Adam Robinson: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became the CEO of GetEmails

Don’t mix business and family. Or friends, if you can avoid it. Startups are incredibly hard in the first place. Trying to add in complexities of family or lifelong friends on top of it is too much.

As part of my series about the leadership lessons of accomplished business leaders, I had the pleasure of interviewing Adam Robinson.

Adam Robinson was born in Houston, Texas and graduated from Rice University in 2003 with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics.

In 2014, he launched Robly Email Marketing after working on Wall Street for ten years. The business grew to $5 million in revenue in the first two years and by 2017 was awarded #1 in Customer Satisfaction across the entire email marketing space. After proving Robly’s viability, Adam worked to scale the business. After testing and scrapping a few ideas, he and his team launched GetEmails in 2019.

In GetEmails first six months it’s grown to $2.5 million Annual Recurring Revenue.

Adam is now based in Austin, Texas where he lives with his girlfriend Helen and their two pet chickens.

Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path? Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

We were building an email marketing application because we had found a bunch of email marketing customer information all over the internet (before the days of Builtwith and Datanyze). We had built everything except for the drag-and-drop editor. Then we hired a guy to build that, which he said would take three months.

At the end of three months it worked great … but when we went to send a test email to ourselves, it looked like absolute garbage. It turns out the guy had built an editor to make websites, not emails. We were about to launch, but we had to push the launch back another three months.

This was devastating for us. We had three non-devs sitting around (also a huge mistake) waiting for launch, and now we had to wait…