Adam Robinson

$10M ARR is the FU MONEY of SaaS.

At $10M ARR bootstrapped, you and your co-founder clear $1M+/year in salary and dividends easily.

You can sell instantly for $30-40M. There are hundreds of EBITDA buyers at this level vs. a handful at $1B valuations.

From here, you can do whatever you want.

Hire a CEO and work 1 hour/week. Grind 100 hours if that's your thing. Raise $50M from a position of strength. Scale to $25M ARR with 25 people and pay yourself $10-15M/year.

Most companies never get here because VCs show up early with decacorn dreams and money you don't need.

That capital interferes with the one thing that makes you great: product-market fit.

Bootstrapping to $10M ARR is easier and less risky than creating a VC-backed unicorn, with a far higher probability-weighted outcome.

If you can find PMF and use customer money to get to $10M, you can do anything you want with your life.

Bending Spoons could run Apollo.io with 20 people, for $100m+ profit per year.

Yet Apollo has 800 employees and is likely break-even at best. WHY!??!

Because Apollo - like so many other SaaS companies - is stuck in the “Zombie Trap”.

What’s the Zombie Trap?

- A company raised $ XXX million during COVID/ZIRP
- The last round was a unicorn valuation at over 10x rev
- Growth slowed, whacked people, got to breakeven
- Valuations collapsed - ZoomInfo w/ 10x their rev now has lower market cap than Apollo’s last round

SO WHAT THE HELL IS APOLLO SUPPOSED TO DO???

Tim Zheng was so confused by what to do that he stepped down as CEO.

I don’t blame him.

The pickle Apollo is in is that they literally CAN’T do what they SHOULD do … Which is what Bending Spoons WILL do when they buy this company (and many others like them).

BENDING SPOONS PLAYBOOK FOR APOLLO:

1/ Reduce staff from 800 to 20 (yet ship features customers actually want FASTER)
2/ Go entirely PLG, focus on contact data, stop trying to be Clay
3/ Increase pricing sophistication to offset ENT rev collapse
4/ Crank 100+m profit/yr out of a great brand that’s lost its way

Once Bending Spoon CEO Luca Ferrari gets on a podcast and explains that he can actually run companies this way, it becomes obvious to the listener that the company should have done this on their own.

But they can’t.

Why?

BECAUSE VC’S WON’T LET THEM.

Founders sign up for a system where making $100m of profit per year is so far out of the range of acceptable outcomes that it’s not even a consideration.

Instead, Apollo, and other Zombies like them:

- Hire new leadership, many from companies than have actually been Spoon’d

- Myopically focus on the one company in their space with increasing valuation (in this case, Clay)

- Ferociously build to try to create a copycat value proposition (which dilutes their brand and confuses the shit out of customers and prospects)

- Aggressively market their “platform”, publicly making claims that they are not what 99.9% of their customers think they are (in this case, a contact data company)

- Pray that they will be as lucky as the few and far between who Salesforce acquires (like Qualified or Braze etc etc)

Meanwhile, I’m licking my chops.

Apollo is the undisputed leader in contact data for the segment we’re going after with MoltSets.com, and they have completely forgotten they sell contact data. Just look at their site.

It’s giving me the opportunity to hit THEIR market with a value prop VERY SIMILAR to the value prop that got them where they are today.

Which doesn’t resemble what they’re currently selling.

DATA IN '22:
ZoomInfo - $20k
Apollo - $99/m unlimited per seat

DATA IN '27:
ZoomInfo - $20k
Apollo - $99/m for 4000 credits per seat (shrinking by the month)
MoltSets - $27/m unlimited, unlimited seats

(Try MoltSets here for free: moltsets.com)

YOU: Ok Adam, you have cheap data. I’m sure it’s shit!

ME: We’ve been rapidly improving our dataset as we hear customer feedback.

The biggest complaint were “stale profiles”, or verified/deliverable emails that were the last role...

That problem will be mostly solved 11/1, and by Jan 1 we will be refreshing profiles every 3days.

The insane thing?

Starting Dec 1, we’re going to re-validate all email addresses of 150m global contacts EVERY 7 DAYS.

MoltSets will be the highest quality B2B contact database in the world.

At $27/mo unlimited.

Where does that leave Apollo?

You tell me.

Bootstrapped founders while OpenAI and Anthropic make it impossible to sell or take secondary.

Using Clay, Wispr Flow and Claude Code, Alex Fine (CEO of Understory) just built 8 multi-channel campaigns to run 1 allbound system across outbound email, LinkedIn, LinkedIn ads, and Meta ads.

It's insane!

It landed 2 new opps in the last 30 minutes.

Here's how it works: 👇

First off, he didn't even log into Clay to build this. He did everything from the terminal in Claude Code using the Clay CLI, MoltSets and Deepline.

The Clay CLI is crazy good. He said the tricky part is building skills that can navigate it and operate it efficiently, but once you do that you can literally do just about everything (we'll show you how. see below).

The other part that blew him away is the ability to find the exact audience he was looking for with precision using MoltSets as a first source. (!!)

Once he was able to articulate the perfect company, he was able to spin up allbound audiences based on anything. Lookalikes from their most successful clients, etc.

So he ran a test...

He wanted to see if he could build an entire allbound motion using nothing but his voice.

Highly tailored segments, messaging, persona matching, case studies, etc.

The results are CRAZY.

We're going over them and HOW TO BUILD THESE EXACT CAMPAIGNS tomorrow LIVE.

Join us get to copy Alex’s exact Claude skill files and terminal setup.

We're covering:

- Voice-to-Terminal Execution: Triggering multi-channel campaigns using Wispr Flow

- The Clay CLI Playbook: Navigating and executing Clay workflows directly from CC

- Terminal Data Sourcing: Pulling verified audiences and lookalikes natively using MoltSets

- Multi-Channel Audience: Syncing targets across outbound email, Meta, and LinkedIn ads

- Build Reply Agents: Deploying Clay workflows that auto-generate tailored case studies the second a prospect replies to an email CTA.

Starts at 11am ET.

Join us here: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regist…

FOUNDERS - WHAT KIND OF FUCKING MORON SIGNS UP FOR THIS???