://t.co/Qr0pGh7efz with 20 people, for $100m+ profit per year.

Yet Apollo has 800 employees and is likely break-even at best. WHY!??!

Because Apollo - like so many other SaaS companies - is stuck in the “Zombie Trap”.

What’s the Zombie Trap?

- A company raised $ XXX million during COVID/ZIRP
- The last round was a unicorn valuation at over 10x rev
- Growth slowed, whacked people, got to breakeven
- Valuations collapsed - ZoomInfo w/ 10x their rev now has lower market cap than Apollo’s last round

SO WHAT THE HELL IS APOLLO SUPPOSED TO DO???

Tim Zheng was so confused by what to do that he stepped down as CEO.

I don’t blame him.

The pickle Apollo is in is that they literally CAN’T do what they SHOULD do … Which is what Bending Spoons WILL do when they buy this company (and many others like them).

BENDING SPOONS PLAYBOOK FOR APOLLO:

1/ Reduce staff from 800 to 20 (yet ship features customers actually want FASTER)
2/ Go entirely PLG, focus on contact data, stop trying to be Clay
3/ Increase pricing sophistication to offset ENT rev collapse
4/ Crank 100+m profit/yr out of a great brand that’s lost its way

Once Bending Spoon CEO Luca Ferrari gets on a podcast and explains that he can actually run companies this way, it becomes obvious to the listener that the company should have done this on their own.

But they can’t.

Why?

BECAUSE VC’S WON’T LET THEM.

Founders sign up for a system where making $100m of profit per year is so far out of the range of acceptable outcomes that it’s not even a consideration.

Instead, Apollo, and other Zombies like them:

- Hire new leadership, many from companies than have actually been Spoon’d

- Myopically focus on the one company in their space with increasing valuation (in this case, Clay)

- Ferociously build to try to create a copycat value proposition (which dilutes their brand and confuses the shit out of customers and prospects)

- Aggressively market their “platform”, publicly making claims that they are not what 99.9% of their customers think they are (in this case, a contact data company)

- Pray that they will be as lucky as the few and far between who Salesforce acquires (like Qualified or Braze etc etc)

Meanwhile, I’m licking my chops.

Apollo is the undisputed leader in contact data for the segment we’re going after with https://t.co/PJFLlYZ67e, and they have completely forgotten they sell contact data. Just look at their site.

It’s giving me the opportunity to hit THEIR market with a value prop VERY SIMILAR to the value prop that got them where they are today.

Which doesn’t resemble what they’re currently selling.

DATA IN '22:
ZoomInfo - $20k
Apollo - $99/m unlimited per seat

DATA IN '27:
ZoomInfo - $20k
Apollo - $99/m for 4000 credits per seat (shrinking by the month)
MoltSets - $27/m unlimited, unlimited seats

(Try MoltSets here for free: https://t.co/PWPLqfNZTn)

YOU: Ok Adam, you have cheap data. I’m sure it’s shit!

ME: We’ve been rapidly improving our dataset as we hear customer feedback.

The biggest complaint were “stale profiles”, or verified/deliverable emails that were the last role...

That problem will be mostly solved 11/1, and by Jan 1 we will be refreshing profiles every 3days.

The insane thing?

Starting Dec 1, we’re going to re-validate all email addresses of 150m global contacts EVERY 7 DAYS.

MoltSets will be the highest quality B2B contact database in the world.

At $27/mo unlimited.

Where does that leave Apollo?

You tell me.

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

Bootstrapped founders while OpenAI and Anthropic make it impossible to sell or take secondary.

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

Using Clay, Wispr Flow and Claude Code, Alex Fine (CEO of Understory) just built 8 multi-channel campaigns to run 1 allbound system across outbound email, LinkedIn, LinkedIn ads, and Meta ads.

It's insane!

It landed 2 new opps in the last 30 minutes.

Here's how it works: 👇

First off, he didn't even log into Clay to build this. He did everything from the terminal in Claude Code using the Clay CLI, MoltSets and Deepline.

The Clay CLI is crazy good. He said the tricky part is building skills that can navigate it and operate it efficiently, but once you do that you can literally do just about everything (we'll show you how. see below).

The other part that blew him away is the ability to find the exact audience he was looking for with precision using MoltSets as a first source. (!!)

Once he was able to articulate the perfect company, he was able to spin up allbound audiences based on anything. Lookalikes from their most successful clients, etc.

So he ran a test...

He wanted to see if he could build an entire allbound motion using nothing but his voice.

Highly tailored segments, messaging, persona matching, case studies, etc.

The results are CRAZY.

We're going over them and HOW TO BUILD THESE EXACT CAMPAIGNS tomorrow LIVE.

Join us get to copy Alex’s exact Claude skill files and terminal setup.

We're covering:

- Voice-to-Terminal Execution: Triggering multi-channel campaigns using Wispr Flow

- The Clay CLI Playbook: Navigating and executing Clay workflows directly from CC

- Terminal Data Sourcing: Pulling verified audiences and lookalikes natively using MoltSets

- Multi-Channel Audience: Syncing targets across outbound email, Meta, and LinkedIn ads

- Build Reply Agents: Deploying Clay workflows that auto-generate tailored case studies the second a prospect replies to an email CTA.

Starts at 11am ET.

Join us here: https://t.co/rhh3NZ9Zs0

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

FOUNDERS - WHAT KIND OF FUCKING MORON SIGNS UP FOR THIS???

[Callum Williams @econcallum]

Holy moly... this new paper finds that 88% of VC-backed founders receive zero exit value 🤪🤪🤪

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

Amos Bar-Joseph just cut his AI monthly invoice from $130K to $50K while ARR grew 25% MoM, and it made one thing clear... the AI model race to the bottom has begun. 👇

He said once they finish the move to open source, that Anthropic invoice will go to ZERO.

Here's what's happening...

For months their agent ran on Sonnet + Opus, and they treated $100K+ invoices like the cost of doing business.

Then Minimax dropped. Then GLM. They ran the evals expecting a gap.

There wasn't one. Not for the work that matters to their customers... scoring leads, reaching out to prospects, updating their CRM, summarizing calls.

Same output, a fraction of the cost.

So they rebuilt the entire stack open-source.

That's how $130K became $50K.

The frontier labs are in a race to the bottom.

Token costs are collapsing toward zero.

Soon everyone will have frontier intelligence for pennies.

So when the model stops being the moat, the harness around it becomes the most valuable asset.. the context, the routing, the taste to know which task goes where. That's the bet Amos made the day they started Swan AI

And it's working!

Tomorrow Amos is going LIVE with me to show you exactly how they cut their AI bills by 60% and built an agentic harness for GTM (and why it's the most strategic piece in the GTM stack - not the model provider).

Plus, he'll demo how he built the custom GTM tooling their using to grow 25% MoM. Like deal rooms and automated collateral generation with Lovable.

Tomorrow at 11am ET.

Join us here: https://t.co/rhh3NZ9Zs0

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

Hey YC Founders - since I can’t turn back time and have you NOT do YC (I wish I could) … If you are rolling your own agentic cold outreach stack, check out MoltSets.

Thank me later.

$97/mo unlimited data + unlimited seats, 100% verified data, will revalidate every 3 days.

Try it here: https://t.co/PWPLqfOxIV

P.S.

Tag a YC founder and I’ll send you a MoltSets hoodie.

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

“Mom, how did we get so rich?

“Your father raised $100 million for his startup.”

“So he got rich?”

“No. I left him for the VC who made 2 and 20 on all the money he invested”

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

Here's my startup hiring philosophy:

Hire people that would be great founders, but are too risk-averse to start their own thing.

The key is giving them free rein to own their area of the business.

Try to control them, and they leave.

Freedom leads to great culture.

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

RB2B is a $10m ARR company with 1 FTE.

I'd be OK if it never grew another dollar.

Why? Because what makes it work are the constraints.

We designed a stupid-simple PLG product that could be supported entirely by @fin_ai. The McDonald’s of site visitor ID.

I know most founders don't agree with this approach...

I can’t tell you the number of times - since BEFORE LAUNCH - people told us we needed to use AI to filter for ICP, find more contacts, draft messaging, and send emails and LinkedIn messages. And it’s what all of our competitors did (who are now all DEAD). While we kept the core product in its simplest possible form.

In fact, it’s STILL HAPPENING.

Last week on the way home from our all team offsite in Toronto my buddy @jesseogtm was yelling at me about how I needed to roll MoltSets into RB2B because it would solve our churn problem and double revenue.

But here’s my question to founders:

WHY DO WE NEED TO SOLVE OUR CHURN PROBLEM AND DOUBLE REVENUE?

If you include our OEM $$$, RB2B is over $10m ARR. And it requires ALMOST NOTHING from us, while our core team goes on to build something we think has similar characteristics but is even MORE promising.

Yes, we have a shared data team of 5 people who support four business units that total $32m ARR.

Yes, Ebru does answer escalated tickets, and continues to improve Fin.

Yes, Kayley handles OEM.

But I am completely baffled that human nature makes it impossible for ANYBODY - even Jesse, a close homie and fellow bootstrapper - to accept that RB2B might just orbit at $10m ARR for the next 5-10 years, its product in its simplest possible form, supported by a SEARINGLY CLEAR value proposition, at a price so low that nobody can disrupt its market position.

I listened to @dhh on @davidsenra's podcast on the way to the offsite. Of course I’m a sycophant, he and @jasonfried are my literal heroes. The first book I read when I decided I wanted to be a Founder was Rework.

In the podcast, DHH made a point about how the HARDEST THING in 2026 as a software founder is to NOT BUILD EVERYTHING, because it’s so easy to build. He said there is something so beautiful about physical products where you finish it, bring it to market, and that’s what it is, on the shelf, forever… And since software isn’t that way, apps often become a bloated mess of noise.

So I put it to you …

What if RB2B’s revenue doesn’t grow anymore, EVER?

What if the website and product are EXACT same 10 yrs from now?

What if I launch a brand every 2-3 years that does the exact same thing?

WHY DOESN’T ANYBODY ELSE THINK THAT WOULD BE AWESOME?!?!?!

Because I do. And I’m going to keep doing it.

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

To be clear, I will not sign an NDA or redline ANYTHING whatsoever for our $79/mo PLG Web-ID product.

Stop asking me over and over again to perform legal work so that your enterprise company can “run a test”. I know it’s impossible for you to believe that I don’t care about your business. But I don’t.

RB2B is PLG, we serve the SMB, and we’re proud of it. And by the way - I think saying “no” to all things Enterprise is one of the things that makes RB2B so awesome. You can’t talk to someone even if you wanted to, and that’s BY DESIGN. We get away with it by having a product that is so simple and inexpensive that you don’t need to talk to people.

If you need an NDA to use a $79/mo widget, were not the right fit. And thats okay.

If you want to buy data, on the other hand … hit me up and our team GOT U!!! DM me. Our data is sick, particularly B2B2C.

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

Startup founder configuring his 50 AI agents, building his SOPs, and monitoring his vibe coded analytics dashboard with 300 different metrics. (He has 0 paying customers)

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

ARR vs. amount of VC money raised

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

FOUNDERS: If you don’t have confidence in yourself as an entrepreneur, it’s normal.

I didn’t believe in myself AT ALL as a Founder until my SECOND startup took off. Why?

Because the first startup felt like it was cheating.

We scraped 250k paying customers from a community page of a unicorn pioneer of our space, cold called them all, got 5k to switch over, and from the day that list was completely burned I did not figure out a SINGLE OTHER WAY to acquire a customer for that product.

It was devastating. I had no idea if I could create something that would work in the “Real world”, or how long this would last before it just straight up died.

After YEARS of banging my head against the wall, I finally got traction with something COMPLETELY NEW. Well, not completely new. It was an website-ID feature in our original app that I thought was so unique it would get people to use the original app. Which it did not.

BUT, when we spun it out as its own company, I made a VSL from digitalmarketer(.)com’s template, got someone on Upwork to make word art out of it, spent $1k on ads, and got $5k MRR back in a WEEK.

(see the video I made 5 years ago below).

3 years later it was at $13m ARR and we only had 6 people. Somewhere between when I launched that and when we hit $13m I felt validated as a Founder, because I actually created something from scratch that thrived in the real world.

That one is over $20m now (https://t.co/qoNfErJ2cI), we did another one (https://t.co/cYiEY5QuZl) at near $10m, and now I’m highly confident that we can make https://t.co/PJFLlYZDWM a VERY nice business.

But that confidence wasn’t always there and took a LONG time to bulid.

If you’re struggling with self doubt, there’s really only one thing you CAN do …

Keep building.

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

FUCKING CLAUDE keeps telling MoltSets users that 20% of profiles are stale and don’t match the validated email address we’re providing. Why am I so pissed about this???

Because everybody knows that Apollo’s stale profile rate is 50-60%, but people are stuck in Apollo's UI, so Claude doesn’t have a chance to stick its nose into the workflow and spot check freshness.

What pisses me off the most is when I ask “well how is it at your other data providers” and I get an “I don’t know … this is the first time I’ve done list building in Claude or over API”.

FUCK YOU CLAUDE

[and by the way, we will almost completely remedy this problem during our next data build … STAY TUNED]

Try Moltsets here: https://t.co/ZxfLkdixXf

Enrich your prospect lists with verified emails, mobile numbers, and LinkedIn data, right inside your AI stack from only $27/mo!

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

Hey X - I’ve lost control of my AI bot.

No matter what I say, it keeps giving people insane deals I would never approve - like $27/mo grandfathered in with no daily cap for https://t.co/PJFLlYZDWM!!!

Can some AI expert please tell me how to stop this monster before it bankrupts me?!?!?

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

In March of 2021, two weeks before we were supposed to be wired $10m for selling my first bootstrapped startup, one of our engineers accidentally deleted the entire code base - and WE DIDN’T HAVE A BACKUP!!!

Here’s the full story and how NOT to run your IT at a tiny startup:

March 26, 2021 was a day like any other.

I woke up, went for a run, made some coffee, and plugged in for the day.

At around 10am, I got a text from Tate, our CTO.

Tate: “Something really bad just happened.”

This wasn’t immediately alarming.

It's a startup. Things always go wrong.

Me: What happened?

Tate: Gustavo (name changed to protect the innocent) deleted the entire code base.

Me: WHAT?!?!?! How did he do that?

Tate: One of our four nodes crapped out, which has been happening all the time. I taught the guys to go into Amazon and 'reset' it. The problem is there is an option to 'stop' the node directly below the 'reset' option. He chose to 'stop' that one, and just then, by chance, a second node crapped out. He stopped that one two. When you stop two nodes on a 4 node distributed database, it’s all gone.

Me: Well, that sucks, but I guess he didn’t mean to. We have a backup, right?

Tate: No, because to save money, I wasn’t writing a brand new backup file every day because I didn’t want to store two 1TB files. Instead, I would update the old file with the new backup information. There is a two hour window every day where it was writing where if the code base was deleted we wouldn’t have a backup.

I finally began to internalize the meaning of what I was hearing.

My heart started to accelerate and my palms began to perspire.

_____

TIMELINE:

10am: Find this out.

10:02am: Call co-founder, James, we panic.

10:15am: Call Amazon, they say there is nothing they can do. Ask for someone higher up, tell them millions of dollars are on the line.

10:30am: Speak to the higher up person at Amazon, they tell us there is nothing they can do.

10:32am: Tate attempts to reach out to the backup company.

11:00am: Acquirer reaches out and says “your website has been down for a couple hours. Do you know what’s going on?”

11:30am: Tate makes contact with the backup company. They tell him he is an idiot and pennywise and pound foolish for having any time exposed without a complete backup file. Say they can’t help.

11:45am: Tate explains that we are about to sell this for $10m - in literally two weeks - and is able to convince them to connect him with a very senior engineer who actually built the product to see if they can dig into the file somehow. But they had never done this before, so they had no idea. They gave it us a 20% shot they would be able to get the code base back.

12:00pm: I go to my friend Brad’s house - a VC - who says he has never heard anything like this ever in 30 years of tech, and that Tate had to be plotting something. I said he had 25% of the equity. No way.

12:30pm: Go to my friend Lou’s house who worked at Vista for 11 years, also never heard of anything like this, also assumes it must be some sort of malicious attack, maybe by the developers?

1pm: I realize talking to my friends isn’t helping. I grab my 6lb dog and start walking around Austin.

I walked until 8pm. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink.

I was calling up our bankers and telling them the transaction was off because we didn’t have a website to sell, and having to explain this absurdity to them.

I had already internalized that I was personally going to get $4m in two weeks - and I basically had ZERO savings at the time.

I was going to pay off my mortgage. I was going to buy a new truck, and buy a boat because I had just found a slip on Lake Austin. After taxes I was still going to bank $1.5m and put it in the equity market.

What did I do?

I thought the smartest strategy was to accept the most likely and worst case scenario, and if I got surprised, great. If not, I was already on my way to healing.

I walked around Austin for 8 hours and told myself, over and over again:

“It’s only money. You will make way more money in the future. It’s only money. You’ll make way more money in the future.”

But it wasn’t just money.

Internalizing that all of the work everybody who had ever worked on it had put in over the years - even though we never got it past $3m ARR - literally brought me to tears.

By 6pm there had still been zero progress breaking into this backup file.

I kept walking.

At 10pm Austin time, Tate called.

“We’re in. They aren’t sure how the process I was using actually works, so they don’t know what we will find, but we are in.”

I was so exhausted from the crushing devastation I was actually able to pass out at around 11pm.

I woke up at 4am Austin time, after having nightmares about backups and databases all night.

I checked my email. There was one from Tate, from 15 minutes prior.

“WE FOUND A BUNCH OF FOLDERS!!!”

I called him right then, and he explained that they were able to dig up what looked like all of the folders that made up the code base.

He didn’t have anything to compare it to, so he didn’t know the completeness of it, nor did he know if there were actually any files in them, but they started with the folders that started with “A’s” and it appeared as though most of the critical files were in it.

After spending eight hours preparing myself for total loss, I felt a rush of relief that I had never felt before or since.

Slowly, over the next 8 hours, I got update after update that they were into more folders with more files, and by noon, they had recovered 97% of the code base.

It would take two days for the website to be up and running again, but the only problem would be that some reports would be off from the day before.

Jesus.

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

Every time I feel bad about my business - which is often - I get dinner with a VC backed Founder in the $20-30m ARR range who has raised over $50m. I share my complaints, then they share theirs👇

- They are unprofitable
- They’re either stuck or not growing fast enough for their investors
- Their investors send them all the Clay and AI financing news weekly
- They have 5x the team size I do (and execs)
- They are on planes at least 1x/week (I hardly travel)
- They are being forced to add product complexity
- They face intense new-entrant competition despite superior product
- They are under an incredible amount of stress and don’t see a way out

After they are done… it always kicks off the same dialogue:

CEO: “But you’re making money, right?”

Me: “Yea, we will probably do $12-14m profit this year."

CEO: “That sounds like the absolute dream.”

To which I always get reminded that... Yes, it actually is!

But when you’re in the middle of it all, it’s so easy to lose sight of.

Startups are hard.

Some things get easier, but in my 12 years of experience, it almost always feels like shit.

But if you can last long enough as a bootstrapper:

1. You will end up being enormously profitable (mini exits every year)
2. You will have total freedom to design the life you want for yourself

Raising money is exciting and validating, but most of the time you end up stuck with no way out.

The reality?

$10m ARR is the FU Money of SaaS.

In 2026, it takes fewer FTE’s than ever before.

At RB2B we’re about to cross $9.6m ARR growing with a team of 3.

99% of VC backed founders would kill for that business.

If you can bootstrap, bootstrap.

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

this is advice I give founders, maybe it helps you:

1/ The only way to experience rapid growth from a cold start is through a disruptive product AND disruptive marketing

2/ Investment capital will NOT help you solve either of the problems of #1 - in most cases it will work against you

3/ Hold off on taking funds from anybody as long as humanly possible. If you absolutely have to raise, do it from people who would give you money if you opened a restaurant

4/ If you can’t raise money from people who would give you money if you opened a restaurant, you aren’t ready yet. Start a simpler business first (consulting, fractional), get some wins

5/ Building a lean, inbound machine that will get you to $10m ARR without many hires, then building a proper company once you are super profitable, you win no matter what

6/ Only hire when it hurts, but let people go the second it seems like someone isn’t the right fit. “I’ve never regretted letting someone go - only not letting them go soon enough”

7/ Start working with an executive coach at $5m ARR to help you learn how to communicate and manage people. You suck at it, have horrible habits, and it will take years to change them

8/ If you are stuck at 1%’s growth at $1m ARR, raising money will not fix that problem. You will likely need to pivot to something totally new and different to grow

9/ If you can hold out on investment long enough, the freedom you will have as a bootstrapper will give you the life you wanted when you started on this path in the first place. VC will not

Just my two cents.

Hope it helps.

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

https://t.co/E6XDD8fOOS

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

@icon Lfggggg!!!