How Adam Robinson Makes $24M Per Year from LinkedIn (Genius Strategy)

Key Takeaways

Adam Robinson went from completely ignoring LinkedIn as a way to Market a SAS products to using it to generate a combined $24 million in annual recurring Revenue across his two companies and he's been able to crack that Revenue Mark in only about 3 years after taking LinkedIn seriously the craziest part is he took his new company from 0 to $3 million in ARR in just 7 months off the back of LinkedIn and in the process Bill arguably one of the strongest personal brands on the platform but you and I both know that most Founders aren't having this level of success on LinkedIn so what gives just like Adam before he realized the potential of LinkedIn they don't believe in the power of it because they don't understand what the platform is actually capable of which is exactly why I'm making this video today I want to show you how Adam was able to build an 8figure startup with LinkedIn break his success down into four simple pillars and lay out exactly what you need to do to replicate his success for yourself and the first pillar of Adam's success with LinkedIn is quite similar to the idea of product Market fit which I'm sure you've heard of plenty of times but I doubt you've heard of content Market fix and sadly this is something I see across a lot of Founders well most of them aren't even posting content in the first place but even the ones that are don't have alignment between the content they're posting and the product or service they're providing to be honest I don't know where a lot of this bad advice comes from it might be social media gurus and coaches that are really just over indexing on vanity metrics and pumping up your follower cap without worrying about Revenue but you have to make sure that your content is aligned with your product and this is actually something that Adam struggled with back when he first started posting I remember sitting down with him in an office and walking him through the power of LinkedIn and why he needed to start posting so he did but we found early on was there wasn't much content Market fix his first product retention. was selling in to direct to Consumer Founders but Adam didn't have experience as a director consumer founder he's a SAS guy he L St a software company before so because he had no experience he couldn't really put himself in their shoes and that showed into content but what he did have was a ton of experience in SAS he scaled his previous startup robly to an 8 figure exit and now was building retention. comom at the time of starting the post on LinkedIn they were doing around 10 to 12 million in annual recurring Revenue so he had quite a track record so naturally he was attracting a ton of SAS Founders from his content on LinkedIn because they wanted to see what he was doing and this is great except for the fact that retention. comom wasn't selling into those people so there was a clear misalignment between the content he was producing and the people that he wanted to attract so there wasn't content Market fit so fast forward a b and he's building his next company R B2B which is pretty much the B2B version of retention. comom the product pretty much allows you to automatically gather contact info from anyone who visits your site so someone visits my agency site I can see what their LinkedIn profile is so I can then go do Outreach to them but what you'll notice is that now his content and his expertise as a Founder start to overlap and match with what his ICP is actually looking for so because he's no longer just selling into direct to Consumer Founders he's selling into SAS Founders SAS marketers go to market folks the stories and expertise and his opinions that he's developed over years in the saspase now can translate into content that that ICP actually cares about and it becomes easier and easier to keep coming up with relevant ideas that pop off on LinkedIn because you're just pulling from your experiences and when you have that overlap between your experience and what your IC cares about you can just take it to the moon it's kind of like when you have product Market fit with your product everything just gets easier so the takeaway here for you as a Founder is you want to make sure that your experience overlaps with the type of content that your ICP cares about and if for whatever reason it doesn't you want to have someone on your team where that is the case and you can use them as the face of your product on LinkedIn but in most cases your experience before launching your company likely LED you to starting your company so there's going to be some sort of overlap between your expertise and what your target audience cares about that's second pillar is building in public so let me explain a bit cuz the thing about building in public is it's not for everybody it's not for every founder not for every company even if you do have the commitment and courage to share everything about your company in public like metrics and what's going well what's going wrong it's still not for everybody there's a very unique subset of companies where this works well remember a minute ago where I said Adam's content was tailored around topics that were interesting to SAS Founders a lot of those posts and topics that really popped off were these building and public style of posts where Adam literally shares every single metric he could think of straight to the LinkedIn timeline so naturally this attracts other SAS banders who care about seeing what other companies are doing they want to see if their metrics stack up how they're doing compared to other people in their category so building in public really works well when the company you're building is also the same type of company that you want to attract so if you're building a stas company in public and you want to attract other stas Founders that can work but just like we talked about a second ago if you're trying to attract direct to Consumer Founders but you're building the stas company They Don't Really Care a whole lot about your churn metrics and your ARR growth and all of that stuff another example of this would be the SAS tool that I just launched about a month ago bluecast it's a LinkedIn content writing tool and of course I have an expertise in creating LinkedIn content and using LinkedIn content to grow SAS companies so by sharing how I'm using LinkedIn to grow bluecast it is inherently good marketing for bluecast it's going to attract other people that want to grow on L Den so it creates this sort of virtuous cycle and there's very clear alignment there again content Market fit you've also got to be careful and take into consideration how you want to approach the times when business isn't going so well cuz when you build in public everything doesn't always go up and the right I wish that was the case but it very much is not the case internally a lot of businesses are an absolute mess so how are you going to approach that if you have a down month or a down quarter or a down year things don't go according to plan and you kind of get away from the initial momentum that got you all this height from building in public I think Adam does this really well he shared several times where retention. comom has had it down month or R B2B is dealing with a lot of churn that's something he's talking about very publicly lately and it doesn't seem to affect the effectiveness of the strategy but it is something that you have to consider as your preference as a Founder it's like hey do I want to be sharing all this dirty lunder it on the timeline there's pros and cons right there's two other places where building in public can really help your business as well one of those aspects is investors now Adams not raising VC he's been very vocal about being bootstrap up but for other companies you are trying to raise venture capital building in public and documenting your journey can be a great way to manufacture this positive momentum a quick example of this would be this company called beehive they were able to raise a 122.5 million series a round in just 6 days because the founder Tyler had been documenting their metrics in public and it was clear that they had a lot of momentum they had a strong product a good team a lot of Buzz around them no pun intended and the VCS came flocking in when it was time to race now if you're looking to hire a players building in public can also be great for this if you're sharing your core values your company culture examples of teammates you have hired and have done well at your company you're going to sort of create this magnet for talent which if you're a Founder you know that attracting A+ Talent is one of the most important if not the most important thing that you can be focused on and just like with investors if employees or potential employees see your company doing very well and that you're on a trajectory for fast growth they're going to want to be a part of that you know what's crazy I actually helped Adam launch his LinkedIn presence a while back so when he first started posting on LinkedIn I helped them get it off the ground from about 0 to 25k and I've done the same for a ton of other Founders and I document all those playbooks in my newsletter that I send out every single week so Shameless plug but if you want to get those Blueprints and playbooks for how to build your personal brand un LinkedIn you can just go read all of those additions on the site they're all there the link will be in the description below so go check that out if you want to use LinkedIn to build your personal brand and use it to grow your startup now this third pillar is pretty controversial but i' be doing it to service to Adam and you guys if I left it out of the video and that's how Adam uses polarization as a tactic to grow his personal brand and get more visibility for his products now it's extremely obvious how this could go wrong and being polarizing for the sake of being polarizing is not a strategy that I would recommend it's not going to serve you you got to be calculated with it and even if you are calculated with it it can still have have downsides so one case of this would be his LinkedIn beef with this guy named Mark klow where they're going back and forth about the benefits of BC versus bootstrapping and it got very heated or very intense you can see in this LinkedIn post I've got up on the screen right now just look at the hook last week Mark kasag belittled me for having not reached 25 million in ARR a bootstrap as founder CEO stating that he added $25 million per quarter at Outreach 500 million rais as BP of sales here's four reasons why Mark should start a SAS from zero before running his mouth quite a bold hook and it got a ton of attention so if we look at this also just look at the graphic here kind of feeding into this polarization that hook alone is a lot but looking at the graphic here of the money on fire at this sort of joke I your Outreach to 60,000 billion in ARR and the post is at like 700 likes over 400 comments a lot of which are people like this saying like it's pretty funny you got some people asking for LinkedIn boxing matches which by the way if anyone needs a Content idea there you go you got some people that think it's a bit Overkill has LinkedIn really become the Wimbledon for ego tennis matches oh boy but honestly if you look at the comments a lot of people are thoroughly entertained by it it got a ton of Engagement and most people can tell that like there's no actual bad blood they Rel to each their own but it didn't stop there so as a sort of nail in the coffin on this beef with Mark Adam dropped this AI generated Dis Track so think Kendrick versus Drake diss track like a diss track on LinkedIn which is just hilarious so again LinkedIn is this sterile corporate environment you have something add he's not afraid to just let it rip like this of course that's going to stand out again almost 400 likes over 150 comments 10 reposts pretty strong for a LinkedIn post another example of this sort of polarization in action was the six cense beef so this company called six sense actually threatened to sue Adam over some of the claims that he was making in his LinkedIn content and instead of keeping it hush hush and keeping the the season deist letter under WS not wanting anyone to see Adam literally screenshotted the season assist and posted it to the LinkedIn time on again as we see in this hook yesterday six cense starting to sue me over a viral LinkedIn post here's a copy of their cease and desist and what they're demanding I do and the post isn't even like apologetic or oh my gosh I shouldn't have done this he continues to double down as my theories are and remain they know their data is terrible 6 cense is worried about what we'll find when we compare their data to ours he just keeps going and Adam gets marketing he knows that having a villain is a great way to get people to Rally to your side and a lot of people on LinkedIn actually are the biggest fans of six sense and he's very much punching up you never want to punch down so if six sense was a smaller company this probably wouldn't be a great look for Adam but since six cense is such a large company punching up as this bootstrap competitor the underdog actually gets a lot of people on Adam's side and just look at the engagement so almost 1,700 likes almost 1,000 comments which is insane on a LinkedIn post so clearly controversy does work and this was around the time where RB Tob was going from Z to a million in ARR and they actually went from Z to a million in AR are in just a few weeks and a lot of that growth was fueled by that beef now like Adam said here it's very clear that social media and algorithms love this type of content but there is a toll right you run the risk of ruining your reputation if you do this too often or if you do it and mistime it or it doesn't quite make sense you have to be very selective about when you engage in a tactive like this if you choose to do so like I mentioned earlier posting and this sort of negativity is not great for your mental health as a Founder so it does take a toll on you personally and as Adam says here when I'm posting I'm living in a world of negativity that I do not thrive in so in Adam's case there was a lot of financial upside and engaging in this strategy and I think it is something that smart Founders will do selectively when it makes sense but you also want to be sure to weigh the pros and the cons in this fourth of vinyl pillar might be something that goes in one year and out the other please don't let your eyes glaze over when I tell you this because it's one of the most important arguably the most important part of this entire strategy and any marketing strategy in general and that's to fall in love with the game you see it's hard to do something you don't like for a very very long time or something you tell yourself you don't like I know a lot of Founders are like I don't like posting on LinkedIn but theyve never actually tried it you don't realize your subconscious mind is very impactful here but my point is if you don't like posting at all or if you don't like writing you're not going to do it consistently and it's going to be difficult to grow and I'll tell you right now even as someone who runs an agency if you go into found a let content immediately wanting to Outsource and get it off replay it and not touch it at all and work with an agency or a ghost riter it's not going to end well for you because even when you do that you still need to be involved with ideation and giving feedback and all those things that go into making a founder-led Content presence work now if you look at Adam he's on the record saying he spends 25 hours a week on his LinkedIn content not 1 hour a week not 5 hours a week 25 hours per week and that was probably a few months ago when he said that which for most Founders is unheard of it sounds like a distraction like why don't I just spend my time actually building my company but what Adam realizes is that time spent on LinkedIn content is building his company for a Founder like Adam whose company is built off the back of his LinkedIn content it makes sense for him to put those hours into the content to make it perform well and again he just likes filming videos and writing content so it makes sense for him it's a win-win and this might be a controversial take but I don't think you can discipline yourself into being very good at content even using myself as an example I've been posting for seven or eight years now and I love writing content I will sit down every day and if I could do nothing else I would sit down here and record these videos write my newsletters write my LinkedIn post just because I like it I happen to get paid for it but I also just love the game Adam is similar in that way and so are a lot of the founders that win with content if I look across our client roster our best clients are the ones that love creating content realize they don't have the time to fulfill on it all themselves so they bring in support every time we have to pull teeth to get a Founder to sit down for a Content interview or to review their post it never works Adam is a clear example of the massive outside success you could have when you just dedicate some time and effort to building your personal brand un LinkedIn and that is how Adam from retention. comom and rbb built his companies to $24 million an annual recurring Revenue using LinkedIn as the driver now to be honest this video is a bit more high level and while there's nothing stopping you from going and implementing these strategies that Adam has used I also made a video where I show the full strategy I use on LinkedIn from start to finish everything you could possibly need so click here and check out the next video where I'll walk you through exactly how to execute a strategy like this and go even more in depth on the winning LinkedIn tactics that Brands and entrepreneurs just like you are using to win so you can just copy and paste those for yourself I'll see you over there