#50: Why Constraints & Guardrails Are Good For Your Marketing

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving, registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5 that's z-u- dash dash-l.com exit5 to learn more.

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Exit. Exit. Exit.

All right, part of my appearance, I just came back from a run, but I had this thought and it's really important. So I was listening to Seth Godin on Tim Ferriss podcast talk about the power of constraints. And this was like a light bulb moment for a lot of things that I see come up within the exit 5 community or companies that I work with. Startups I advise around just kind of general marketing questions. I think this advice can be applied to really anything in business. But for the sake of this, and mostly what I talk about is marketing and startups, we're going to focus in on marketing. But I think one of the things that happens is we ask questions like, does anybody have a good example of an ABM strategy? Does anybody have an example of a who's doing good content marketing? Does anybody have an example of X? Or how would you approach Y? And those questions are so hard to answer because it's missing the most important thing in decision making, which is constraints. And so one exercise that we used to do at Drift, and this was great. David, who's the CEO of Drift, he, at the time, he would always force me to think about, like, he would say, all right, hey, we want to do our first event this year. We want to do our first customer conference. Okay, great. So then that leaves me to be.

Like, well, where should it be?

How big should it be? Who should speak? What should it look and feel like? And that is where marketing and kind of any decision in business becomes almost paralyzing. There is infinite choice, infinite possibilities. It's impossible to make decisions. And so I think one of the things that you have to do to become better at marketing and making decisions is to come up with guardrails. And so as we created things over time, before we even went and created that event, the very first thing we would do was get in a room together, get on the whiteboard and say, okay, so what are some guardrails for this?

What do we want it to look like?

Well, we want it to look like this and we want it to feel like this. And it needs to be in Boston because right now we don't have the budget to like fly everybody over to the west coast or to do it somewhere else. Okay, so you're starting to go down the list, right? So it's gotta be here, it's gotta be in Boston. How many people do we want? Well, we don't want to have a hundred. That's a bit too small. But we're not ready to do like a 5,000 person event. We don't think we get people there. So a thousand. Okay, so we want a thousand in Boston on this date. What date do we want to do? Well, there's this other conference going on and a lot of people are already going to be in Boston because of that. Okay, so let's boom. So it's going to be in September. So now all of a sudden, before I've even started to think about what the actual like logistics and approach to creating this event and doing the marketing for this event and the promotion for this event, I already have this list of 4, 5, 6 things that I can then go and make decisions around. And so I just wanted to record this quickly to put this down on like as you're thinking about marketing, planning and you could apply this for anything. Hey, we should do a podcast. We should be on TikTok. We should start a YouTube channel. We want to go up market well, come up with guardrails, come up with constraints for all those things because there's going to be lots of guardrails. Maybe you have to do it with no budget. One question that I see come up all the time is like hey, what's a good ABM strategy? And to me the best ABM strategy to start with is going to be do something to start. Can you find 10 ideal customers that you want to sell to and reach out to them directly via email and LinkedIn message with a video or short email that is the non sexy, like that's how you start. And then from there you can build and say okay, hey, we did 10 of these in a one off basis. We got two responses. That's not bad. 20% response rate. Let's build now let's do 20, now let's do 30. Okay, now we've done a hundred of these things. We're starting to prove out a little success now. Let's go think about investing and building out something, something broader. So that's, that's separate from the constraints discussion. But I think it's a way you can test into that. So two really important things from this is number one you gotta have constraints and number two, you gotta be able to test into ideas as opposed to always jumping for buying the most expensive tool or like defaulting to buying the tool, period, that that's gonna solve your problem. So constraints test before you scale. Those are two very timeless and important lessons in decision making when it comes to marketing. See ya.

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