Dave Gearhart (2:39)

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. Well, that's some of the actual marketer. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

Ross (2:54)

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

Dave Gearhart (2:59)

No, I mean, yeah, I think SEO is one of the most important things 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.

Ross (3:17)

Yeah.

Dave Gearhart (3:18)

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.

Ross (3:25)

Like.

Dave Gearhart (3:26)

No, 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 looking at. 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 content has multiple formats. It is podcasts, 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 also an amazing time to be in the game because so much is changing with AI and search. It's a good time to be here.

Ross (4:05)

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

Dave Gearhart (4:10)

Wait, why? What is the overall like from an industry insider standpoint? What is the tone?

Ross (4:14)

I mean, it's balanced, I'd 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. Still quite significant channel. But that's the nervousness. It's just. Will it be negative 2030.

Dave Gearhart (4:47)

Yeah. Wasn't it big news though, 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 Gemini update, like Flash or whatever it was called, because their Gemini 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?

Ross (5:15)

I think so. It's that I. And that's Kevin's take. And ChatGPT, as in 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 that Gemini update likely is. Okay, but not here to have you kind of riff on SEO. I appreciate it. I mean, why I thought of having you here is you're a great content creator. I mean, 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're building a brand that's clearly well known, 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. We'd love to hear about your personal workflow. Like, what does that look like in process? Yeah.

Dave Gearhart (6:25)

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 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 my career into VP of marketing and CMO at a couple of smaller SaaS companies. And at the two companies that I was at, 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. That becomes their passion. I started writing about it on LinkedIn. 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 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 brand halo from that. So I had a podcast. People started listening to podcasts. I decided that I was gonna try something new. This was in 2019, where I was gonna launch paid content for marketers. I was like, I think this is valuable. I'm a capitalist. I'm gonna charge money for my content, like a subscription business. And in addition to my job as cmo, I was like, I'm gonna launch this thing on Patreon where I share my lessons, learnings, and thoughts on marketing, and I'm gonna 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 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 was really valuable for people. I thought I was going to have like 20 members. It'd be $10 a month. I would have been happy with $500 a month, like, for side income and like, contribute to my rent. But 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, 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.

Ross (10:15)

There you go.

Dave Gearhart (10:16)

And like, this is how this stuff happens. Like, you're absolutely right. And so my wife and I were new parents at the time. 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 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 don't have to post all the time. And so 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 has just exploded. And then that was the kind of thing that led me to realize there's something bigger here. There is 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. 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 two and a half years ago and I launched that and 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. 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 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 could be a webinar that we do 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 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 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 building this on top of today.

Ross (13:27)

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 want to speak 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?

Dave Gearhart (13:45)

What do you mean from an ideation standpoint?

Ross (13:46)

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

Dave Gearhart (13:54)

Yeah. So I mean a lot of it is. A bunch of it is driven off of my personal experience. And so I went from PR, like I worked in this industry for 10 years. Over that time of 10 years, I 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 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 and advised 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 one on one conversations where I'm not the expert. 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 Kips, 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. There's not one source, it's multiple of them. It's like 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. If somebody who writes a newsletter, 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 riffing on which topics are most important and relevant to people right now.

Ross (15:48)

What I like about your community and you made me think of just this thread of obviously talking to your customers, 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 just respect, 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 I don't know if you'd agree with that idea of like seen where people.

Dave Gearhart (16:27)

Absolutely. I mean like, I think it's this is like SEO. 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 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 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 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 community have the same question and it just. The cycle repeats.

Ross (17:38)

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. Just like Dave, sit down every day 9am for an hour block. You have someone on your team edits every single post. Like what does that look like?

Dave Gearhart (17:54)

Somebody on the team that edits my LinkedIn?

Ross (17:56)

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

Dave Gearhart (17:59)

Absolutely not. No way. Nope. Just that's me. I think you got to be careful with outsourcing that maybe if that's not your strength. But I've done it for so long. But yeah, I. 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 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. 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. 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 writing 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 like a made up thing, a belief of mine. I don't know if it's because when I don't schedule posts, 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, 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. 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 going to write tomorrow and it's just on my calendar, in a task on my calendar at 9:00 and I have a video clip that I want to post and some copy and I'm going to sit down tomorrow like between 9 and 10 o'clock just like when I go through my inbox and I'm going to 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 it's like a prompt. I'll see somebody else's post in the feed about this and hey, like here's why AI sucks and 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 then you basically the kids call it like ratioing 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 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 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 working out. But I found that the true way to grow on LinkedIn 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 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.

Ross (22:14)

I sometimes feel like I'm almost to a hundred percent. 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, it.

Dave Gearhart (22:26)

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 an 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 need to just talk about what you're doing? So 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. Here's my hot take on marketing for today. 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 and 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 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, that makes sense. But it is. 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 50, 000 impressions and just blow. Blows every other piece of content away. But then it's.

Ross (23:46)

That would only happen if you didn't. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Couldn't do it all in a row, right? It's because you do the other stuff.

Dave Gearhart (23:52)

But I think you just kind of got to look at it 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 marketing and product performance, the engagement rate was great.

Ross (24:03)

Yeah, makes sense.

Dave Gearhart (24:04)

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

Sponsor (24:08)

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Ross (25:24)

Yeah. On your scheduling point, 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.

Dave Gearhart (25:49)

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, the real way is to be patient. Wait until you already posted today so you're going to get dinged from LinkedIn number two. If you're really passionate about, just wait the next day, schedule it. Make it 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 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 or you gotta wait six to eight hours. Whereas, like Twitter, you can just go, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

Ross (26:31)

Yeah.

Dave Gearhart (26:32)

So it is better to wait.

Ross (26:34)

Makes sense.

Dave Gearhart (26:34)

And 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, if you're taking athletic greens or whatever, that works perfectly. Then. Then 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 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 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.

Sponsor (27:17)

Right.

Ross (27:17)

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

Dave Gearhart (27:26)

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

Ross (27:39)

Team loves me. So you had the anchor point of your kind of brand and posting. 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 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 content on site content last deliberately and that's normally what you would do.

Dave Gearhart (28:17)

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

Ross (28:23)

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

Dave Gearhart (28:25)

It's just not. It's not. 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 thing. Like 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 just kind of became unintentionally the whole flywheel because it's like we do a podcast with someone that becomes the newsletter that becomes the 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 we have 5,000 members in this like private community and we have, we get about 10,000 website visitors a month and 99.9% of them come to the website through direct search or searching for exit 5. So we have no, we don't rank for any keywords 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 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 want to go do and execute. Now we just haven't done it. So we've done it last 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 personal bias towards. Like 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 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 decide like, I'm gonna start a video. No, he's fluent. He has no learning curve of like having to make videos. 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 long form like written content and so just happened to be that way for us. I don't think there's a right or wrong way to do it. Just the ingredients match. If you did something again, your background is SEO and website. That's probably going to be where you're going to start to build your moat. You're not going to be like, 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?

Ross (32:00)

Yes, that's fair. I'm not on TikTok. 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?

Dave Gearhart (32:31)

Yeah, sure. So first, 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 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. Then nobody says they use Facebook anymore. Everybody still uses it because they're all checking it at some point. And so Facebook was great because we had this loop of, like, you're waiting in line at Starbucks 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 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. 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 in 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 don't want to pay $8.25 per month per user 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 verse this other thing? And I don't know the answer because I didn't evaluate other companies. I wanted to move this thing off of Facebook. The head of customer success at Circle is this guy called Tim Fein 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 this white glove onboarding. You know, we moved over all the content. They hooked me up with this other guy, Jordan Godby, who runs a company called Growth Community, where they help people build communities. So that's why I went with Circle was like I was a solopreneur at the time. This seemed like an overwhelming project, like migrating websites essentially. They made it real easy and the product worked for me and they 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 dedicated mobile app. And so like 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 cheap but like you also pay for like HubSpot or something. And it's become a full marketing automation platform for our community. And we have a dedicated, we have a full time person on the team, Matt, 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 we're not writing code, we're creating content. And so yeah, we use circle for 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 gonna 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 gonna suck in the short term. But like, I gotta rip this band aid and like 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, 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. 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 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, there's so many lessons in there learned 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 someone's community on Slack and you just spend half your day getting blasted with like at here at channel. 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. Yeah, inbound.org growth hackers, all those communities from back in the day just end up going to zero because they just become a sales channel for the members.

Ross (37:47)

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

Dave Gearhart (37:51)

No, you, you Will, like we've had some scenarios where we've had to kick people out because they auto DM'd a bunch of people like upon joining and that stuff happens. We're working hard to like we have a stat, we have a team and we have to work hard to do it. I do think that's one of the benefits that I didn't understand. Like it's a paid community because I wanted to generate revenue from it. But I do think 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 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 out of it and you're going to put in more to get that thing out of it. So it's a win win.

Ross (38:33)

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.

Dave Gearhart (38:49)

Yeah, yeah.

Ross (38:50)

Do you have any?

Dave Gearhart (38:51)

Well, no, they can't because the mechanics and the incentives don't work. Right. And so if you're a SaaS company, 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?

Ross (39:06)

And then like rounding error as well probably.

Dave Gearhart (39:08)

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. Ultimately, even if things go really well after a year, you're in a board meeting or you're in an exec meeting and the VP of sales is like, wait a second, 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 the Venn diagram of like, how do we extract the value from this 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 five. And so we have a 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, how's it going? You have to think about it like a true product and be a product manager 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 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 trying to do lead scoring and nurturing on members to try to like get them into your product, then, you know, it's not the same.

Ross (41:07)

Makes sense. 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 perception do you feel people have currently towards that? Like, what's the thought process? If there's an encapsulator, it's crazy.

Dave Gearhart (41:31)

Well, I think there's a couple things, right? And so I think it's not just AI, like separate from AI. My perception as a former marketing leader, I'm just a thought leader now, is like, turn SEO. I'm an intern. SEO has become harder because of how much like the proliferation of content. Fifteen 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 and so it is much harder to drive traffic. Consumers 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 I don't necessarily need to go to Google and type in like world news. I don't need to go to that because I'm going to see it somewhere else. So those are 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 ChatGPT for search related questions now. And so I just think about that as a consumer, like 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 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 we'd think about it, is like earned media and 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 ChatGPT, through Instagram, through TikTok, through YouTube shorts. Like I don't think 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 in Google. That seems to be changing. That's bigger strategy. That's like why, why does a CMO invest in SEO? Because we want inbound, organic, high quality traffic coming to our website, period. If there's a middle layer there, whether It's Google, Chat, GPT, whatever, we don't necessarily care. Like in the Exit 5 example, we're playing on LinkedIn because it works and that's where our audience is and we have an advantage there.

Ross (44:56)

Yeah, makes sense. I think that's a great summary and way of thinking about it. Like if we the SEOs 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.

Dave Gearhart (45:17)

Or just like, you know, there could be a future where like let's just use Exit 5 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 chat GPT, someone asking Google.

Ross (45:33)

Yeah, that's the job. Yeah.

Dave Gearhart (45:34)

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

Ross (45:42)

Yeah, agreed. I mean that's the new kind of day one. Noah 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.

Dave Gearhart (45:52)

Wait, what's that tool called?

Ross (45:53)

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

Dave Gearhart (46:07)

AI brand monitoring.

Ross (46:09)

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.

Dave Gearhart (46:17)

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

Ross (46:21)

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 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 depiction that the bigger players are going to keep winning.

Dave Gearhart (46:48)

Yeah.

Ross (46:49)

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

Dave Gearhart (46:57)

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

Ross (47:01)

No, they're here. Yeah. I highly recommend Exit 5, of course. Go check Dave out on LinkedIn, follow connect with you and I think it's been great. Dave, thanks for coming on.

Dave Gearhart (47:09)

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

Ross (47:14)

Of course.

Dave Gearhart (47:18)

Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what, I'm not even going to ask.

Sponsor (47:23)

You to subscribe and leave a review.

Dave Gearhart (47:25)

Because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community.

Sponsor (48:31)

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