Hey there. 👋
In 2018, Adam Robinson hit rock bottom.
He was fired from his finance job and spent a year of his life and a million dollars on a product nobody wanted.
Today, his company Retention.com makes $25M+ ARR.
In the next 7 minutes, you’ll learn:
Why Adam says not to build before you sell
How to stay lean and scrappy until you hit product-market fit
Why being “stuck” is just part of the game
The tale of one man and his jerky
Let’s dive in.
Sell first, build later
Adam spent a year building Robly, an email marketing software that he thought could rival Mailchimp. But when it came time to promote it at launch, nobody cared.
The big shift came when he flipped the sequence, validating before building.
Here’s how to do the same:
Craft the one-line offer. It should be so obvious people feel dumb saying no. If you can’t explain your value in a single sentence that gets people excited, you don’t have product-market fit yet. (We like these examples from StoryBrand.)
Not being able to fill out this very simple card from DigitalMarketer.com made Adam rethink everything about Robly.
Mock it up for cheap. Adam used Photoshop files, Upwork freelancers, and an iPhone-recorded video ad. Don’t overthink it. The point is to make something concrete enough that people can react to.
Test demand fast. $5K in Facebook ads → $10K monthly recurring revenue in 8 weeks. Quick tests reveal winners (or losers) before you sink months of time and money into building.
Sound familiar? Last month, Joseph Choi told us how his founders validated demand by making content before they ever built apps. Adam brings the same principle to SaaS: sell the promise first, then build the product once people prove they’ll buy.
Don’t invest months building features until you know the pitch alone makes people reach for their wallets.
If your business is facing constant rejection and slow sales from the start, it won’t get much easier compared to ideas that click early.
“The ones that start hard, stay hard. The ones that start easy, stay easy.”
👉 Try this: Write down 5 one-sentence offers for your product idea. Test them with prospects until one lands. If no one bites on your offer, even the best code won’t save you.
Lean, mean testing machine
For Adam, being lean isn’t a phase, it’s a strategy.
His cofounder ran sales for 1,500+ customers out of a Google Sheet until they hit $10M ARR. The first CRM came only after 15 demos a day were already happening.
You can stay lean by:
Using free/low-cost tools + AI to multiply yourself
Delaying hires until you absolutely need to offload work
Testing before you invest
By keeping costs low, you buy more time to experiment. And it only takes one winning experiment to break through.
When Adam was stuck at $3M ARR, he kept rolling the dice with experiments until one hit: identifying anonymous site visitors’ emails.
That single feature unlocked growth and became GetEmails → Retention.com, which now makes $25M+ ARR.
Want to hear more about his journey?
👉 Watch the full interview with Adam here.
Where’s the beef?
Another story about selling before you overthink your product is a classic here at AppSumo.
Back in 2014, our CEO Noah Kagan challenged himself to make $1,000 in less than 24 hours.
The business he landed on was Sumo Jerky, a beef jerky subscription box idea suggested by Sumo-lings. (Important note: The man did not possess any jerky.)
But Noah made a landing page anyway.
Then he got to cold-emailing people, asking if they wanted monthly jerky delivered to their door. Enough people said yes and paid that he validated demand before he even had a single bag of jerky to send.
9 hours (and a ton of caffeine) later, Noah ended with $3,030 in total revenue.
From there, he found suppliers, shipped the boxes, and scaled it into a profitable business that eventually sold.
Some takeaways from his jerky journey:
Real-time communication wins. Cold emails, Zoom, texting, phone calls > posting and waiting around.
Get to the root of rejection. Ask prospects why they wouldn’t buy. Usually the answer uncovers what they really want and how you can solve it.
Ask for referrals. Whether someone says yes or no, ask who else they know that might be interested.
Focus on what already works. Offices were already ordering snacks (and had budgets to expense them), so they became the perfect customers.
Don’t spend a ton of money. Noah launched in 24 hours with just $7.99.
Downsells work. If someone didn’t want the full 3-month subscription, Noah offered just 1 month instead.
Build + maintain your network. Noah realized he hadn’t reached out to some friends in a while. Your “garden” of contacts needs regular tending or it’ll decay.
Got advice for getting unstuck? Send us your best tips and we may just feature you in a future issue.
❤️ & 🌮,
The AppSumo Team
P.S. Make your favorite entrepreneur’s day by sending them over to Mind Your Business.