B2B community building + how dbt Labs built a 25,000+ member community with Janessa Lantz, VP of Marketing

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This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by my friends at Metadata. Yes, they're my friends. I'm working with them right now. Hey Metadata, what's up? Metadata helps demand gen marketers automate paid campaigns and drive more revenue. If you work in demand gen, you know how running paid campaigns can create so many technical, mundane and repetitive tasks? You got 17 tabs open in your browser? More like 170. You're jumping from LinkedIn to Google to Facebook. Plus there's all the audience creation, creative and testing variations. It can be an entire job just to keep track of this stuff and make sure it all is running properly. And with humans doing it, there's bound to be a lot of wasted time and potential for mistakes and missed opportunities through AI and automation. Metadata frees you from having to manually do these tasks so you can spend your time on the work that matters most, Strategy, creativity and the experimentation. Demand gen teams use metadata to execute hundreds of campaigns without ever logging into Ad managers, automatically monitoring their campaigns and optimizing for pipeline and revenue and drastically scaling their performance before needing to hire more people or hire an agency. In the last two years, metadata has automated 92,000 campaigns and influenced over 2 billion in pipeline for customers like Zoom, Ramp, Pendo and ThoughtSpot. ThoughtSpot generated 5 million in pipeline in their first few months at a 1 to 6 spend to pipeline ratio. There's a stat right there. Write that one down. That's a stat that will get you promoted. If you're a demand gen marketer and you're running paid campaigns today, you really should consider using metadata. You can learn more about how the metadata team can help you do humanly impossible marketing. Marketingtadata IO that's metadata IO and make sure you tell them that you heard about them right here on the Exit 5 podcast. 1, 2, 3, 4. Exit. Exit. Exit. My guest on this episode is Janessa Lance. She's VP of Marketing at DBT Labs. All right, Janessa, thank you for doing this. Thank you for being here. I just told you in the green room, which is just us before this, that DBT Labs have come up in a bunch of different ways before this. And then I was like looking at your LinkedIn profile and you've had a really interesting career story. So I want to talk about DBT Labs and Community and all the interesting things there. But first I just want to talk to you. So take me through your career story. Like tell people what you're doing now in just a brief overview of your career and then I'll ask a bunch of questions.

Hefner well, I don't know that my, my career story is all that interesting. I graduated in 2009 and the economy was shit and there were no jobs and the worst. Yeah, it was quite a time. And just about the only marketing job I could find in Philadelphia happened to be as an intern at a. At a SaaS company here. And that is how I found my way into B2B SaaS marketing. And I've been there since.

Can we talk about this for a second? I've never heard anybody tell. That's like the exact same story that I tell. I gradu graduated in 2009, didn't know what I wanted to do. Nobody was hiring marketing. I got a marketing degree, but like, I didn't know that that's really what I wanted to do. I was just always kind of like a Good writer or into communications. So I applied to a million jobs. After six months of not finding one, I finally got one at a PR agency who, unlike they didn't do a free internship. They did $10 an hour. And so I took that job. And that was the thing that kind of got me into. They had clients in tech and startups. And so it's not like I woke up one morning and wanted to have a tech marketing career. Just happened. And I've never talked to anybody who said the same thing. So. Okay, this is awesome.

Well, you're making me feel like I had a good. Because my internship was $12 an hour.

Well, where were you, though? Where were you?

I was in Philadelphia.

Fewer in Philadelphia. I was in Boston.

Yeah. But it was a tough market. Similar thing. It took me about 10 months post graduation, I think, and there just were hardly even jobs to apply for. So I was unbelievably excited. Continued to wait tables for probably my first three years of professional life. Right. Because it was just like the money was so tight. So that's kind of. I think it was happenstance at the time. You know, inbound marketing and HubSpot were just kind of coming onto the scene, and I got really excited about content marketing, was following everything that HubSpot wrote and was like, oh, yeah, I'm a good writer too. Like, I can do this. And so that's kind of how I got into it. And then joined a startup in Philadelphia called RJ Metrics, which was the first data company I was at. That's where I met a bunch of the folks who I'm working with now at DBT Labs, and then did a stint at HubSpot and now with the Philly company again.

There's a couple of things that stand out to me in that story that I think will be relevant to people. So most people listen to this are like, you and me either have a marketing leadership job at a B2B SaaS company today or want to get one or individual contributor or whatever. So I think a lot of people will relate to that story. So one thing that's interesting to me from a career perspective is it's not like you dreamed of going to RJ Metrics, but you got an early opportunity, and I'm just making up your career story. So tell me this is wrong, but you've joined a company, you start to do marketing, you take a chance on. There's this company in the market that's putting out new ideas, and you're like, you know what? I'm going to follow them and I'm going to be smart at my company. You become smarter and better at marketing because you have HubSpot who's pumping out great content about marketing. You latch onto this one piece of marketing, which is content. You become great at content. Now, 10 years later, whatever, five, seven years later, you're VP of marketing. I think this is a very relatable story. You don't have to wake up with a plan to become VP of marketing. But it's like you came up at SaaS companies focusing on content and you use that as your wedge to now do all things marketing.

Exactly. And you have to start with that. I think every marketer begins as a specialist and has to build your core skill set. And then, you know, through that you learn the basics, right? You learn about your target market and audience and you learn about conversion rates. Right? And like that applies in almost any other aspect of marketing. It's like it's always about who your audience is.

Then the, the other thing I was going to say is I also think this, the meta marketing lesson is like, you learn from HubSpot in the HubSpot did an amazing marketing job, owning inbound marketing, building their brand around inbound marketing. You're like the actual example of this playing out, which we talk about a lot, which is like the opportunity is to make your dream customers smart, be the number one resource for that. I used to read their stuff like religion. You did the same. And so I think that's also the marketing opportunity. Whether you're DB Labs or whatever, metadata, whatever company you are, the opportunity as a marketer is like, huh, don't do marketing. Be the number one resource for this person in your niche. And so if your niche is marketing, then sales software, like, how can you make that person smarter? How do you think that has influenced you? Like you were early HubSpot follower. How has that influenced your take on how you do marketing?

The patterns at DBT Labs felt very similar to my own experience with HubSpot where we had these, you know, at DBT Labs we had these early users who got excited about DBT early on and saw this like remarkable career progression. And so a lot of like the earliest cohort of our users, they have started data companies and data tools. You know, they've joined like VC firms who are really betting in the data space. They're leading data teams. They've become like quickly, in just three years, like real leaders in this space. That felt really familiar to me with my own experience with HubSpot where you kind of learn this new way of doing things, and it, like, opened up a new career path for me. My first job out of college, I was literally buying email lists and spamming people. Like, that was. That was part of my job. It's like. It's like the fake enemy of HubSpot, right? Like, that was their enemy. And so a lot of that felt. That felt very familiar. And so I think about. I really like that this is something that Dharmesh CTO at HubSpot, says is success is making the people who believed in you look brilliant. And I think a lot about that, right? Like, how do you. Those early people who you made really successful or have been successful from your product? That's, like, where the magic happens, right? Like, those people just become such incredible advocates for your company. So it's just like marketing as education.

I love that. Well said. Let's talk about your career for before we talk more about marketing tactics and strategy stuff. You went from comms to VP of marketing. And not that that's not possible, but it's four years later, you're now running marketing at a company that has a $4 billion valuation. You have a huge business that you're running, and just four or five years ago, you kind of were just doing one slice of that. What's been the progression of Janessa over that time? How have you changed as a marketer to be now this boss VP of marketing to, like, I'm just running the, you know, one slice of comms. Like, what. What. What has changed in your. In your approach?

I think that one of the biggest things there has been working for a boss who really believes in me. So this is my second time working with our CEO, Tristan. He was the VP of marketing at RJ Metrics and then brought me back into this seat. And he has consistently been somebody over the course of my career who has been like, you could be doing more. I remember a conversation I had with him years ago where he was saying, like, what do you want from your career? Like, where do you want to end up? And I was like, I'd really like to be the editor of a SaaS blog. And he was like, no offense. Is that it? And it was like, a real moment for me. And I think that sometimes we need that, right? Like, we need somebody in our lives to say, like, hey, you could actually do more. And so I was not looking for a marketing leader role at all, actually. When I was thinking about leaving HubSpot, I was looking at other communications roles, and. And they were ready DBT Labs, then Fish on analytics was ready to hire their marketing leader. And I was excited to work with Tristan again. That was the thing for me is having a boss who was saying, hey, you could do this, you'd be really good at this. I really believe in you. And I think that's kind of probably under talked about just how important it is to ultimately work for people who are going to bet on you in big ways.

It's probably giving you so much more freedom. Not only did he, you know, help push you to take on more, but like probably as you as your CEO and you've worked together before, there's like, there's less that you have to explain, you know, because you can be on the same page because he.

Absolutely.

And you know, you might know where he could probably even be more direct with you because you know where each other are coming from.

Yeah, those long term relationships matter a lot. So I think it's like bad advice to say like you have to stay at a company for three years. Right. Like it doesn't, it doesn't actually matter that much, but it does matter to build these like long standing relationships because ultimately those are going to be the people where you build your career.

Yeah. Okay, first of all, if you want to see what a gangster marketing LinkedIn profile looks like, go to look up Janessa. Janessa Lance. She has. This is why, I don't know why more people don't take the time to actually like write meaningful Things on their LinkedIn profile, but this is amazing. Okay, so I have a bunch I want to talk about DBT Labs, but I have some marketing specific questions I want to ask you along the way. So you've done some amazing stuff since, since you joined. Two years. It's only been two years. Okay. Hosted your first.

Almost three years.

Oh yeah, it's 2022. Who knows? You hosted. Okay, hosted our first user conference. You had 3,000 attendees at your first user conference. You rebranded the company from Fishtown analytics to DBT Labs. You launched a podcast, you created a category called of analytics engineering and you created on demand training program that has trained 1300 analytics engineers. You have a DBT community Slack channel which has gone to 15,000 members. Is that right? 25,000 members.

Good.

Okay, we'll talk about that. We're going to get back close. There's now 5,500 companies using DBT Labs. DBT Cloud customers grew from 80 to a thousand. The marketing team grew from one to 11. And you went from a bootstrap company to raising 150 million. So let's go back, all the way back and just talk about you. Join DBT Labs. You're the first marketing hire. What are you doing in April of 2019? What was that first year like? What things did you do?

So one of the questions that Tristan asked me a lot at that time was like, what does the community need both from us? He's like, let's ignore all the stuff that a marketer should do. How do we create value for the people who are using dbt? And at that point the answer was training. People just wanted a lot more education. Somebody, a woman on our team had put together like a two day training program called DBT Learn and we had put like 20 people through it. And so we talked a lot about how to scale that. We did more training in 2019 and the plan for 2020 was to like really lean into in person stuff. And then we ended up building an on demand program instead, which has been usually valuable. So that, that question was an interesting one for me. Right, where like, instead of starting from a place of like marketing stuff we can do, we're like, yeah, we're not doing any demand work at that point. It was just like, how do we create value for the community? Which was a different habit for me at that point, which today feels pretty natural and like, like they already had the right move.

They already had some customers that had some traction when. When you joined?

Yeah, today we have like a self service motion and a managed revenue motion. When I joined it was self service only. I think we were, I don't know, 20k. Mrr. It was like pretty, pretty early on, but there was traction there.

But did you not have pressure to go from 20k to 25k to 30k to 40k to 50k? How do you come in and just be like, yeah, we're going to make some training videos.

I'm incredibly lucky. So. Well, there are a few things. One is that we have the elusive product market fit, which is like, well, what does that mean? And it means like there are dynamics happening in the market that have nothing to do with what marketing does. And that is the shift to cloud data warehousing. Right. Shift to the cloud overall and then shift to cloud data warehousing in particular. And so what happens is companies are saying we want to move to processing data in the cloud. What is the data transformation tool that people use in that environment? And it's dbt. Like that's the answer. So there's like something happening that's bigger than us, which means that the marketing team then a little bit more so today did not have to think about creating demand. We saw 10% year over year adoption of, I mean, month over month adoption of DBT for years. And that translated into the commercial product as well. Just this, like, very, very steady growth. And the CEO wasn't saying like, oh, growth is good. We need to like, figure out how to finagle it and triple that. It's like, just keep doing what's working. And what is working is like creating value for the community and educating people.

It's so good to hear you say that because on social media and I contribute to this, no doubt, but there's a lot of marketing advice pushed in your face about how to do marketing. And one of the most important ingredients is like, well, which company are you doing marketing for and how are things going there? Because if you're scrapping and clawing to create demand, you're trying to like educate people on a new way of doing things and create demand, then you can't go do those other things. It's like in your case, because that's where the company started. Look at all the amazing things you got to build. And you got to go and do the slack group early. You got to go and focus on community early. You got to focus on training and content early. You weren't like, we need five meetings by this week because it's just going to be a different approach.

Yeah, and certainly some of that comes from. Some of that comes from like market dynamics, but also just like having leaders who have like pretty appropriate expectations for what's going to happen at a given time. We also had, you know, marketing came in before sales. I was in the seat about nine months before we hired our sales leader. And, and so that removed a lot of pressure. You know, when he joined, I remember having a conversation where he's saying like, hey, should we be talking about demand gen? And I was like, I don't know. I mean, see, see how it feels like, get a handle for what's coming in on the Contact Us form. And like, if we need to run webinars, we'll run webinars. And we did not talk about demand for probably another 10 months after that because it was like the demand was there. So, yeah, you have to know your market. Right? Like, you have to know what's happening in your business. And you know, I think that when you look at our marketing, a lot of it is rather, it's actually rather boring. Like, we do a lot of, you know, demo content does really well, for us. And that's because the word of mouth and like the brand awareness exists. Right. And if you don't have that, then you have to think about more high level messaging, which for us would be like increasing data team productivity. Right. And like, we don't have to do that kind of stuff because the brand awareness exists. So it's like you have to know where your business is at and like the awareness that exists before you can just like copy somebody's marketing strategy.

Yeah. If you're just sending everybody to get a demo, but people don't even know who you are or have exactly. Yet.

It's like, exactly. Yeah. And like we put a demo offer out there and like, we just get like tons of registrations and people show up and it's weird, right? Like, that has not happened to me.

It's amazing. Everyone listening to this podcast is so mad at you right now.

I know. I just feel like it's so easy, honestly. It's like it's doing marketing here is so easy because like, the community just creates this like halo effect around, around everything that we do.

Let's talk about the community then. First, let's define community. Janessa, how do you define community? Everybody's talking about community. I'm talking about community. I'm talking about community. How do you define it?

How do you define it?

I can tell you how I don't define it, which is like, okay, you just flipped it back on me. Are you kidding me? It's my podcast. I think the number one way that I think people mistake it is everyone asked me about community and they're like, so where should it be? Should it be on Facebook, should be on LinkedIn, should be on site. And I actually think that. I think that if you have the right hook, the right angle, the right reason, the right people, the right ingredients, I actually don't think that the platform is going to be the reason that you succeed or not. I don't think that yours is success. I don't know anything about it, but I don't think it's successful because. Because it's on Slack. It's like. And there's probably reasons you wish it wasn't. Same way. I have an amazing community on Facebook. It's amazing. But I also wish it wasn't there. It's like everyone that I've ever talked to is talking about it. So I think, to me, I think the community is like, it's a place for people to hang out and talk to their peers about a particular topic. And so that could be golf and golf is very broad as a category. Or it could be like golf in Vermont. I'm definitely a part of the community of golf in Vermont and I think some type of like shared belief. So it's not a pretty sexy definition. But what's yours?

So I think about it, you use the word place as part of your definition, which I think is interesting. I think of it less about being a place. To your point, like the platform doesn't actually matter that much and very much around like the goal. And so the like community work is anytime you're trying to connect a person to another person rather than a person to a company. Right. So like a newsletter is not community work. Right. Because it is, it is me, the company who is emailing a bunch of people now. Something that happens. Like our, our founder has been writing this roundup newsletter now for like going on seven years and now it's spawned this like this, these like other sub. There's like this whole substack community and all these like data nerds have their own substacks and they like reference each other and have conversations in their substack. That's a community. Right. But if, but if it's just like company publishing content, not community. And so it's very much like how do we as a company create connections between like minded people? And if you're doing that work, that's community work. And if you're not, it's probably marketing.

You're like the person in the middle, like facilitating the connection between like minded people.

Yeah. So like we have these meetups that happen all over the world.

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We are rarely like on stage presenting at those meetups, but we're finding people who are doing smart things and giving them a platform.

So you have, you might, you have a Slack group, but in your mind, the DBT Labs community is not just a Slack group. It's the combination of those things.

Yep. Slack meetups. One of our community managers the other day was, was doing work in DBT and was streaming it on Twitch and like it was a small group of people who turned out for that. But like people were super excited about it. Yeah, you know, just to like just so, just to watch them write code. And so the platform is, is sort of. Yeah, the platform is secondary.

We're going to talk about this for a little bit and I'll come back to some other stuff, but just let's talk about the Slack group functionally first because that seems to be like a huge thing. Can you Talk about how has it grown? How do you run it? Because my guess is you don't just have like a social media intern hopping in your Slack group and being like happy Monday and sharing a meme. So how has it grown? How do you run it?

There's a lot to say there. One is we have a lot of data on this. So we pipe all of our data into, into Snowflake and we built DBT models on top of it. One of the metrics that we look at the most, we look at weekly active members in Slack. We also look at activity by channel. So one of the things that happens in a large Slack group is like you cannot find value in a space of 25,000 people. Right. It's like you show up at a 30,000 person conference. The size doesn't make it useful. Right. What makes it useful is if you can find like like minded people to talk to. And so we talk about micro communities which in Slack it is like topical channels and we care a lot about activity around those, those topics. So are there 25 or 30 people active on a given topic in a week? If so, that's like an important health metric where you can say, hey, people have found like ways to section off in small groups and help each other.

Who manages on the team? Like on your end?

We have a community team. They're separate from marketing for us and we have folks who moderate. We've also shared ownership of this quite a bit. Like we have so like vendors for example, have Slack channels. So Mode analytics and Snowflake and Databricks. Right. Like they all have panels within our SOC community and play a big role moderating in there, which, which has been really fantastic. Yeah.

So there's like a whole sub communities. So like that. Which becomes like a great marketing channel even for those companies.

Yeah, I. Okay, so here, here's a framework I've been thinking about for community. Tell me if this lands for you. I think there's like community has maybe you could say two goals, right. And you have over here you have like growing community. Right. Like you want to bring new people in. And then down here we have like expanding use cases. Okay. So now we have our two by two. And I think in our bottom left we have maybe what I would call like gardeners or librarians. And these are like the moderators, right. People who have to be in the space whether it's a meetup or Slack. Right. And like making sure it's a nice place to be saying hello to people when they join, picking out anybody who's an asshole, that kind of thing. And then I think when you're thinking about expanding use cases that aren't necessarily focused on growing the community, you're talking about people who are like really pushing the leading edge. So maybe you think of them as like researchers or scientists, right? The people who are like, we tried this thing, now we're going to teach you how to do it. And then when you're talking about growing the community and not necessarily deepening the use cases, you're talking about your evangelists, right? Like the people who want to go out there for us. It's like people who are going to introduce DBT to like the Oracle community or the tableau community. These like massive groups of data people have, have like not really interacted with DBT at all. And how do we bring them in? And then I think in the top, right, you have your educators, your teachers, right? Like tools, templates, courses. It's like, this is the stuff that we know works and we just have to bring more people in. And I think marketers play can do pretty well in that top right quadrant, right, where like they're pretty good at teaching and increasingly are saying like, wow, this is a super effective marketing strategy.

Don't you think that what your product is, is so key to like why this community is so successful?

Oh, definitely, yeah. Yeah.

Can you talk, can you talk about that and explain and try to explain it? Explain like what DBT Labs does and why Community is such a good fit? Because I think that's an important ingredient.

Yeah, I think there are a few times when community makes a lot of sense. One is when you have Bottoms up adoption, right? Like you have to have a huge base of potential users. If you're, you know, I don't know how much value like Boeing is going to get out of a community like you. You need, you need a certain amount of scale. I think highly technical products do really well. So like, we are certainly not the first company who has seen an open source company who has seen a community emerge around it. There's like a real history of that. And open source companies often do very well with community plays. And then I think the third thing is teaching people a new way to work. And this was very much my experience with HubSpot and inbound marketing, right? Is it's like, hey, we actually need you to work in this different way and we're going to teach you how. And so it becomes like a really rich space for people to like learn alongside each other.

That's a great way to think about it, because I think you can probably make the case for community at any company. I think you could make the case for Boeing where you could say, we're going to create a community for people who work in this role and it's where they're going to hang out and talk online. But I think your fit is much better. And this is where people can actually start to see huge business value from it. It becomes not as hard to be like, well, what's the value of this community? Because if it's connected, if you have a bottoms up sales product or something, and your community is all about helping salespeople and writing better sales scripts and you're sharing templates and videos, I think it's got to be that level of you're making this person smarter at your job. And then in your case, you also have the technical piece of it, which seems to people towards gravitate towards community in that world.

Well, here's where the Boeing example maybe breaks is it becomes a part of like customer acquisition costs. Right? So if you're selling bow and jets, you can afford to spend like a shit ton of money to acquire a customer. And so you don't really have to rely on community to do that work. Right? You're going to, you're going to hire an ex aviation COO and they're going to schmooze with your potential buyers. Right?

Right.

Whereas when you're talking about this big base of end users, we can't, like, we at DBT Labs cannot support, support all of these people in the ways that they need to be supported. And so it becomes extremely valuable for us as a business to make it easy to connect people to each other.

I recommend community to everybody. I love the way you have broken this down, but for me, I think it a very even more simplistic level, which is, here's a different example. I love golf. Maybe in two years I want to start a golf, a business in the golf niche. I think that the best way for me to sell products in two years would be if I started a community today.

Oh, definitely.

And by community, I don't just mean a slack group. It could be a podcast and a blog. It could be a YouTube channel or something. So I actually think maybe I use the word community and audience more interchangeably now that I kind of hear the way you talk about it, which is, it's hugely valuable to have an audience of people to then go say, hey, you know, we, we talked to you about X, Y and Z. You mentioned bottoms up. A couple times. And so how do you have an effective community and grow an effective community but also do it in a way where it connects it as bottoms up? Like there is a great sales connection, it does help drive your business. But I've found that a lot of times people try to sell in the community and that's where it doesn't work. So what's the, how does this all connect back to like your, your business and your funnel?

So let me do brief history to answer that question. So community very much came first for us. We had community first and then we added marketing and then we added sales, which is kind of unusual and certainly great. So that started when actually before the product even existed. Tristan and our co founder Drew started a Slack group where they were like we're gonna chat while we're like working on this open source product. And then somehow I got an invitation too because I was working alongside them and, and that was like, that was the thing, the seed of the community. And then like early users of the open source product would join the Slack community and be able to find like the people working on the, on the project. I think that our co founder, I think he sent something like 30,000 Slack messages over the years, like just always in there like answering questions, helping people. So that's like the first thing right is community came first and then for, for the first 3, 4 years of DBT's existence the company was a professional services company and so it was helping, you know, doing analytics consulting using ddt. And then we, then we released a paid software product and then as that took off, accepted venture funding. And so in the lead up to thinking about being a venture backed business, that's when we added on the marketing layer. And then once we're ready to sell into the enterprise, you know, that's when we added on the sales layer. And so we're continuing to think about that like as we go into new regions, it's the same motion, right? New regions. Like I mentioned, like the Oracle audience, we always say like how do we get community in there? First let them meet people and find out the use cases and then we put field marketers in and then we think about putting sellers there.

Your community was founder led from the beginning. The founder level is the founder is pumping content in the community. This is not a SaaS company saying we want to start a community. Hire a social media intern to build community. And you wonder why this is working.

Yeah, and continues to be the biggest advocate for it. And so every fundraise announcement that we've done. Our founder has disappeared for like a week and thought about, like, writing this blog post to the community about why we raised. Right. And like, why now and why in this environment and why at these incredible valuations. And so he, like, doesn't care about the PR work that we're doing almost at all. It's like, oh, whatever, TechCrunch, whatever, whatever. I have to say, I have to be able to say something true to the community. Right? I have to be able to give them a story that resonates. And so he continues to be like the biggest advocate for community. And that's the only way it works. Because if you don't have that, if it's led by marketers, there's going to be pressure around pipeline and people are going to say, you know, we have to gate some content for the community.

But also, but also, like, I think, I think there's usually the founder of a SaaS company usually started that company for some reason because they have some deep wisdom, some deep expertise. And so, like, was why I believe in the whole founder marketing, founder brand thing is because they have marketing gold. The fact that your founder knows this market, this product analytics at this level and can actually help people, that, to me is the best marketing ingredient. So let's use that. What ingredients do you have to use that to your advantage? Maybe not all founders are going to hop in there and do it, but I think that your founder is an expert in this niche is like a huge marketing ingredient that you can use to build community. And also you built your own publishing company. You mentioned TechCrunch. You don't even need TechCrunch. You have an announcement to make. Your founder writes announcement, you send it to your community. That can be your PR strategy.

Yeah, I don't know if you do a podcast dedicated to founder brand. I haven't read the book yet, but I've been reading your.

It's okay.

It's yellow.

If you haven't seen it, it's yellow.

I've seen that. I'm looking forward to reading it. I do think that Tristan fits the bill on that. Again, like, before a product existed, he started writing a newsletter, which at that point was called the Data Science Roundup. Now it's called the Analytics Engineering Roundup. He's been doing this for seven years. At this point, I think the only break he took was like when his kid was born and he took a month off.

My goodness.

So it's this incredible consistency and we still see it. Like people fill out the contact US form. And we have a little question. How'd you hear about dbt? And people will say, I've been reading the Roundup for five years.

Huh?

Right.

I was going to ask you, how do you. How do you measure the value of the community? So Pet Ped sent out this Tweet that said 80%. 80% of sales conversations start from the community. You're able to measure that?

I think I don't totally know how that I didn't listen to the podcast with Tristan and him. What I would say is 80% of our pipeline is what we call marketing source, which is just this big lumpy bucket of like, stuff. We're not totally sure where it came from. So it could be a lot of it is a contact Us form on our website. And most of the time people are mentioning something community related. Right. They're saying, I was subscribed to the Roundup for years. I've been a member of the Slack community. I heard about it from colleagues or friends all the time. And so I'm comfortable saying 80% is community sourced. But that's roughly what's happening there.

Well, yeah, it makes sense. That's your megaphone. You might not be doing a ton of other things. Majority of people are telling you that they heard about you through some content or community. It's like a lick your finger. Yeah, 80% of sales conversations come from the community. Okay, what else? I have more things that I want to ask you, but just what else is interesting about your role and what you're doing that other marketing nerds would find interesting?

I'm not sure. Honestly. I think that on the surface, a lot of our marketing is very boring. Like, I don't think we have like, don't think our visual identity is like super mature. I don't think our demand gen offers or like, particularly cutting edge. And it doesn't matter. Like when, when the underlying dynamics of the business are working, that other stuff, like, doesn't actually matter that much. That's one thing. So again, it goes back to that question of like, what's happening in the market landscape. I think the, the other thing that we have really leaned into is the education piece which you and I talked about just a bit. So we built out this, this training program, started in person and, and now we run it online. And since then it's been turned on into like a rapid onboarding program that we do for enterprise customers. And one of the things that was surprising to me is like, we hear, we've heard from enterprise customers who say, they felt really confident buying because the on demand training program exists. And so they know that if a new analyst joins their team, they can say, hey, spend your first week watching this material. And so it's that thing again of like, education, education, education. Marketers almost can't do enough of it. Right. And we get, we get so interested in, like, growing our lists and building bigger audiences and like, how powerful that is just to teach people what you know and put it together in a, like an accessible format.

Especially when the most SaaS companies are built for that reason. It's like it's founded on some expertise. So train people on your way. I also love that you, that I also. Maybe it's because of the Persona and the person you're selling to, but like, I love the fact that that is on demand. You can have customer success or whatever. But like, we made 10 videos and here you're gonna, you're gonna watch them as you go through.

Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's so easy to do. It's probably work that, you know, it's knowledge your team already has. It's just packaging it up into a course. So that's the stuff, like, we do a really great conference as well, that, that I'm super proud of, but like a great user conference. Consistency in a newsletter. Education. Right. Like, that's the stuff that I feel like at this point, I would say, like, is there a reason that a company shouldn't be doing that? Is there a price point? Is there a time that that stuff isn't impactful?

It's refreshing to hear you talk about the things that you don't think are great and are not getting to. Because I think it's very easy in this role, especially once you've taken on the venture capital money, to be like, the website isn't great. We got to redo the website. The logo isn't great. We got to redo this. We got to change this. We got to change this. But you seem very grounded in. I know my goals, I know what's working. And yes, not everything's going to be perfect.

Oh, there's a lot of stuff that isn't perfect. Yeah, I think, I think we're definitely not, we're not shining on. On user experience on the website either, and currently hiring a whole, whole bunch of design designers to help us with that, which I'm excited about.

Is that like a, is that a product of your relationship with the CEO? Because I feel like a lot of marketers listening to this, they feel like they're under constant pressure from, like, the CEO, like, yeah, even if those things are good. But what about this? And what about this? And we got to change this, and we got to change this. Like, where does that come from?

I definitely think it starts with him creating that space. I also. I love focus. Like, it's. It's probably the most important thing that I can create for my team. Right. It's really hard. Like, there are always a million things to do, and the thing that, like, I want is it's okay maybe if I feel a little bit scrambled as I think about the amount of work ahead of us, but I don't ever want to transfer that to my team. And so something I'm frequently asking them is like, can we actually take this on? Should we be right? Is this too much? Are we trying to do too much? Are our appetites too big? Because I think that's a real risk. And you end up doing a whole bunch of stuff sort of, like, poorly. Don't learn from it. What you could.

Yeah. Or you rush the team to do it and doesn't really achieve anything. And everyone's like, why did I just work on all this stuff if we're not even going to use it?

Yeah. And that's a Dave Kellogg idea. Right. He talks about why execution matters. And his point is, like, execution matters because good execution means you learn something. It doesn't matter if what you do ultimately doesn't have the intended impact, as long as you executed well. You can say, we learned something through this experience. The problem is when you panic, you do all this work, you put something out the door, and then you're going, oh, well, maybe it didn't work because we actually didn't get our partners on board or we didn't send an email to enough people. Well, then you learn nothing. Right. Then it's a total loss.

Yeah. There's, like, lots of re. Once you sit down and try to do the analysis, like, there can be lots of reasons why a campaign or something that you did, didn't. Didn't work.

Yeah. And so it's totally fine for something to miss the mark, but you still want to take the time to execute really well so that at the end you can say, hey, we're at least smarter.

I also learned, like, earlier in my career, I used to get really, like, nervous and, like, defensive about being behind on goals or missing goals. And what I've learned now is it's more like the CEO or whoever, often they know it's going to take time to hit the Goal, but it's more about, like, do they trust you? And the way you get trust is by showing that, like, you're able to like, identify the problem, have some ideas on like, what it might be, and then be able to propose and go do two or three things to make progress toward that. So it's not about not being able to say that you missed the goal, but it's like, we have this hypothesis, we're going to go try these couple things each week. We might get closer to finding the solution, which is going to get us closer to the goal. Don't you feel like it's part of showing your work and being able to articulate the strategy and why you're doing things? Those give you more, I guess, leeway.

Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, so we, we kind of had our first test of this last quarter. We, we had like our, our first quarter where pipeline numbers were at risk and we hadn't been in that position before. It's like, you know, we're fairly new to the whole pipeline ever.

You've never lost, you've never lost a game. The team is just going kind of.

Right. It honestly feels that way sometimes. You know, like every board meeting we're in, like, our, our investors just like love us. Great job. Great job. And you're like, it's too easy. Right? Like, we haven't been tested yet. Like, we can't, we can't actually do a victory lap. So we felt this in December. We're looking at our pipeline numbers and we're like, they're like really bad and what's going on. And that was a real moment of what happens in those moments is everything. And didn't panic. Like our ops leader, revenue marketing, sales leader, like, did the analysis, whatever figured out the problem. Those are the magic moments, you know, and it is, it is a trust building exercise because at this point, we're coming out of it on the other side and we're like, hey, we handled that really well. No fingers were pointed, no blame was cast. Great. Like, we can handle this.

That's great.

We still missed our pipeline target for the quarter. And that was also okay.

Yeah, it's going to happen.

Yeah.

Just hopefully not all the time, but it's going to happen. And you'll know why.

It's interesting too, because, like, at this stage of a startup, we're still sort of figuring out how our numbers connect to each other, you know, like, we don't actually know. Like, hey, we actually need this exact amount of pipeline to Create. It's still fairly new. And so I think that that's one of the ways in which goals can go wrong is people get hyper fixated on a number. And actually at the end of that, we were sort of, we had basically miscalculated how much pipeline we even needed. There were other things going on there. But it's interesting when you shift from saying like, I am personally on the line, it is my failure for missing this number to saying like, we're all in this together and we're going to figure it out. And we're actually just trying to understand how the business work works and like, change that tone a lot, that whole experience.

Yeah, I mean, well then it's also like, it's not going to be like, oh, if we, if we add 5,000 new Slack members, this, that's going to equal X in revenue. It's like, that's. That you might figure that out in five years maybe.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I've, I've really enjoyed about working at a data company and with a CEO who, who still identifies as a data analyst is that there's like a real understanding of what can and cannot be measured. And like, measurement is hard and it's expensive and you understand the limitations of a metric in data in ways that, that I've really enjoyed. And so I think that people often have this idea that like, we must have this like, well instrumented marketing machine. And it's like, no, we're actually pretty comfortable saying we do not understand how slack signups impact revenue. And like, yeah, that's like totally fine. And we're not going to try to map it back.

But like, again, that has to be, you have to be aligned at the top from the CEO down on that one. And I think that's so important. It's also just good to hear for people listening. Wherever you're at, walking, driving, working out, whatever, it's like you have to know which things you need to measure. But like, I think so many people get out of the gate and they're like, they want to start a podcast to build community in a different sense. And like month two, they're like, well, how is this driving pipeline? And it's like, well, that's not why you're doing this in the first place. Maybe you'll be in a position, you know, because like, now that you're at your scale, you could probably figure that out. Like, you could probably measure slack to pipeline in some way. But like, is that even worth doing it right now? It's just, it's not so like in the early days it should just be about building. And now to hear somebody like you who has a 25,000 person community to be like, we're not sure how that's influencing pipeline is like, I think it's actually refreshing to hear versus like we got everything down to a science. Everything's perfect, perfect within our org. Everything's perfectly measurable on our team. Like that's just not reality.

No, it's not reality. And like you hear it in one of the places where we, where you hear it the most is like on gong calls, right? Where people are like, yeah, I've been in the Slack community, I've been right? And people are talking about it. You know, it makes a difference. I really like the lens of thinking about marketing in terms of like time horizons, right? If you're thinking about like brand demand, revenue, right? So it's like the stuff that's closest to revenue. You have to understand that like get your numbers, right? Like counting things is hard. We're a data company. Yeah, we're a data company and it's hard, right? Like what is an opportunity? What is a lead? What is a hand raise event? What do we mean by these different things? It's like legitimately challenging. And so it's like get those numbers, right? And then as you think about demand, it's like how many new contexts are we creating? How do we think about influence versus this, right? And then you get into the brand numbers and I think like the brand numbers tell such a great story, right? They matter, right? Like it's impressive. 25,000 people in the Slack community, 7,000 people attended our conference last year, right? Like these are cool numbers, but trying to map them back to revenue is like, we'll get there. Let's focus on like counting these things and really understanding the three months around revenue and then like the six to nine months and then work out.

So do you have like a, do you have like a scorecard for like here's how we measure marketing. We have brand goals, we have revenue goals.

Probably not one that like exists in a good dashboard, but that's always the way that I'm thinking about it is like, like what does this program support? Does it support brand demand or revenue? So for example, like our meetup program, we have email addresses from the Meetup program that is like not a demand program. We're never putting those email addresses into our CRM system. We're never going to market to those people. People. And so thinking about it is like we treat those very differently and certainly in the online world, like what's the difference between a demand webinar and a meetup? Like they kind of look the same. Right. You always end up with a zoom link, but you still like treat those experiences differently and think about their goals as being very different.

Well, you should.

Most people don't do what you just said and that's why they're like, why are these events not converting? It's like, well, you just did a meetup with a hundred people and so yeah, no kidding. When you email everyone on Tuesday to book a meeting, they're not going to want to book a meeting.

Yeah, they weren't expecting, they weren't expecting that experience. Right. Especially if you're like doing it through the meetup platform. So yeah, that framework is one that I go back to all the time. It's like, what's the purpose? Are we doing this for brand or demand or revenue in the self service world? Right. Like when we're talking about revenue, we're saying like swiping credit card or pipeline for the sales team.

Okay, that's helpful. I feel like I want to interview this interview for hours and hours, but I have another meeting and you do too. But before we wrap up, you mentioned you are hiring and so let's use this as opportunity to talk about what are you growing the team? What are you hiring for? Because I'd like to have a boss like you who seems very balanced and wants to grow revenue but has some realistic expectations. So what are you looking for?

We are looking for event managers. We are looking for a website strategist, pipeline marketing to work really closely with our SDR team. Field marketers, kind of all, all parts of the funnel and yeah, all teams, ops.

Always looking for ops people, everybody. You just raised the money, money. Now you have to go build a big team.

I know, I know marketers are in demand. It's a great time to be looking for a job. But I do think that DBP Labs is a great place to work. And the thing that I always say is like we have a CEO who was in the marketing seat and understands the challenges of marketers and that's such an unbelievable advantage and actually makes doing marketing here rather pleasant. Occasionally maybe he goes deeper than what he should, but overall has a real understanding and respect for the discipline and that's always what I like to try to sell people on.

Love that. Yeah, people always say, is it better to work for a CEO who knows marketing or not? I'm like well, probably most cases, it's a benefit. It's more of a benefit.

Yeah.

Okay. You're awesome. Thank you for coming on. I appreciate you taking the time to chat about your story in DBT Labs. Just go to LinkedIn and you can look up Janessa Lance and connect with her. If you're one of those many roles that she listed, reach out. Thanks for listening to this episode, Janessa. Appreciate you. I'll see you around.

Thanks, Dave.

Okay, bye. Bye. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@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 market marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast 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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