#53: Building the career resource for content marketers with Superpath creator Jimmy Daly

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Exit. Hey, it's Dave. I just wanted to record a quick intro for this one because this interview is a little bit different than the typical content that I have here where it's not specifically focused about B2B marketing, but I was just itching to have a conversation with somebody doing something a little bit different. So this conversation with Jimmy Daly. He is the founder of a company called Superpath, which is actually a website and community for content marketing pros. Not too dissimilar for to exit 5 and what we have, but his focus is specifically on content marketing people and he's built an amazing solo business. I guess they have a couple in place employees, but he's built an amazing website and community in the content space. And I think there's a lot to learn from the his approach and what he's done and how he's built the business. And I found that people that listen to this podcast are interested in some other things just beyond B2B market. I don't plan on doing a bunch of these, but I had recorded this interview for something else that I was going to do, and I recorded. I was like, you know what? Maybe I think people on that listen to Exit 5 podcasts would really enjoy this interview. So I'm going to run it here. Send me an email if you got something out of this. I know you will, and make sure you go and check out Jimmy, but send me an email helloxit5.com and let me know what you think. Otherwise, sit back or giddy up on your run or workout or whatever you're doing around the house. And here's this conversation with Jimmy Daly. All right, hey, everybody, that's listening. This is an early episode. I don't know when we're going to release this, but this is my new podcast called the Dave Gerhart Podcast. Only I didn't have a creative. I didn't have a more creative name than that Jimmy, because I just wanted to make it easily searchable with my name. Yeah, it works, and it works. So I'm super excited. My guest today is Jimmy Daly, and we're going to talk about an amazing company that you're building right now, but basically how you quit your job and became an Entrepreneur, working for yourself. And I just was saying to you before, before we hit record, that I recently shared about this kind of topic on LinkedIn and that I'm going to be talking more about it. And I just texted my wife, this is not bullshit for not blowing smoke, but I was just in line getting a coffee and I text my wife and I was like, I'm feeling super fired up because the response that I've gotten to talking about this topic is just like, has blown me away. People secretly texting me, C level execs who are still in jobs, texting me, being like, I need to do this, and emails and LinkedIn and everything. So it just has me re excited and I reached out to. Because you've built an amazing business and I want to just start going and talk to you. So. So here we are. So thanks for. Thanks for risking it and coming on this podcast.

Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. No, I'm pumped to do it and I feel like, God, I spent a lot of time in my head thinking about this topic. I haven't been real public with how Superpath works, how it started, why I think a lot of other people probably would enjoy doing this kind of thing too. So it's kind of a. It's a perfect forum to just like unpack a lot of this.

Oh, great. All right. That's even more exciting. Yeah, I, like, I have, I have, I have mixed feelings about. Maybe not mixed feelings, but like, I'm down to talk about it, but I'm not going to be. I'm not going to be the type of. I'm not going to be like sharing my income and my, you know, exact numbers of things. Just, I don't just. There's no upside in any of that for me to do that. And I'm more like the thing that I get so excited about. It's just like this, this life. I mean, I say it every day and I'm like, I say to my wife and my friends and family, I'm just like this path that you can take today because of the way, like, if you have expertise, I think if you have expertise in a niche, and I'm not saying anybody can. You can't wake up and do this. Right. Could you have done this at 22? Could I have done this at 22? No. But I think after you have built up, let's say, a decade of experience in a field, whether you're a personal trainer or a marketing exec or whatever you are, I think you can go and do this. Today. And so it's, I'm, I'm super excited. Let's, let's just go back and tell. Before we talk about what you're doing now, just take us to there. Like what, like the short version of your career story. Who are you? What were you doing? And then like we can talk about how that led to go work for yourself and this thing that you've created.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay. So I feel like a lot of people, I found marketing kind of by accident, had several crappy jobs, built some momentum over the years, and eventually ended up with, with a pretty good amount of experience and some really cool opportunities. So the most recent thing I was doing before Superpath was working at Animals Content Marketing Agency. I was the VP of growth, so I ran all of our sales and marketing and it was fun because in some ways I felt like a founder because it was a small company and I had been there. I think I was the, I don't know, seventh or eighth employee at a company that when I left was around 50. So you just end up being involved in a lot of cool things. And so eventually we formed a leadership team which I got to be part of. And like, that felt like business to me. You know, it sort of like transcended sales and marketing and started to feel like business. And I love that. You know, I loved sitting down and thinking about like the company strategy and all, like the wow, all the nuances and like complexity of that. Really enjoyed it. Anyways, the biggest, the biggest takeaway from that, from that job was at some point I made the transition from content marketer to kind of like team lead to eventually salesperson, which isn't like a really natural transition for marketing people. But I got to do a lot of sales work there and that really gave me the confidence to feel like my skill set was complete or at least ready enough to go try and do this on my own. I felt like that was a hole that I didn't have, you know, like all the while thinking like, one day I want to start my own thing. But like I know you have to be able to sell. And I got some like really good on the job practice doing that well.

And, but like prior just to give people like a longer sense of your career. So I'm not, I'm not distracted, I'm just over looking on LinkedIn. Like you, you essentially worked in a, in a content. So you, you, you got into marketing and then the niche specifically that you focus on was like you kind of became a content marketer that that became your thing. And like, basically for. For a decade, if I look at, if I do some quick math on your LinkedIn, right, from like August of 2010 to June of 2020, you essentially were working in content in some capacity. So, like, do you feel like your thing separate from the business stuff? But like, I feel like in order to truly do this, you have to have your thing. So for you, it was content.

You.

You knew content inside and out.

Yeah, for sure. And like that role, like sort of evolved in phases, right? There's like a content creation phase of my career was all I did was just write, you know, and then eventually got to dabble a little bit of strategy. And there was a thing like when I was at Animals, Walter and I, Walter Chan, who's my now business partner and then boss, we would do like these monthly one on ones and as we started talking about like my career, I came up with this model in my head of that I wanted to be like Jerry west, but for content marketing. Right. Like, I want to be a great player, I want to be a great coach, and then I want to know the business of it. You know, it's like you have to start by. You got to play the game for a while first before you understand it well enough to coach anybody. Right. And then like, as you get into the coaching part of it, you start to understand all the other things happening around you, like, who funds this, what's our margin on it, how do we sell it, you know, like all that type of stuff. And that was like a. So that was like the model that I sort of held in my head of, like, as I was progressing through my career and I was thinking about how am I going to layer the skills. So, yeah, it was for years and years and years just writing and that was it, you know, and that was great. Honestly, like, there's some days I wish I could just be a content creator again because I really enjoyed all that work. Yeah. But as you, as your career kind of evolves and goes on, like, you sort of appreciate all the other stuff, like in order for you to be able to write a blog post, a lot of other stuff has already happened and a lot more stuff is going to happen afterwards, and that stuff became particularly interesting. So, yeah, there was like a long period of like really understanding content marketing from a few different angles before I felt like I could do this.

I do think separately, because I think like the path to becoming a solopreneur, working for yourself, whatever. Right. I think in 2022, it's you can have a huge advantage if you know how to, if you know how the Internet works and content and social media. And so like I, you know, I think like, as I talk to more people or like we do this podcast and talk to others, or I'm already getting messages like, you know, how do I, how do I. And I just think like, especially if you are fluent in online marketing today, like, that's obviously what's enabling this, right? This is all possible because like, these are things, it's basically driven by online work. And I think that clearly one of the reasons you've been able to build a successful company is not just that you worked in content marketing and talk and are building a business around this content marketing niche, but like you did content. And so for you, like social media, publishing, building website, creating content, all the things you need to like bring eyeballs to your thing is kind of like already in your DNA. And I think that's just a, that is a huge hurdle. Like, I don't think that anybody can just be like, yep, I'm gonna quit my job. And like, because if people ask me they're like, how did you, you know, when you quit, like, how did you get your first clients? And I'm like, I literally wrote on LinkedIn, hello, I quit my job and I'm taking clients. And like, that's not to like be, I'm not even trying to be arrogant with that, but that's literally what was possible because I had built of following in a niche. And so I think that's a, it's a undercurrent that I just think is important to like, to call out about what, you know, where, what your path has been.

Yeah, for sure. I, sometimes I might be getting ahead of myself in this conversation a little bit, but I think of the work I'm doing at Superpath now as the slow process of turning a longtime reputation in the industry into equity, basically. Right. And I feel like I, I take that really seriously. I treat it very carefully, but I feel like that's essentially what I'm doing because it was kind of the same thing when we opened the doors at Superpath. It was like I wrote a blog post, I had a personal email newsletter I'd been building up for years and years. Send an email out to them, the people were already there. It was just sort of letting them know this new thing was happening.

Man, that's really good. I wrote that down because I want to remember it, to clip it or something. But basically turning a long time reputation into equity And I think that is so key because I do see a lot of people that they poo, poo this, this solopreneur path because it means, like, you know, become a LinkedIn influencer and create a course. And like, I've done all those things and I have a whole other rant that we could talk about, about courses and everything for, for the positive. But I think that that's the difference between someone trying to do a get rich quick scheme and sell you a course. And like, what you're talking about, which is like, you to me, you're cashing in on reputation in, in a niche. And, and it's like, you've built trust, you've built, you've built credibility. And so you're not just like, Joe Schmo who created a course because there was an opportunity to, to chase the money. And like, I feel the same way. Like, I've, I've created a course about B2B marketing that has generated more income than I made in half a year as a cmo. And like, yeah, I have no shame in telling someone, like, I sold. I sold a course because, like, damn it, like, what's in that thing is a decade of lessons and learnings and valuable stuff. And maybe other people have talked about that before, but, like, that's from me. And there's enough of the audience that I had built online. Did I think that maybe a hundred people would be willing to, like, pay for some additional content? That was my bet. And they did. And like, you can generate, you could, that could be. You could sell a course. And what if you created a course about your niche for whatever you did in, like, like you made in another 200 bucks a year, 200 bucks a month from that. And that was like, you know, 10% of your rent or mortgage. Like, is that not meaningful?

Or.

It could be. What if you make a hundred grand from the course and you can go buy a property or make a down payment? So, like, I don't, you know, I see a lot of, like, hate for the courses stuff, and I, I'm sure you feel the same way, but I love that line about, like, this is based on this equity and reputation that, that you had already built up and now you're primed to go and build a business here.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. It felt like by the time I finally did this, and there was some false starts, like, in, in the years leading up to this too, you know, and by the time I, I finally did it and it stuck, it felt almost obvious. Like, it hasn't been easy. I would never say it's been easy, but it felt like I have no. I have no more excuses left. You know what I mean? Like, if I'm gonna do it, so now's the time. For a lot of reasons, the reputation thing, but two, just like, the world is primed for it right now as well. The tooling is there. People get it. There's. I feel like this kind of loosely, at least loosely fits into, like, the Web three trend of, like, you know, sort of the decentralization of everything, you know, like, niche, niche people. Like, I mean, I feel like you and I would fall into this category. Like, yeah, we're not gigantic companies, but we can still provide super valuable services to the right people.

And people. There's like, a devil's advocate to this, which I sometimes play in my own head, which is like, well, if everybody goes and does this, there'll be no companies for us to, like, sell things to. And I think on the surface that's true, but I actually think, like, at the end of the day, probably one out of every 10 people who hear about this will actually go and do it just. Just by nature. Like, I think it's always going to be. And I'm not knocking being at a company at all. I did it for a long time. Like, you can always make good money and, and live, like, a regular life working at a company. And there's, There's. There's nothing wrong with that. I, I think that this story is going to be out there doesn't mean that everybody's just going to, like, quit their jobs and, and go and do it. All right, let's talk about. So you. You're at Animals for a while. You're at Animals, which is a content marketing agency. You're in a content job, let's call it, for a decade. You get to this point. Tell me about, like, when did the idea come up and when did you actually go and leave and kind of like, how did you. How did you go from at the company to starting it?

Yeah, so this spring of 2019, I was at Animals, and I started this Slack Group group, which at the time was called the Content Marketing Career Growth Slack Group, which is kind of a mouthful. And I didn't really. There was no, like, vision of, like, turning it into something. I just saw, Saw this trend of Slack Groups, and I was like, oh, I don't. I don't have one of those. I don't know of one. Like, I'll just, I'll make one and I'LL send it around to some of our customers who, like, the way that. At least the way agency sales unfolded for me was like our. A lot of our customers, like, we were like, friends, you know what I mean? Like, if I'm traveling, I, like, try to hit up people. We get lunch and stuff. And so that was, like, our first group of people in there. And pretty quickly, it became, like, this really awesome group of pretty senior content people talking about stuff that I had never seen discussed anywhere else. And it was really cool. And like, what? Just, like, people talking about, like. Like budgets, you know, like, being really frank about, like, here's how much money I'm spending. Do you guys think I'm getting enough for it? And, like, other senior content people actually can help you through something like that, you know, or, like, funny.

Those are like, those, like, the most important things, like, inside. Inside of a company, actually. It's like, how much do you pay people? What is the budget? But, like, you can't ever. You can't ever talk about that.

Yeah, totally. And there was a lot of that. And so we built some momentum pretty quickly, and then probably come.

And this was. This was not a. This was not an Animals Slack group. This was like, Jimmy. Jimmy on his own, like, happens to know a bunch of people. I'm gonna start this thing.

And to be honest, there's a little bit of gray area there, because I was running marketing for animals. But at the same time, I kind of didn't want this to be part of animals marketing. Like, I wanted it to be. To be my thing. And it ended up. That was fine. Like, I had been running this newsletter for a long time. I kind of thought it would fit more under that than it did under stuff we were doing in Animals. But, like, some people from the. From the company joined and Slack groups at the time, they weren't a thing like they are now. Anyways, a lot of changes were happening in the business. So, like, fall of 2019, Walter, the founder of the company, was ready to step down as CEO and appoint a new CEO. And that ended up, like, shaking up our leadership team. And there was just a lot of changes happening. And it started to feel like the right time for me to start thinking about what was next. And actually, it was Walter that came to me, and he was like, this Slack group is a business for sure. And I was like, yeah, you know what? I see it. I see it's probably.

Was he in it?

Yeah, yeah, he was in it. He was an observer. You know, he wasn't like, Real involved in it, but he was. He was watching. And so we just, like. That led to a series of conversations between him and I about, like, how do we monetize? How do we grow it? You know, like, what does this look like? A lot happened between fall of 2019 and spring of 2020, to say the least. When I finally left to go actually do this thing, I mean, Covid among them, but Shake up and Leadership in Animals, I was, like, excited to go and do this, but was trying to figure out how. There was two constraints for me. One was I couldn't go to zero dollars. I couldn't bootstrap it from nothing, and I didn't want to consult. Right. And I know that for a lot of people, consulting is sort of the engine that kickstarts this because you can start earning some money right away, but I really didn't want to do that.

For what reason? I'm interested to hear that, because that is a common thing, and it's interesting to hear you say, nope. So what were the reasons you didn't want to do it?

I had done consulting, so I guess that's like a whole nother thing. But, like, I've been doing freelance work and consulting throughout that entire 10 years. Always had something else going, which I think was good because you. You learn a lot. Like, you got to sell yourself. You got to collect the invoice, you got to make the customer. You just sort of, like, experience this fuller spectrum of content than just the writing piece or just the editing piece or whatever. And I just found it to be kind of draining. I didn't really enjoy it that much, you know, and the thing that I was worried about was that if I got into consulting, that I would. That I would lose sight of the original business goal and basically be. Be a consultant.

You know, it's almost like, so, like. So, like, not having that fallback pushed you harder to, like, make this thing work.

Totally. And it. But it also pushed this other thing, which was that I needed some money to get it rolling.

Right.

And so that Walter ended up being an important part of that.

So wait, let's talk about. On the consulting thing. I think you're so right. So there's a couple things I just want to come back to based on some messages that I get from people. Number one, a lot of people say, like, how can I start to do this? And despite Jimmy saying, like, despite you saying I didn't want to do.

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Do consulting. You're essentially telling me the answer to that. Which is, but you had done it in the past and for, for however many years you had done. And so, so for those people that are listening that are like have a current job, I actually think the easiest path to eventually go and build your own thing is like to do that. So, so maybe there's one or two consulting projects that you can take on. Because I think for a lot of people the big jump happens when they're like I gotta quit my job. And quit, quit my job means stopping my current income and then like starting at zero where like I think you can, you can have some cash flow that makes it much easier for you to like then take the step. And so consulting can also be a pot, like a way to, a way to bridge that for, for others, you know.

Definitely, definitely. And I was like if you've never, if you've never consulted and you quit your job and then start consulting, like I wouldn't really recommend that probably like it's a whole. Consulting is a whole thing. Like you gotta do it well, you know what I mean? Like there's a lot that goes into doing it well and maybe, maybe there's too much personal bias baked into this. I just always found that it was like an energy drain for me.

Yeah, no, I have a, I have a love, I have a love hate relationship with it. I think what I do is a little bit is, it's, it's unique in that the consulting work that I do is not hand. Like I'm not doing any hands on work. It's basically all there is. I happen to have like a couple of wins with, with two B2B SaaS companies and there's a lot of venture backed B2B SaaS companies that want to do similar things or know those companies. And so like there I'm basically, I'm straight up just trading on like my reputation and my experience and being in an advisor basically with a paid relationship with a, with a handful of companies. But I have three companies that I've been doing this with and I'm not actively like taking on more for that reason because I think it is, it's very much like reactive. You know, it's reactive type of work. And yeah, I think it's, I'm more of a, I come from a more of like a creator path. Like, like you do. Okay, so, so you, so you, you make this decision to leave. You have nothing to start. I'm, I'm curious to hear about. You said something early which a lot of people don't say is monetize. And a lot of people say, how do you know? How do you monetize? I'm. I'm afraid to. I'm afraid to monetize. But was, was that a push from Walter or like, you know, you knew this could be a money income generating thing and why did you do that?

Yeah, that's interesting because I feel like the content marketing part of me was a little afraid of the monetization part, but I had also just spent two years selling really expensive deals for an agency. And so a lot of my day was talking to huge B2B SaaS companies and being like, all right, it's 100 grand. What do you think? You guys want to do this?

Right? Right.

I feel like, actually I think that part of that part of my sales experience made me feel like, you know, these deals we sell are gigantic. I don't need to sell deals this big. I could sell tiny deals and this business could be really lucrative for, you know, for, for me and a small team, potentially. You know, it gave me a ton of confidence. And actually at the time, like, we were really on a hot streak. We were closing all kinds of good deals. I was actually, like, hungry to monetize. Like, I wanted to be on sales calls. I wanted to be like, figuring out the packaging and the pricing and making all that stuff work. But additionally, and I still feel this way, I just think that community, like creator stuff doesn't have to be community. Like, that's what my version of it is. But I feel like community comes with all these sort of like grassroots, like, good vibes, you know, it's not about monetization, it's about connecting people and all that. But at the same time, the monetization is my incentive to keep it going and make it better and help more people, you know, So I think of it as like, it's a good thing. Like, if, if Superpath can monetize, then everything works better for everybody. It ends up being a win all over the place.

Like, talk to anybody who runs a huge free community. It's a nightmare. They all go to shit. And I think one of the reasons why is because of that. So it's free. The people aren't as invested. And so maybe there's a two for one there, which is like you get to monetize, which you generate income from. But at least in my limited one person and things sample size, like, I think it also helps improve with the, with the quality from a. From a community standpoint, there's also other ways to monetize a Community. You could have. You could have had a free community and monetize through sponsorship. So monetize.

Actually that's what we ended up charge.

For membership for sure.

Yeah. No, so we've never charged for the Slack group, which is brought with it like a host of challenges. Like, exactly. The challenges you just described is like, you get a lot of people, it's hard to moderate. There's spam, there's all this stuff. But my thinking going into it was like, get the people there and monetize behind the scenes doing a type of selling that I already knew how to do, which was B2B bigger deals. That's what I wanted to do in retrospect. So like, actually as this was happening, I was watching DGMG, which then became Exit 5, and I was like, damn, we should have just.

By the way, both of our. Both of the first name. Both. What was the name of your.

What was the name of your content marketing career growth Slack group?

That's like, that's as bad as Dave Gerhardt Marketing Group.

It was terrible. We actually.

My wife always gives me. She's like, you name. She's. She's like. For someone who like says you're like this brand person, like, you suck at naming things. You just pick like the most lit. You can pick the most literal word and like that's your name.

That's so funny. It work. It works though.

Yeah, I agree.

So. But I basically like created a business that I thought fit my skill set. You know what I mean? And we've kind of just been running with that ever since. There's like a lot of stuff that's happened, like some good. Lots of challenges. Like, if I was going to start it all over again, would I do it exactly the same? No, probably not, you know, but it's working pretty darn well, you know, so like, we live with some of the problems that we've committed ourselves to, you know?

Yeah, I hear that. So you. So starts off as a Slack group. It's content marketing people kind of sharing their stuff. You're managing it, it's growing. I have stuff that I want to ask you later about. Like what. What makes a community that people will be interested about. Like, what makes a community run. But take me back to the first, like, what was the first deal that you closed? A sponsorship package. Like, tell me like, if you can. And as much as you're comfortable sharing publicly. Sure. Like the actual first monetization, the first deal, the first sale. How do you structure it? Because so many people have Questions about like, how do I know how to come up with a price? How do I go find somebody for it? So I'm just. If you could go behind the scenes, best you can on that.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean our, our first dollar we ever made was from Len Marketing, CMO at Podia. And our first product was a. So the first thing we did was a job board and from the beginning we had plans for multiple lines of business. The job board felt like a natural place to start because it was already happening in the group and we just felt like it'd be like pretty low hanging fruit and.

And did you build or did you build the job board? Buy. Buy the job board. Use a tool for it. How did the job board board get created?

At first it was just notion. I just made like a very simple thing in notion and we would share the links in the Slack group. And then very. Just like serendipitously, a guy that had been doing some dev work for us at Animals emailed us and was like, hey, I. I quit my job and I'm building a job board SaaS product. And that's nice board. And so we're like done. That's great. Like we'll be your first customer. I actually think we were their very first customer. But actually that starting with Notion works surprisingly well and actually we do that for everything now. We start everything with no code and make sure we understand all the racks before we get into anything bigger.

But that's amazing. I found I. My job board is as I have the Exit 5 job and my job board is nice board. Also the way I heard about nice board was I think I listened to it on like my first million and they talked about or it was like a deal. I got it for like 99 bucks on the app Sumo Marketplace or whatever. And yeah, yeah. Is that like way less than you paid?

Yeah, yeah, way less.

I mean, okay, so here's, here's the ROI for you. Yeah, Email. He's amazing by the way. Like has respond like responds all the time. Yeah, I pretty sure it was 99 bucks. I got it like on an app Sumo deal.

That's so funny.

And it's made over. So I invested 99 in some design and we've made over 100 grand from that job.

That's so cool.

To back to your point, man. I. This is why I with you because the notion thing, this is where every. If you have an audience, this is like please start things that simple. Because for me I'm like just want to fist bump you through the screen. Because my job board was a Google Doc. Like it started as a Google Doc. It was like people in the community were reaching out and they were like, hey, I'm trying to hire for X role. Can you promote that? And I think this is about. One of the huge things about having a community is like almost you get these ideas. You don't have to come up with these ideas on their own. They tell you. And so I was like, sure. And so I was like, this week we have three featured jobs in the community and it was like a read only Google Doc. And I charged, you know, whatever for that. And after the first month I was like, wait a second, we just did 10k in revenue through a Google Doc. There's something here. And at that point make the decision to go and build and invest. And so I love that as like a you start with notion, like, how can we prove this out? And how can you monetize with just a freaking notion doc and, and build from there? Love that totally.

You know, I feel like people might actually like it better too. You know, like sometimes I look back at, at those days and I feel like it felt like a real club. You know, it's like you're only getting access to this like special doc that like other people can't find. There's no like URL, but. And like you can't do it forever, you know, like if you're going to scale a business, you just can't. But I feel like to some degree doing it like in hacky ways like that, I think people actually appreciate it, you know.

So what did, what did. Len, Len, so you build this job board. Did you, did you reach out and say like, hey, we have a job board. We're looking for promoted role, like featured roles. Like how did that start?

We didn't. Yeah, we didn't even have a job board. But what we did have a job listings channel in the group. And so I was like seeing the, like anybody could post a role in there and just say like, oh, my friend is hiring for this, that type of thing. And so I was just going to those listings and trying to find the hiring manager and just emailing them, being like, hey, hey, you know, I run this slack group for content marketers. I can get you more exposure to these people. Like, I'm pretty sure we can actually help you do this. And additionally, the thing we. Part of our value prop back then, which I thought we would keep doing but, but ultimately decided not to, was that we would help you vet the Candidates. And at the time, I was even helping the candidates write cover letters. I was reviewing their resume. So I was. It was like a. Like a lightweight recruiting service, really. So I went to Len and I was like, I've known Len for a long time. And I was like, hey, your job got post did. How about this? For $300, I will promote this to our group. I'll vet the candidates and I'll help the candidates, like, put their best foot forward. And he was like, great. It's like, easiest 300 bucks ever. And we found someone amazing. This woman, Rachel Burns. She still works there years later. And so we had this win right off the bat. That was like, one, we found someone. Two, like, came directly from the community. This person was great. Everybody's super happy. Len recommended us to a couple other people, and we were kind of off to the races at that point. Like, figuring out how do we scale it? Should we get off notion how much of this kind of, like, recruiting thing can or should we be doing? You know, all of that evolved quite a bit, but it was like, that was like the spark we needed to get it rolling.

And don't you feel like it, like, changed your perception on monetization also? Because, like, you kind of made up this price of $300. You ended up landing a great candidate for this company. The. The price to value ratio is just like, it's crazy there. Like, I wonder if that also kind of reinforced, like, you feeling good about this.

Oh, for sure. Well, I guess the thing I didn't want was to be like, hey, Len, it's 300 bucks. I'll post it. That's it, you know, Like, I wanted him to be like, this is the best thing ever. Because I wanted him to go tell all of his other CMO pals, you know, and that worked.

How did you come up with the price? How did you come up with 300 bucks?

I think I went on WeWork remotely, and I think their base price was around 300 bucks. That was it. There was nothing else to it other.

Than, I'm telling you, this is how people make up pricing. Like, I got a DM about this last night. Like, how do you come up with pricing? And I'm like, I think you. Look, if you're starting this, ideally you're coming from, like, a niche. And so, like, you've been in the content world, you've hired people, so that's one way you could come up with pricing for your service. Like, for me, I roughly know, like, what I would pay a marketer and so I can back into, like, here's what I think I would charge for my hourly rate. But here's what it has to be for me to make sense. You have to just be able to, like, back in the napkin it. And I think what you said is really important. Underrated details. I was like, the first thing you did is go and find somebody else, because almost everything has already been done. And so if I'm launching a job board, what is. What is remote jobs or whatever, or we work remote or whatever. You said, like, what do they have? What do they charge for this? Okay, could I. Could I just make that up? And so I think if you're struggling with pricing, it's usually already out there in some way and you can figure out and make a guess based on what it should be for you.

For sure. Yeah. Like, when are you. Like, if you're. If you're a marketer and you're going to post a job, you're gonna go around all the various places you could post them, and the prices are gonna fall within, I think, like, a reasonably tight range, you know, But I do feel like it's important to go, like, really above and beyond for those first customers. You know, the other thing we did actually for Len was we did a video. Like, we did like a Zoom interview. It's like, I interviewed Len. He talked all about the role, you know.

And did you post that video in the community?

Yeah, well, I embedded it in the notion, doc, so that anyone who's applying could, like, see Len, get to know him. And so, yeah, there was like. I mean, now we. We moved away from that model. It actually worked incredibly well, but I don't think people would pay what it's actually worth, you know, Like, I think that the package that we sold is worth thousands and thousands of dollars, not 300 bucks.

Well, yeah, if you could get. If you could say, like, if you knew for a fact that you were going to hire. What was it? What was her name?

Rachel.

Okay, so, like, if you knew that you were going to land Rachel and she was going to work there for X years and be amazing, like, you, you know, you could have charged 15, 20 grand for that. But there's no. There's no way in at that point in time that that makes any sense. Right, right. Okay. So you got the community, you got the job board. That was kind of the beginning. What. What has. What has evolved? Like, where do you have other channels now?

Yeah, so now we have four total lines of business. So the next thing we Rolled out after that was a paid membership. So it's like basically what you'd expect. It's like, it's courses, it's exclusive content. We pair people up for one on one calls each month with like an agenda, like stuff to chat through. We do monthly office hours.

Is it in Slack? Like where's the, where's the paid?

That all runs in Podia. So it's not, it's not as. It's not a community. You know, like there is like there are like some kind of community elements to it, but it's not a community in the same way that the rest of the Slack group is.

It's more about a content site.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like you log in, you get access to all the stuff that other people don't get. So we started rolling that out and again like my thing was like actually at first I like was trying to sell these individual like $50 a month type things and it just like wasn't really working. And then I realized like, why am I doing this thing that I don't know how to do? Like I know how to go to a team and sell like a package to a team, give them a volume discount, try to get their whole team on it, like that type of thing. So that was the direction that started heading pretty quick, quickly. And so a lot of the people who are, who are in that group now are, you know, it's them and their five content marketing co workers. You know where I've sold to their, their boss who's like the VP of marketing or something like that, that's been like a whole, I don't know, each of these lines of business has like its own story to tell. You know, like there's a lot of things about that that have worked really well and some that have been incredibly frustrating. But in general, like my whole hypothesis with Superpath is that Rising Tide lifts all ships. So if we. I say this to myself every day because our top of funnel, which is the free Slack community, is free. It's open to basically anybody. As long as you don't want to come in and spam everybody you can join. That has to be really tightly run, has to be really good because the better that is and the more people participate in it and like it and get value from it, the more the other lines of business been benefit. And so I feel like there's like a really clear line from like, better community, better job board, better community, better paid membership, better community, better sponsorships, which is that, that was the next thing.

We launched was set the fourth line. So you have the free Slack community, the job board, paid membership, and then sponsors.

There's one more. So I don't, I don't consider the, I don't consider the free Slack community like a line of business necessarily. I more consider it kind of like our center of gravity. And then the fourth is the talent marketplace. That's the newest thing we've done, actually has been by far the most lucrative thing we've done too. And that was.

Explain it, talk about it.

Yeah, sure. So I go out, I sell a content package to a B2B SaaS company and then I source and vet freelance writers to do the work and I make those connections happen. And then we do some management in the middle. So we have an editor who edits everything. If you need help coming up with ideas, we'll help you come up with ideas. So in some ways it's like we run it like a very lightweight agency. But the whole gist of it is that. But we have so many great content creators in the Slack group. There's still plenty of demand for content out there. And I'm trying to like, trying to figure out like, how do we bring those two things together?

So, so it's not necessarily like finding like, I'm Dave, I work in content. I want a new job because a lot of people have approached me to be like, you could, could you run like the reverse of your job board? But I couldn't do that publicly. It'd just be too much work. And I, I think it's an amazing idea. I just, I don't want to take it on, which is like, like candidates. And the number one question I get is like, do, do you know people? But this is, this is not that. This is more about like content work. Like, okay, so you're trying to get a project, hey, we need some articles, we need articles.

We need a couple articles a month or we need 20 articles at once or whatever and then I'll go find freelancers. But actually the reason we came to this, we had toyed around the idea of a marketplace. Like what would it look like, who's it for? Is it, you know, all that stuff. But one thing I noticed, noticed was the job board, you know, a full time job gets posted and it would get, you know, I don't know, maybe on average it would get 20 applicants and like maybe like 100 people total, like interested in it. And like nice board kind of lets you measure like clicks to the application. And then like I'm following up with People like how many candidates you actually, actually get that applied. But then I started noticing that some people would post freelance gigs and they would get like 10 times as much interest. And it got my brain thinking. Like a company hires a content marketer. Like I don't know, like not that often, like once a year maybe, if that. But they work with freelancers all the time. So there's just like this, this cadence of work that needs to happen. And so I like set out to do some customer research. I talked to a bunch of B2B SaaS, content people to figure out like how do you find freelancers? Is it a pain in the ass? You know, like what have you learned? Who do you work with? Like what do you pay them? All this kind of stuff. Everybody across the board says it's a headach, you know, like I basically just lean on my personal network to find people. There's no place to go, you know. And then on the freelance side, like they have a whole bunch of problems too. Like it's annoying to get paid. A lot of freelancers don't really like the business development part of it, you know, like they, they're happy to do the work but they don't really want to spend a bunch of time like going out and finding customers. And so I was like, I think we could figure this out. So like same thing. I just like made a little airtable base. You know, there's like a form you fill out if you need an article, right? Like that. We have a little thing that helps us match with a wr and we manage it all on air. Actually we still manage it all on airtable for like 50 bucks a month. And yeah, that's again like again that has like a whole. I could talk to you for like two hours about all the things that have happened with that. But that's been really interesting because I feel like it's a huge value add to the community. Anytime people can come there and transact, you know, and that's become like that. I didn't, I didn't think that that would be important, but I feel like it's become really important that what makes the slack group sticky I think is that if you can come to there and transact like you can pick up work, you can hire somebody, you can find a freelancer, you can do these sort of important day to day job things there, sometimes for free, sometimes we monetize, but you keep coming back.

It's so interesting. I didn't know that much about your business is cool to learn today because you have a lot of selfish, benefit driven reasons for people to want to be in the community. It's not just like, yeah, here's another. Because there's a million communities, I'm sure there's millions of communities where people talk about content. Content and so but you have the others. Like you could be like, I have no interest in, in being a community, in being in the community and like another slack group or Facebook group to check. But like I'm, I work on the content team at HubSpot and like I want to make another 500 bucks a month and like here's this, here's this like place for content people that like helps them get side gigs. Yeah. And there's jobs. Like there's lots of hooks there beyond. I think you've built like many hooks beyond the community for it to be valuable, which is super smart.

Yeah. I will say I feel like in some ways we spread ourselves pretty thin because for a long time it was just me. We hired one person now, so I have one person helping. But the dream was this like multi, multi lines of business, you know, like sort of diverse streams of income and all that and like it actually does work. But you, you could spend all of your time just on one thing. Like each of them is, has enough potential. I think that it warrants someone working on full time and like maybe we'll get there at some point. I don't know. But. So I find that I have to find. I have to like, I have to like sort of comfort myself sometimes to be like the dream that you came up with was a business with four lines of revenue, not four perfect lines of revenue because they always each have things going on that need work.

Well, it also, it also depends on what you want though also. Right. Because like there's a, there's a certain point where like some of the things that you might enjoy about like being a solopreneur working for yourself is like, you know, family time and flexibility and like, you know, I think about this all the time where I think that what, I think that exit 5 could be a 10 million dollar a year business. No problem. I mean not no problem. Not that it would take no problem. But like I, I see it. I, yeah, I've seen other companies do it. Content Marketing Institute or others. Like, and I see the demand for it. I just, I don't want to, I don't want to do that because what that would require would like, I would probably have to work 100 hours a week on it and there's people who might say, well, 100, you know, you could build a 10 million dollar business. But I got, at this point in my life, life, I have, I have enough. I have young kids. I want, I'm trying to optimize for like, I want high income in revenue. Sure, I do want that. But I also want time with my family and stuff right now. And so they're. I'm sure you have the same thing where you're like, you're like, this is crazy. We have these five. We have five things here. Like, each one of these could be its own business. I could have a team of four people and each, Each, like there's a pod of people that work on each one of these things. And it's a business. I'm sure you think about that all the time.

Time, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I. I would say, like, so I have a business partner too, which adds like another layer of complexity to the whole thing, I think.

Has that always been the. Has that always been the case and I just didn't know that.

Yeah, so. So Walter's a kind of a silent partner. I mean, he. Basically what happened was I said, I want to do this business. I can't go to zero. I've got a mortgage. I got. I got a baby on the way. It's like two months into Covid and like, I have no idea. Idea what's going on in the world. Like, it was. I just was not in a place in my life to bootstrap the thing from nothing. So we came up with this agreement, which I've written extensively about. So this is not like brand new information, but basically Walter said, I'll put up enough money for you to take a salary for one year. And in exchange for that, I want equity. And the goal is let's get it profitable within one year. And actually it felt like that was a really good deal. Like, it made it really possible for me to like, just go in and think a little bit longer term. Not thinking about, you know, how much money can I make this month to replace the income I used to have. It's more like, okay, I got 12 months to figure out a way to get us just in the green, you know, or in the black, I guess. And that was great.

Can we pause on that for a second? What, what was the actual process of like, you know, because there, there's probably legal. Like, how did you figure out the right amount of equity? How did you set up the business? Like, can you, can you just talk through some of that?

Yeah, for sure. So Walter had been my boss for almost five years and we had worked together really closely and we had had it out some couple times. And like, we just, I think we just trusted each other. Like, we had been through some like, really challenging, like, business stuff already. And so I think we both felt like pretty comfortable that we could figure out how to make this work. And I'm trying to think how we. I don't. I mean, basically we started talking, I mean we made a spreadsheet, we started talking about numbers. Like, actually that felt like pretty uncomfortable at first to be like really frank about numbers and equity and how much I thought we needed to get rolling and stuff like that.

And is it equity? Under the assumption that because equity is like, equity only means something if there's an exit. And so like, is this like, hey, we think.

Not necessarily. Not necessarily. So as of this month, Walter takes a share of our profits, which was the plan all along.

Ah, got it. So, okay, so you don't need to sell the business. It's like, if we can grow this to X a year, you would get this in profits. And now he, like, he invested in it, got it going. He consults with you and helps you, but he's just basically getting a dividend every month or whatever. Every month.

Yeah, exactly. And we came up with a formula where like, there's a lot of math involved in this, you know, so like we had a. I have a base salary and the deal is, is if, if I make more money, Golden Walk, which is his holding company, also makes more money in equal proportion. So like I get my salary and then anything above that gets split and it's like a fairly conservative amount. It's not, it's not crazy.

Yeah.

And his like Walter's whole thing. To me, one of the reasons I felt very comfortable doing this was like he, he told me and continues to tell me often, long term thinking is a competitive advantage. So if you're thinking like if I do this for five years or ten years one, you start thinking about like, how do I make it sustainable so that I like doing it? You know, like, how do we focus the whole thing on profitability, just generally running like a healthy business, you know, and also like, how do we over time. We're not there yet, but like, how do we over time get me less involved in a lot of the day to day stuff, which is like 100%. My goal is that I feel like I'm trying to set up these different lines of business. It's a lot of work to get it rolling But I also see how each of them could work, run almost independently, probably with like some human assistance, but not, not a ton so that I don't have to, you know. Like, I guess my, my thinking on the whole thing has been like, I am 100% doing this because I want better work, life balance, I want to spend more time with the family. I have all these hobbies I like doing, you know, But I also feel like we're in this sort of like kind of intense period to get it all working the way I want it to work. But I have, but I see the vision, you know what I mean? And like a lot of that stuff has already kicked in.

How is all, how is all that stuff managed behind the scenes? Because it can't be manual. Like how much you get paid, how much you get paid based on the revenue and all that stuff? How does that work?

It's just a simple formula. Like we have a simple formula. I mean, actually I don't really mind sharing. Like basically the way that we do it is we take 25% of the monthly profits and split it.

Got it. Okay.

So I get base salary plus 12 and a half percent of monthly profits. Walter gets 20, just 12 and a half percent of monthly Profits. So that still leaves 75% of the profits to go back into the business. And at some point we may decide to do something with that.

Yeah, it's just so, no, I'm so fascinated by this because it's like completely opposite of the, like I have a setup where, and, and it's much different. I'm not, I don't have as, as much of a long term plan. And so it's like for me, my, I pay myself a salary through the business.

Right.

But it's also all goes back to me because it's all, all, you know, all the profits. And so it's this weird mix of like I have a salary on paper and that's mostly for like, for tax and income reasons. Right. But like what, what, how do you, how do you manage? Like the, the variability? Like what if all of a sudden in the next three months, superpath goes nuts? Does that all just go back into the, into some account somewhere and you, but like you, you, you and your.

Family, if it goes nuts in a good way.

Yeah, yeah, like, like you just, you, you, you print a ton of money in the next, in the next quarter and like you want to grab, you do something or make an investment. Like how, how does that work? You're just not going to do it.

So we have it. We have a checking account which has been building up over the years. It's looking pretty nice lately. And, and like I definitely look at that sometime and I feel like half that's mine. Right? And no. So we.

So wait, who is the other half? Whose is the other half?

Walters?

I thought it was 25%. Oh, you each get 25%. No, no.

So like, so he owns 50% of the business overall.

Okay, okay, I got it. I got it.

Yeah, yeah. And then each month we divvy up 20%, 25% of the profits and then we, we reserve the right to at the end of the year talk about what to do with the other 75% of profits. Got it.

You know, that makes sense. So in some ways it's, it's almost easier because it's like you just have a longer time horizon. So like, yeah, hey, we'll make that decision for like, you know, at the end of the year when we look.

At, when we look at profit stuff.

Totally.

You mentioned hiring someone. Is this full time salary benefits, like how do you set up high hiring?

Cool deal. Yeah. And I've always envisioned having a team, but a small team, like a really lean team. That's kind of the way I hope to run the whole thing. So we hired a person. Her name is Sierra. She runs our content marketing and the community. And the two are very tightly tied together, which is why I wanted to keep those in one role. And so she manages all the day to day stuff in the community. She does all the moderation, she facilitates conversation, all that kind of stuff. And then she puts basically cherry picks the best stuff and turns it into evergreen content for the blog. And I felt that was a pretty important role. One, because Slack community management was getting to be unwieldy for one person to deal with. And then two, like we had never capitalized on the Slack grow. Slack group for growth. You know, like there's so much happening in there, but it's all kind of trapped in there. And so I was, I felt like that was one. It's like a way for us to kind of like walk the walk. Right. But it's also also like there's just like a ton of awesome stuff in there that I think that we should be leveraging for growth. You know, more people on the site, more people on the newsletter use it to drive more people in the Slack group. So. So that's what she does. Yeah. And she's. Yeah. Full time benefits, the whole deal.

When did you make the change to name it? Super Path. How did you come up with that?

Yeah, yeah, right at the beginning, so. Right, right. I mean when we decided like this is going to be a business, I. I knew immediately, like content marketing, career Slack, it wasn't going to work. And the name is a mix animals. Our mascot was Super Lucky Cat, which is like a, like a little stuffed animal that I think the Asahi. The beer company, it's like a Japanese beer company. Anyways, I don't. They had like done some promo at some bar and we ended up with this like Asahi cat that we called the Super Lucky Cat. And an animal is like our, our shared email address and some of like the, the. The names that we used for like internal projects and documents and stuff was super lucky here cat. And because I in some ways felt that this was like born from animals and in some ways a spin off too, I wanted to keep the. Some, some nod to that. And then the path just came from like career path and mixing those two things together.

What's a. What's your website built on? Looks nice.

Webflow, but only as of like a couple weeks ago. It was on Squarespace for years before that.

Do you just kind of hacked it together yourself?

Yeah, like two hours. Just like threw it together because, you know, that's what we do with everything. We just like so that to make.

It work, more people need. More people need to hear that notion. Google Docs. Squarespace, like this is. I think you have the tools to like build something and get feedback and then scale and. Yeah, now you feel good about like actually spending dollars in a nicely designed website for sure from webflow. But basically your old website funded that. Like that's how it works.

Oh, for sure. I feel like, you know, I apologize. I'm just running a second because I got it. We were doing office hours.

All good. We're going to. We'll wrap up. Don't worry.

Yeah, no, the. I feel like the not no code thing is amazing for like I can't code. You know what I mean? And even if I could, I shouldn't be spending a bunch of time doing it. It's not the right. It's not the right time investment for me. So I feel like using no code to like, to understand your specs, you know, like we. I built a website in Squarespace in two hours. We used it for like two years and by the time we did it for two, I knew every single problem with it and I knew every single thing I wanted out of a real website.

Okay, last question. Since we gotta wrap up and I wanna ask you about this. How has your life changed? Change more positive, negative, since kind of going out on. On your own? And. And what would you. What would you say about life before and after in a company versus working for yourself?

It's a lot. I mean, I don't. It's both. It's easier and it's harder, you know, Like, I feel the. I feel the. The burden of it sometimes, for sure. You know, Like, I, like, literally last night I was like, trying to go to sleep and I was like, damn it, I forgot to do whatever. And I'm like making notes on my phone because I'm like, I have. No one's going to do it. I have to do it. You know, and so there's definitely some of that. There's also just like, amazing benefits, you know, Like, I live in Vail, Colorado. I ski all the time. You know, there's no one. I don't have to be accountable to anybody. I love that I could never go back to, like, someone wondering where I am and what I'm doing all the time. You. You know, But I would say, yeah, I like, I would say it's harder than I thought too, for sure. You know, it's more work, for sure, but it's also more incentivizing and more satisfying work, you know, I would definitely say that, like, I see a future for this same like you said with except five. Like there, I. We could grow this for a long time. You know what I mean? This could be a really cool business and I could take it whatever direction ends up feeling. Right. I love that. I love knowing that, like, I don't have to go somewhere else to find the work life balance or the. The work that I want to do. Like, I can do it all right here. It's like, it's totally up to me how all that stuff gets shaped.

Yeah, man. All right. This was awesome.

Go.

You got to go. I'll talk to you later. Thank you for doing this. Just don't close the window after. You know, you know the drill.

Okay, Cool. Awesome. Thanks, David. Chat, man.

Appreciate you. This is really fun.

Take care.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have a community, a community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about. Get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast setting and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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