The Startup Ideas Podcast - The step by step guide to starting a business from $0

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

I’m joined by Adam Robinson who has bootstrapped startups to millions of dollars in revenue, as we deep dive on how we would validate and grow a startup idea.1) The Yonder Phone Pouch market is exploding• Locks phones away to create "phone-free spaces"• Already in schools, concerts, comedy shows• Huge potential for innovation (charging, remote unlock, etc.)• Adam predicts 98% of middle schools will require in 10 years2) How to validate & launch a Yondr competitor:• Target affluent customers first (Elon approach)• Have 100s of conversations before building• Look for "eyes lighting up" as signal• Prototype only after strong validation3) Growth strategy: Micro-influencer UGC• Outreach to 1000s of relevant micro-influencers• Send free product, ask for honest posts if they like it• No monetary incentives needed for authentic content• Aim for breadth of coverage, not mega-influencers4) Copywriting Framework• Study successful brands in similar space (e.g. Jolie)• Use AI (Claude, ChatGPT) to adapt their style• Remember: Don't copy, but get inspired and make it your own5) The "third way" of building startups:• Combine Rework's bootstrapping principles with Y Combinator's focus on product excellence• Result: Profitable growth without VC dependency• If product is truly excellent, word-of-mouth drives growthWant more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideas 🎯 To build your own portfolio businesses powered by community you might enjoy my membership.You'll get my full course with all my secrets on building businesses, peer-groups to keep you accountable, business ideas every single month and more!Spots are limited.https://www.communityempire.co/📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free:https://www.gregisenberg.com/70,000+ people are already subscribed.To improve your rankings your business on Google and using AI for SEO, sign up tohttp://boringmarketing.com/FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND ADAM ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/retentionadamLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/retentionadam/Episode Timestamps:0:00 Intro02:34 Startup Idea 1: Yondr Phone Pouch 2.009:53 How to validate & launch a Yondr competitor18:41 Growth strategy: Micro-influencer UGC26:28 Copywriting Framework30:43 The "third way" of building startups:

Here is what a yonder phone pouch is. It's this contraption that basically prevents you from accessing your phone, which is the greatest drug on earth. I just have this incredibly high level of conviction that some sort of locking phones away is going to be a part of kids' futures, you know, and in a lot of other environments, too. And here's where I think the potential for innovation is. there's a huge opportunity to like identify an elegant feature set around this pouch that just makes it work a lot better. If you were going to create, you know, yonder 2.0 or yonder for XYZ niche, how would you actually go about doing so?

Adam Robinson, you've made it to the Startup Ideas podcast. This is the highlight of my career. This is literally, it's only downhill. from here. I'm so excited to be here. I feel like I'm on a mountain top. By the way, I was on a mountain top all of last week. I was in the woods in Colorado, sitting like a monk, basically, reflecting on life. I was getting nature therapy. You like really achieve deep inner peace if you're totally unplugged and in solitude. It happens to everyone. We live like that for a million years before we were evolved to do that, you know.

But it's just hard for people like us, right? You're busy. You have family maybe or whatever. And it's like maybe later, maybe when my kids are older and then you never do it. So I just keep doing it. And it's like so great because it actually helps you with the time with your kids. That's how to prioritize it. So anyway.

So you were on that mountaintop. You were brainstorming startup ideas. You decided to text me. We're now here. And I'm ecstatic because you're the real deal. you've built, I mean, you've built businesses from zero to 20 million ARR completely bootstrapped. So when you talk, I listen. That's rare.

Yeah. Not many people end up doing that for a lot of reasons, which we agree are stupid. Some of them, you know. Exactly. Exactly. So let's just get into it. You know, what's on your mind right now and what could you share with people? So look, I, you know, to this nature theme, right?

like we lived in the woods for a million years and then a couple thousand years ago we started living in cities which pulled our brains in a totally different direction that were not physically evolved to be in. Then 150 years ago the industrial evolution happened and for a large part of the population it really made them live in a crappy environment. Then connectivity happened whenever it was 10 years ago which is literally the worst. So, the yonder phone patch exists for a lot of reasons, right? Like, this device is like fentanyl for us. And it's so powerful that we've literally had to create a pouch to like go in

and respect a comedian, for instance, and actually listen. Otherwise, we'd just be on our phones, you know, getting our monkey mind whipped around by like whatever alert or text message that doesn't matter from someone. that we receive. So I think this like take this device that I know is absolute kryptonite for my well-being and like put it in a place where idiot proof this like put it in a place where I can't touch it is like a massive market for the future. And it's very in its infancy, you know, how many schools have a yonder patch like hardly any? My guess is in 10 years, 98% of middle schools are requiring people to put their phone in a pouch and lock it during the day.

That's my guess. So there's probably people who don't even know what a yonder patch is. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So here's what a yonder phone pouch is. And I hope that I'm going to inspire a lot of innovation out there because the yonder phone patch only works in one way, right?

Which I think is the tremendous opportunity because there's a lot of people who would prefer. for it to not work in this way. So if you go in Austin, like if you go to Joe Rogan's comedy place called the Mothership, as you walk in the door, they literally require you to take your phone out of your pocket, put it in this pouch, then they touch the pouch to a device that locks the pouch and you cannot open the pouch until you touch it to that device again. So your phone's there. You're holding it, but you can't access it. So you're It requires you to be, you know, it just helps you pay attention to the actual and participate in the environment that you're in, right? So that's the application for a comedy show.

You can see the application for movies and theaters. Education. I mean, I just read this book called The Anxious Generation, which I would highly recommend reading. It's by the guy who wrote the coddling of the American mind. I mean, these cell phones are just terrible for, for middle schoolers. You know, everybody's getting them earlier. and earlier. My buddy runs a charter school here in Austin. I'm like, is there a chance that by the time my two-year-old is in middle school, the parents will have agreed to have not given them smartphones.

He's like, no shot. There's always one that will because we're getting the point where everybody had smartphones when they were young who are having kids now. So, so anyway, that's what it is. It's this contraption that basically prevents you from accessing your phone, which is. the greatest drug on earth. And here's where I think the potential for innovation is. This device, this, the yonder pouch, which I'm sure is just growing exponentially, right? I don't know, but like, I just have this incredibly high level of conviction that some sort of locking phones away is going to be a part of kids' futures, you know, and in a lot of other environments, too. the pouch works in one way.

It's a very, you know, kind of a 20th century device, if you want to call it that. It's very not tech. It's just like it kind of like works like the theft things in retail stores. You touch it to that device. It locks. You touch it again. It unlocks. Right.

Like if you have a 2,000 person high school, the practicality of that is not really great. I think there's like kind of like what Elon did to the car, there's a huge opportunity to like identify an elegant feature set around this pouch that probably is not that much more expensive than the just what they're doing right now. That just makes it work a lot better. Like, oh, it charges your phone wall. It's in there. Or, you know, it like the principal of the entire school when the bell goes off hits up. unlock and all the kids can like get into their phones without literally queuing up you know for a half hour to walk out of the building to like tap their device on this thing.

Shh, don't tell anyone, but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions. And I'm giving them away for free. These aren't just random guesses. They're validated concepts from entrepreneurs who've built $100 million plus businesses. I've compiled them into a one simple database. Compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast. But the main thing is, most of these ideas don't need a single investor. Some cost nothing to start.

I'm pretty much handing you a cheat sheet. The idea bank is your startup shortcut. Just click below to get access. Your next cash-flowing business is waiting for you. I am fat if I were not doing what I was doing I would be like

digging a rat I don't I would be digging a rabbit hole on this device keep my phone away from me market yes for sure yes because we're going to want that more and more

and I think more and more people acknowledge that we don't have the power to do it ourselves right so from a scale perspective from what I heard yonder was doing like 30 to 40 million in revenue they've got over a million students every day using the product in 21 countries which is crazy um that cost about 25 to 30 dollars usd per student um another interesting thing is i just checked um google trends and i use this tool called glimpse that add some search data on top of it the some of the top searches for google trends for yonder is yonder stock how do I invest in yonder

invest in yonder is yonder publicly traded which is a really good signal that people believe in the company so if you were going to create yonder 2.0 or yonder for xyz niche how would you actually go about doing so I would probably take the Elon approach and make a fancy one for rich people first

You know, like, I just feel like rich people are also very aware of this problem, a lot of them. And like you can have, you have access to them through social media. So like, I mean, this is literally what I would do. I would just start talking. I would, whenever I was around my more affluent friends who have kids, I would just start talking to them about this. And I would probably buy yonder and show it to them. And then I would be like, what if this could do X, Y and Z?

Right. You know, and then I'd work on what the X, Y, and Z was after, I mean, hundreds of conversations. I would not build anything until I could say X, Y, Z, and I would get, like, a literal eyes light up asking me where they could buy it. And then I would start prototyping something physical. I would do an enormous amount of, because, man, it's like prototyping is expensive. You can save a lot of heartache through talking. I don't think people really understand that who have not started several companies before. You know, something's happening to me right now, which is this great example of like not talking enough.

Like we're building this other feature for RB2B. And we built a tangential feature first. We put an ICP filter and ideal customer profile filter first. and didn't really talk to people. We thought we knew what they wanted. We didn't think about the fact that like, okay, so like, if you filter down by ICP and LinkedIn, you're filtering an 800 million contact database. Yep.

So a restrictive ICP filter makes sense. A lot of our customers, we resolve 10 contacts a day. If they put a restrictive ICP filter, which is like and instead of or, it's going to give them zero to one contacts like, per month. You know what I mean? But we defaulted to the and, right? So I asked, and we didn't realize this to like, I asked the people who are trying to beta test this other feature to set it up. And then we're like, oh my God, like 10 out of 10 people, the way we built this are doing something that like we would want to nudge them the other way. And the first reaction is like, oh, it's fine. Like, you know,

support can explain it or whatever. But it's like, no, if it's 98% of people that we want to nudge one way, support to explain to the 2% why. Anyway, so, you know, I just keep learning that lesson over and over again. But, but that is literally what I would do. I would just go, go start talking to people. And then there's a bunch of interesting tangential, kind of like, if you can get people to unplug and disconnect for a few days, universally, people feel like it's an incredible experience. So if you can start like, you know, renting these summer camps in the fall in the Northeast and like, you know, having family experiences or like, you know, people in their 20s can like, you know, bring 30 people there or whatever. Like I'm just so interested in getting people away from their phones. And I think that like more and more every day people acknowledge how terrible this ongoing, you know, onslaught of, of, uh,

you know, our lives now, right? Like you and I are, we're in it, dude. Like, we're, you know, we're, we're the worst victims and perpetrators of this, of this problem. How do you know I wasn't just checking Twitter right now? Yeah, and I'm sure you were. I didn't know I was just on Twitter this whole conversation. Yeah.

It's like, uh, I talked to these guys one time in, in, in, uh, L.A. And they're like, yeah, we like help apps become more. addictive. And we also have a consulting firm that helps the platform make the platform less addictive. So they're like causing the problem on one end. And then they're like helping, you know, consult with Android about how you can like layer the black and white on or whatever, you know, they're both sides. They're both sides. They're like gray goose, but they're also alcoholics anonymous. Yeah, totally. But I guess if you understand the problem, that well, you can help you can help those.

Totally. Totally. So I'm on the Yonder website and I see something I like seeing, which is if you go the Yonder website, they have a bunch of different categories. So it says, first of all, their tagline of phone free spaces, like perfect, really, really well said. So elegant. So elegant. By the way, like, like anytime you can get a super clear statement that's like under five

words. Yes. That really captures the essence of what you're trying to do like that is totally magic. Three words is the goal. If you can get to three words, God bless you. So with RB to B real quick, like there's like this weird thing where we're identifying website traffic, but everybody does it different. And the right visitors from us are not the right visitors from somebody else. So my tagline, use us too. I like that. Yeah. Beautiful, right? Yeah, that's really good. That's really good. So on the Yonder website, phone-free spaces, you got homes, all these categories, home, school, music, comedy, events and weddings, courts, workplace, productions, hospitality, and other.

What that says to me, whenever I see something like that, I'm like, okay, how do I create Yonder for X? Yeah, totally, totally. I think going to your point, like, if you can mock up some of these landing pages, mock up the products for X and then just start talking to those people, that's a great approach. The other thing I usually do also to your point is once I see categories, I'm like, okay, these are categories. But what's a group of people that I would go target that has specific needs for this thing? So, you know, yonder for rich people. yonder for, you know, wellness people or whatever, just, you know, going down the list and and then seeing, is there something unique that you can provide to them?

Totally. Like, surely, I look at that and I don't know what it is yet because I haven't had other conversations. Yeah. But what I do know is that one dumb device is not the best, it's not the best for all of those different applications. it's like 80% there for all of them. It's not 100% for any of them. It might be 100% for one of them,

which is where they started. And then they realized it was 80% for the other 15 or whatever. Right. So like the way I love thinking about it is like I saw this thing that a VC made one time that was like Craigslist. And then it was like all of the startups that have been started since Craigslist that have taken a slice of Craigslist. This is like, to me, this is like that's the story of startups. It's like yonder's Craigslist go make one and then like other slices of like either a smarter or a dumber or like a whatever, you know, whatever musicians need that like, you know, hospitals don't or whatever. I just think there's a huge opportunity.

And when my buddy who runs a charter school is literally saying what the top search volume is, he's like, I don't know much about this stuff. But like if you can get in on yonder somehow, like this is going to be in every school in America. in 10 years. Like this idea, right? Like, and I understand why. I couldn't imagine something that is like interferes with learning more than a student having a smartphone on their desk. That's right.

And I think, like literally like maybe like when I was in middle school and raging hormones, like a naked woman in front of me would have been worse, but like not by much, you know. I think you're totally right. I think there's also an opportunity. When a market gets really big, there's just an opportunity to be a Me Too. And if you just innovate on like your $5 less or you're black, you know, you're red and black, you know, just a color color way. Yeah, totally.

That could also be enough. So you're a, I would consider you a growth guy or a marketing guy. If you were going to create yonder for rich people, let's just say you did some quick testing. people are like, yeah, that's something I want. If it looked like a, I don't know, really dope cigar, high-end cigar case, I would totally buy that for $799, $799 instead of $149, or $249, which you undercharges. How would you go about actually growing the thing?

I would do what Ryan Babenzian at Jolie did. And I would do. a micro to medium influencer UGC strategy. And I would start before I had the device. It's manual. So by the way, I'm not trying to like promo my stuff or whatever, but like I had this guy.

And there's this Apple, there's this B2B app called Clay, who's also massive UGC motion. I had the two of them on my weekly live show a few weeks ago. And it was unbelievable. a lot of it was unintuitive and the they were saying the exact same thing that they did right to grow this B2B app with legion agencies and to grow a showerhead business with micro influencers it was the exact they were saying the same words that guys don't overthink this it's literally just outreach right

Like, you know, we had a novel thing and like these people tried it and liked it and they made content about it. Right. So I would, I would pick a few thousand influencers who kind of like had either, either we're talking about things related to health and mental health or, you know, they have an audience that like the subject matter are things that are like tangentially interesting, interesting to affluent people. And I would go after them and I would say, I have this pouch. If I send you one for free and you like it, would you post about it? If you don't like it, throw it away. But if you think it's dope, post about it. Right.

And with interest-based social media and the randomness of TikTok or whatever, it's like if you get enough of that going, you know, one out of every couple hundred goes viral. like basically what Babensi was saying is just like before we started this we were trying to come up with like how do you create a stream of traffic that was the volume of paid but the quality of organic and that is what I would do it's a it's basically a cold calling thing so by the way those guys got the showerhead business Jolie to 50 million run rate in 36 months with three people they just hired their fourth full-time employee They have double digit free cash generation off of this physical product business. They send a $99 filter every year to people who buy the showerhead that does not get canceled. It has 93% gross churn, 19 million ARR with like 95% margin of filters, right? It's like one of the most beautiful businesses I've ever heard of. And if you're like, what's the strategy?

He's like, it's all inbound now. they all come to us. But like in the beginning, it was outbound UGC. That was the only thing that we did. So that's what I would do. And you don't need to incentivize these people. Like it's really as simple as just sending them the product and being like, if you like it.

Look, here's the thing. This is what I, Ryan's a great entrepreneur. He's a second timer. He sold a shoe business to Steve Madden. He waited for years before he started another company because he was looking for the perfect combination of financial. and product principles to build a product around. And then his skin was drying out.

And he's like, oh, the showerhead, it's perfect. It's one size fits all. It's like whatever. It's not susceptible to fashion, which was like killing him about this. The inventory management is not a problem. And he's basically like what, you know, it's a, they're ugly. It's a, there's no brand story around showerheads. So he just saw the opportunity there.

And the product is very good. We have one. if you have a great product that is good enough to have word of mouth, there are 1,000 things in the world that you can do to speed it up. This UGC thing would be one of them. The problem is, it's hard to get a product that's good enough to get word of mouth. But my thing is, you need to keep talking to people until their eyes light up because their eyes lighting up is a sure indication that if they get it in their hand delivered as you promised, they will tell somebody. else, right? So, like, is this going to work if you have something like the product of the first company that I started 14 years ago? No, because the product wasn't good enough.

But, like, I have this company, RB to B now. We have an incredible UGC strategy because, like, the product is so good and so hot that these lead gen agencies, when they post about it, it does more for them than posting about anything else. Right. So, like, that's my point. It's like, both of them said this. It's like, they did not incentivize these people with, money at all, not $1, right? And that's why what they also said was it's about the breadth of the coverage of the audiences rather than going to one person. And they were like, one person who had a massive audience, like Kardashian or whatever, they're like, they both had this view. They're like, those people are way overpaid. They haven't really helped the brands at all. And the way to think

about it is if you were going to pay, rather than paying $500,000. for one post, you should pay $500 for a thousand posts from small people. So those are just some kind of like core principles of getting it to work. Because I would hope that with the experience that I have, that I wouldn't even be at that point unless I was like, I know that rich people want this because they're asking me where they can buy it. Right? And then like I get the prototype.

I handed to them and they're like, other people are then coming to me who, know them and saying, how do I get this? Right. At that point, I would start the UGC outreach. And I'd be like, here's what's coming. You know, good sales copy. If I get you one and you like it, you know, will you make content about it? And if you don't like it, we, will you throw it away? Right. Like, quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called boringmarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google. And the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI.

I could help you outrank your competition. So for my own businesses, I wanted that. I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg. I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses. I wanted to rank high in Google. That's why I like SEO, and that's why I use Boringmarketing.com, and that's why I invested in it.

They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money-back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com. Someone's going to listen to this and be like, yeah, but I can't write copy as well as you, Adam.

And I think in a really easy way to do it, is if you find another product that has great sales, copy like let's say Jolie like go and sign up buy a Jolie for example um just study their their copy map out their funnel and then just go to go to Claude or go to chat chbt and be like hey this is what I'm trying to write for this product I wanted to be in the style of Jolie because I like it for the following reasons could you take a first stab at it yeah totally and um I think, look, you can't copy people. That doesn't work. If you copy people, you'll get like 1% of what they're doing. That's my deep belief. It takes people a long time to learn that. It took me a

long time to learn that. It took me years to learn that like copying. I don't know why it took me that long. I don't know why I didn't like, I just didn't appreciate the kind of artistry of being an entrepreneur and like the fact that the world doesn't want something that's the same. It wants something new. But like taking a lot from what's working over here and applying it over here does work. You know what I mean? Like at what came to mind immediately is like I went to Bhutan on a trip in 2011 and they're drinking this like butter tea, which was like so good. And then a few years later, I start seeing this bulletproof coffee. And it's like the same idea. It's like this dude was in Nepal drinking this butter tea. And he's like, oh, if you put that in coffee,

he kind of does the same thing. It has this like really makes your body feel really cool. And I didn't even know that that was a backstory until like a year ago. And like, that's literally what happened. If every single person in Nepal and Bhutan is drinking tea a certain way, then there are definitely a ton of people in America who do the same thing. And if you're a great storyteller, game over. Right. But all that stuff, like I wasn't a good copywriter 14 years ago. you know like like but like you said I was just like looking at stuff that I was like man like what about that do I think is so amazing and then like how could I just like adapt it to what I'm trying to do you know and I think that's what all the grades do right like it's like steel like an artist

there's this great book called steel like an artist like if you take from one person you're a plagiarist if you take from 20 people you're an artist right you just kind of have to do it that way And then I think the longer you're in the game, the more you develop your own true style, and the less you're doing that, you know, like I'm not really looking at stuff anymore when I write copy, but man, I've been doing this a long time. Totally. You know? Totally.

Yeah, I think what you can steal is not the individual recipe, but like the direction of the recipe. So, for example, you know, one of my favorite websites is once.com, Jason Freed's company. And it's this beautiful manifesto around how they see the world and how things have changed and all that. I'm not saying go and like copy once.com, but you can, what you can copy is the recipe of like a manifesto. and and, you know, a main character having, encountering problems and stuff like that and apply it to whatever it is, you know, you're trying to do. Because recipes like that don't really change. Like human beings don't really change.

And it's really just about adapting that to whatever it is you're doing. Beautifully said. Thank you, sir. Yeah, these guys love being different. They love being different, but like, did they invent the manifesto? Probably not. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, like these guys were like one of the most influential. You know, I sort of read four hour work. So I worked as a trader at Lehman Brothers for 10 years. The day I arrived in Manhattan, my roommate Jake Lodwick was building. Vimeo on a Dreamweaver instance, baby blue homepage, big letters. And he's like, I think I'm going to make this thing that shares video with people. I was just like, why would you do that?

You know, like, no, we didn't have smart phones. Like it was, it was 2003 or 2005, no, four. Anyway, so that made me want to be an entrepreneur. I was a trader for 10 years. And when you're a trade, when you're like, it's really hard to describe the life, how much of a fucking grind it was. Like I was getting up at 4.45 in the morning because the gyms were I had to get to work at six.

Gims were not open until like 530 or whatever. I was running across a Brooklyn Bridge on the coldest day of the winter at 4.45 in the morning in Manhattan every single day because I wanted to work out. And then, you know, putting a tie on, like getting on the subway. Like it was just brutal. And then financial crisis happened. I had a good year. And then a bad year.

And then I got fired because I lost a lot of money at once. But I've saved some dough. I was like, okay, what do I do now? I don't want to do that anymore. You know, and I think I've got enough money to like transition this to something else. And if not, I'll just go get another. I go back, right? Like, but I was on the clock.

And you read four hour work week after you've lived that life for 10 years. And it's like he was riding to me. He said that he was riding to somebody, one of his friends who was an investment banker, right? And it's like this idea that like if you're making a lot of money and you're living that way, that's not actually good. Making far less money for far, far, far, far less output is actually a much better position to be in. And like, there's a lot of ways to control your expenses. And then you have this free time to do, you know, whatever you want, presumably. Just the way he thought about time versus money was like a massive paradigm shift. And then I read rework and I was like,

holy shit, this is it. You know, like, this is the direction that I want to go in. And then my first startup basically ended up being a rework business. It was like 3 million ARR, 50% profit. I had two co-founders. But it was like an email marketing business in the customer account was shrinking by a percent a month. But like it's a good, it's a high, a low term product category as net revenue expansion. Because like you're charging people based on their list size.

and they don't switch that much because it's like where the data is being stored. So it was kind of just stably at three million error, but like at some point it was going to end, which was not a great space to be in. And then I think the perfect combination is it's like rework fundamentals, but Y Combinator orientation towards growth. If you can think about product market fit and growth from the Y Combinator lens, which I really don't think rework emphasizes that much. They're not, I'm not sitting there reading the rework book and being like, I need to strive to have a truly excellent product that has incredible word of mouth before I even take anything to market.

That's not the vibe that I get from that. The vibe that I get from Y Combinator is it's all about your product. It will solve all of your problems. The reason you're going to get burnt out is because it's not growing anymore. The reason it's not growing is because the price not good enough. Like if you kind of marry those two ideas, I think you can be in this like, perfect world of entrepreneurship where it's like you have enough conviction to stave off vCs and you know whatever not go down that path that's like stacked against you horribly but you still

have the understanding that your entire life is only going to be as good as a product that you sell like that's just the reality you know and I don't think those rework guys emphasize that enough So maybe I'll be the guy who sort of comes out with this, you know, religion about how, you know, well, Jason Freed was spot on. The Y Combinators are spot on in many ways, but like they missed the mark in some. There's this. There's the third way. Totally. Well, I thought, you know, I was listening to that.

I was like, maybe I'll be the guy too. Yeah. No, I think we're really aligned in the way we think about this, right? Because my whole thing is like, look, if you have a chance of making a. big company that would require venture capital, it's going to be because you have a great product. If you have a great product, you really shouldn't need venture capital unless it's a really capital heavy business, right? Like if you're like doing vertical takeoff and landing helicopters, like one of my friends from New York, right? You're going to need to raise hundreds of millions

of dollars to experiment with that. And then to roll it out, you're going to need to raise billions. But like software strangely, it's like it is the lightest thing to create, but we have had the lowest standards for profitability. Right? Because just the multiple thing and what we can go faster or whatever. I personally believe there's like ways to structure your pricing and go to market to where it kind of offsets the needs. for capital to build huge teams to go distribute it, you know. And I also think bigger teams move slower. That's kind of a counterintuitive thing.

Anyway. Dude. That's the pod. There you go. That's literally the pod. Mic drop. Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for coming on.

Where could people learn more about you? Yeah. I hope that I'm as big as you on Twitter someday. I haven't actually had time to focus on it. LinkedIn's where I'm at. I make a lot of stuff almost every day. I like have an incredibly transparent, you know,

journey sharing thing going on there. I tell it the good and the bad and the ugly. So Adam Robinson on LinkedIn, if you want to email me, Adamatretention.com, I'll respond. Yeah, man. Rb2B.com. If you want to figure out who's on your website

and get their LinkedIn profile, it's free. That's what I'm up to these days. Damn. And I like how you gave the email. You know, people, your email is about to blow up. Sweet. Yeah, that's cool. And dude, you should, you totally could create a system that takes your LinkedIn content and just in an elegant way moves it to X.

But that's the story. I got to, you know, we got to talk about that. Yeah, I'd love to talk. Anytime. I just am such a believer. So now that I have a large social media presence and I am in a position where I am respected in the startup ecosystem as someone who knows what they're doing, I will never start a business without that. You know what I mean? I was talking to one of my co-founders because we have this other business that sells to e-commerce and it's so hard because outbound's getting so hard. And it's like, what do we even do to like, create awareness and generate leads and stuff.

And I was like, dude, like now that I have this founder brand stuff, like I feel like starting a business that sells to anyone other than people in SaaS, given this audience that I have, would be like the Kardashians starting a lipstick and being like, we're, we are not using Instagram. Nope. We're going to go do that. We're going to create a brand that doesn't involve us. And we're going to pay a bunch for ads.

And we're going to start from zero. It's like, it's just, it's just the biggest superpower of all time to create. organic content that people like. So I would encourage anyone listening, if this is still rolling, to start today trying to find your voice. Because once you do, it's going to open up doors you never knew. Totally. And going back to your yonder idea, it's like if I was going to start that idea, I'd start

with a TikTok account and Instagram somewhere, build content around phone free spaces, go, you know, review phone free spaces, phone free. Like, get at phone free experiences on Instagram or whatever it is. So it's a good place to start, not just for personal, but for, as I always think about it as my minimal viable product is my social account. Yeah. So, Adam, I'll catch you later and maybe on a mountaintop somewhere. All right, man. Thanks for having me on, Greg.

Thank you.