How Dave Gerhardt Built a B2B Audience of 200,000+

Foreign.

Dave, excited to have you on the program. Many people listening to this, I'm sure know you, but for those that don't, maybe some SEO people. Yeah. The founder of Exit 5, a very well respected, high growth, top B2B marketing community. I'm a part of it. I'm pumped. I'm excited to be in there. It's been valuable so far, so that's what made me think to invite you. And yeah, you got a great background as a CMO at some big startups. So, um, excited to be here, chop it up with you.

Yeah. Thank you, sir. We got the. I figured I, if I was going to come on your podcast, I was going to dress like you and.

Oh yeah, we're branded.

But yeah, no, I'm happy to, happy to come on any opportunity to talk about Exit 5 with somebody who gets the space of, you know, content and marketing and social media today, which is, you know, you've, you've built a great business over the years and I've, I've been familiar with you. So when you guys reached out, I'm like, yeah, I'll hang out for a little bit. Happy to chop it up with you guys.

Nice. I appreciate it, Dave. Yeah, I mean, we're traditionally as, you know, like, we're SEO at the core. You, I don't know, you describe yourself. You probably wouldn't describe yourself as SEO. Is that fair to say? Maybe you would. I don't want to.

I mean, my only experience with SEO people, I'm going to get killed right off the bat is that they just usually give me a spreadsheet of ideas and don't do anything. So I'm. No, I'm not an SEO person.

Well, that's some of us.

Actual marketer. No, just kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

They're coming together. A good SEO. I think maybe it wasn't the case five years ago.

No, I mean, yeah, I think SEO is one of the most important things in, in marketing just because I believe so much in that. I think there used to be like content marketing as a channel of marketing and like now I think the smart people know that content is the whole game in marketing.

Yeah.

Like there isn't. It's, it's not a other channel, you know, and it's not like it was 10 years ago where like the innovative companies today have blogs and they rank for keywords. Like. No, it's, it's content is the game in marketing and search is a huge part of that. And I think that great SEOs play a important role because they're not just, they're not just looking at what, you know, specific. It's not just about keywords. It is about understanding the whole content strategy. And what I think is super exciting about content today is like, like content has multiple formats. It is podcast, short form, long form, events, transcripts, articles. Like, there's so much that's converged that a smart SEO can use to drive traffic for the company. And I think it's. It's also an amazing time to be in the game because so much is changing with AI and search and it's just, it's a, it's a good time to be here.

Yeah, it depends on who you ask in our industry, but I appreciate the optimism, but yeah, it's fun.

Why, what. What is the. What is the overall like from an industry insider standpoint? What is the tone?

I mean, it's, it's balanced. I suggest. And we could link. I was just referencing a Kevin Indig article specific to B2B that there's some anticipation that AI search engines will be around 30 to 35% of the overall search pie eventually. But the like, apocalypse is if that's not apocalypse, the more negative sentiment is if that's not 35% and search just goes down. That. That's our pie shrinking as a channel. It's still a quite significant channel, but that's the nervousness. It's just. Will it be negative 2030?

Yeah. Wasn't it, wasn't it big news though? Like, like Google's latest update. It seems like they're. And this is not my wheelhouse, I feel like I'm talking in a different language to somebody. But I watched a video from a guy who was excited about Google's latest, you know, Gemini update, like Flash or whatever it was called, because their, their Gemini, you know, AI is starting to like, basically fold in what used to be Google search. Like, is there something there that is promising or is that also a threat?

I. I think so. It's that I. And that's Kevin's take. And if Chachi as an OpenAI has mentioned they would do advertisements that potentially I think to do that well, we need to drive clicks potentially. So that's optimistic that normally you'd probably need organic in there to get people to click ads. That's how Google has done it, of course. Right. So I think that's what Gemini, that Gemini update likely is.

Okay.

But I not. Not here to have you kind of riff on SEO. Although I appreciate, appreciate it. I mean, why I thought of having you here is you're a great content creator. I mean, you're. And I just saw you do a post on LinkedIn that mentioned you're about to do articles in your own website. I don't know if you're thinking about SEO for your own website, but you seem positioned as someone who's great at content marketing, no matter how much you think about SEO, to actually very strongly do good SEO, because you have. You're building a brand that's clearly, well, not respected and all those things. So I think the community in SEO world should hear about how you think about content creation. I mean, you have a successful podcast, you're posting what seems like Pretty Daily on LinkedIn and other networks. Would love to hear about your personal workflow. Like, what does that look like in process? Yeah.

Yeah. So. Well, this is like the cool part about Exit 5 being a business now is that it's essentially like the things I've been doing for probably, you know, seven to 10 years, but that content is now the standalone business. And so I came up as a PR intern, marketing manager, product marketer, eventually grew, grew my career into VP of marketing and CMO at a couple of smaller SaaS companies. And at the two companies that I was at, like, the. Both companies had brands and both companies had this strong, like, organic presence. And we did launches. We drove a lot of attention through LinkedIn, through social media, through articles, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, and we've always kind of been good at that. And over that time that I was doing marketing, I started writing on LinkedIn. This was @ a time when, like, nobody was really writing on LinkedIn. Like, I would write a post and people would be like, you know, relax, bro, this isn't Facebook. But LinkedIn has obviously changed a lot. It's not necessarily like a Rolodex anymore. It used to be like, oh, I met Ross at a meeting for real, and I'm going to send him a LinkedIn connection after the meeting. And then we're connected. But now LinkedIn has just become a social network. And the main focus of the social network is, like, business content. And so I started to love my job. I started to love marketing. I started to love the craft of marketing. I'm sure, like many people who listen to your show, love the craft of SEO. They take that seriously and that. That becomes their passion. I started writing about it on LinkedIn and I got, you know, 10,000 followers, 20,000 followers. All of a sudden, like, I've been on Twitter for a decade and I still don't know what works there. And then I'm on LinkedIn and I got seventy thousand, a hundred thousand followers, and it's like, whoa, this is crazy. And at the time, I was at a. I was also at a company that was doing really well, and the company became known for their marketing. I was the person leading the marketing. And so I got a lot of, like, you know, brand halo from that. So I had a podcast. People started listening to podcasts. I decided that I was going to try something new. This was in 2019, where I was going to launch paid content for marketers. I was like, I think this is valuable. I'm a capitalist. I'm going to charge money for my content, like a subscription business. And in addition to my job as cmo, I was like, I'm going to launch this thing on Patreon where I share my lessons, learnings, and thoughts on marketing, and I'm going to charge dollars for it. And I got this idea because my wife was listening to this comedian, and the comedian had a Patreon. And so she had her, like, public podcast, which is open to the world, but then, like, twice a week, she would share episodes that were for subscribers only. And I just kind of felt like I could do that based on the response I was getting to my content. And so I said, I'm going to launch this thing. I changed jobs, and it was kind of a big deal for, like, some people that knew the companies and stuff. And I released the first episode talking about why I left the company. And it was for member, it was for subscribers only. He was like the only fans of marketing, basically, right? And it was just me talking into my phone and me sharing, like, you know, I love marketing. It's kind of like what my brain is doing all the time. And so it's very easy for me to create content. It's like, oh, I saw this article today, or here's an interesting ad screenshot. My comments, you know, that that was really valuable for. For people. I thought I was going to have, like 20 members. It'd be $10 a month. I would have, you know, 200. I would have been happy with $500 a month, like, for side income and, like, contribute to my rent. But, like, really quickly, within the first 30 days, I think I had a thousand members. And so I went from $0 to $10,000 a month in recurring, like, subscription revenue almost overnight. And that was the thing that just like, broke my brain forever because I've been in SaaS and tech and I'M like, man, how many founders have been like, you know, pound their head against the wall for like years to try to get to like, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 recurring revenue? I was getting this now through content. A couple months into that, we got 2,000 members. And one of the members messaged me and he's like, hey man, it's cool listening to you rant about marketing all the time. But like, there's 2,000 of us here. Like, you should let us talk to each other.

There you go.

And like, this is how this stuff happens. Like, I, you know, I. You're absolutely right. And so my wife and I were new parents at the time and we were. I, I went from thinking nobody used Facebook to now like, I'm on Facebook 24 hours a day to figure out like, what's wrong with my kid at every moment of the day. And so we're in Facebook groups. I launched a Facebook group and I just included it as a benefit of joining on Patreon. So when you join, you get a link to, to a private Facebook group. You go in there and that was again, that next thing that like kind of ruined my brain forever because now I'm not posting. I don't have to post all the time. And so I'm, I'm like doing my thing during the day. And I come in and I see in the community there's like five new discussions or like one thread is just like exploded. And then that was the kind of thing that led me to realize, like, there's something bigger here. There is a, like a community of marketers. And I've obviously been in online marketing for a while. I'm not the first to have a community, but it was started through me, through my brand. Obviously people thought that was, you know, they wanted to taste the recipe that I was making. They were willing to come in. That turned into a real business. And I decided to pivot it from like, initially I called it Dave Gearhart Marketing Group. My wife tells me I'm terrible at naming things, which I am. And once I realized it could be a real business, I wanted to kind of like unbundle myself from it. And so I came up with a new name called Exit 5 about 2 1/2 years ago and I launched that. And I did it for my, I did it by myself for about two years. And then this year I decided to really go all in on it. And we have a team of five full time employees. They're all remote. We have 5,000 members in our community. So that's the main part of it. But we also now do in person events. We have a popular podcast, we have a newsletter, we're starting to do content. And so that's. I wanted to give you that background because that is like the long winded way of saying like that playbook is what I've done at companies where we do, you know, strong organic content. And it's this amazing flywheel that you can create. Because I wrote a post on LinkedIn today about, like, everybody talks about sales and marketing alignment. Not enough people talk about product and marketing alignment. And here's why that post went nuts. Ton of engagement on that post. That's a signal for me that now this is a topic people are interested in. And so now that LinkedIn post can become a newsletter that we write to our audience. Right. That newsletter is popular. That new, that, that could be a webinar that we do in two in, you know, in two months when we have one of our events. I know that that topic now is popular and we could have a talk track on that. We did our event this year, our first event in Vermont. We had 200 people. I sourced the nine speakers for that event because I've done the podcast for two years. And I just literally went and I said, who are the most popular podcast guests? Who could I reasonably get? Would they come to Vermont? And I emailed them all and I said, hey, you're. You were one of the most popular podcast guests this year. We're thinking about doing an event like, would you want to come speak? And they said, yes. And so I've just been able to create this, like, this flywheel through organic content where you use social media to get real time insights and feedback and signals on what people want. And then you create various forms of content from there and it becomes this flywheel. That's what I've done for marketing at companies, and now it's become the whole business with Exit 5. And the niche that we're focused on is B2B marketers. But I think you could take this model and you could do it for SEOs, you could do it for plumbers, you could do it for hr, you could do it for accounting. I just have trust and credibility in the space of B2B marketing because I worked there for like 10 to 12 years. And that's the business that I'm, I'm building this on top of today.

Nice. So from an ideation standpoint, the kind of typical place you would go would be sales calls, form submits, all that Good stuff. I think about Exit 5. I wonder. I don't want to speak for you, for you, but yeah, where does that. I know some of it's just your experience and connecting those threads, but where's that origin coming from?

What do you mean? From an ideation standpoint?

Yeah, so like I'm writing a post today about product mark product plus marketing. So like what does that come from consistently? Obviously not.

Yeah, so, so I mean a lot of it is, a bunch of it is driven off of my personal experience. And so I, I went from PR, like I worked in this industry for 10 years. Over that time of 10 years I was went from PR intern to CMO. So my career acceleration was really fast and I saw a bunch of lessons and so a lot of it is like reflecting back on lessons that I've learned like anything in Life. There's a 8020 rule and it's like, yeah, the things that were relevant to me in 2011 were, are still relevant to someone in their career today. So that stuff is timeless. Right. But then also a thing that keeps me in the game is I've invested in advise in a bunch of startups and so I'm still like in the game with knowing what's relevant to marketers. We have 5,000 members in our community. I'm in there every single day. I know what questions are popular, I know what people are asking about. And so I have my finger on the pulse of like what's relevant to them. I also have hosted a podcast like yours. I've done it for 200 episodes. Once a week I talk to a CMO or like a subject matter expert in marketing. And so I'm doing usually one to two episodes a week. That's two and a half hours of like one on one conversations where I'm not the expert. I treat my, I, I say I'm not in the game anymore. I'm not the expert anymore. I'm taking this from like I'm a student again, where I'm interviewing these amazing people. This person's a CMO at this hundred million dollar company. I had Kip, who's. Kip's my friend, the CMO at HubSpot. We had him in our like CMO community to do a deep dive session. I was like taking notes the whole time. It's just this, there's not one source, it's multiple of them. It's like, you know, my career, the community, podcast, guests, social media, all those things kind of make for what we're seeing with content and Then now we have a team of five people. And so we have somebody who manages the community, we have somebody who writes a newsletter or we're getting replies to our emails, we're seeing what's popping off in the community, we have an editorial calendar and we're kind of just always like, you know, riffing on which topics are most important and relevant to people right now.

Nice. Yeah. What I like about your community and kind of you made me think of just this thread of obviously talking to your customers is an important part, but maybe not always you have the customers, but something's valuable for your community in particular for content creators is you're going to that in the moment place where questions are getting asked. Like, I've already created social media posts around stuff I've seen on Exit 5, and that was valuable for me. I've just seen people asking buyers and people I would disrespect, even if they're not buyers, asking questions about SEO content. That's like such an easy thread to pull on and I'm guessing you do as well, but that, I don't know if you'd agree with that idea of like, yeah, seeing where people are.

Absolutely. I mean, like, I think it's, this is like SEO, like smart SEO folks have been doing this forever, right? Where it's like, hey, we need to create content about a particular topic. Let's go find out what people are saying about that topic online. And it might mean, you know, I used to like mine, like Quora posts back in the day, right. Or like subreddits or you're, you're an in person, you're at an in person thing and you, you know, you're going to a local networking event. I think this is just the digital version and it's at scale, but it's like the core about what makes great marketing. It's like, do you have a deep understanding of your audience? Do you know what people want? And then can you go and create that and give it to them? And that's what the business has basically become. I don't think we'd be as good at it if it was like the cyber security community. It happens to be based off of an area where I've worked for a long time and have a lot of connections. And that's been in an advantage. But that is how we create content. It's no different than finding out what people want. Seeing the popular topics, it's usually 80% of the stuff is going to be if someone's asking it multiple people in the other in the community have the same question and it just. The cycle repeats.

Makes sense. So I mean that's the forest kind of view. How about the trees? I don't know if there's anything interesting there. Does like Dave sit down every day at 9am for an hour block you have someone on your team edits single every single post. Like what does that look like?

Somebody on the team that edits my LinkedIn?

Yeah, maybe. No, that's absolutely not.

Absolutely not. No way. Nope, just that's me. I think you gotta be careful with outsourcing that. I mean it can maybe if that's not your strength. But I've done it for so long. But yeah, I. So, so the tree part of it is for LinkedIn specifically. I have found that I like to write there every day. Sometimes I don't write on Saturdays and Sundays. However, I haven't seen a drop in engagement. I think you can. People still check LinkedIn on Saturday and Sunday and so the engagement still works. I found that posting once a day is the sweet spot. Typically between 7 and you know, 6 and 9am in the morning for me. And then I try to write one post a day because that has become like my blog now. If I had a different business I probably wouldn't write there as much. But we see a direct correlation between like, you know, LinkedIn is the number one traffic driver for Exit 5. I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn and so that makes a huge difference. But it's the. We look at self reported attribution for all of our members, sponsors, whatever, it's LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn. And so the more that I write on LinkedIn we see a correlation between traffic and email subscribers for Exit 5. And so Exit 5 is the thing that I care about growing right now. And so the more impressions that I can get on LinkedIn, the more goodness that that leads back to the Exit 5 funnel. And so I try to write about marketing once a day on LinkedIn. So that's kind of like step number one is like all right, I'm going to write. I go back and forth between scheduling content recently. So scheduling is awesome because like we're humans and it's just nice to have stuff. It's nice to be like I have a block of hours right now and I'm just going to use them to commit to WR and I'm in the zone and I'm just going to riff off a bunch of posts. But I have found that scheduled posts don't perform as good. I don't know if that's a placebo. I don't know if that's like a made up thing, a belief of mine. I don't know if it's because when I don't schedule a post, like I'm often active on LinkedIn and then I write and LinkedIn knows that like oh, he's really here right now. And so, and so, you know, and I'm curious to hear your perspective as somebody who's obviously thought a lot about like you know, search algorithms and stuff in the, in the past. But that's one hypothesis. So I've lately what I do is every single day I have a calendar at like 9 o' clock and I have just a LinkedIn spot and I just use that as my scheduler. And so tomorrow, so today we're recording this on a Wednesday. I have an idea of the thing I'm gonna write tomorrow and it's just on my calendar, in a task on my calendar at 9 o' clock and I have a video clip that I wanna post and some copy and I'm gonna sit down tomorrow like between nine and ten o' clock, just like when I go through my inbox and I'm gonna write a LinkedIn post. I also think LinkedIn values like engagement. And so even if you did schedule something, you need to be there. You need to like reply to comments, you need to send stuff back to people. And you get so many content ideas from commenting on other people's posts. And so so often like it's like a prompt. I'll see somebody else's post in the feed about this. And you know this, hey, hey. Like here's why AI sucks. And you know AI is going to ruin us all. And I'm like actually I think AI is awesome, here's why. And I write a comment on that person's post and that and then you basically rate they. The kids call it like ratioing on, on X or whatever, right? Where now all of a sudden someone's post had 66 likes, my comment has 103 likes. Great signal. I'm going to copy and paste my comment and I'm going to take that, I'm going to save it and that's going to be a future post of mine. And what I do is I just keep a backlog. I just have app like Apple Notes. I've used everything notion Google Docs, right now I got Apple Notes. I'm looking at it right now where I just have a LinkedIn backlog. And so If I don't have a new post idea, or if I get to LinkedIn tomorrow and I don't have a fresh idea to write, I'll dig through my backlog and see if anything, like, strikes me, if anything is good. A lot of times I don't even reference the backlog. I just have an idea and I just go, or I'll write something in Exit 5. And I'm like, yeah, I want to adapt that for LinkedIn. And so I've just tried to make it a daily habit. I enjoy doing it. 80% of what I write about is marketing. 20% is about like some random thing about my family or, or working out. But I found that the true way to grow on LinkedIn is to focus on, is to become known for something. I've become known as like the B2B marketing guy. When I was posting about everything, working out, food, fitness, startups, vc, this and that. You don't grow. You got to pick one, one particular topic. And so what's the topic that it's valuable for you to be known about? Write about that topic. Do it every day. That's the best way to figure out what's going to work on LinkedIn.

So you feel like a good ratio. I've always been a little too much. I, I sometimes feel like I'm almost to a hundred percent. But you'll go, you'll add that you. Are you very deliberate about that? Like, I've done four posts and now my fifth one is going to be personal. Probably not, I'm guessing, but no, I'm not.

No. But I also think like the way to, you can. It depends on what it is, right? And so like I've seen like PR people like GhostWrite for founders and CEOs and they try to do this and it becomes like too much. Where you're like, every article, everything from Dave is like, it's either a original thought about marketing or it's like some link to an article that's like, did you know that 72% of CMOs think that like you, you need to just talk about what you're doing? And so like, it's basically like marketing is a thing that I'm doing and so I write about what I'm doing, but it's never like this force fed, like, here's my hot take on marketing for today. Thursday, you know, Thursday, December 19th. It's just like, talk about the stuff you're working on. For me, the thing that I'm working on happens to be marketing. If you're a founder in, in if you're, if you're a founder and you're start. You have a company in the like AI space for customer service, you're probably going to write about that all the time. You want to become known for AI and customer service and there's like the kind of force fed like takes the corny like PR style, like writing on LinkedIn. That's not what works. What works is being authentic, writing about what's happening inside of your company. Lessons from meetings you're in, injecting your personality into those posts. And then occasionally there's a random post, you know, but it is here. I post all these podcast clips from our podcast. They're like highly edited. We pay someone money to do them. Then I post like a 7 second video of me like on a hike with my wife and that video gets 50000 impressions and just blow, blows every other piece of content away.

But then that would only happen if you didn't do, if you.

Yeah, yeah, that's fair.

Couldn't do it all in a row, right? It's because you do the other stuff.

Yeah, but, but I think you just gotta, you just kind of got, gotta look at it and, and roll with what the audience wants. I also noticed that when I write about marketing, it performs better. When I wrote that post today about sale, you know, marketing and product performance, the engagement rate was great.

Yeah, makes sense.

That's what people have come to known, you know, that I write about.

So yeah, on your scheduling point, I, I don't, I don't know if you find this but I mean it's probably correlation or causation and sometimes I'm just like, I probably could schedule things. I think you're right about that. Part of my personal feeling sometimes is like I'm so passionate about this exact thought. I like needed to get it out in the world and maybe that somehow because that passion is wrapped up and I need to publish this now, it's probably also a better concept, therefore it performs better.

So this is. So I had this conversation with a founder friend of mine recently because he just like goes rogue and just like posts on LinkedIn in the middle of the day. I'm like, if you're passionate about that topic though, you need like the, the real way is to be patient. Wait. And you already posted today. So you're going to get ding from LinkedIn number two. If you're already pat. If you're really passionate about just wait, wait the next day, schedule it, make it your, your morning Post the next day and more people are going to see it. And so I have the same feeling too. Like you just want to open your phone and like rant on something, but if you can just pause and like wait and get it in the next queue, that get in the queue for like when everything is fresh. Because LinkedIn also doesn't want you to post. I found that it's like about once a day you can. Or you gotta wait six to eight hours. Whereas like Twitter, you can just go.

Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Yeah.

So it is better to wait.

Makes sense.

And that's that, that's the whole thing about why my schedule, why I have this the way that it is. It's like once a day in the morning. Like you're taking an adv. You know what you're taking athletic greens or whatever. That, that works perfectly. And then, then, then if you, if you're really passionate about something, I would tell you, like write it. Like Ross, you should write it. But then just schedule it for the next morning when, then we'll go out when everything is fresh. Right. And then on the scheduling thing, even if, even if I am right, that it does limit reach, it's not like monumental. It's maybe 10% or 20%. Right. And so I'm a big believer in like life and systems and everything. And so like, is it sometimes worth like the 20% reach trade off because it's easier mentally to like write your post and schedule it? Yes. And so let's just schedule it and deal with it. Right.

Makes sense. Agreed. Yeah. You feel like that's a, as a metaphor for being a good CEO, like you shouldn't just jump in and then break everything in your company.

Oh yeah, I do that all the time. Just, just, just, you know, just dive bomb into Slack for no reason. Like why should just wait? Why, why did I not wait and just like discuss team meeting tomorrow. Why did I have to drop this bomb in this way right now?

Team loves me. You. So you had the anchor point of your kind of brand and posting. You, you added the podcast for Exit 5. Like we probably can't create an analogy for every high growth SaaS company, but you added podcasting, you added in person events, you have the community. You're now doing articles on websites. Is there a specific. I'm guessing you think those are appropriate size, like how, how much leverage there is for your company, but I don't know. If you think about that from your content stack, you specifically, I mean, it's okay to say you're adding like content on site, content last deliberately. And that's normally what you would do.

For all my criticism about SEO in the beginning, like, I suck at SEO.

So that's part of it is like, yeah, okay, that makes sense.

It's just not. It's not, it's not my thing. It's not. So, so I've had a. So, so here's a good example. Like, I had a podcast starting in 2014 and it was just like my true first, like, real side project, passion project. I was working at a startup. I was a customer success manager. I started to get into podcasts on my own. I had this idea of like, hey, I'm in Boston. The startup scene is really awesome here. Nobody has a podcast about like startups in Boston. It'd be really cool to start a podcast. And so my CEO was like, you should just do it. And I did it and it was amazing. And I started a podcast. And so I've had a podcast now for 11 years running in some form. And that has just kind of been my. My thing. Like, you know, I had a. We had a podcast at Drift, I had a podcast at Privy. I had the Exit 5 podcast. Like, we've just kind of always had one. And I've used it as like the Trojan horse for creating lots of other content. And so because I've had a large following on LinkedIn, it fuels it. Because we do a podcast interview. I do this podcast interview with Ross. He's an expert on SEO. We get clips from this episode. Those clips drive listeners. They also drive awareness and drive traffic back to our site. We don't have a ton of articles on the site, but I can get a transcript and the video and the recording from every podcast and I can make a short little article on the site. Even if it's not perfect for SEO, it's a way to meet other people in the industry. It's a way to like, basically use other people's voices to help grow your brand as opposed to like Dave's hot takes. And so I've just kind. I started. Podcast was a natural start for me. Right. And makes sense that that just kind of became like unintentionally the whole flywheel because it's like we do a podcast with someone that becomes the newsletter that becomes a social media. Like just doing one hour podcast interview could get us all the content we need to, like fuel v1 of the Exit 5 content machine. Now we're at. Now last we're starting to write articles on the site. Which is funny because, you know, we have 5,000 members in this like private community and we have 10. Maybe, maybe we get, we get, we get about 10,000 website visitors a month and 99.9% of them come to the website through direct search or like, you know, searching for Exit 5. So we have no key, we don't rank for any keywords in, in B2B marketing. And so now this is a real business and we're thinking about channels to scale. We are doing things in the backwards order which is like, wait a second, I actually want, if we have 5,000 people in a paid community, there should be 50, 000 people that come to our website every month for our free content. And so like I want to make a, I want our website to basically be like, if there was a free version of Exit 5, it's our content on our website and that's the vision for like what we should do, what we want to go do and execute. Now we just haven't, haven't done it. So we've, we've done it last. But I think any look at any company, any person, any startup, you need just one or two core marketing channels to get going and to get initial traction. And oftentimes it is something that you have a, a personal bias towards. Like this guy, there's a guy called Vin Matano and he's making a lot of really great videos about like he was a sales rep at Demand Base and now he's like full blown like influencer marketing and B2B. He's probably in his early 20s, but he's been making videos since he was like 8 and 10 years old. And so he didn't, he didn't decide like, I'm gonna start a video. No, this is, he's fluent in like he, he has no learning curve of like having to make videos. He's, he's grown up doing that, right. And so that makes sense as his channel to start. So he doesn't have a website with article, you know, with long form, like written content and so just happen to be that way for us. I don't think there's a right or wrong way to do it. Just the ingredients, you know, match. If you did something again, you came up. You know, your background is SEO and, and website. That's probably going to be where you're going to start to, to build your mo. You're not going to be like, yeah, the fir. Hey, I'm Ross, I'm starting a new company. The first channel we're going to launch is TikTok. Like, this is not what you're going to do. It doesn't make sense for you, right?

Yes, that's fair. I'm not on Tik Tok. So you nailed me. You nailed me. So, I mean, the community, as we mentioned, is great. Hopefully you get some signups from this podcast. But I think intuitively, from a content standpoint, as a lesson for some people who may consider it as a channel, you have a unique ui. I instinctively was thinking, every community is on Slack now, and you have a differentiated kind of experience that I haven't seen before. Would be curious if you're comfortable sharing what tool is it, roughly, what is it cost?

Yeah, sure. So. So first this was. The whole community was on Facebook for a while, and it was great. It was going great. And there's just a loop with humans where you're in. You're on your phone. Everybody tells you they don't use Facebook anymore. At least my generation, I'm 37. And so we kind of came up right around high school, college. Facebook became huge. And nobody, nobody says they use Facebook anymore. Everybody still uses it because they're all checking it at some point. And so the face Facebook was great because we had this loop of like, you're waiting in line at Starbuck to get a coffee. You pull out your phone, you check exit 5 because it's one of the Facebook groups that you're in. But I didn't have any of the data. I didn't have anybody's email addresses, really. Communication was hard. The. The feed was very, like, ephemeral in that, like, there'd be one or two trending posts, and that would kind of suck up all the oxygen. I wanted to build more of a content library. So Facebook wasn't right for a lot of different reasons. And I made the decision to, like, I started shopping around, trying to find. I want to move this off of Facebook. So Slack, everybody's community. Everybody does community on Slack. Well, there's a couple things people don't understand about Slack. Number one, the free plan of Slack is not sustainable for a community because the search goes away after, like, the archive goes away after, like, some set time period. And so one of the huge value props of having two years of Exit 5 is you can go search for SEO and Exit 5 and you can see, you know, 54 posts dating back to last year. You couldn't do that in Slack. The other thing is Slack, you have to pay per user. So adds up, obviously, like, it's a great business. We have high margins. I still, I don't want to pay $8.25 per month per user to, to have to power the community. And so we found this company called Circle and there's a couple other ones. And a lot of people ask me like why Circle vers this other thing? And I don't know the answer because I didn't evaluate. I wanted to move this thing off of Circle. I wanted to move this thing off of Facebook. The head of customer success at Circle is this guy called Tim Fine and he's been in my network for a while and he's been hitting me up for years. Move off of Facebook. Move to Circle. Move to Circle. We'll make it easy for you. So I finally one day just was like, all right, can you do that? Can you make it easy for me? And he said yes. And they like did like this white glove onboarding. You know, we moved over all the content. They hooked me up with this other guy, Jordan Godby, who runs, who runs a company called Growth Community where they help people build communities. So that's why I went with Circle was like, I'm a solo, I was a solopreneur. At the time. This seemed like an overwhelming project, like you know, migrating websites essentially. They made it really easy and the product worked for me and they, you know, what I got was a white labeled product. And so it's like you go to exit5.com join or login, you get the web app there and it's a custom designed private community. We also have a private, like a dedicated mobile app. And so like that, that's a big piece of like replacing Facebook. You know, we have the Exit 5 app and so that's the product I think we pay, you know, 20, 30 grand a year for it. It's not, it's not cheap. But like that is what, you know, you also pay for like HubSpot or something. And it's like it's become a full marketing automation platform for our community. And we have a dedicated, we have, we have a full time person on the team, Matt, you know, making a good salary and his full job is running the community, like treating it like a product manager. And so for a year it kind of stagnated while it was just me like posting and ghosting. Matt's in there every single day. We have so many things set up from workflows to zaps to automation to data. It's a full product, it's like a software product. But there's no, you know, we're not writing Code. We're creating content and so yeah, we use circle for that, that I'm sure other things work, but it just happens to be where we are. The hardest thing was we lost like 2000 members when we moved off of Facebook. Like 2000 paying members. Like I churned 25k of MRR and that was an intentional decision. I knew that this was going to be a long term business I wanted to like. And I'm sure you've, you know, you've built a great company. Sometimes you just have to make a decision that's like damn, this is going to suck in the short term. But like I got to rip this band aid and I, we're finally here a year and a half later. We have a team, we've made all the revenue back. Things are going awesome. The hardest part was for six months, you know me getting hundreds of messages from people who were so mad that we moved the community off of Facebook because they love Facebook. Facebook was better there used to, you could go look at it. You're in the community, you go look all the time. People would post like is it dead in here? The engagement is way down compared to Facebook. And so there was some element of like we had to retrain, we had to think about things differently. It's not going to be the same as Facebook because Facebook is much more of like a social media feed. I wanted to build more of like a membership, like a library. And so yes there is the community where you can talk to each other and you can post but we have hundreds of videos and we do, you know, live streams and AMAs and it needs to be like re pitched to doing that. And so that was more than what you asked me to answer. But man, so many, so many lessons in there learned from, from moving off of platforms. But I could also get on my soapbox about Slack. There's large communities that have been built on Slack and you're paying member of on of someone's community on Slack and you just spend half your day getting blasted with like at here at channel. Like none of that happens inside of exit 5. You can still message members, you can still message each other, but there's no way to like mass like ping everybody. And ultimately the hard part about community is just becomes a place to spam people, you know.

Yeah.

Inbound.org growth growth, hackers, all those, all those communities from back in the day just end up going to zero because they just become a sales channel for the members.

Yeah, it's been been good signal. I haven't I don't think I've gotten a pitch yet from anybody.

No, you, you will. Like we've had, we've had some scenarios where we've had to kick people out because they, you know, auto DM'd a bunch of people like upon joining and that stuff happens. We're just, we're working hard to like, we have a stat, we have a team and we have a, we have to work hard to do it. I do think that's one of the benefits that I didn't understand. Like I, I, it's a paid community because I wanted to generate revenue from it. But I do think a big, a big value prop is that because it's paid, there are no spam. Like, there's no free low end people coming in to just like blast you with spam. It's like a gym membership in some, in some, in some level where like because you're paying for it, you're a little bit more committed, you have a higher expectation about what you're going to get, get out of it and you're going to put in more to get, to get that thing out of it. So it's a, it's a win, win.

So that's a, that brings me to another question of like if we're bringing this to a B2B. I mean obviously you're a B2B company, but the typical SaaS company, have you seen them run? I mean I've seen free communities run by SaaS products, but I can't think of one that's beside.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you have any?

Well, no, they can't, they, they can't, they, they, they can't because the, the mechanics and the incentives don't work right. And so if you're a SaaS company, you're usually probably, you're probably a venture backed SaaS company. Most of the companies in the space are. And you wouldn't have a paid community because how would you account for that revenue?

And then like rounding error as well, probably.

Right, it would be a rounding error. And why would we charge for this? We don't really need the revenue from the community. Ultimately what we want is more subscription sales of our products and so it doesn't make sense to charge for it. So we make it free but then because it's free it just becomes like another, like it's essentially just gated content and it just becomes a way to feed the, you know, ultimately, even if things go really well after a year you're in a, you're in a board meeting or you're in an exec meeting and the VP of sales is like, wait a second. And this community is going really good. Why don't we use it to nurture and like sell our product in there? It's like, well, kind of what makes Community great is that you're not like pushing a product and it's about genuine the people. And so there's just like the Venn diagram of like, how do we extract the value from this is really, is really hard to understand. And then the other mistake is like a lot of times inside of a company, it's not treated like this is our business at Exit 5. And so we have a, you know, six figure, well paid person running the community. I've been at companies where it's like, oh, community. That's the intern's job. And the intern like checks in in the community every Tuesday morning and asks people like, you know, how's it going? And it takes, you know, you have to think about it like a true product and be a product manager and, and manage that level. So I just, I don't think a lot of the incentives line up inside of a company to structure it. Right. I don't think it's impossible. I think there are smart companies out there, like Kip, like Kip at HubSpot is an example of like, I think they get it, I think they could figure it out. I think you'd have to work with a company who believed in like, look, the best marketing playbook in B2B is to be the number one resource for your customer, for whatever the thing you're selling is not because of your product, but because of like, you know, you sell HR software. The best marketing strategy is to become a brand that is like the number one source of knowledge and information for HR pros. And you happen to sell HR software. So if you can build a community for them with that in mind, I think it can absolutely work. But if you start like trying to do lead scoring and nurturing on members to try to like get them into your product, then you know, it's not gonna burn out.

Makes sense. Well, we're almost at time here, Dave. I mean, before we go, I think especially for our, our audience. You asked me, but I would kind of bounce it back off you. You talk to a lot of CMOs on your podcast. People are talking about content marketing and SEO in the world of AI generally. Like what it, what perception do you feel people have currently towards that? Like, what's, what's the thought process? If there's an encapsulated.

That's crazy. Well, I think there's a, like there's a couple things, right? And so I think it's not just AI. Like separate from AI. My perception as a market former marketing leader, I'm just a thought leader now. Community manager is like SEO, I'm an intern. SEO has become harder because of how much like the proliferation of content, right? And so like 15 years ago, if you had the only B2B marketing blog, you could rank and you could just dominate and crush all the traffic there. But in any industry, in any niche, there's so much content, right? And so it is much harder to, to drive traffic. Consumers. This is again separate from AI consumers. The searchers Search now means different things. Like so many people now are getting their information that they used to only get from the Google machine. We now get it from. Maybe you and me are not on it, but most people are. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram x LinkedIn, those have all also eaten away at search, right? Because like I don't necessarily need to go to Google and type in like what, you know, new world news. I don't need to go to that because I'm going to see it somewhere else else. So those, those are the, those are the bigger, the, the big trends. And then you have AI coming in the picture. AI makes generating content even easier. So now there's even more competition. So like, hey, we want to rank for this term. We don't even need humans to create this content. We can just do it with AI. Then there's the other side of the conversation which is AI is actually becoming a search engine. So there's like five different things in there that I said, which I understand why your world is crazy crazy right now because it's not just that AI is a search engine, but now I'm thinking my personal life, I would say that maybe 50% of my search is now done. Like I am almost defaulting to Chat GPT for search related questions now. And so I just think about that as a consumer, like I'm, I'm not a great cook. I'm trying to get better. I'm making steaks the other night and I'm going back and forth with Chat GPT about cooking this ribeye on a cast iron pan. It's amazing. It's such a better experience than like if you've ever gone to Google and you type yeah, time and temperature for cooking salmon. You gotta scroll down like 1500 words to see the little call out box of like, oh, it's 375 for 18 minutes. Like why couldn't, you know, chat. GPT can tell me that directly. So there's a lot that I think is going to, there's a lot that I think is changing. I do think though I don't know if it's current form is going to win, but I think that like the broader thing about SEO, at least in how I, I would think about it, is like earned media and doing, creating content to bring people back to your company and product. That's never going to go away. Now how you do that is going to change, but I think it's always going to be a game of like we have a point of view, we're creating content, we want people to come back to our website, whether it's through Google, through chat, GBT, through Instagram, through TikTok, through YouTube shorts. Like I don't think that that core thing is going to change. You're always going to need to like find ways to get people to care about content. It used to be by creating articles and getting them to rank by Google, rank in Google. That seems to be changing. That's the, that's the bigger, that's the bigger strategy. That's like why, why does a C CMO invest in SEO? Because we want inbound, organic, high quality traffic coming to our website, period. You know, if there's a middle layer there, whether it's Google, ChatGPT, whatever, we don't, we don't necessarily care. Like in the Exit 5 example, we're playing on LinkedIn because it works and that's where audiences and we have an advantage there.

Yeah, makes sense. I think that's a great summary and way of thinking about it. Like if we, the SEO is listening to this evolve to thinking more as like we're often saying organic growth now of a similar concept synonym to earn media. And if we kind of take our mindset there, I think it's definitely defensible. As you mentioned, it's just going to evolve with that change.

Or just like, you know, there, there could be a future where like my job, like let's just use, let's just use Exit 5 as, as an example. Right? You search for B2B marketing community. I want Exit 5 to show up first in that. Whether that is someone searching on YouTube, someone searching on TikTok, someone's asking ChatGPT, someone asking Google.

Yeah, that's the job. Yeah.

Is, do you, is that where you see things going? Is that like the future job? Like that still is the job like the SEO role is like that person owns that help. Help me make sure all of those things are true.

Yeah, agreed. I mean we're. That's the new kind of data. Day one. Noa Toa is a tool I recommend that's up and coming. I think Ahrefs and others will show of like how you show up on these tools, how to influence.

Wait, what's. What's that tool called?

Noa Toa. The name maybe needs some re. No, like, you know, something a t o a dot com. We can put it in the show notes but good tool for kind of identifying how you show up.

AI brand monitoring.

Yes. This is kind of the new thing and influencing the results is still kind of a little bit of a black box, but yeah, I agree on the overall thesis. Well, thanks. Yeah, yeah, go.

It's. It's wild though. I mean, is it a stressful time or is it a fun time?

I mean, it depends on who you ask. We're lucky to be. We're a position up market. We have a lot of big customers. We're up in 2024. 2025 is looking quite good too, so you never know. But, but a lot of. I think you hit it on the head that a lot of the smaller players are getting washed out. It's very hard to win and that can be. It's quite painful for both agencies and smaller businesses for search as a channel. So I think that's an accurate kind of depiction that the bigger players just keep. Are going to keep winning.

Yeah.

Well, thank you for coming on, Dava. This, this has been great. I appreciate you taking your brand lens to search. Hopefully our audience founds it valuable. I'm sure they will definitely. Please.

If I didn't lose them in the first minute, I hope they're still here.

No, they're here. Yeah. I highly recommend Exit 5. Of course. Go check Dave out on LinkedIn. Follow, connect with you and yeah, I think this has been great. Dave, thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks man. I appreciate you having me. Good, good thoughtful discussion. Thanks for being a good host.

Of course. It.