#80: Inside Exit Five - Why We Moved Off Facebook & Lessons from Building an Online Community

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1, 2, 3, 4 Exit.

Exit.

Exit hey, just some quick background before we get into this conversation. So this is a little bit different, but I wanted to I've been getting a bunch of questions since we decided to move the Exit 5 community off of Facebook to Circle. I've been getting a lot of questions from people and I know a lot of marketers out there that listen are.

Involved in communities, think about building them.

For your own, maybe for your company.

And I thought, you know what, maybe.

It would be useful and just interesting since we're all marketers behind the scenes to share some of the backstory, like how do we get on Facebook? How did Exit 5 get started? Why did we move to Circle? And recently this is a conversation that Jordan Godby, he runs a company called Growth Community and they help community builders basically scale their businesses. And he works with Circle and helped me make the transition over there. He wanted to do a discussion for.

His podcast about about making that move. And I was like, you know what, I bet a bunch of people from.

Exit 5 would find this interesting. So this is our conversation. We talk about everything that I just mentioned from Facebook to Circle.

If you're thinking about building a community.

Want to hear some of my mistakes and learnings along the way or just want to hear a little bit more behind the scenes about Exit 5? That's what you'll get out of this conversation. And you can also go check out Jordan on LinkedIn. Jordan Godby, he is the Circle guy and I'm Dave Gerhardt, host of the Exit 5 podcast. And there's some action happening at my house right now. So all right, here's this episode.

So let's dive into it. You've been on Circle for a couple of weeks now and you have this really cool product and this community that you've done for a long time. So we'd love to just hear about where you started and what you do and what this is all about. And then let's dig into where things are today.

Sure. So I'm Dave Gerhardt. I'm the founder of Exit 5, which is a community for B2B marketing professionals. I'm now going with the tagline that it is the number one community for B2B marketing professionals, according to me. And so we're going to use that on billboards, print ads, we're going to go with that everywhere. I spent about a decade as a marketing leader in B2B SaaS. I was VP of marketing. I came up as marketing manager, director of marketing, VP of marketing, cmo, and then was chief brand officer at two companies. And basically while I was coming up in marketing, I got really into marketing. I really enjoyed marketing. And I. So I would start, I started kind of sharing what I was doing and learning on Twitter, on LinkedIn. I had a podcast, the company that I was at. So I basically found out that I had this love for marketing at the same time that I was working at companies in the SaaS marketing space, started sharing what I was doing. That led to building, never on purpose, building a following online on marketing topics. And eventually all of a sudden I had 100,000 followers or something on, on LinkedIn and I wanted to try to like transfer that audience and build my own thing. And I had this idea of charging for content. And so I initially launched on Patreon. I called it the A list, which I was like, this is a curated group of marketers on Patreon called the A list. I had a private podcast. I shared my thoughts regularly. There grew to like a thousand members really quickly. And I was, did not expect that. I expected to have 20 or 30 members and just kind of have it be a side channel that I put content in. It grew really quickly. There was product market fit right away. But then early on, a bunch of the members were like, hey man, we don't just want to hear from you. Like we are all marketers. We want to talk to each other. And I was like, wow, wouldn't that, wouldn't that be a great idea? And at the time, one of the members was in a Facebook group and he's like, you should just add a Facebook group. It'd be a really easy thing. And I didn't think about the long term implications of that. I just did it. I'm very scrappy, I'm very impulsive. And so I did it. I added the Facebook group. It was an awesome component. It added a new level of what this Thing could be. And it changed from Dave's marketing thoughts to like, oh, now here's a collection of a couple thousand B2B marketers. Over time, I realized that this could be a business. This is a media company. This is my future, my future career, my future business. I was still working as CMO at the time. I realized I could do this full time. And so I kind of kept going, kept going. And then about a year and a half ago now, I left my job to basically work on this full time. I was doing consulting and also running this community that I called DGMG at the time, which is Dave Gerhardt Marketing Group. Terrible name, but that's kind of how it always starts. And then I had this epiphany which is like, oh, this is actually much bigger than me. And it can be something much bigger if I rebranded and, like, remove my, myself from the face of it. And especially now, we had some significant scale with the community. And so I rebranded to Exit 5, relaunched it. I had a lot of demand from not just new memberships, but new partnership opportunities. Companies kind of coming out of the woodwork like, hey, we want to sponsor this, we want to work with you. Can I get my team in here? And I never thought about doing this full time. I was just going to do consulting, have a couple consulting clients. But then really quickly, it became so obvious that, like, oh, this is what I love doing. I love marketing. I don't have to have clients, I don't have to work with a lot of people. I get to kind of tinker and, like, make content, podcasts, videos, content. I've always had a good sense of, like, what people in marketing are interested in. And so I've kind of channeled all that over last year into Exit 5. And now it's grown. And about a couple months ago, I just was thinking about the future of this as a business, as either a scalable company that I can grow and manage and run forever, or an acquirable asset. It's a very valuable and interesting asset to a lot of companies in this space. And I wanted to move off of Facebook, and that's kind of where. That's where Circle came in. And one of the questions that keeps coming up, I know you have a list, but I've gotten a bunch of messages like, hey, can you tell me why you chose Circle versus other platforms? And I gotta be honest with you. And I'm sure you know you have deep Circle experience, Jordan. But a big differentiator was Tim, who runs the customer success org over there hit me up about a year ago and he messaged me. He's like, hey man, you should really think about, like moving your community to Circle. It'd be awesome. Here's why. Why? We'll totally help you. And we kind of had a bunch of false starts, but still comes back to as good as the product is, like the sales process and the onboarding process and then like ultimately meeting you and getting connected, that was such a differentiator that I never even felt like I was shopping for other platforms. I felt like I had a good team of people who were going to like, help me make this transition. And that was ultimately more important than like this feature. That feature, especially when there's five or six tools that like, maybe on the surface do the same thing. I didn't want to spend six months like researching 15 different platforms and feel like I bought the wrong car. And it was so much about your help and the team at Circle that made this happen. And now I've made the switch and no joke, in two weeks. And this is not like clickbait. We talked about this earlier. We have 100% 10x the value of the community by moving into Circle. I'm a little bit mad that I didn't do this earlier, but I'm just happy to be here now. And it's all good.

It's all good. Yeah. The future is very bright and you hit on something really interesting. And this is what I talk to people about because sometimes they come to me and they're like, I'm looking at Mighty networks. I'm looking at Heartbeat, I'm looking at some of these other competitors. What do you think it's like? Well, if you go to any of their marketing sites, they're all the best. They all are the best looking, they've got all the coolest features. And if we zoom out, they all sort of do the same thing, right? It's like you can chat with people, you can do live events, you could do courses, whatever. But you just outlined, you know, what's the sales process look like, what's the onboarding process, what's the customer service look like? And that's a huge thing that a lot of times I think people don't figure out until it's too late. Like you get into a tool because it looks so awesome on the outside and shiny. And then it's like you start having problems or you realize the software is maybe not as bug free as you would like it to be. And then when you go to try to fix that or get help. Then you find out, oh, customer support also is not great. And then you're just sort of in a world of hurt because it's hard to move.

I also feel like. I feel like when people message me that they're looking for, like, a very specific answer, like, oh, well, this. They have this one feature that X person doesn't have and then they're. I've seen this before. Then they're going to message me back. Well, well, actually, no, they can do that. So why did you make that change? And it's like, yeah, there's probably some baseline level of, like, features and requirements that if you. But even as a marketer, I always, like, never wanted to get into the feature battle from, like, a competitive standpoint because it's just. It's too much. There's too much stuff to think through. And so I think that was a. That was a huge. A huge piece of it.

And something else that I talk to people about when they ask me is, you know, not to just go on a total Circle promotional rant here, but a community, a company is. It's really hard to run a good company. Right. And there are so many things behind the scenes, like vision. What are they actually trying to do, where are they taking the product, what does the roadmap look like, and then how well do they actually execute against that over time? And so I've had the privilege of having a very close relationship with Circle and with the co founders. You know, one of my buddies started it, so I was working with him even before it was a thing. And so I've been able to see what he told me. The idea and the vision was three, four years ago. And I've been able to watch them quarter after quarter consistently knock that out.

What was that?

That was Rudy. Okay, so head of design, product, working closely with Sid. And then those two in the very early days were the guys that were just jamming on the prototype and doing all the coding and everything themselves. And then you raise money and then you hire, and then the team expands and then you're managing and you're growing. And that can also be really challenging and problematic. And so now it's, you know, more than three years in and they're continuing to dominate, continuing to push the edge. And I really think they're a market leader at this point. And a lot of tools have been around way longer than they have, but they have that solid foundation. But they continue to see the future of where online communities and online training and coaching and courses and all of that stuff is going to. So that's the other reason why I've decided to be all in on Circle.

Do you think they are okay with the 1600 Slack messages and ideas that I've had about the Circle platform?

I think they find them very, very helpful. Very good feedback that will be prioritized and implemented accordingly would be their corporate statement.

But in all seriousness, I do feel like that was a big piece of it for me and obviously I'm on a subscription plan that I'm paying to have access to that. Like, it's not, it was not a cheap purchase. Right. But I did feel like in wanting to make this change, I didn't want to. Like, for example, there's no one at Facebook that I can talk to or suggest things about. And I think that that was a big thing because I'm building and learning this on the fly and there's going to be lots of different ideas that come up. And I think it's just, it's very valuable to have a team there, whether it's through support or customer success or even just like the onboarding and migration and billing process that we, that we went through, that was a huge, a huge value add that. I have no idea what all the features of Circle are, but I know that they helped me migrate off of Facebook and that was kind of priceless.

So I'm really curious about when that moment was, when you decided, okay, Facebook is no longer good enough and I want something else and I'm open to looking because for a long time it was good enough and it was providing a lot of value and people really happy. And it's still super common today. Right? There's millions and millions of Facebook groups. Many of them are paid, many of them are attached to very high end programs and high ticket coaching and courses and whatever else. So I personally am just really interested in this because I'm trying to figure out how much should I go on the, on the offensive of evangelizing the gospel of Circle and trying to get people to open their eyes and see the light versus am I just preaching to, you know, to atheists that don't want to be converted and they're like, nope, Facebook's great. Everybody's here. They all love it. There's no problems. Maybe we all know that there's little problems, but what was that like for you of it being okay enough? And then like, I think maybe I should look for a dedicated tool?

Well, I think a big part of it was the scale. And so with 3,500 paying members. It was very clear that this is. This was not just like a. A side group. This is a very real business for me, and I wanted to make it more of a real business. And one of the challenges of being on a Facebook, in a Facebook group is like, I have 3, 500 members, but I don't really have their contact information, and it's not easy to market to them. Like, I do have it, but it's in Stripe or in some other payment tool. And it's not. Not the cleanest, like, membership management system. And so, like, for example, we had to have a manual process, which is like when somebody canceled their subscription in Stripe or on another platform that we were using, I would have to then have somebody that was helping me send a CSV file to a VA that we had and at the end of the month, go through the Facebook group and boot out all the people whose membership canceled or churned. Right? So, like, that's one thing that wasn't a huge deal. I didn't. I didn't mind, like, having people be in there that. That weren't paying and kind of all even out in the end. But also the community started shifting from discussions. I do think the discussion part of Facebook is great for engagement on discussions, but we started to add more content, and people were having a hard time finding, like, hey, where was that video that you posted? And where were the templates for that? And so as we kind of evolved, the marketing people in there started sharing more decks and videos and templates, and there wasn't like a dedicated place for that that made it easily searchable and accessible inside of Facebook. The other big thing was I wasn't unlocked. So as a platform like Facebook, for example, everybody that's here is. Is using Exit 5. They're a marketing professional of some kind. Maybe they're a freelancer. Maybe they're a contractor. Maybe they work in house. Maybe they work at an agency. When I see Jordan's profile commenting on one of my discussions, and I click on you, it shows this picture of you, which is your regular Facebook page, which, for me, you know, I'm. I used to use Facebook a lot, like maybe 15 years ago, and now I just kind of have it. And it's like, now I have it, it's like a picture of my kids and myself in the winter, and I don't have any pictures on there anymore. And you click on my page and you're like, who is this guy? There was no way to unlock the professional network of it versus I Wanted people to be able to click on Jordan and say, oh, Jordan is VP of Marketing at a 200 person SAS company in the healthcare space. Like, oh, and here's his LinkedIn profile and here's his email. There was. I wasn't able to unlock that level and so I wanted to let people not have to use their Facebook personal profile, but basically be able to create their own profile. And so that was another huge thing, was like, oh, wow, I can tap into this. And a lot of people are like, why are you not using Slack? I don't mean this in disrespectful way, but anybody who says, who suggests Slack as a tool for a community has not done enough research onto what this actually takes. Because number one, you can't use the free version of Slack because a huge value of having the community there is like, is the archives, right? And so somebody wrote something 90 days ago. You're not going to be able to find that in the free version of Slack. Okay, so that's fine. I'll upgrade and we'll get the paid version of Slack. Well, did you know that it costs $9? I think it's 8 or $9 per user. And I'm running this as a business. This is not a charity, this is not a not for profit. I want to generate revenue from this business. And so I'm charging $20 a month for a subscription. I'm going to go give 50% of that right back out to Slack just to manage this. That was not going to be scalable either. And there just was a lot of other limitations with within Slack. And so I think it wasn't one thing, it was like the combination of a bunch of these different things adding up led me to be like, this is not the right platform. On top of that, I just always felt like I never really owned the audience, I never really owned the community. Facebook group could get shut down at any time. I didn't have access to all the contact information and everybody in there. I also didn't like that people had to go to Facebook to get it. There was a lot of members that would message me and say, hey, ah, I wanted to join Exit 5, but I just went through the signup process and I realized, you're on Facebook. Let me know when you're not there anymore and I'll join. And so it was a combination of those things. Plus Circle. Now having a dedicated mobile app was very attractive because I've always thought, man, this would be a killer mobile app. But I don't want to spend 50 to 100 grand on my own to try to build this. And so them having that as part of this to get the white label dedicated mobile app was the icing on the cake. And then the last piece of it was and them having, hey, we're going to help you manage the migration process, we're going to help help you try to like keep as there's going to be revenue churn, there's going to be, you know, frustrations as you move, but we're going to help you mitigate all that. And so it's like the combination of those seven or eight things made it like, okay, this is time to make the change. Now I will say there's going to be short term pain. Like you're, it's never going to be like this one to one comparison. But I've already, I'm willing to take all the short term pain that I felt and I've, I've lost subscription, I've lost revenue. I didn't generate revenue for a month and a half to do this. Totally fine. Because from the beginning, I think I told you this on one of our earlier calls, like, I'm okay with doing all those things because I want to make this move now because I want this for the next two, 3,000 members or two, three, four years of Exit 5. I felt like it was the right time to make it, to kind of grow up and level up. And that's why I made the switch. Are you ready to focus on professional.

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What I hear a lot of people talk about. A lot of times the excuse of why we're on Slack or Facebook is because, oh, it's easy, everybody's there, it's free, we already have the app, they're already used to checking it. And I get those, you know, those excuses or those reasons why. But for anyone who's interested in truly building a world class brand, a world class product, something that is going to be expensive, high ticket, I think it's a really bad user experience to take them through this whole sales thing on your website marketing and talk about all this value and then you drop them into a free Facebook group or a Slack group just because it's free and easy. It just doesn't match up. Right. If you were to sign up for some expensive exclusive country club and then they're like, we're just going to talk over Facebook group. It's just weird. And plus like with Facebook, people are going to Facebook to go to Facebook and then they happen to come to your community or they see something in their main feed versus having them sit down with the mentality of I need to go to exit 5, I want to go check out what's going on today. And it being more intentional about you and your members and your community rather than just some addictive habit that they have to open up a browser and always go on Facebook every single day, you know.

Yeah. And there were people that were like, oh, I don't want you to move off Facebook. I use it all the time. There are people that were like, I'm not joining because you're, because you're on Facebook. But ultimately I just felt like this was the best long term decision to build the right platform for the future.

So talking about moving off of Facebook and onto Circle, some things are just copy paste, keeping it the same, having a discussion feed. But then you had mentioned these other things that you had wanted like trying to organize content or videos or files or recordings inside Facebook just wasn't working out. So when you started moving over to Circle, what were some of those transformations or changes that came in your program just due to Circle allowing and enabling you to do things that weren't possible before.

A big one is the member is the member profiles and member directory. And so now instead of just Dave Gerhardt and you click on my like old Facebook profile, you now going to click on the profile of thousands of marketing professionals and you can see who they are, what they do for work, what their specialty is. And these are all things that People have to self select an ad, but I'm noticing that most people are going to go and do it. So, so, and all those members can now message each other. Right? If you opt into messaging, you can be like, hey, I'm also like a content marketing manager at this stage company. Like we should connect.

That was a huge value add.

Like right away I know for a fact that that's going to be a big ad for us. And then I just think like the whole concept of different spaces or sorry, space groups as I'm getting my lingo down, which if the circle folks are listening to this, I think there's some work that they can do. And what Jordan can help you on, just click cleaning up the lingo there doesn't matter. They're like channels. But to have different channels for different topics is great. And that's something that you help guide me through, which is like you kind of want to have one general discussion channel, but you want to have some, some breakout areas. And so I noticed that something in the Facebook group people kind of wanted on Fridays I would do like, oh, on Friday you can promote your stuff in the Facebook group. But I didn't want it all week long. But now because you're a paying member, we have a dedicated channel for that. And so sure, you, you were on a podcast, you wrote a blog post, your company's doing something interesting, you post until you're blue in the face. Now it's all in a dedicated space. And so that way you know if you're going in there, it's not going to be overly promotional because you're going into like the promoted links space or there's an area called, that we call links, which is like people are reading interesting articles or listening to podcasts or reading books. You can now go and like take a screenshot and add it there. And it's separate from the main feed. We also have a big part of it is marketers are always looking to hire other marketers. And so we have a space for, for, hey, if you're hiring people, you can post your jobs here. Or if you're somebody that's looking for work either as a full time employee or a contractor, you can post in there. We have a dedicated space for recommendations. People want to get recommendations for vendors or agencies or video editors. And so, and there's a swipe file. So there's all examples of good marketing that people can add to.

There's templates.

As I'm rattling these things off, you can now see how the ROI or The conversation about value enjoying this is like tenfold. It's not just one thing. It's not just like, oh, did I get my question answered? And I do feel like sometimes being on Facebook, I got a message from somebody one time and he was like, I asked my question in your group. The answers weren't good enough. I'm canceling. And it's like, all right, well, that's fine. But now let's say that happens and you ask a question, you don't get an answer. But then tomorrow you happen to see that Nancy wants you to know about a great video editor that she worked with, and you're like, shoot, I'm going to pinch for a video editor. And you find that person, you contact them and you hire them. Wow, that was sweet. I didn't have to go to Upwork, I didn't have to go to Fiverr, I didn't have to post on LinkedIn. I got a recommendation in here, right? Then the next day you're back in the group and you see that someone's having this kind of frustrating problem with their boss at work and you read that discussion. So over time, the value starts to add up. It's like when you want to charge for a subscription and charge for content your members aren't hanging on to. Like, well, how am I going to see the value now? In some ways I'm even like, shoot, should I even be doing a trial? I'll give you a one day trial because I feel like over the course of seven days in the trial now, there might be four or five different things that you would like if you did the math on the value of those things that you would get. And so being able to break out different spaces, have different channels, have members be able to contact each other. And another thing that we did this week was we did a dedicated live stream in there for the first time. And that was awesome. Much easier to do all those things in one place in one platform. Now I'm just like, man, I got to go hire some people because I think this thing can really scale and I need some help.

That's amazing. Yeah, the value is absolutely 10x. I mean, just being able to come in and immediately go to a place like the template library and say you're doing a marketing campaign, you know, strategy, and you don't have any way of doing that. You're just starting from scratch. Maybe you're new on the job or you've just been promoted to a new role. You can just go in and get these templates. That have been created by these awesome marketers that are much more experienced than you are. And then start looking through like the swipe file and seeing great examples of copy and headlines and landing pages and it just goes on and on. And the community is adding to it. It's user generated too, which I think is super valuable for the them.

There's also a lot of value for. You know, I would get a lot of comments about people who would say, like, I've never seen this person post, but they email me about how much value they've got out of Exit five. And so I think like when you're on Facebook, most of the value comes in just like reading the discussions. And I think there was more value to extract there.

Well, wow.

If people are getting a lot of value without having to actively participate, there's other ways that we can give them content. You know, whether it's members only content or templates or swipe file or jobs or recommendations, there's a lot more that you can, you can get a lot of value without having to be like an active top commenter in the community per se.

So a question I want to ask you is around why you reached out for help because you already had a community that was successful. You've been running this for several years, so you've really figured out your product market fit. You're a smart guy, it was already working. You could have figured this out on your own. Circle is one of those no code type of tools where you can click around and they've made it fairly easy to go in and set up those different spaces, give them a name. Right. So I'm curious, what was the experience like and what made you want to work out, want to reach out and work with someone like me?

Well, I will also say what was funny is I asked you so many questions early on and that was because I didn't know the tool. Now that I've been in there every day, I'm changing stuff. Like I get it now. And so part of it is like, it's great to be able to learn by doing, but for me in getting help, I think it was probably two parts, which is number one, I have revenue and I think it's wise to trade money for time. And so like, yeah, I could spend three weeks trying to figure this out and do it or I could write a check to somebody and have them help me build it out. And part two of that is also pay for expertise. And so you have done a bunch of these, you know, circle in and out, you're not just going to help me do it. Hey, dude, you're not just going to help me do it, but you have ideas on like what's going to make it great and best practices. And so it's not just like that. You help me with the tech side of it. You're like, well, here's some structure that I suggest and here's some things I suggest based on the different ways that I've seen this done before. So it was helping get it off the ground. But it's not like you were just like tech support. It was also having the expertise and having the strategy. So time and expertise, I think were, were the two big reasons.

Yeah, that was one of the first things that you and I talked about was really around your vision and your goals of what do you want this community to become over time in the long run. So what are all those ideas? What are those features, those things? And I didn't want you to feel limited by the tech and you didn't really know the software well enough to be limited. You were like, oh, I want people to be able to like do this and find jobs and submit anonymous questions and find all of our templates and our resources. And we just went on and on and on, on. And so I think we, we really started with an MVP version that is already so much better, but then there's room and you understand how to grow it and how to expand it from there because as you add more members, there are going to be more requests, there's going to be more feedback. There's. You already have more suggestions and so now you're capable of, of getting to that V2 and beyond.

Yeah, but I think you, you gave me good coaching in that. Like you almost don't want to over optimize it out of the gate. Like have the structure of spaces and dedicated channels, but don't overdo it and split up everything so that the general discussions. For example, I was like, oh, we can have a channel for product marketing and a channel for demand gen and channel for video and a channel for SEO. And you kind of were like, well, yeah, but then nobody would have anything to talk about in general. And so I think there's also some balance in letting things shake out. And I think one of the most amazing things about community is so much of it is community driven. The ideas for the spaces are going to come from, I'm going to be observing, be like, wow, nobody posts in this space. Why is that? Is it because I need to tell people about it? Is because they don't understand how to use it or I'm noticing that in general discussions, like all the time, this one thing is coming up, maybe that would be better served as a general discussion. And so I think it's important to have some structure but also be able to iterate and make changes as you kind of see things shake out on the fly. And I'm a learn as you go kind of guy and that's how we've gotten here. But I think the having your expertise with me to partner on this was huge. And I also just think like being able to send ideas and send videos and ask questions from somebody who doesn't work at Circle, and I don't mean this in a negative way, was also really valuable because you're not just going to give me the kind of stock, like that's a great idea. I'm going to forward that to our product team. You're like, you came up with lots of interesting ways of like, oh, well, we can do this with Typeform and Zapier and we can do this and that. And I think, you know, inside of Circle, if you work at the company, you're not always incentivized to do that versus you're going to just help me kind of deliver the best product overall to the point where not to over plug you. But I'm like, oh, how can I hire you on a more long term basis? Because this is the help that I need in running this community over time.

So for sure appreciate that.

It's getting more chaotic in here by the minute, so we might have to wrap.

All right, no worries. All good. Any, any final thoughts or things that you want to leave leave the audience with if they do have a community or maybe they're on those other platforms, maybe they've looked at Circle.

I think the tools and the tech and the platforms are great. I don't want people to think though that I still think the product matters the most. And so you need to have a niche, you need to have a strong audience and then when you get the right product lined up, it's going to be like one plus one equals three. Like if you don't have a good idea for a community, you don't have a strong network and engaged audience. Just buying Circle and then wondering why your community doesn't work or hiring Jordan and wondering why your community doesn't work is not going to work. But I think what we've done with Exit 5 and where we happen to be on this journey and then being able to spend and bring on Circle.

And bring on Jordan.

That's the perfect opportunity to do that. And so I just push people to still focus on the community, focus on the content, focus on the engagement. And I've always been a believer that, like, the tools and the tech can make what you have better, but they don't make the thing great without, without the real meat. And that's just me as a creative person and as a marketer.

100%. Couldn't agree more. Well, Dave, it's been a pleasure working with you, and you have an awesome product, an awesome community. I'm so excited that now you're on this new trajectory where it's going to keep growing, getting better and better. So, so excited to see where it goes and looking forward to helping you make it amazing.

There was one thing that I meant to say to you, which is one of my biggest hesitations was I got 3 years of content in this Facebook group. I'm going to lose it all.

Yes. Yes.

So two weeks into this, my hypothesis, which I think you helped me get talk off the ledge, has been right. Not one person, knock on wood, not one person has asked, where was that post? Because we're all humans, and 80% of the time, we're going to ask very similar questions. And so, yes, there may have been a question that's been asked before, but, like, there's so much engagement in there already. Very quickly. Like, we've answered the question again in some new way.

Yes.

And even in the past, even in Facebook, people would ask the same questions over and over. Even if I told them that it had already been answered, they're going to do it anyway. And so if you're sitting out there and you're like, ah. And this was my fear. I have so much kind of sunk costs and, like, legacy in here. If you have an engaged community, they're going to come and, like, replicate that in, in the new space. Yeah. And that was a big thing for me. And I, I, I, you know, on the record or off the record, I meant to tell you that I meant to send you that message, and I've been. That's been. I feel much better now.

Awesome. So glad to hear it. The fear never happened. People are happy. We're all just looking, looking forward. We're not looking backwards. So.

Yeah, well, there's enough, there's enough good stuff. Like, we've at. We've increased the value in multiple different ways that, like, nobody is, nobody's thinking about that.

So it's absolutely all right, man. Appreciate your Time. This has been amazing working with you and let's keep it going.

Yes, sir.

Thank you.

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 always 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 a 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. 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 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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