#60: From Building an Audience to Launching a SaaS Company - Adam Schoenfeld (CEO at KeyPlay.io) & Camille Trent (Director of Content & Community at Peersignal.org)

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One, two, three, four. Exit. Exit. Exit. All right, we're live. It's the Exit 5 podcast, the world's favorite and fastest growing B2B marketing podcast. I have no idea if those claims are true, but it's my show and I can say whatever the hell I want. Adam and Camille are here. I'm excited to talk to both of you. I've been wanting to do this for a while. I don't know why I didn't reach out to Adam sooner. And here we are. So I have a bunch of questions right out of the gate. I want you to each introduce yourselves, give context so people can hear your voice. We'll get into Keyplay, Peer Signal. You got two email addresses. I'm sure that's a nightmare to manage and you got all that stuff going on. But anyway, let's kick it off first. So, Adam, quick background on you, who you are, what you're doing now and then Camille.

Sure. Yeah. I've been a founder in the SaaS space for quite a while. I'm starting to show a few grays here. I founded a couple companies in marketing tech. The most recent previous one is Siftrock, which sold to Drift. And that's where I met you. Dave was my time at Drift. Spent a few years at Drift and learning a bunch there. And then after a little time off, I started Pure Signal, which then of evolved to pure signal plus keyplay. We're doing this media plus SaaS thing which we're going to talk a lot about.

Awesome. Camille, Hello. Good to see you. A big fan of your, of your work and everything that you've done so far. Where did you come from in this story? What's your background?

Where did I come from? All right. I won't go too far back, but I started out as a copywriter, like thought I was going to do big brand advertising stuff and then ended up in Houston where they're not really known for their big brand, big agency stuff. So got into like the B2B world that way. Still in advertising, started agency side still, then kind of slowly made my way to broader marketing and stumbled my way into tech, I would say, in the startup world. So loved the pace once I finally got there. And then I've just been at startups for the last couple years.

How did you and Adam get connected and at what point did you get hired there?

Yeah, so there's definitely a Drift connection that we'll see, I think, like throughout this podcast. But a couple people at Dualie, so Michelle and Cody, like actually both kind of randomly like mentioned and endorsed Adam. So that's kind of how I knew that he existed. And then after that, I think I started following him, started seeing his posts and kind of what he was working on at Pure Signal was like, just really fascinated by that type of content. I think there's like a, you know, big gap in the market for that type of data backed content. So I was really drawn to that. It's kind of, yeah, it's the type of content that I like to create. And so I think when that role became available, it's definitely attractive.

And so you were at Dually doing marketing.

That's right. Yeah.

Got it. Okay. All right, Adam, let's talk about the formation of this. So you leave Drift. Obviously you're an entrepreneur, you're a startup founder. Inevitably you were going to go start something. You started to really get heavy into the content. I must have talked to you maybe over a year ago and you kind of had this just seemed like content idea to me. Did you have this idea the whole time that eventually this was going to be a SaaS company and you were going to be a SaaS founder again? Or did you. Did that path make its way there? I'm just trying to like rewind and see how we got here before we talk about what you're doing now.

Yeah, I did want to start another SaaS company. Like, I didn't know what problem I wanted to solve. I didn't know what the product would be what the commercial model would look like. But I did want to like found and grow another SaaS company. So I kind of knew who, right? Like, I've been in the sales and marketing tech space and so I wanted to focus there. And so instead of just like doing a bunch of interviews, I started studying SaaS companies, primarily product led growth, because I thought that was kind of the, like the hot item at the moment. And so started a newsletter, built this little data set of about 300 companies to start. We were kind of slicing it and dicing it. I say we. My co founder, Andrew was doing nights and weekends, like writing some scripts, doing a little bit of, like writing a little bit of code, but not, you know, there was no product. He was just kind of powering the newsletter and the content and the data set that we put together.

Did you two join together to start this thing? Like you started content and then you're like, oh, I need a co founder. Or did you two decide to go do something together? And you just were going to. He was the person you were tinkering around with.

They were in parallel. So I was starting to play with the content and starting to think about like, what market, what product do I want to build? And I met him and we were spending time and then I said, hey, why don't we just tinker in this sandbox that I've already kind of got going a little bit. Like it wasn't much at that time, honestly, but I said, hey, like, let's tinker here. I honestly, I don't know what the business is. You have a job, so you're not like urgently trying to leave your job and go do this. So it kind of served the purpose of giving us a sandbox to play in. And also just like, I felt like I got to stay in the flow, like writing, connecting with people, thinking about the space.

Neither of you were like really getting paid at the time, obviously, but he was gainfully employed. So it was like, hey, I know Adam. Like, yeah, I'm kind of have an itch to do something. Let's mess around and see where this goes. And then you start doing this. You build a data set, you have a newsletter. You're basically focusing on what's happening in the product led growth. So you're kind of analyzing trends and what's happening at product led companies. Because within the B2B sales and marketing space, that's where most of the exciting.

Things and growth started to happen.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

And I wasn't like, oh, I want to Build a product led sales tech company or something like that.

Right.

And our key play is not that I was just like, this is the interesting thing to start with. And so that's where we dug in first.

So like today that could be, somebody could do that with like let's analyze every AI company in the space and you could do something similar, which I'm sure you're both nodding, which is like, I'm sure there's something interesting that you can do with all that content. Okay, so you build a data set, you build this newsletter. Did you primarily just launch this? Like you have enough of a reputation inside of B2B SaaS. So my guess is like you kind of just start doing this on LinkedIn. You show up regularly on LinkedIn with this content. LinkedIn becomes the main driver for the newsletter.

Yeah, that was exactly right. So I, you know, 10 years of compounding or whatever of just posting a couple times a week on LinkedIn and there's a bit of an audience there to start with. And then we put the actual data set, like if you wanted to get into the airtable and filter and sort, you had to sign in. So I kind of learned that from Drift Insider, by the way, like what we did there. So we put that inside of like a little app, a very thin, you know, app layer. It's an at an embedded airtable. And so that then subscribed people to the newsletter. And so we got kind of the, the flywheel going between LinkedIn and the newsletter and we kind of cross linked between the two things.

And what was the value you said we got that from Drift Insider for people that might not know what that is. And I actually think there's pros and cons to each approach. I feel like it's been a positive thing for you. Can you just talk about that?

Yeah. So this whole like gate or ungate and I don't know if it's gating or not, but I felt like this data set was like almost like a product. Right. It's in this gray area where, you know, we were writing scripts and we were updating it and the data was refreshing and so it felt like something that it was be worth to log in for. And then by doing that we're actually, you know, getting the subscriber base built so that we could communicate with people on an ongoing basis about like our research and share our content with them. So yeah, it was kind of a debate up front, but then I, I thought there was enough value there to make that something you'd Sign in for. But all the research we did, like we'd publish a lot of decks and graphs and insights that we pulled out of the data set. All that was like zero click ungated. We'd put it on LinkedIn, we'd put it on the website, we'd put it wherever we could. So but we did have that one thing that was sort of behind the sign in wall.

Do you need like a login and a password or could you just like authenticate with LinkedIn or something? So it was a little bit frictionless.

Yeah, we chose to do authenticate with LinkedIn only. That's the only option. A few people have been like, can I sign up with email? I'm like, sorry, no, that's helpful for us because you know, we can see the person's title. So if we get into more, you know, segmenting and it grows, there's probably some like lanes we can put people into. But honestly the, the reason we did it at first was not a data play at all. It was just, that was easier. That was like the quicker way to put things up behind a sign in.

It's like everybody's like, well, why Dave, why did you pick Facebook for Exit 5? I'm like, it wasn't like some process where I had like different flowcharts of like all the possible places to build a, an audience. It's interesting to like peel back the layers of this because I do feel like I would say 90% of the questions that I get now about Exit 5 from like other creators is like, well, which platform did you pick and how? And it's always like this. It's like, ah, we wanted people to log in, we pick LinkedIn. Like, is that perfect? I don't know, but it works. And like, let's build. And that's not where the, the 8020 is from the content. I also think this is a great example of you led with a unique value prop and a value add thing. You had this data set, people wanted this data and so it's like it always comes down to the offer. The offer is the data. The what's in it for me is the data. This is very relevant. This is thoughtful. This is deeper than anybody else is doing it. So yes, I'm going to give you that exchange value. Okay, so you build that thing. At what point did you start to think like, wow, there's something here and I can't do this full time because we're going to build a SaaS company and like, we need to bring in Camille for example.

Well, we had some bad ideas for SaaS companies that we invalidated along the way. So it was a lot of months of kind of just, all right, let's keep doing the content and community work. But we don't still know what our commercial business is like. We were thinking about brand measurement. We were thinking about all these different ideas, and we'd interview people and they were kind of dead ends.

Do you have an idea that you loved, but it was a bad idea?

I did have an idea. I loved that it was a bad idea.

Can you share it on this podcast or is it like, you're gonna. It's on the shelf in case you do it later.

No, yeah, I loved it. I talked to, you know, Dave Rigotti, right? He thought of doing a company in this too. It's like brand measurement for B2B. I was like, that would be great. I mean, that's always just this thing that nobody can wrap their arms around. But then I was interviewing CMOs and they're like, yeah, I mean, I want that, but I'm not really going to pay for it. Was the takeaway.

They would pay for it. I think it's a great idea because it's like, that's the one CMO question. Like, everybody wants to, how do I perfectly attribute my brand? I think they might not pay for it upfront. In a pinch, they would pay like, if it already existed. And they were like, I could just, boom, here, give you this one thing and we'll spit it out and we'll tell you the number and you can bring it to the board. They would want that.

Somebody's going to figure out how to build this business. I could not figure it out. Andrew and I, like, banged our head against the wall on it for a while. It was like the prices people were willing to pay versus, like, what it would. The cogs would be. It was just like, there's not a business here.

And as you flesh out what this business idea is going to be, you're sitting on this newsletter slash community thing that is continuing to grow. When did Camille come in?

So we had started to get some customers. So people started coming to us saying, hey, these data sets that you have, we had kept growing them. They were getting bigger. They're like, these are really cool. And I'm seeing companies in there that look a lot like my icp. Can you do something more custom? Can you help me build, like, my target account list? Can you help me, like, rank my icp? And we're like, we don't do that. Like go to Zoom info or whatever. Right. But then we dug in a little bit more on some of those and they were as people who had tried a lot of things and failed or didn't feel like the solutions were good. So we just took a few of those and said, how about you sign up for six months, you pay us and we'll kind of build this around you. We'll use the Legos we have, but we'll like kind of build around your use case. And we had three or four customers say yes to that. We kept getting that inbound from the peer signal community. And so when Camille joined, we had what, Camille, like seven customers or so?

Yeah, I think seven.

So then I was like, well, I don't want to stop doing pure signal, but I need to like allocate my time probably a bit more to the SaaS business. And I was like, what? How am I going to do this? Like, what's the kind of person. I didn't know what the role was. That was the hard part at first. So I kind of like put up a job post that was very vague, and then I put up another one that was like, do you want to come be a guest analyst? Right, Camille, is that accurate?

Yeah, yeah, that's accurate. Because I would say I love the job posting, like maybe ironically, and that it was like three different jobs in one. Like, I think you did say, like one part editor, like one part analyst, like one part growth marketer. And I was like, I think that's what I am. And so it seemed like an interesting role. And I think I also like submitted for the analyst position just as a. Wanting to try it out and just like, see if we were a good fit in general. And I think that's kind of what we did.

So there's a couple things I want to come back to there. So you, you're building this audience the whole time and you're kind of searching for like, what is the Adam, you know, you. I know I want to do a SaaS business, blah, blah, blah. You have this audience, they basically, even though you have your own ideas, they come to you and they're like, hey, here's an idea. Why don't you do this? Why don't you do this, why don't you do this? And is that when you're like, oh, like that's actually how you got to the revenue generating side of this business, as these people told you, you went and did it. Is that accurate?

Exactly. And at some point we said to a couple of them, hey, we'd like to build this like what you're describing or we'd like to address this problem. Would you pay? Would you pay for six months? And once a few of them said yes, that was like, okay, this is worth pursuing. And that's when we, you know, like incorporated and did all the other things to build a SaaS company, which is.

Well known on this podcast. But like, this is my favorite example of like one of the best advantages you can create from a business standpoint is if you can do the audience thing first. The challenge is most people don't have, you know, they don't actually go and genuinely explore. And so they kind of like half ass do the audience building thing because they already have the thing that they want to sell you. And like, the reason this worked well in your case is because you literally didn't know and you had to wait until 5, six people told you and then you're like, oh, there's some there, there, let's go down this and, and go and build. And like, I talk about this often, but I honestly believe there's 15 businesses that if I wanted to, I could build off of. Things that I've Learned from the Exit 5 community. There's an agency, there's a content business, there's a this, there's. Without ever setting out to do that. And I think what happens is the reason why this is for everybody that works at a SaaS company. Why did the content work here is because there was no misaligned incentives that from the beginning you're like, hey, there's some interesting data. We want to serve this up in a unique way. And boom, all of a sudden an audience gets built. With that, there was no secret little growth hac. You focus on the quality of the content, you focused on original research, you built an audience. That's why this works. And damn it, this is my favorite example of. I talk about this all the time. If I was going to do something separate, if I was going to build a golf business, we talked about golf, I would start with content and media first. So today you have the core business, which is now called Keyplay, and you have the community or content business, which is called peer signal. What's the state of those two things, Camille? What do you focus on? What do you do? How do those two things work together?

Yeah, sure. So I think like the role, if people are curious, is like director of content community, right? And so it really started out as just content and I would say still is like, you know, 80, 70% content. Because the community is there, but there's no dedicated community. Right. Like, there's no Exit 5 yet. Right. And so.

Right.

Wait, let's pause on this for a second because this comes up a lot and I think what you just said is an important distinction. I think it's a myth that when people talk about building a community, at least in my opinion, and sounds like from what you said the same. It doesn't mean that there is a Facebook group or a Slack group. It's community like Adam, we know this from Drift was like, in the early days of Drift, there actually wasn't a community. It was. There's people that follow this content and like, if I write something on LinkedIn, they're going to respond. They're on our email list. It doesn't have to be community per se in one set location.

Right.

You've now built a community of people who know that Pure Signal exists and enjoy getting that content. But that doesn't mean they have a place that they have to, you know, go and talk to each other all the time.

Yeah. So, I mean, we can feel the community. Like, I mean, I can get like, Adam's perspective on this too. But I think coming in, like, I knew that he was getting responses from those newsletters. I could see the responses on LinkedIn. Like, I could see that. That there was already a community there and there were already other people like me that wanted to be a part of what Adam was building. Right. So I think he already had that advantage in terms of knowing how to build something that people want, people will kind of rally around. So there's that. And it's just a matter of like, protecting it. And part of that is, I think, like, protecting Adam's time. So really that's like how I think of a lot of my job is, you know, as, like, we built out the SaaS community. Like, we still need to keep the, the content at that same high level that Adam started out as. So I think just being able to come in, build some frameworks, keep up that same pace, or actually try and elevate the pace or shipping weekly, we're promoting things more often. So it's really just kind of putting gasoline on the fire in terms of building that community, building that audience early on, that's what I focused on. I would say the first month we were just running really, really fast and just getting that momentum up. And then it was kind of that cool down period. If you think about it like a, like a workout or something, where it was like, okay, it's December. Like we need to start planning for the next year. We need to like slow down a little bit. But like we did, I think like what, what we needed to do to kind of like make that splash and kind of quickly expand on the momentum that we had.

Since this is an audience of all people like you, other marketers, people working in marketing at SaaS companies, can you give us a glimpse into like, what are your goals, what are your KPIs, what does your role have ownership of? And like what are the metrics that you're trying to move?

Sure, yeah. So we thought about this like pretty deeply, I think like when we announced the fact that we had a SaaS product. So when I came in, nobody knew that we had a SaaS product. Right? Like they knew about Pure Signal as this like research.

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Media arm and really we didn't even announce it as that so no one really knew what we were doing over here. So Adam and I talked about like how we wanted to announce that being very careful to, to make sure people knew that the integrity of the media brand of the research was not going to go away like once we announced the SAS brand. So a lot of that announcement was very careful and thoughtful in basically us talking about me not being a SaaS marketer, right? Like that was something like actually kind of hard for me to swallow but like a very good thing of like I'm not attached to revenue. So I think that's like an important thing to get across here is unlike previous jobs, not attached to revenue. Like we believe strongly enough in community building an audience in just putting out good content that that's my focus. Like so the KPIs are around audience building. They're around like the sentiment, right? Like the sentiment and like the replies and things for the engagement rates. Like everything that a media company would be measured on is really what I'm measured on.

It was a little awkward for you at first I think because it was like yeah, no MQL goal, no lead goal. But it's sort of classic inversion, right? Where like those are the things that lead to bad. So we need to do the opposite and we need to just think about this truly as a content and media standalone thing. And so the goals are subscribers and like the profile of the subscribers and engagement and literally like number of newsletters that we get out in the quarter that meet our quality bar. And just we have a belief that that's going to accrue business value for Keyplay somewhere down the line because it already has. So I like for me, that was a no brainer. But it's like, I think for Camille it was a little bit awkward. It's like, wait, so I don't have to like drive a lead count to Key Play. I was like, no, that's gonna happen. Like, if this thing works, it's gonna work out downstream.

You don't have some inside. Aren't you two being like, all right, well, what about once a month we should do some promo where we talk about something in Key Play in the Peer Signal newsletter. Is there, is there anything like that?

Yeah. So, okay, so we're starting, we're going to try our first version of this here with some product releases we have. And I think the way, the way we're trying to do it is Keyplay will have a product release. So we'll enable like the unit of value that we have is signals, right? Like these true false clues that we can answer about companies. So those are valuable for Keyplay customers when we add new signals or when we release new capabilities. So the way we're going to do it, you'll see like some of that in the next couple months. We'll release all that into Peer Signal too. And then we'll do research that uses those capabilities and we'll reference back like this is from the new signals of Key Play. So I think that's where we want that flywheel to kind of start to work.

This is the ultimate example because you have like a smart person who's in charge of the research and the content. You have a CEO who believes in this approach. And here's the kicker, and this is where I think a lot of SaaS companies miss the mark when they try this approach. You actually have the best thing here, which is like, your product is going to be directly connected to like what you can do here. And so it's not about like every fifth email is like, save 20% on a key Play membership. It's like, no, you're actually going to talk about the interesting things, like you can make genuinely valuable Peer Signal content while you're in an authentic way talking about what you're doing with Keyplay. And those things are like, you're strategically now making decisions about what you should do with the product because you have an audience to sell to as opposed to like, hey, we built this thing, let's promote it in the next newsletter. Because then you just have this like, I love it. You're basically going to be able to do like marketable moments where you're using the Peer Signal audience as A way to like drive users and, and demand for what you're building with Keyplay.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's the luxury. I mean, maybe we got a little lucky because we didn't quite know that, or maybe it was because we put peer signal out. The product we built was driven by that. But we've seen role models, like if you look at Zillow and what they did with their score and how they turned that into this PR machine with like looking at real estate trends and data across all these different markets and they would slice it up and this was, I don't know, 10 or 12 years ago. Like that was just an incredibly effective, you know, kind of distribution strategy that also brought value back to their, their product.

Oh, that's interesting. So that like at the product level you can almost be the PR machine. It's like you can have the. It's not like thinking about Listicles for Camille and the team to go, right? You're like, wow, layoffs is crazy right now in SaaS. How is that impact? Like, you know, what are we seeing? You can serve it, you can do a quarterly report or something like that. I love that. This PR machine is great. I want to come back before we.

Move too far from this.

I want to talk about the metrics for a second because people are going to ask about this and I want to just get more specific answers. So you mentioned some audience building metrics. Can you give us some examples of those? Is it a channel specific? Is it all encompassing? Like what's an audience building metric that you own?

Yeah, sure. So I pulled up the OKRs, right, that we have for this quarter. And so within community, like deep in our community moat is kind of like the overall goal. And then within those, it's a matter of growing quality subscribers. Right? So we're planning on doing some sort of like analysis at the end of the quarter just so we can make sure, like we have a good gut check that these subscribers that we have been getting are quality. And we can kind of get signals from that through LinkedIn posts and things like that. Like who's engaging, right? Who are the people actually seeing this content and replying? So I have a subscriber growth number for the quarter and then I have like defining and doing like one or two big rock things right, for the quarter. So that's important, like because we found that there's like these, there's dividends for consistency, right? So we want to make sure that we publish consistently and we're publishing weekly. And that by the way, Is the other is the last KR here is. Is. Yeah. Publishing basically one newsletter a week is essentially what it is. But then we find, like, these spikes when we do these big projects, right. When we do these, like, pillar projects or data sets. So a couple examples are we have, like, three data sets. We have gallery. It's like a screenshot gallery. And then there are just some opportunities that come up. And so you like, these change. Like, we thought it was going to be one thing, and then the most recent one that we did was that partnership with Corporate Bro. That was just like. That just came about, right, like. Or it was just like an opportunity that we felt like we needed to jump on. So I can get in the weeds there, but those are kind of like the three things measured on for this quarter.

I think it's so important to have that mindset and be able to be flexible, which is like, I do a lot of people, they will set okrs, and then they're like, nope, these are my okrs for the quarter. This is what we're doing. And I think, especially with something that requires creativity and idea generation, like, you know, you and Adam have to have a framework where, like, what if you have a great idea, like, after this podcast, are you going to be like, well, we. We can't get to that until July because we've already set okrs for this. And it's one of the reasons that I love this stage of the company more than a later stage of the company. You can make these decisions and you can be like, yeah, let's drop everything we're doing and do this and do this thing with Corporate Boat. I do want to talk about that, but I want to go back to one thing. So I love how you have this objective of deep in the community moat because it gives a. Why it's one of the things that's like, why is goal setting important? Well, this gives you this, like, what am I doing every day? Like, my job is to deepen our community moat. How are we going to do that? By this thing, this thing and this thing. And you have. It's great to grow the subscriber number. That's. You want more people that are subscribed to your email list. That's fantastic. But I love that you have this quality thing because, you know, anybody could find ways to juice the numbers. Right. How are you going to go and do that quality measurement? Is it a manual thing? Does Adam and the team have some, like, secret scraper to measure the quality? How are you going to do that?

Yeah. So, I mean, Adam can talk more to, like, what we're planning on doing for the analysis, but I'd say, like, the initial things that we've done are, you know, on LinkedIn, you can see the insights of job by job title industry, that sort of thing, seniority. So we look at that fairly frequently. And then you can do kind of the same thing. Google Analytics, like, look at those things on LinkedIn.

Is that for the peer signal company page? Is that for Adam's account, your account? Like, what is that for all of the above?

Yeah, all. It's kind of qualitative, but we look at all those things, we look at the open rate, right? That's sort of an indicator of quality. Like, did the. Did the message land to get people to open? And then we look at my posts, Camille's posts, the company post, and we look at the website demographics. You know, LinkedIn's like, tag.

Oh, right.

And so we want people in, like, the software industry, and then we want go to market titles and founders primarily. So we're kind of like, did this post sort of hit the core or not? Did this, like, initiative, this kind of set of things hit it? But it's kind of like a glance. And we also look at the comments and we're like, did the head of product at airtable comment about a PLG piece? Well, that's pretty good. Did Elena Verna comment? Did Kyle Poyer comment? Like, that would be right. Like, we're getting to the people who are influential in that space. So.

But that's not necessarily like a number. You're. You're like, hey, we're gonna do a 5 to 7 slide, like, recap of this quarter. And you're gonna go back and look at your kind of pillar post and see the comments of that, like, I lick my finger. And if you're not watching, like, and you're just kind of like, directionally, did the right people comment on this?

I think at some point we'll try to establish, like, what is on profile for our audience. Like, what's the people we seek to serve, what are their job titles? And then we look at, you know, as a percentage. But that's probably something we do, like on a quarterly look back. And we're not too obsessed with it, right? We're trying to just get a sense for week over week, are we hitting the topics and creating the content that appeals to the type of people we want to serve?

I love how you mentioned, like, these are the five sources. It's each of your profiles. The website and you're going to look at those things. And you mentioned something interesting about the LinkedIn Pixel on the website, which is ultimately, if you can measure your website, who's walking into your store based on job title and company, that would be the best metric for all of this, right?

Yeah, I think that's like the most underrated free marketing tech there is. Like LinkedIn website demographics, they just hide it in the ads product, but you don't need to buy ads to use it. So we look at that pretty often and it's great. Yeah, because it's like you said, who's walking in the store, who's coming to peersignal.org, signing up, looking at the data sets, where do they work, what are their titles? That's incredibly valuable.

What about the company? Do you have company pages for Peer Signal and Keyplay? And are you investing in those and doing anything with them on LinkedIn?

Yeah, I can take this. So we do have pages. I wouldn't say that we, like, invest heavily in those pages. We want them to exist and we want them to be legitimate. But we know that just from like a little bit of testing and doing this at other companies. I know, like, how much more reach and how much more influential it is for Adam and I to post. Right. So essentially, if you go to those pages right now, you will see a lot of reposts from me and Adam. Right. Because that's like, that is our voice, that is our brand. Right. And so it needs to exist. And like, you know, when we're able to free up more bandwidth, we could add that in. But right now it's like a lower priority. The one other thing though that I'll add on the metrics is the fact that we have that LinkedIn off, like for the app, that we have the peer signal side of the business. Like, that does open up the ability to then like analyze that audience, right? Like X will know the titles of people who then like, subscribe to the newsletter itself. So I hate using the word funnel, but, like, you can kind of use a little bit of like a funnel. Like last week, right, we had this corporate bro, still hiring today website that we put up. So if you look at the Google Analytics there and then you look at the Google Analytics on Keyplay, like, you can see what seems to be like direct correlation where there's spikes, right? Where like, it translates to keyplay audience, right? It translates to site visitors.

How would that have happened if there's no in your face call to action? Like, why Were they finding out about keyplay when you did that?

Because people know how to use the Internet. It's a great miracle of modern marketing that they know how to, like, type things into search or the little bar at the top of the browser, or even if you don't put a orange button, they still see that you're part of it, and they go get curious.

So people are like, hey, this is cool. This is a cool initiative. I see Adam and Camille posting about this. I wonder, what is keyplay?

And those are the exact people we want is, like, the curious people. Because we're early stage, we want early adopters, we want early community members. So that's, like, perfect for us, and we don't have to be overly promotional about our brand in that process.

All right, I have some other things I want to ask, but either of you have anything particular on. On your mind that you think will be relevant to this Exit 5 audience? Before I take us in a different direction, I'm open to talk about anything.

Add a couple bullets. I should just, like, keep a notebook right here so I can make sure to hit them.

All right, let's go. Give me the bullets. Give me the bullets. Dave.

Love the good list of bullets.

I had them. Let's see if I can, like, conjure them back up again. But I think, like, I hate using the term owned audience, and I think that people might see this play. I think, like, when we first launched this, like, one of the big, like, misnomers was you should create an audience so that you're gathering customers. Like, you're gathering, like, future customers. And I think, like, that, again, like, puts you in the wrong mindset. Even if you're, like, doing the right thing, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. And so when we got those comments of, like, wow, this is a brilliant play, like, you're gathering these customers. You can eventually sell to them. And so I think, like, Adam was pretty good about, like, clarifying. Yeah, that's great. It's building an audience. Building an owned audience is great, but that's not why we did it. We did it for the insights. So I think if there's one theme of what we're talking about here is you get the insights for what type of business to build and then how to iterate on that business. And that's why you're doing it, is be closer to the customers, be closer to the community. And that creates the flywheel more so than I built this audience. So now, you know, 5% of them will translate into a Customer, you know what I mean? Like, and just trying to figure out that funnel. So I think that mindset helped.

Yeah. Well, I think what you described is like the how a lot of average. Averagely, if that's a word, averagely, performing content efforts at B2B SaaS companies work, which is like, hey, we have this product that we're trying to sell, so let's make content like, around that product and like, maybe, you know, the audience will grow where it's like, if you did it the other way. And I use this example all the time, which is like, if the three of us were starting a. We're just, we're like, we're not starting a company. We're starting a media business. And we're going to make a media business about the life of a marketer. And we just focus on that. And we just focus on subscribers, quality of subscribers, sentiment. And I'm just looking at the metrics that you talked about, right. That will set you up because it's going to force you to ask the right questions in order to succeed. Right. Where you fall down is all of a sudden, well, we've been doing this for four or four weeks now. And Camille, what's up with the content? It's not driving any leads. And it's like, well, no, no, that's not why we did this in the first place. And so I think it's key to have that alignment. And for anybody listening, I know a lot of people listen to this and they're like, I want to take this approach, but I'm at this company and they have this existing content function that's kind of already part of that machine. Do either of you have advice for, like, how would you. If you were at a SaaS company and you wanted to, like, take this approach to content, but you're kind of part of a bigger machine, or like, they just want to stick to the status quo. How could you go and test into this and prove to your boss and your coworkers or whatever that there's an approach here that you could take? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, my thoughts are just. I think where people go wrong is they try and just do too much, like, up front. So I think just like picking a channel, like picking a lane. And this is another thing. Like, it took a little bit of like, Adam and I talking, for instance. Like, I think when I came in, like, Adam, you wanted to add like, a few other channels. And I was like, I think, like, there's a lot of juice like just to get like in LinkedIn, right? Like before at like TikTok and Twitter. Like things that would probably like, get us to the right audience. Like a lot of tech, the marketing, salespeople on Twitter, like, clearly TikTok is on the rise. There's a lot of reasons to do those things. But with the skill sets that we had and with where our audience was, there was just a lot more to get from LinkedIn. And I think it's been the right move, as hard as it is to not get distracted by shiny objects.

So focus on one or two channels, which is a common theme among high performing content. I would also say find ways that you can prove this. Get small signals. And so like you might have an idea for a content piece and instead of measuring it by how much traffic or MQLs or whatever metric it generated, like, do something and be like, I'm going to measure this because I want to see people's response. And so here's a perfect example. I started this other podcast called Dave Gerhardt Podcast only because I don't know what the heck I want to do. I love podcasting. I love this format. I just want to talk about things that I like personally, whether that's working out or golf or starting a business or anything. And I had no path forward, but I was like, just go and do it. And I just started it. And in three weeks I know that I'm going to keep doing it more. The download numbers are not high, the audience is not high, but I'm getting like three to five LinkedIn messages, Instagram DMS or emails a week from people that are like, I love this. This episode was really great. Do more of this. And so like, I'm using those signals as like now literally on my to do list this week is like, go and book three more guests for the podcast because that's. I'm going to start to build right there. And I think that's just one example of like why you have to ship and why you have to put stuff out there and why you have to not always worry about what's the goal. You have to find these like little signals. And so my goal for starting this was like, are there positive signals? And I love that you all had that approach. And Adam, this is even how this whole thing started. You started doing this as a one off idea. You were kind of blown away by the feedback and the signals and the LinkedIn comments and you're like, shoot, let's go do more of this. Let's keep building. I Love that approach. I just wanted to, like, put this on tape for everybody that's listening.

Totally. I mean, I think it's harder to do it in a bigger company where you're trying to add this on. Like, doing it from scratch in a way is easier. Like, we have an unfair advantage of just starting with this. But it's possible, I think, if you focus, like you're saying, and you narrow it down. Right. And you give it time and let it and iterate. Don't try to have a master plan. Right. You have to know, like, exactly what you're saying. Are you getting signals back and what do you do with that? And where do you lean in? Where do you back off?

And it's huge because you're the CEO and you're the founder. And so you. If Camille gives you this currency of signals, you're not like, well, I need the hard data. You're like, no, no, I. There is hard data. There's subscribers, there's other metrics. But I believe in these signals. And, yeah, four years from now, it's going to be a completely different approach. Okay, so here's what I want to go in a different direction. For the last nine minutes of this podcast, talk to me about what's happening in the B2B SaaS world right now. That from your perspective, what's going on? How would you describe, or just tell me what's interesting, what's alarming, what's positive, what's going on according to the wise folks and all their data at Pure Signal?

Well, I mean, I think you'd have to be under a rock to not feel and see that we're in a correction of sorts of.

Right.

I've decided to lay off 7% of the Exit 5 staff this week. 7% seems to be the number as suggested by all VC firms. So we're going to go with 7%.

It's been rough. I mean, they keep coming in and look, I mean, I think we, a lot of us got over our skis in good times and are correcting. I think there's a lot of certainly things to be concerned about out there.

Right.

A lot of cutbacks, a lot of freezes. But also we do see a lot of companies still growing. I think the seed and a markets are probably still moving along. We see a lot of interesting innovation. So we track hiring. That's one thing. We did this project with corporate bro Ross Pomerantz, who a lot of you probably follow stillhiring today. We've already collected. It's about to hit 1000 submissions of people saying, hey, my company is hiring right now. And, you know, we go validate that with key play hiring signals, where we look at their careers page and figure out, like, what are they hiring, how much?

But nice.

So there's still a lot out there. I think the latest gartner forecast for 2023 is like a 9% increase in software spend, which is still like, a lot. So I think it's hard times in that people have to pull back. And I think that buyers, I call it the return to rigor. Buyers are putting a lot more rigor on every purchase. And I think as go to market leaders, we have to apply that same rigor to, like, how we're going to market and what we invest in. And you can't just, like, spend freely on every possible campaign, program, initiative. You don't want to work every account that comes in. Right. I think it's like focus and precision is, is where people are going right now.

It's cool to hear the founder of a SaaS company who believes in return to rigor also has such a strong play in this, like, approach to content and audience building. And I mean, my guess is, outside of what you pay in salary, like, you're probably not spending that much in order to create content, are you? Right. Like, I mean, you can do this. I think it's a myth that you have to be well funded and have a ton of money to be able to do what you're doing.

I think that's right. I mean, if you can find somebody like Camille who's a creator, Right. And who can just produce like, way more than the average person because she's like a creator's mindset. She's not a necessarily like a marketer mindset. Camille, I know you, like, you are a marketer and you're a marketing leader too. Like, you have operational skills, but you are able to create a fast rate. And I can create too. And we put stuff out and we're willing to just put stuff out. So with that mindset, you can do a lot without spending a ton, for sure. I also think in a return to rigor, brand and community matter more because, like, how are you going to break through the noise? How are you going to get in front of people? Right. I just think if you don't have that going, it's harder. Right? Like, you're getting into these feature comparisons and you're getting down into, like, the RFP world and it's kind of like. But if people are part of our Community or know our brand or have some affinity or we build some credibility. I feel like that's a. Like, even more important when buyers are applying more rigorous.

Yeah, there's a great Seth Godin quote that I talk about a lot. And I don't know the original source of this, but I know that he said it. And he said the difference between B2C and B2B is that with B2B, you're not spending your own money, you're spending the company's money. And so oftentimes, like, your job is perceived to be on the line. Not necessarily you're gonna get fired for a bad purchase, but basically, when you're buying something in a B2B context, you're either going to buy the cheaper one because nobody ever gets fired for spending less money. Like, oh, we bought X and it was less money and so we bought it. Or you're just going to buy the SaaS product or tool that you used in your last job. Oh, my last company used HubSpot. Like, I know that that works. Let's just use HubSpot.

Right?

He says unless or therefore, you have to give them a real reason. And that reason is not going to be a feature or benefit. It's going to be a story or a cause or a community. Right? And HubSpot did this by selling the vision of inbound marketing. We did this at Drift with selling the vision of conversational marketing. And then, you know, what you're doing now is a different way. You're not necessarily creating a category. You are. You've built an audience and you've built this community. And so the reason people are going to buy from you is because they know like and trust you from your content. And so, hey, these are good, smart people. I already, like, you know, get all my content from them. Like, shoot, yeah, they have a piece of software that could help my business. I'm going to be willing to give that a try, even if it's not the right fit in the long term.

That's the hope. I mean, I think we're seeing it to some extent. I mean, for us, it's like the interplay is that the people in Pure Signal have a similar mindset to the people we want to sell to with Keyplay. Like, they think about a return to rigor. They think about, like, how do I be excellent at go to market? And we have software to help enable that mindset and we have, like, content community to help feed, like, the learning. Even if you never buy anything from us, which 99% of those people are never going to buy anything from us.

All right, what's coming up? Come on. You're not a big public SaaS company and there's not a lot of risk. Tell me what's coming up next. What are you all working on right now?

Oh, man, a lot. We're busy. I think January is like the busiest month I've ever had. Camille is, like, driving me, Dave. She's like, we need more. We need more stuff. We need features.

That's what she should be doing. That is how this works. Like, yeah, I could blog my ass off, but if you're not giving me any, any new ingredients, like, I'm just going to put out the same menu.

Yeah. So we're leaning into the problem of how do you find companies that are growing right now? Which I think is very timely. So if you sell HR tech, if you sell marketing tech, if you sell a product that helps people when they're scaling or increasing complexity, then it's very helpful to know who's growing and how they're growing and where they're growing. So we've done this with hiring signals. We're going to do more of tracking headcount change, triangulating that with who they hiring, what open roles they have, looking at funding data, trying to really build a picture of which of your accounts are growing. So that helps our customers in keyplay pick better accounts. And then in pure Signal, we're going to have a lot of juicy data about ratios between teams and where the hiring demand is and who's growing. Is it plg, is it not? Is it what categories? So that's going to be a really big, I think, angle for us coming up.

That's great. People will love that. I mean, in exit 5, all people do is ask about benchmarks and ratios for this and that. You know, even if they're. They don't give you a roadmap of what to do. But I think people need them to sell ideas to their boss. And I mean, like, yeah, how many sales reps does this company have compared to marketers? Okay, last question, then we'll hang up. You both can go on with your days. Thank you for being here. Camille. From a content standpoint, what's exciting to you? Eventually you're going to do something off of LinkedIn. Are you going to be on YouTube? Are you going to be on TikTok? Are you going to be doing events? What future content platform do you think could be next for. For Peer Signal?

Yeah. So we're both like, very Bullish on podcasts. And I would even like extend that to show. Right. Because that gives us a little more room of a show. It could be live, it could not be live. You can repurpose it into a podcast. So I like the idea, and we've talked about this, of essentially what we're doing in written format, like bringing that into a podcast where we deliver some of these market updates, like market insights right from the B2B SaaS world. That's probably like Adam and I, and I think of that as the macro analysis. And then we also do some sort of micro analysis where you get a subject matter expert in that's doing that play or that's like an expert, you know, in that specific growth tactic. And then you get them to kind of like dig into the nitty gritty details. And so I like the idea of thinking about micro and macro analysis. And do we have a good blend of those things?

I love a show. I think if you could do a weekly show where you're talking about the news in the. In this space, I think that'd be super interesting. So I'm rooting for you. Adam, always good to see you. Camille, nice to meet you and connect with you. Thank you both for doing this. Check out Pure Signal. Check out Keyplay. Follow Adam and camille both on LinkedIn. And thank you for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. Thank you both. Enjoy the rest of your day. I'll see you soon.

Okay, thanks for having us.

Thanks, Dave.

Bye. Bye. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 55 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@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 how 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 editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to 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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