Behind the Scenes of Drive by Exit Five

We're in the beautiful city of Burlington, Vermont. I'm a little bit worried about the next 48 hours because, like, socially and emotionally, I'm absolutely white. But I'm gonna dig deep. I have my. I have my support staff here, and I'm excited. It should be fun. This is a little behind the scenes of Drive Exit 5, our first event. We took a chance on doing an event. I'm not gonna lie to you. I was worried if people were gonna show up, just because I think you always go through that feeling of imposter syndrome and doubt. And then when people actually show up, you're like, holy shit, this is amazing. The weather looks amazing. So the good news is, if the event sucks, you all have left this amazing city, like, with some positive vibes. And Leah keeps saying, like, come on, it's not gonna suck because we have an awesome day and a half tomorrow and Thursday. I don't know. I'm kind of overwhelmed right now by, like, the fact that you all came. And I just want to give a quick toast and thank you for coming out. And I'm excited to see y' all in the morning. Yeah. And this is what happens at my house. Leah's the handy one. I just watch. Excuse me. I'm trying to work here. Oh, look at that. It's Founder Mode. Maybe you've read the very popular blog post called Founder Mode. This is Founder Mode right here. You get the pizzas. I wrote about this the other day. Like, all the shit that comes up with an event that is, like, not what you thought your job was gonna be. Dan's literally, like, making a. Wait. You know what Dan just did? He did Founder Mode. That was Founder. That was Founder Mode shit. We have these welcome bags. We get a lot of free stuff because people want to reach B2B marketers through us. So Sendoso hooked us up with all this. Great move. Also, I've been to events before where, like, you just leave with a bunch of random. A Frisbee. Like, it just ends up going in the trash. So, like, okay, let's do a gift. But it functional. We got these nice little totes, so in the bag. Everybody gets one of these. Pretty nice. You know, I'd wear it. We got a little notebook. We got some stickers made. Everybody loves stickers. My kids have already stolen, like, so many of these. We got Cookies Grove Cookie Company. Somebody had sent me these, like, a direct mail thing. A lot of direct mail is, like, garbage, right? These cookies are amazing. And I'm on LinkedIn. I see some guy and I'm like, the B2B cookie guy? No, like, there's a niche for everything. And so anyway, I messaged him to come on the podcast and then he messaged me a couple days later. He's like, hey, you're doing your event. I'll send you 200 cookies. So shout out to Grove Cookie Company. We had heard from the community. Like, everybody wanted to do an in person event. I was like, no, no, no. I'd done a bunch of events in my past life as like a VP of marketing. It's fucking stressful. And I was like, I'm running a solo business. Why would I want to proactively bring that stress into my life? So I'm like, I don't want to do an event. And Dan comes on, he sees the community. People ask him for a vent. He's like, oh, event could be interesting. And I was like, now we have a team. Like, we can actually do this. And then I said, okay, I'll do an event, but I don't want to go anywhere for it. I think we should try to do it in Vermont. And Dan was like, that's kind of a sick idea. And it's a good idea for two reasons, I think. Number one, there's a trend of doing like smaller events in kind of like off market cities. And I think there was something about people being like a B2B marketing event in Vermont in the fall, a beautiful time of year. Okay, I'm down. We've all been to the events in San Francisco, the big convention centers. Like, there's definitely value in that, but I think people want a smaller connection. And then on top of that, we got to say, oh, but the story behind Exit 5, it was named after something in Vermont. So Vermont was a place that I went to when I was dating my wife. Her family lives up here. We'd escape here on the weekends. I'd be like, off the grid, you know, just not on my phone, walking around, hiking, skiing, whatever it is. Over that weekend, I'd always get an idea. Vermont became like the place of inspiration. So when I was rebranding to Exit 5, I was like, I want to come up with a name for a place because it's a community. It's a place you go to learn what's a place? And I was like, 89 North. And I was like, oh, Exit 5, that's Leah's parents exit. And that's kind of. That's where we'd always go and what we'd call it. So it all kind of came together and then to do this event, the first one here just feels. Feels awesome. I think people like it here. I should have reached out to, like, what are we doing for the local economy here? Bringing 200 B2B marketers with their. Their company cars. Then selfishly, home game for me. I can go sleep in my own bed in 12 minutes. My kids came by to the welcome reception. It was big, big for my brand having my kids there. So he's not a complete assh. Hashtag father mode. Hashtag father mode. My slides got messed up. It's okay. It's year one. Imagine being really bent out of shape by this and, like, someone's head where heads are gonna roll. Dan, I think we've stumbled upon an interesting trend. Here's a hot take, BB marketing. Hot take for you. I think, like, niche, smaller niche events are in. And that was real. I left that welcome reception with a lot of energy last night. People were like, man, we just want to be here. We're excited to be in a new place. So many are here in Vermont for the first time. Dimitri posted on LinkedIn. He said, I'm heading to the B2B Mecca, Burlington, Vermont. So I just want to give you some random facts and stats about drive. There's 200 attendees from all over the world. We have people here from Australia. That's a fact. Denmark, Tel Aviv. And there's basically no direct flights here from anywhere. So thank you all for the effort. We have 200 bottles of maple syrup, 200 T shirts, 200 stickers, 200 her notebooks, turn her cookies. We have nine sessions over the next couple days. We're five miles away from my house, so that's really convenient. It took us two days to sell out the tickets, so I was so stressed about this event. And then two days. I've been to conferences where, like, you sit all day in rooms. Like, we're not going to have that. There's like one or two sessions at a time. Then we got break, then we got breakouts, so hang in there. Like, I went to one earlier this year. Man, there was no oxygen in that Marriott. Like, we were in there for eight hours. And everyone after was like, my goal is to not have that. Actually, I told my daughter we were gonna have a band for this event. She said, dad, you bought a band. She said, are you R11 out of 10? I feel 11 out of 10 so far. Everybody's hanging out, everybody's chatting, and we got really lucky with the weather. Like, all of the breakout Groups are outside. Can you tell the story of when you told Dan that you booked this venue? He makes it sound like I came over here with like a blank check and was like, we'll take it. But I knew we wanted to do an event. We were like, okay, we want to do an event. When's it going to be? Can't be in the summer cuz no one's going to come. Can't be the second week of September because it's inbound and then there's Saster and it can't be in October because it's too expensive. Everybody comes up here for leaf peeping and that literally left this week open. I came here, I've been to this place a bunch. I asked her for a quote. It was like very affordable. And I just used my credit card and I put a deposit down and I called Dan, I said I put a deposit down on a venue. He also said it was like what, a couple weeks before his wife was having the baby. Yeah. Oh yeah, forgot about that. And then, sorry, we have so many good little clips for this. If they could all be taken completely out of context and everyone could hate me or if you use them in the right way, people be like, oh, he's actually kind of likable, that guy. I've stayed up past nine clock for two nights in a row right before this at breakfast I'm like, dude, we all love that you're on the mic interrupting people. I hate it. He's like, yeah. He's like, make sure you do it a lot during my session. But I wasn't the first one. Some other dude kind of made it up first. Go ahead, you can talk on the mic now. My favorite review of that book was it's somebody wrote one star on Amazon and all it said was, this should have been a blog post. Yeah, one of the cool things is like accessibility. Like I love that all the people are sitting in front of and hanging out here today. Obviously everybody's very accessible. So if I just couldn't get to your question, it's not open. Go find Devin in the break or go find him the hallway. I think a lot of events you go to, panels can be hit or miss. But also I wanted to bring on three people who would not give you the canned kind of bullshit, nonsense answers you get on a panel. Come on my panel. Run this town, baby. Tara. Tara and I, she's like one of the few B2B marketing leaders that also lives in Vermont that I know, which they've all come out of the world. There just was something about being here, like being in the lunchroom, being out there. The conversations were easy. People just would come up to each other and say hello and sit down for lunch. And I want to make sure if we do more events, that that is like the thing. So what's Next with exit 5? We're doubling down. I think we built the number one community out there for B2B marketers over the last year. Eleven months ago was a solo business. There's now five awesome people on the team, and I just would like to take a minute and say thank you. We decided we're like, let's run it back. Small promises to start. Number one, the size. No need to be any bigger than this because there just is something here. And I want to just copy and paste that Mic check, mike check. I bet you didn't see you were going to get a freestyle from dg. Oh. So we just wrapped up the second day of drive. It's over. Monday we went out to team dinner. We met the Exit 5 team for the first time. I saw my guy Dan for the first time in five years Wednesday, about halfway through the day yesterday, I wanted to just put all our chips in and cash out and walk away. We played one hand of like, roulette or blackjack or whatever, and we won. And I was ready to cash out. This is roll the dice. We came back today. We rolled the dice. We had to come back today. This is not hyperbole. I would say, based on how my expectations went, this was a 12 out of 10. Yeah. And hey, the NPS already says that. Are you looking already? You Want to know one live reaction. The MPS to 86. Is that good. A 50 is considered good. A 60 is considered great. We have an 86 MP score right now. We have zero detractors so far. I mean, that's unbelievable. I wish I could say that it was like we did some crazy thing. Like, my biggest pet peeve is like, all these events now they're like, we're doing the festival. It's like a festival, but for X. We did none of that. We had talks on a stage and breakouts. The reason that this was successful, and I'm not lecturing anybody. I'm just feeling the energy because I know this now. It's because we have built a successful and engaged community. And those people have come today and met for the first time the last two days in person. And so the. The. It was unbelievable. If there's an open seat at a table, doesn't matter if I don't know you, someone's going to sit there and hang out. It was like the most friendly, welcoming environment that I could have imagined. It wasn't like we did applications for, for attendees. It's just like the right people showed up. The right people decided they wanted to buy a ticket and be here. So Dan and I, all week, we joked, like, I have this really bad recency bias where if I do anything, if I have, like a good meal, I'm like, I'm only eating that ever again. We were both worried about me. Like, halfway in, are we gonna do events? Last night, this guy texts me at 11 o'. Clock. He goes, did we just become an events company? This is it. Mark it down. No. So the other news is then we. We really had no plan of doing this event again. We just said, we're gonna see how it goes, do a test, whatever. This morning, we kind of just looked at each other and we were like, should we just run it back? And Dan literally went over to them, talked to them, and we have committed to do this event same time next year. September 10th, 11th, we'll be back in this venue. In that room, the coolest moment was the CEO of Hula, which is this company, she found me and she's like, I just want to let you know, like, the people that you brought here, this has been amazing. We want to do more stuff with you. Like, the whole thing has been top to bottom. I gotta just want to shout you guys out. You guys have not put a camera down for one second. Like, I see you and I salute you. Respect. Hell yeah. Let's go. Yo, yo, it's dg.