A Deep Dive into GetEmails with the Co-Founder & CEO, Adam Robinson

Yeah, I mean, co-founder for both. Ish. Okay, yeah. I mean, right—we, I’ve co-founded, so it’s the same group as our last company.

So I grew up in Houston mostly, which is like two and a half hours down the road. And for five years—when I was five to ten years old—I lived in Wilton, Connecticut. My dad was in the oil business. So, like, you’re either in Texas or Greenwich, Connecticut. That’s where a lot of these other guys are but they bounce back and forth through there.

He started poor. He grew up on a farm. It’s one of those stories where he’s a smart kid, went to UT, got a job as an engineer, and then saw these traders were just absolutely killing it. I think he was sitting in a research analyst seat, saw that the traders were killing it, and made his way over there.

It’s like, “We’re both working the same hours of the day and these guys… how do I get to be one of them?”

It looks like they’re doing exactly what I’m doing because we’re both sitting at computers.

Yeah, I’m reasonably certain I considered a computer 10 feet away from here.

It was three kids, and my parents are still married. So it was kind of boring, in a sense. A really loving household. Not a lot of drama. I don’t have one of those stories where it’s like, “Yeah, you know, it was…” It was just very middle class, suburban school, musical events, emphasis on education. It was a really nice way to grow up.

Yeah, so my brother was a really good swimmer. He was the first high school swimmer to ever swim a 50 free in under 20 seconds. Pretty cool.

He went to Stanford. My co-founder was actually one of his swim teammates at Stanford—he’s also our current CTO. He tried out for the Olympics in 2004 in the 100 breaststroke. He got third, missed it by a tenth of a second. But then the next year at NCAA championships, he beat the gold medalist in the 50 free. So he was like, “Man, I should’ve tried out for that.” Because since you’re eight years old, all you want as a swimmer is an Olympic medal, right? That’s the goal.

Exactly. And it was fun to watch that from pretty close. It’s just amazing what those guys put themselves through— all throughout high school, two-day workouts.

Tate, my co-founder, was a comp sci major and a swimmer at Stanford. So basically every hour of his day was accounted for.

Exactly. I don’t know how they do that, but I think swimmers come out of that sport with such unbelievable discipline. I don’t think anything is ever as hard as that the rest of their lives. Jobs are a joke. They’re like, “Okay, I was swimming eight hours a day, which was extremely physically demanding, and studying eight hours a day. So yeah, I can definitely work eight hours a day.”

It’s worked for us. One of the next questions is, what was your first job out of college? I worked at Lehman Brothers. And funny enough, my dad worked at Enron as an oil trader—so we caught these two bankruptcies.

I also found that the typical guy who trades credit default swaps at Lehman Brothers—you’d just categorize him as the LAX bro from Yale or something. One of those Ivy League LAX dudes. But you get swimmers in there too, and the swimmers are always such good kids.

His coach said what he did differently from other people is he worked out seven days a week. There was this school of thought that your body needs to recover. And their attitude was just, “We’re going to try not to do that.” These guys are such mental animals—it’s impossible to describe how important the mental game is to being a truly elite athlete. You just can’t be a mess and be that good.

One of the biggest things his coach said, that I read, was that he never burned out. It just wasn’t in him to ever get tired. The repetition—that was what made him great. I mean, I can’t do it.

You can’t—you’re an athlete.

Sure, yeah. I always kind of thought I wanted to be an entrepreneur for some reason—I don’t know why I had that in my head. But these Wall Street jobs, if you could get them coming out of college, you just got them. They paid great, and it felt like the big leagues. There were these guys who were super young and absolutely killing it at the time.

So I somehow finagled my way into trading credit default swaps at Lehman, which—unbeknownst to me—five years later they’d be making movies about. The Big Short—that job. And that was awesome.

But even more interesting than that was showing up in Manhattan, and my roommates at the time were starting this website called Vimeo—in the apartment. One of the top 10 websites on the internet at one point. It was just really cool. I watched that happen.

And I think what really kills people’s souls—those Wall Street guys who still have souls—is the idea that you’re just extracting money from the system. It’s not a bad job, but there’s not much satisfaction in it. You’re not building anything. And it just seemed like those guys were having a much better time. We were both doing great—this CDS trajectory I got lucky to catch was unbelievable. We did way better than the guys 10 years before us, and way better than the guys 10 years after us.

But still, I had this purpose idea. I wanted to start a tech company in an apartment like my buddies did. Then the crisis happened, and a bunch of regulation hit the market I was in, which made it really easy to walk away.

I had some money saved up. I started trying to make investments—which were all horrible. If I had just done the opposite of what I did, I’d have a million dollars. Dollar for dollar, what I passed on versus what I invested in—insane. I passed on things like Box, Plaid… Plaid just sold for $5 billion. That was the first investor meeting I had after QuikFinance. It was insane what I did and didn’t do.

But still, it worked out—no regrets. Somehow I found my way into this email marketing space, which is a long and great story, but I’ll save it for another time.

We had this incredible customer acquisition strategy that was finite. We found that one of the biggest companies at the time had 250,000 customer records on the outside of their website that they didn’t know were there. It was a non-password-protected community page with first name, last name, business name, and ZIP code. The amazing part was there was a six-digit unencrypted number in the URL that, if you scaled by one, it was a dead page. If you scaled by two, it was the next person.

So with Tor IPs, over three months we captured all this data, sent it overseas, and had people fill in the phone numbers. That was our first product. Took us forever to build. We made all the mistakes—had it built overseas, then Tate rebuilt the entire thing.

At first we had someone else build the editor, and just before launch, we found out he’d built it for web, not email HTML. That added a three-month delay. It was horrible. It took 18 months to get a product, and we spent way more money than we should have.

We started selling it with the value prop: “Get 50% more opens for half the price.” I started selling $15–$20 subscriptions over the phone, which takes forever to reach cashflow positive. Luckily, the list was great, so our conversion rate was solid. But still, when you’re paying salaries and selling those one-by-one $15 subs, it’s excruciating.

Eventually, I had this idea that I wanted to start the company in a crazy apartment. Like MTV Cribs–style loft that these guys were living in. I was living with them. Slowly but surely, at one point there were 39 cold callers coming into my apartment every day. We’d throw one desk up at a time, and suddenly all three bedrooms were filled with people. So we started putting them in the living room.

Then it’s like, “Man, we need another place for dudes to pee. Maybe they can start peeing in the sink, in the laundry…” And then it ended. We chopped from 39 to 6 because all those people were just calling that one list—and the list ended.

The email marketing space is incredibly difficult. There are 200 vendors. Mailchimp dominates it. Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit—they’ve all done a good job doing what Mailchimp isn’t doing. But I still think Mailchimp is growing faster than anyone, and they’re 10 times as big as the others. Everyone thinks their product is free. By the time users realize it’s not, they’ve already set up everything—they’re not switching.

It’s just an incredible brand, incredible company, incredible culture. I admire them so much. Very difficult to compete with. They’ve put a stranglehold on the market. You could only do a few things, and you had to be really well-positioned to do them. That’s debatable, but they’ve done a great job—let’s leave it at that.

We spent three years trying to come up with ways to do what they weren’t doing. Failed over and over. Probably spent a million bucks on devs, building stuff and abandoning it. “Let’s add this feature, that feature. Maybe if we do this, we’ll get that part of the market.” But they weren’t going to switch.

Eventually, I stumbled across the identity resolution market. A buddy of mine helped with this—Ryan Urban, CEO of a company called BounceX in New York. It was an enterprise-grade lead generation/marketing firm that charged on a SaaS model. Big company—$100 million in revenue. They wanted to acquire an email service provider. He called and asked if I’d be interested in selling.

I don’t think he really wanted to buy ours—we weren’t his customer base. But maybe somebody more upmarket. It was a buy-or-build thing they were exploring.

We started talking. At the time, they were identifying people for ecommerce sites who were already on the list but not logged in, allowing brands to send more abandonment emails—cart abandonment and such. That’s a big portion of users: not logged in, but they’ve put stuff in the cart.

So first I was like, “Can I try to sell that, just along with Robly?” But we couldn’t get a single person to listen. If I start talking to you about switching email marketing platforms, you just zone out. You’ve solved the problem already—you don’t care about new features. You’re not listening.

Then, over lunch, he says, “I think the real money is in selling email addresses of people who aren’t on their lists yet.” You can do that in the U.S.—not in Europe or Canada—but his investors wouldn’t let them do it. So he’s like, “If you want to, JB, go for it.”

I started mentioning it at the end of our sales conversations when we were trying to sell the BounceX tech bundled with Robly, and you could just see people’s faces light up. They were like, “Yes. That’s what I want—more email addresses.” Nobody wants to talk about sending more emails to people they’re already emailing too much. They want people who aren’t on their list, so they can grow.

That’s when I asked, “How do we talk about this other business?” But they were so busy doing other things, the whole situation fizzled. Meanwhile, I started going down these rabbit holes—asking, “Who can I talk to that knows about this?” I met this one guy…

He’s got an agency, and he’s used all these technologies. He’s like, “Well, BounceX does that, but there are several other guys who do it too. They’re all very small. There’s a couple different parts of the market—some just sell you the record.”

He said, “The problem is, they’re not software guys. The products are really hard to use. You have to sign contracts, no matter how big or small the customer is. You have to build your own integrations underneath.”

He’s like, “If you could just make this product easy—Mailchimp easy—I think it would take off. If you sold them email addresses they didn’t have, the big guys won’t touch it, but there’s this whole space of the market—the little guys would be all over it. And by the way, some little guys are huge in terms of traffic and email. There are two- or three-person companies doing millions of unique views a month. They’re paying $50K to $100K a month for email marketing.”

It’s just a world you’d never know about unless you were exposed to it. That started this journey of, “How do they do it? How do we do it?” That took another year to figure out.

We eventually figured out how to put all the pieces together in the background, and decided we’d put it inside Robly as a feature. The funny thing about that was people would sign up for the identity product—the email-based retargeting product we called RoblyID—they’d have a horrible user experience, wouldn’t use any other part of Robly, and would download files every day to upload them into Klaviyo or Drip or whatever they were using.

I was getting really into reading Y Combinator stuff—product-market fit, all of that. And that’s a sign: if someone’s willing to endure a horrible user experience and still pay for your crappy product, there’s probably something there.

We started doing customer interviews, and these people were like, “This is an 11 out of 10.” One guy said, “I was buying opt-in email addresses for $2.50. You’re selling them to me for a quarter. They open and click the same. I sell advertising against my JV newsletter…”

So, we realized: this is a crappy product because we’re trying to make people do something they don’t want to do—switch ESPs. And quite frankly, the other ESPs are better than ours. We hadn’t built automation yet. We’d put it off for five years. But this is a great product if it’s connected to everything. Like the guy said, if you’re up and running in 60 seconds and it’s easy, that’s what people want.

I’ll preface this by saying we failed over and over again with my ideas for the last three years. But watching this one come to fruition was just like, “Oh my God. How much I’ve learned. How far I’ve come.” It was awesome.

I didn’t want to steer the mothership away from Robly—it was still a pipe dream. Before you build something, you don’t want to distract people from improving the product that’s actually paying the bills. But I mocked up the UI in Snagit. Got a girl on Upwork to make all the Photoshop files. Got another person on Upwork to code all the HTML and CSS. Then Tate, my CTO, spent two weeks building a minimum viable product—just a script you put on your site.

Start to finish, it was a nine-week build. We launched it on November 1 of last year. Spent five grand on ads in the first month and hit $10K MRR by the end of the month. That process had a lot of lessons. You just have to go through it all.

There’s another great lesson in all this. When you’re a small, bootstrapped, lifestyle SaaS company—the kind you wanted to build because you read The 4-Hour Workweek and 37signals seven years ago—you’re trying to will this thing forward, and it’s not moving. Then you just tilt slightly to another market that’s super new and has no competition, and it’s like… dude.

So currently, we’ve basically done all our advertising on Facebook. I wasn’t expecting this, but we do these stupid ads—my girlfriend and I—new ad every week. My view is, you’re not competing with other software companies. You’re competing with people’s timelines. The machines love faces. If you can create this 60-second sitcom every week, people will actually start anticipating the ads. You can really build a market that way.

Our ads are ridiculous. The other interesting thing is our product gets incredible engagement. If you just describe what GetEmails does to people, 50% of them will have a passionate negative reaction: “That’s a total violation of privacy. You’re stealing people’s information. You’re the scum of the earth. You should fucking die.”

You get all these comments. You can wind these people up, get them to write back ten times. Then Facebook thinks the ad is gold. The engagement is amazing. The reach is crazy. It’s kind of a silly strategy—some alt-right kind of energy—but it works.

As of yesterday, we’ve spent $127,000 on Facebook ads, and we’re doing $2.2M ARR. Since last November, $127K in ads for $188K in monthly recurring revenue. That’s the kind of market you want to be in.

This is the same guy—me—who tried for three years to grow this email marketing business and couldn’t get any movement. It’s such a great story. Such a lesson.

Something interesting was going on in that other market. It had been around for a while. I had evidence from people who were using the other products that the products worked. It was a reasonably good solution, but they were all tiny—because the product and marketing package wasn’t good.

One of the companies… the way they explained it was unclear. It was really hard to get started. Another company sold five things, and this was just 10% of what they sold. They didn’t care about it.

So I thought, “Oh, this is a great opportunity to explain it how I think it should be explained, give people the right resources to understand it, and make the product sweet from a software perspective.”

You put our script on your website, and we can identify full, personally identifiable information of up to 35% of your anonymous traffic—people who didn’t fill out a form. And we send all that information straight to your email marketing app in real time.

If you want to really spit fire on a Friday—we’re going freemium for like 95% of the market, because I worship Mailchimp so much.

It’s 500 emails per month, for free, for anyone with a website in the USA. Forever. It’s silly. I’ve never heard of a value proposition that good.