#HowIGotHere with Dave Gerhardt

Foreign.

So Dave, I'm super excited to have you at the product led podcast. Tell us to begin with, how did your career start? Where did you find your passion for marketing?

It was by complete luck, complete chance. I'm not one of those people who says that they were, you know, some people be like, I knew I was going to be an entrepreneur. I was, you know, I had a lemonade stand, you know and I was basically, I went to college, I went to college to play sports and have fun and was never really took school that seriously but I had to pick a degree and so I picked marketing. But I actually don't think I learned much about marketing while I was in school. But when I graduated, had to get a real job. I had to find a way to pay off my college loans. I had to find a way to get out of living at my parents house. And so I got a job from the only people that were hiring me, which was a PR agency in the Boston, Massachusetts area. And it was in 2009. And so the 2008 financial crisis happened here in the states and it was really hard to find marketing jobs. Everybody had just kind of laid off sales and marketing people. So I was trying to apply for jobs. I applied for jobs for six months while working at a golf course back at home. Finally I got a yes from a company and I took it because they were the only one who gave me a paid internship. So I got 10 bucks an hour to do a paid internship at this PR agenc. I go there, I start having success with work and it feels awesome. You go from not caring about work and your career to all of a sudden you're on a fun team and there's great boss and great mentors and fun people to be around and the thing you're doing is people. We like that feedback loop as humans, as people. And so I was actually doing a good job in helping the accounts that I work for get coverage. And that got me more recognition inside of the company and with clients and people want to work on your team and that becomes addict fun to feel that. And so I realized that the thing that I had been kind of underlying behind the scenes good at my whole life has kind of just been like writing and communicating. I've always been interested and enjoyed public speaking and writing and typically have kind of skewed towards the communication side of things. So I got to use those skills to actually have some business success and that translated into a marketing job at another company and then that got me into startups and then eventually I kind of rose through the ranks in marketing to go from marketing manager to cmo, and now I don't work in inside of a company. I just, I work for myself and I do some consulting with a bunch of different companies in the space and have a couple other side projects.

Congratulations. That's so wonderful to hear, but maybe for the younger audience. So when you say I studied marketing, I did the same. And I almost say I'm sorry to hear that. Why? Because, like, the curriculum is so outdated and I don't know if it is better these days. But just like, I think you really learn marketing on a job.

Yeah, well, I think, I totally agree. I think at the time, well, it was also, at least for me at the time, it was a very. I think things have changed a lot. So 2009 was like digital marketing, like, was still like, you know, the shift to digital had happened, but not full scale like it is today. And so I think like, yeah, if you're learning marketing in school today, that better be kind of online first, because everything in life is now becoming Internet first. So it has to be digital marketing. But yeah, I kind of like, I think the one marketing course that I can remember was like, very. Man, it's so boring. I think I would probably, you know, it's funny, I probably like bought that textbook and own it now and like, enjoy reading it now. But it was very much like 4P's or 5P, I don't even know.

Oh, that was Philip Kotler.

Yes, Kotler. Yeah. Okay, so that was a book, right? There you go. There's one book. But like, I wasn't into that then and that didn't do it for me. Whereas, like, I may have been more into it if like, let's say the course was like, build a website. You know, figure out SEO. Like, that stuff I got into. And so I actually learned a lot about marketing in parallel to my career working at companies because I ended up launching my own podcast in 2014. So eight years ago, I launched a podcast when I knew nothing about that. And I interviewed startup founders around the Boston area where I was working. And I called it Tech in Boston. Really creative name. I know. And I did 60 interviews over the course of two years. And that was like, that built up my network unintentionally, but also, like, I had to figure out how to set up a website. I had to figure out how to host a podcast. I had to figure out. Somebody emailed me and they said they want to sponsor the podcast. I had to figure out like, how much do you charge and how does that work and what are the details of that? So I actually learned a lot. And so one of the things that I recommend most to people who I see now, like, hey, I want to get into marketing, or I'm doing something else and I want to get in. I'm like, there's never been a better time because there's so many things that can be marketing today because marketing has become this management of all these digital properties. So maybe you work in accounting and you want to move into marketing. Start. You could start a blog or start a podcast or start a newsletter. I think that's a great way to like tinker with something outside of work also.

Absolutely. And I kind of got very triggered when you say this book that we were mentioning, which is a good book, but now that we are like over 40 years old, when you are a kid, like at a college and you would just like to get a job, those strategic thoughts are usually not something that would help you greatly. They will like sit you in front of computer and you will have to click on freaking Google Ads or whatever they give you to the work. So I do believe that, like the way how knowledge is being systemized and you are like a huge part of this way right now is when we are hearing out the experience and then like trying to figure out patterns and then like kind of the theory which gets in the book five years later. How would you describe it? Because when you have written this awesome book, founder, brand, which I'm literally obsessed with, Amazon, a best seller. So good. How did you derive this knowledge into a comprehendable concept that we can learn from?

Well, thank you for getting the book. I worked with a great company to create the book. And so I had this idea and I knew I wanted to go through the process of creating a book. It was honestly the realest answer to this. And I wanted to write a book and I wanted to sell a book. Not because I thought a book would be a way to make a lot of money. Because if you want to make a lot of money, book sales is not the best way to do it. But I feel like I had a lot of things to say in the marketing and kind of business space. And I had seen demand from other channels, whether that was LinkedIn or community or podcasts, that audience, there was a clear appetite for like, huh. If I feel like if I wrote a book, I could sell it to people and could share their story, but I didn't want to write a book that would be outdated in A year or two, which can be really hard with marketing. Right. That's like, everything is like, these channels change so much. I just kind of looked back and I was like, well, what is the thing? Common theme between what I had learned in marketing at a couple companies and through those. And it was like, oh, there's always been this idea of building an audience for the brand through the founder. I connect with that personally. And so I went to put those down. I worked with a company called Scribe Media to actually create the book. And so it was great because it was like I had a team to. I'm not a very organized person. Like, I'm not disorganized, but I'm not a planner. I'm not like a. I got my template and like, you know, week one I need to write this chapter. Week two, I need to write. This is not who I am. And so it was the perfect. Almost like a personal trainer to help me get the book. And they also handled all the printing and the publishing. And so if it wasn't for that, the book would have never. The book would have been a series of tweets or something.

Gotcha. But when you do this research for the book and you just hyper produce content, it's not your first book either. I mean, you have been doing this with conversational marketing and Drift before. So mainly, how do you conceptualize this knowledge? Where are you getting your source information and how the magic happens in your head is my question.

Well, I mean, typically in all of those cases. So I've been a part of a bunch of different books. Now, the first one was conversational marketing that you mentioned at Drift. The second one was we wrote a book called this Won't Scale, which is about how we did marketing at Drift. The third book that I was a part of was a book called the E Commerce Marketing Handbook, which we did when I was at Privy. And then the last book is Founder Brand. In each one of those cases, the content was already there. So it wasn't like this is not writing a book about history where there's a lot of deep research. I think it's like we were doing and living those things. And so in the case of conversational marketing, we wrote the book two years into our journey of building a company that was based around conversational marketing. So the book was mainly lessons we learned from our company, lessons we learned from hundreds of customers. Right. Countless conversations with partners and investors and advisors. You have so much stuff around the company and so it's all kind of there. Okay, so that's one, right? Hey, wow. We could. This could be a book, right? The second one, this won't scale was while we were growing the company at Drift, the marketing team got a lot of attention. People liked the way that we did marketing. You know, they were a role model for others in the industry. Like, hey. And for me, it was like when I was coming up in marketing was like, I looked at HubSpot that way. Like, we read the HubSpot blog and we checked out all their stuff and people are now starting to do that for us. And we kind of had this approach that was a little bit non traditional. So many people, you know, we had so many inbound things about people who wanted to interview us or talk to us or do whatever. Same thing there, huh? Wow. There's so much demand for this. And we sell a product to marketers. I wonder if we wrote a book about our approach to marketing, would that be interesting? And really, it becomes more of like, I think great writing is more of an editing exercise, and it's more like arranging all these things that are already there and figuring out what the story is and how you want them to flow. Same thing with Privy, the E Commerce Marketing handbook. We had basically 50 episodes of a podcast that we had done where either myself or Ben, who's a founder, was kind of doing these very tactical interviews about marketing lessons. Hey, we talked to this person. They told us, here's how to improve the conversion rate on your website. Well, we have an hour of that conversation times 50. We have so much content. Let's take all the content from our podcast over the last six months and turn that into a book. And then we filled in the gaps with like, oh, this section. We don't have anything on this section. So let's go see if we can find an expert and we find someone who we can interview for an hour and then, you know, take their words and turn it into book content. That's how we created that book. And so this is a great way, I think, to write a business book. Right. Obviously this is much different than like, if you were trying to write, you know, something a little bit more creative or narrative or fiction. But I think in the case of like a. A business that is based on expertise, I think oftentimes you have that stuff already out there. It's either what, what you've already done as company or even if in the early days, it's the idea that propelled you to start a company in the first place. And this is kind of like the meta lesson, which I Actually, which we talk about in founder brand, which is like that stuff is already, it's already out there. Marketing can become secondary because like if you're a founder and you're building this company, you're already trying to hire people and you don't know what to say for marketing. Well, like what the hell are you saying when you're trying to hire someone? Like, you're obviously saying something. There's obviously some story, some pitch, something that you have there. So. Okay, interesting. How can that be used for marketing contents? That's like, that's one way that I just have kind of grown to think. It's like instead of always trying to create something from scratch, there's oftentimes a lot of things that you already have out there. And in the case of a book, a book seems to work really well because despite the fact that we're in this digital age, people like having a physical. I have a bunch of books on my desk right now. They like to have and to hold that and I think you can just package that up and use it to your advantage.

How many ebooks did you read in the last year or so?

How many ebooks have I read? None.

Kindle doesn't count.

No Kindle. I usually read most on my Kindle, but Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was. The other thing is like ebooks became such a commodity. And there's nothing wrong with an ebook, by the way. Like the other day I spent $60 on a 12 week like workout program. Ebook. Just called an ebook. But it's fantastic because it's the person that I trust. The content is legit. It's the same thing with like the term webinar. It's not that there's, there's nothing. That's just the name for it. It's like. But in people's minds, so many companies have just kind of like, especially in the B2B space space, they just pump out, you know, kind of average content. And so in, in the case of drift, we actually wrote that book. This won't scale because we were like, oh, maybe this will be a whole play in itself. In a world where everyone is doing these, you know, ebooks or PDFs or whatever. What if we just go the other direction? And it wasn't a 300 page book. Right. Neither is founder brand. Founder brand is like 110 pages. And you know, could Founder brand probably have been a PDF? Yeah, I could give done a PDF of 100 pages. But it's about having that physical book and it worked really well. And by the way, it's also inherently more social and viral and shareable. How often do you see people taking a picture? Look at this ebook that I just downloaded. Right? But like, I, you know, to this day, just this morning, while I was making my coffee, waiting for this, I was checking my Instagram DMs and B2B. SAS startup founder, actually one of the founders of Chili Piper. She was listening to my audiobook and tagged me in it and posted it. And this is now Evergreen. The book has been out for nine months. It's also very social and shareable, and so it's not a cheap project to do right? At each company, we had raised venture capital money. We had sizable marketing budgets. And so it wasn't like we stabled this book together for 1,000 bucks. And so like, maybe you can only do ebook to do v1, but if you have the budget to do it, it's an awesome investment. If you know how to use it.

In the right way, go for the real thing. All righty. So, Dave, another thing that kind of came from your brand marketing leadership adrift. So back then, you practically become a rock stars. I remember, like, people wearing your merch at conferences. And I was enthusiastically asking, though, where did you get it? Meaning that I won some as well. And that for me is the ultimate brand. Love that somebody like volunteers. Yeah, I will be your walking billboard. I will proudly wear a T shirt of a company that I don't work for. And just like from the part of community building and just like creating all these bass, all these, like, excellent brand elements that were out there, how did you engineer that? How did you envision this ecosystem?

I didn't. I just got to run and execute the plays. I think specifically the brand vision and the merch vision that you mentioned was all from David Cancel, the founder and CEO. And that was one of the reasons that drew me to the company in the first place, which is early on, you know, some of the things that we did two, three, four years later. And the company he had talked about from the beginning.

Wow.

And so he was an experienced SaaS founder before Drift, and he knew that they were going to go and start another SaaS company. But there was 10,000 other tools that on the surface seemed like they did just what Drift did. And so one of his big bets in starting the company was, hey, we're going to bet heavily on brand. And brand doesn't mean our design or logo. It means really like our reputation. And how are we going to build a reputation in this industry? We're going to look at the way other people have done it and we're going to try to do things in a completely different way. And he was like, the merch is a perfect example, right? He was like, well, everybody just kind of has these, like, shitty startup. And gosh, I've had gotten so many of them over the years, like hundreds of shirts and, and mugs and Frisbees that I will never, you know, that just create waste and just going in the trash. And he was like, I don't want to see. Yeah, we have some tears on the podcast. Not just kidding, you know, he was like, we want our brand to feel, like, not cool for B2B SaaS company, but like a brand. Like cool for a brand. And so he cared a lot about the quality of the merch and stuff and the design. I think that that's just one example of exactly. You get exactly what you said. You said you have people who actually want to wear this. And so we really, you know, his. His thinking was like, hey, if we're going to do stuff, if we're going to spend on this, by the way, because it's also not free, let's do something that people actually want to wear. And it turns out that at conferences and events and other people, it's like, how can I get some drift swag? How can I get some drift swag? I have friends and family who have no idea what I do. Texting me, being like, could you send me a drift hoodie? I think that's just an awesome example of the harder to quantify stuff. But we felt it because we saw the pictures. We were so involved on social media that you get that feedback loop because all of a sudden you see pictures of people wearing your stuff or with the book. And I think that's harder to quantify in a spreadsheet. But when you're out there where conversations are actually happening, you can see that.

For the lack of the other word. And by the way, the silent laugh was about Frisbee, because I have two dogs, they love Frisbees. So good. I would definitely utilize that. But anyways, what I kind of reflected on what you were saying was this notion of brand love, meaning that, like, you have so much affiliation, it's a complete intangible assets. Like, you don't put this in your balance sheets. Right. And it's hard to measure, as you like, quite nicely pointed out. But what would you say back in retrospective? Because the same happens as well as like drift and preview, like privy exploded during the last three years or so, the first time that I was working with it, I accidentally find it on Shopify. And right now, like, it's a go to and we're talking about this in communities, like, what a shift. So do you have like a secret sauce for creating brand love?

No.

Or love in general?

I don't. And I'm pausing on that intentionally because there's not one secret combination. What is exciting to me about marketing and brand building and all this stuff is like, I think that each time, and I only know this now because it's years later, I didn't know this at the time, but like each time you're basically like the chef, right? And you have to deliver a dish that everybody loves and enjoys eating and gets them full and has them want to tell their friends and other people. But you have different ingredients in order to deliver on that. And so like at Drift, we had different ingredients. We had well known founders, we had tier, you know, super tier one investors like Sequoia. We had a bunch of money, but we also had like a competitive market. Right. And a couple other factors. And so like, you have to work that in. Okay. There's already companies in this space. We had no customers when we were at the Drift. In the early days, Privy was completely different. They had raised very little money. They had been around for almost a decade and kind of had a failure and then pivot success moment and a repositioning of the company. But then when I went there, they already had, you know, millions in revenue and almost, I think it was like half a million users that were already using the product. And so there it was less about like, how do we make, you know, how do we build this audience? It was more like, whoa, there's hundreds of thousands of people already using this. How do we, like tap into those people? Like, the audience is already there. Let's use them to like spread the word. And so it was more about like creating a brand around something that was already there and being like, hey, this, like, we need to reposition and rethink how we talk about this to make it more interesting and appealing and, you know, clarify the positioning of something. And so I don't think there isn't a playbook, but I will say that my preferred method is usually around content and community and audience building and basically thinking of the product that the company is trying to sell and building a media company or media brand around that. And media brand meaning where the product is the content. It's not like most companies do content and it's pretty good content for a company that's sells software where like the opposite, you know, I think that not the opposite, the real way to do that is to be like, how do you build content that is so good for your dream customers that they want to read your stuff and be with you regardless of whether you have something to sell to them? And so, like with Drift, for example, we built this podcast called Seeking Wisdom and created this amazing community around it. And it happened to be from the people that make Drift. And by the way, when we were ready to launch our product at Drift, we could announce it to the Seeking Wisdom audience because we're like, hey, you know that thing we've been telling you about, it's here. You know, you already know and trust us. Why don't you try this thing? It's just, it's such a different conversation. And so I think that the way that you build a reputation as a brand today is online through content. And so in each case we focused on at Drift, it was about building community and content around B2B marketers. At Privy, it was about building content and community around small businesses in the e commerce marketing space and really becoming the number one resource for that Persona kind of separate from the product and then betting that most people are shopping for products, they're not just going to look for one and buy it. They might Google other things. And so we wanted them to see our blog, we wanted them to see our podcast, we wanted them to join our Facebook group and community. And it was not a product forum. It was more about you as the customer. How can we help you achieve your goals? And it happens to be powered by Drift. Right?

I have no idea how this will end with you, but I attended like DG Academy and you use this expression so I will dare to repeat it. Demand generation highly influenced by the thoughts of our common brand. Chris Walker, would you say that these are the parts of the marketing that are actually vital for demand generation or. I really puzzled with the idea that demand generation is one stream and demand gathering is the other stream and everybody's talking about ads and SEO and stuff like that. Whereas you have this very unique voice, at least in B2B space. So whenever people are calling like something which is like unmeasurable in marketing, you know where I'm getting with this. But would you say that this is like demand generation part?

Yes, I think demand generation is like the big word that could mean anything.

Oh, roast it. Feel free to roast it.

No, I don't have a problem. I really don't I don't care too much about acronyms. I actually think the biggest problem is we get too caught up in acronyms and you know, and we get caught up in all these words when it's just like just, just actually separate. Step back. And this is. I learned this lesson at Drift with David. He was like, forget about all the buzzwords in B2B marketing. Use your brain. Think about this as a business and as a funnel. And so I think the definition doesn't bother me. I actually think what this narrative that Chris is pushing hard on makes a lot of sense and is smart, which is there's really two motions and it's not new. He's just turning up the volume on telling this more. There's two parts of and actually any good just to shout out the demand gen people out there, like any good demand gen leader already knows this and believes this and is splitting up their function how they see the business into these two paths. But there's basically, yeah, there's demand creation and demand capture. And I think the problem is that most companies and most marketers just kind of operate in this. Like whether they know it or not, they just go straight to demand capture, which is like they do adwords, social advertising, SEO. That's all stuff that is basically like direct response level stuff, right? You're going to show up in search. If someone goes to Google and actually types a keyword and finds a page. Right. Or sees an ad. It just that is how is not how people often buy. Especially in B2B, there is multiple touch points and there has to be so much more than just the direct response conversion stuff. It's important that that stuff is there and you drive a ton of revenue from those channels. But you have to a lot of times, especially in the B2B world where Chris and others are talking is there's 10,000, 15,000 other tools out there. You're trying to sell something to a big enterprise, right? You need to create demand for this thing. People don't wake up and they're like, you know what I need today? I need a conversational marketing platform. People didn't know that at the time. We made the case for that and then built content education to tell people that and then had the market saying, huh, do I need conversational marketing? Right. That's the position that you want to be in. We're now let's say something like conversational marketing is already established as a category. There's probably more demand capture involved at this stage than at the beginning. But I Also think that to me demand creation is also about playing offense and being more proactive about building a brand and telling a story and getting people excited about something that is bigger than we're just selling this piece of software.

Love it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. That was quite a brilliant answer. I do believe from watching the world around me that what you're saying for the last five years that I'm tracking you on LinkedIn, your thoughts are getting like, are gaining a lot of momentum, especially now like when E commerce attribution is broken, like post iOS 14 changes and like the ones that are using like meta ads. The other thing which like hits what shit to the hit the fan was like recession and just what is going on consumer wise in terms of expectation. So everybody is like, yeah, the companies with like the best brands will win. Focus on your customers. But if like really direct driven, if all your metrics were set up in this reality of direct response. As you are a consultant to startups, what I want to ask you is how the hell can companies transition?

I mean you might not have to. I would say first, is it working? If what you're doing is working and you're doing just those things and it's working, then don't just go do content because I said it, or don't go start a podcast because Chris Walker started a podcast. Maybe you don't need to. Right? I think it starts with a hypothesis about first, like how do people find out about you and how did they buy from you in your industry? And then like kind of map those things out and you need to then go kind of like lay down these bricks or like sticky trap. Maybe sticky traps is better to get people to come to you. And typically that's like are they, are you know, like are they going to come to us? And I think in most cases the answer is no. And so you need to focus on like how can we, well, how do we take people from not knowing who we are to buying from us? Right? Like what's the basic steps in the funnel? Awareness, interest, desire, action. Right? So like if you don't have any awareness that you exist, you're not going to be able to get anybody to sign up for your thing. Right. And if you can't get any to sign up for your thing, you can map back the whole funnel. So I would say first it needs to start with a philosophy like do you believe that your marketing strategy is broken? Can it get you to where you want to go? How do people buy? This is the non. Well the spreadsheet part of it is, I guess, quantifying this and understanding it's working, but you have to be able to articulate what type of marketing do we want to do. And so at Privy, the hypothesis was that they had kind of only done the direct response stuff. SEO, ADS, AdWords. The hypothesis was that we listen to hundreds and hundreds of customer calls. Right. People are small. These are entrepreneurs starting Shopify stores who are either moonlighting, doing this on the side and so they don't have a lot of time, or they are going full time on this, but they're also doing 15 other things because they're a traditional small business owner and trying to figure this out. And so, well. Oh, interesting. What does that person need? Well, from what we hear on the calls, they need a lot of education, they need a lot of help. Okay, interesting. So can we provide that for them? Yeah, probably. We have a lot of internal knowledge from customers and stuff and stuff that we've done. Okay. And if we create that content for them, do we think that people might create an affinity for Privy and be more likely to buy from us? And by the way, there are ways to measure this because we can get 200 people on a live training session or we can have 10,000 downloads of our podcast and we have a masterclass where people go to that and they watch videos live. There's plenty of ways to measure that, but I think it starts with a philosophy. Does this make sense, like, what I'm trying to get at? It's like a lot of people, we just see this and we can't actually articulate where. I think for me it's like, fundamentally why are you doing marketing as a company? Can you answer that question first?

I think that like, we're not necessarily thinking about the meta aspect of it, Right. So especially when you are like dealing with more like engineer driven companies or like technical founders, which also have their quirks in terms of personal branding and posting on social media. But we love them for being smart and we forgive them or without collaboration with marketing until they see some success. So sometimes it's kind of like show, don't tell. And within companies you kind of not necessarily have guerrilla projects or something like that. But sometimes it's really difficult, like for CMOs to get a buy in if you have a founder who profoundly doesn't believe in marketing. So you need to show something before.

They don't ever give it the time that you need. So like, if we just like, let's say for the sake of this conversation, like Replace the word brand with just, like, organic and so channels that you own and create. You're not just spending money on someone else's platform, right? To go and get those eyeballs. The returns from that are incredible. The problem is it takes time. And typically, like, we make this decision, like, too late. It's like, well, we need to. You know, what are we going to. Like, we're so far behind on our sales goal. Like, what are we going to do to hit the sales goal, like, between now and January? Like, the answer is not going to be, like, brand content. You know, it's like, that stuff is going to take time. And so you end up in this, like, this constant battle of, like, you should have done it early enough. And so I think with Drift, we did it from the beginning, which was huge. It's definitely. It's much harder to do this down the road and add it on because it takes time. But just on the, like, taking time being worth it thing, it's ridiculous. I don't have a spreadsheet to quantify this, but I have a paid community for B2B Marketing Pro. That's called Exit 5, right? Everybody that joins Exit 5 is $20 a month. There's now, like, 3,200 members. Everybody that joins, answer a question. Like, how did you hear about it? 90% of those people say LinkedIn. Okay? So you know what I'm doing lately? I'm doing more LinkedIn, love it, simple. I'm posting more. I took. I was like, took. You know, I was just like, didn't go as hard after LinkedIn for, like, three to six months. Cause I got tired of it. I'm back on it now, and I'm noticing that again. So that speaks like, you just have to be there and do it. And it takes time. And, like, so in the early days of Drift, we were not, like, David was not like, let's do this podcast. But after three months, we're gonna revisit this and, like, see how it's doing with the sales numbers. You know, it's like, he wanted to have the podcast and forever because he believed in having the podcast. And three, six months in, all of a sudden, we start getting unprovoked, like, inbound messages. People are messaging him on LinkedIn, they're messaging me on Twitter. They're talking to. They're coming into sales and talking to our sales team again. There was no spreadsheet that calculated that and told us, like, six is the number. Right? But it was like, we knew, like, holy shit. More people are starting to come to us inbound and telling us about it. Let's go do more of this and let's invest more in the podcast and so let's bring on guests and let's invest in the studio. And like that's how you start to see that. And the reason why I really respect what Chris Walker is saying right now is because he's given me the tool that I wish I had to go and measure that, which is, oh wow, that's actually genius. Self reported attribution, perfect. It's not, it's not the whole story. You still need to measure attribution from like the digital channels. But if we had self reported attribution like on, you know, whether done by our sales team or on the website back in the day at drift over 50% of those first, you know, however many customers would have said they heard it was through word of mouth or content or the podcast. And so those are like the signals that you need. And so if you want to make the shift to do more brand, I think race the word brand and say like, what are you really trying to get? Like, you want more of your own audience to market to, right? You don't want to have to like go and spend dollars every time to go and do this. Like, and in a very simple way, I feel this as a, as an entrepreneur, right? I run a, a business for Exit 5. I have an email list of 15,000 people. Whenever I send out, if I want to make money, I put an offer or I put a promo in that email list or there's a sponsor and it makes Money because that is 15, like email is still the most underrated channel. We own that audience. And so when we press the send button on that day, and I don't even mean make money, it could be like you and me are doing an event. How am I going to get 200 people to sign up for that event? I'm going to send an email to my audience, right? And they know me, they trust me, they know the copy, so they sign up, right? I, I think we underrate that. So I would just go back to be like, are you trying to build your own channels? Is that why you want to do this? Okay, great. Well now let's keep going down the list. Well, okay, that's a great idea. You want to do that, but it's going to take time, by the way. You're not just going to do all this in three months. And so I would say let's give this like a six month check in like, at six months, we're going to pick one or two channels that we're going to focus on. Hey, we're a B2B SaaS company. We think we want to do LinkedIn. Great. I would say just focus on LinkedIn. Don't do LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. Like, you got to be great at one channel. Focus in on one. Pick one or two channels. Probably not even two. Pick one. Give it six months. Commit to consistency. I think the best metric for doing this in the early days is an output measure, not a quantifiable one. Because it's like, look, we're going to do this podcast anyway. I'm going to commit to doing this podcast every week for the next six months, and then we're going to figure out how we're going to, like, measure this moving forward. I think you need those types of outputs where it's very easy to go do. I mean, you host a podcast, right? There's days you don't want to do this damn thing. Like, or maybe not, but not today. Okay, not today. And that's kind of you. But, you know, there's days where you don't want to do it and you just know that you just got. You got to just push through. You got to get, you know, you got to publish X amount just to get out.

It's like freaking do it exercise.

Yeah, Like, I. Look, I have 3,000 paying members of a community. 50% of them or more don't know that I have a podcast, and it's called the same thing. And so it's like, you always are going to be up against it. And so, so much of it is about repetition, repetition, repetition. So every week in my newsletter, I'm plugging my podcast. That's not because I expect some, like, direct correlation between those two metrics. It's because I just know that over time, I got to keep telling people about it, keep telling people about it, and eventually it's going to continue to grow.

I wouldn't say it's drop the mic because you have more exciting stuff to say. But, yeah, I just ran out of excellent.

That's all that was.

No, that was like a freaking excellent taster. Because, yeah, it's so easy to just, like, undermine the longevity of it probably, like, in your professional life as well. You have people like, who saw you five years beforehand on the stage now, like, sending you an inquiry to do business with you, or just like lurkers such as I who have been following you on LinkedIn. Since forever. Maybe like those mini products could be good. Good, good, good, good idea how to enter your ecosystem. Because sometimes, you know, like, it's a little bit awkward to just like go all in. So sometimes it's all about, like, try it before you buy it. And that is an excellent talking view about product led growth. Right. So you don't want to commit and go like fully like on 100k offer or something like that without having a little bit of a taste of it before. So could we apply those principles to contents, just like structure, content, hierarchy, how things are structured?

Yes. As far as like testing ideas. Yeah. I mean, I think this is why this is to me the most underrated part of, of audience building. And by audience building, I just mean, like, could be any channel, could be LinkedIn followers, Twitter followers, email list. When you build an audience in a niche, let's just say B2B marketing, you now have a direct feedback loop to that group of people, right? And so you can say, basically you can test ideas and so you could send out a newsletter and you could try a very controversial or different topic. And maybe there's only 50 people on your newsletter, but you usually don't get more than one response. But you're like, you know what, this week I'm going to say something crazy. And I don't mean to for the sake of saying something crazy. I'm going to take a really strong take on this marketing belief that I have and here's why SEO is dead. Whoa. When I sent that email, I got more responses than I've ever gotten before. I got six. And I don't know, it's not because six is different than two, but it's like, oh, shit, I got six responses that time. Huh? People are really interested in it. So as the marketer in me then takes that as a signal, like, oh, wow, this is a topic people are really interested in. I'm gonna go do more of that. And so maybe next step is like, I'm gonna do a one hour. Hey, I got more responses to my email last week than ever before about SEO is dead. I wanna talk more about this. And so next week I'm doing a one hour zoom call that you can all come to and I'm gonna break down my formula and talk to you about why SEO is dead and blah, blah, blah, blah. Then you go and do the live session. Nobody shows up. Fantastic. Great learning, right? What did you learn? There's so many we can go run down. Why? Well, was it the content? Was it the offer? Was it the time of day, was it they didn't want to show up? Was it they maybe just wanted a video. There's so many different things you can run, but this is one example of how you, like, have spent very little money. But you're trying to identify this. So I'll give you another example. This is much easier once you have an audience. But I've been messing around with, like, I really want to do something outside of B2B marketing. I have plenty of business and things in B2B marketing, but I love content, I love podcasting, and I like so many other things outside of marketing, like being a dad, working out, playing golf, working on myself, books, whatever. So I went to LinkedIn and I posted this morning. Before this, I said, I'm exploring a new podcast outside of marketing. I'm making one huge list of people I want to have conversations with and learn from across everything. Parenting, entrepreneurship, fitness, books, health, blah, blah, blah. This is a bad idea, right? I should probably just find a niche. And I just posted just to be like, this is a bad idea. Right? Because I wanted people to say, no, this is a great idea. You should do this, you should do this, you should do this. So Now I have 50 comments of roughly people who are saying, like, you should go do this. I don't know if I'm going to do it, but damn if I don't feel better about it. Like, I've already kind of tested this one idea. Like, huh, If I went and did this thing, could there be an audience there? And I think you can do this in a very small scale. Maybe you don't have an audience yet. Maybe you don't have email lists yet. Maybe you don't have followers yet.

Okay, but you can post in a Facebook group or whatever.

Like, go somewhere else. Yeah, go somewhere else. Or even, by the way, even if you don't even have that community, go and do your own research and be like, I'm on Reddit and in this one subreddit, there's a Reddit community about people who run one mile every single day. And they've ran a mile every single day for like six years. And it's all these people are putting, okay, I just found this niche community about people who, holy cow. I had this idea of, like, I'm going to run one mile a day. Just baseline, one mile a day. There's 3,000 people in this community who do this. That's good enough idea for me to go test, like, one step further. So I think a lot of times in Whether you're building a physical product or community, digital product, whatever, nothing is new. There's always going to be new forms of something, but you can pretty much go and test it. And again, this goes back to like the ability to like, if you have the ability to build an audience and you have email direct access to getting your feedback from people who might be in your audience, that creates a huge advantage for you. Another idea by the way, is founder brand the book. I had the idea for it, but I crowdsourced a bunch of it from the Exit 5 community. I was like, hey, I gotta ship, I've been working on this book, I gotta ship the title to the publisher. Here's the title. What do you think about it? I mean that was like a cheat code for getting the book done and feeling good about it. So could the title have been better and different? And is there 15 ways you could have written the title? Yes, but I got a gut feeling from the group of like, this is a pretty good, this is a good enough idea. I get what you're trying to do, go ahead and do it. And I think that's back to the this is why like I hate the social media roi, like direct sales conversation. Because like how do you quantify that, this value of social media, right? For a company like you're getting those insights from people who are in your audience, it's not just about did they buy our product. You're getting this like feedback loop from social media at scale, which I think is very powerful.

That's brilliant. Saw your post in the morning and I knew immediately that you were testing. I actually wanted to ask you about that, but you. So congratulations. One brilliant thing that I absolutely adore about you is how spontaneous can you be? It doesn't seem that you have like this 5 month content plan in place, right? Maybe you have it, maybe you don't. You will tell. But anyways, what I'm very, very, very impressed with is just like this, this approachability, this human aspect of your kind of natural ability, how to form the conversation. Is that engineered or is it natural?

It's natural for better or worse.

But how do you decide like what to post? Is this a daily process? Like talk me through your process, please.

Yeah, so the funny thing is this is a weakness of mine also. It's not now because I work for myself but like as a cmo, this is a weakness which is like I have, have so many ideas and could drive a team and other people crazy. Be like, you just said do this and now you want to do this. And there are pros and cons to everything. For me, I can be pretty spontaneous about it. I know people who, like, work for themselves or even a similar position who are like, they got a tracker for. They post this on this day. They measure the engagement of that. I've never been into that. Sometimes I think of things in advance and I'm like, you know what? Tomorrow I'm going to post X. But usually it's like I kind of just think about, oh, I haven't written anything today. What should I write about? Okay, I have an idea. Write it on my phone. Oftentimes I'm like, I should write something today. I think it's important to just post consistently. What do I have? And so I go in my Apple Notes. And so in my Apple Notes, I have a backlog. This is literally the whole process, very scientific. I have an Apple Note called Social Backlog, and I just put stuff in there. And I have memes, screenshots, links to things on Twitter that I to post on LinkedIn later. And so I'll just go through there and I'll be like, oh, I haven't posted that. Okay, I'm going to post that. And so actually, this is a very simple advice, but I share this with a lot of founders, especially those who I Talked to about LinkedIn. It's not about performing in that moment. Like, you got to write something. It's like you have these thoughts all day. And so now it's more like, oh, I kind of have lots of different thoughts about marketing and business all day. Well, you can't just post them every minute that you have them. And then I don't want to forget them. And so I write them down in my Apple Notes. And now I've created this, like, infinite backlog. I probably have two, three weeks of. If somebody wanted to schedule a bunch of social posts for me, they could. And I'd probably have a month worth of content by what's in the backlog. And so I'm constantly trying to, like, you know, I'm constantly posting things and seeing what's out there. But it is definitely very spontaneous. But I think with LinkedIn, LinkedIn is mainly the channel that I post on the most consistently. And I usually post there, like, once or twice a day. I do some stuff now with, like, sponsors or others where, like, I do have scheduled stuff. So, like, I have like a sponsored post that I have to put out tomorrow, and that's on my calendar to remember to do that. But otherwise today I didn't have anything. And while I was sitting in my car waiting to go in the doctor before I wrote that post. And that's my post for today. And then if I think of something later when I'm on LinkedIn again, if it's been five, six hours, then I'll post it. But usually on LinkedIn it's like you need kind of six to eight hours in between posts to see anything meaningful. But once a day is there. Once a day is good. It. Other than I'm very spontaneous with it. I just, it's tough. I have like a real love hate relationship with the, with social media because it's super. It's been, I mean, it's helped me build an amazing business. Like I wouldn't be able to do the things that I can do and where I'm at today without it. But it's a lot. You burn out on having to post all the time. Every now and then you write something and it was not meant in a negative way. Like, and you know, it's so different than if you talk to me and, and you hear my voice and someone interpret, what do you mean the sky is blue? The sky is blue is not blue where I am. Look at this more. You deal with some of that stuff. But recently I've been trying to just treat it as, you know what, I'm just going to have more fun with it. I don't care. Especially now that I work for myself. There's no boss or company that I'm representing. It's all me. And so I can be a little bit more freewheeling with it than I would be in the past.

I think that we are ending this up in a danger zone of no excuses, of just like doing the freaking posting, of like making sure that we are there like on a present basis. But do say goodbye with a final piece of advice, please. Dave. How can the founders and SEOs that are listening to Product LED podcast find the courage, stamina, as well as sometimes the guts to say something on a frequent basis? Like, what's your best way that you are seeing around the industry? What would you say?

Suck it up. It's just writing a couple words on your phone like, you do much harder things all day. You have much harder conversations with real people inside of your company, hard conversation with employees, with investors, with advisors. You also don't have to put your whole, you know, you're not putting your Social Security number online and you know, pictures of you in your underwear. Like you can literally write. You can almost have a separate character and be the business version of yourself and just share lessons that you're learning about your industry, about your company, about the things that you're doing. And you're already doing so much of this internally. All founders that I know are very heavy communicators inside of the company. They're sending Slack messages, sending email messages, they're sending looms and videos and writing wiki posts and sending, you know, the founders monthly update. That content is all there. It's more about just thinking about, like, oh, how can I turn my brain onto what might be interesting to others? I would also say you can take some of the pressure off by not worrying about the result in a very like two, three week short span. I would treat it as, I'm going to take the first six months and use this to just kind of like find my voice, you know, Like, I'm sure you do the same thing. Like, if I go back, if you were to go back and I was to you to play me the first podcast interview that I ever did eight years ago when I was the host, that would be the worst thing. I don't even want to go listen. I don't want to hear it. And the same is true. But honestly, look, in most cases, nobody's following you on social media anyway. And so if you have this big fear about the reception, nobody's going to see it. Also, I would say that even if you do have an audience, let's just. I have 140,000 followers on LinkedIn. I think on average maybe like 30,000, 40,000 of those people see one of my posts. And so the audience of who actually sees what you write is so small anyway that to me, the goal for the first three to six months is to use it. Use it as a way to find your voice and then from there you can refine. My last thing I'll say to this objection is I hate this objection. Because this is marketing today. This is how you build awareness for your company. It is done through social media. Social media is not like a separate thing anymore. It is literally how we all, as humans communicate. And whether you like it or not, it is where the conversations about people's work and life is happening at scale. It's on social media. And so if you care about marketing your business because you want to grow your business, so if you care about growing your business, then like, can you look at it from that lens? Like, this is a service, this is a. It's a tax. Like, I don't love working out, but I do it Because I want to be in good shape and be healthy. And so you got to do it. Okay? You got to do some marketing. That's like the CEO saying like, ah, I really don't like finance. And so I'm not going to be involved in any of the finance of the business. And it's like, well, that's not going to go so well. And so I think marketing is one of those essential things that you have to be able to do Also. Last point, marketing is just another word for sales. And so if you want to grow the sales of your company, social media is one of the best ways to be doing that. You just got to be willing to sign up for the long term. It's not a get rich quick scheme. It's not six minute abs. It's going to take time.

Okay, now it was dropped. The mic stain, the very last thing. How can our audience continue this awesome conversation with you? We'll of course link your community there, your podcast, everything that you are known for. But what's the best way? What's the best way to get into your ecosystem?

Send me a fax. I have a fax machine that is for podcast listeners only. No, you can just google Dave Gearhart or go to LinkedIn or exit5.com. But thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun. It's fun when people are fun podcast hosts. Sometimes it's like you have a question number one and you're going to ask me that question and no matter what I say, you're going to hit period and then. All right, question number two. And I think you do a nice job of hosting this and I appreciate you having me on. It's really kind of you. You.

Same to you. Like, I'm speechless. Thanks to all our fantastic audience for listening to this episode. Rock on and continue growing through product. Bye.

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