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What's up, Dtcpod? Today we're joined by Adam Robinson, who is the founder and CEO of Retention.com. So, Adam, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and what you guys are all about@retention.com.

So I'll give the three minute bio. I'm 42 years old. I graduated school from Rice University in 2003. I went to New York. I was a credit default swap trader at Lehman Brothers. My roommates in my apartment started Vimeo, the video sharing website. So I watched that happen as I was a trader for ten years. We were both kind of, like, killing it in different ways.

What they were doing seemed much more interesting. And the financial crisis happened. Like this job I had, they literally made a movie out of it's called The Big Short. It was a very interesting place to be at the time, but afterwards it was kind of like it was a shrinking market. I really wanted to do what these other guys had done, tried to get into tech. Somehow I found my way into the email marketing SaaS world, and I created a company. It was called Robley email marketing. It was a newsletter app, and we were, like, sweeping breadcrumbs off of the constant contact, sort of.

That's who we were positioning ourselves against. And it worked well to the extent that it was a decent lifestyle business. But that space was incredibly difficult to operate in. There was this MailChimp behemoth that had a free product that had an unbelievable brand and were bidding up all the channels. Like, it's amazing that clavio after the game appeared to have been won, came and did what they did. I mean, they got a couple of breaks along the way, but like unbelievable with how dominant typically it's like above 60% of a market in like that was the shape of it. It was like MailChimp was everything. There was like constant contact.

It was like the Pioneer, but they got crushed by MailChimp. And then there were like 150 vendors with 2 million in revenue, right? So it's like selling cola, like very commoditized, very mature, whatever. So I was trying to figure out how to grow a company in the space, watching people niche down and have success like ConvertKit or Clavio or something like that. And I just couldn't come up. Everything I tried didn't work. And I heard of this identity product, meaning when someone hit a website without them filling out a form, you could get an email address of that person. I immediately thought, how is that possible? If I could do that, I could sell that to anybody with a website. No fucking question.

I've been in the email market for five years. This is the biggest problem in email, right? Of course, the ethics of it are debatable. The compliance landscape is completely misunderstood. But I was like, screw it, I got nothing else going on. I'm going to try it. At the time, it was entirely a third party cookie solution. I thought third party cookies were going to expire 18 months later because that's what people were saying in 2019. But I was like, I'll just try this, whatever.