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Email, in my humble opinion, is still the greatest marketing channel of all time. It's the only way you can truly own your audience today. But when it comes to building those emails, well, if you've ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know just how painful that can be. I won't name names, but templates get too rigid. Editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever when it shouldn't. That's why we love Knack here at Exit 5. Knack is a no code email platform that makes it easy to create on brand high performance, forming emails without the bottlenecks. If you're frustrated by clunky email builders, you need nac. If you're tired of hoping the email you sent looks good across all devices, just test it in NAC first. And if you're a big team that's making it hard to collaborate and get approvals on your email, you definitely need nac. The best part, everything takes a fraction of the time. You can see Knack in action@knack.com exit5. That's knock.com exit5. Or just let them know you heard about Knack from exit5.
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That's us.
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You're listening to the Dave Gerhard Show.
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All right. Hey, I'm back with a solo episode. It's just me, me and my friends on this episode. I talk about the one big idea for this week, which is attention. Why did we make attention a dirty word in marketing? It doesn't have to be a dirty word in marketing. And in fact, I could argue that attention is the name of the game in business in marketing. So we talk about attention. I talk about the hard thing about hard things. We talk about an event we're doing, and I take a bunch of listener questions from the ghost of marketing past to should I start a business beyond Exit 5? Enjoy this episode. It's me solo. The sunglasses are back on. It's Dave's podcast. All right. Hey, I'm back. Solo episode. It's just me, Dave. I'm the founder of Exit 5 and host of this show. Dave Gearhart show or Dave Geart Podcast. I don't know, whatever. What does it say? Dave Geart Podcast. That's me. We named it after me because I don't. Just makes a lot of sense. And I want to do more podcasting in 2026. I know I've been doing it forever, but we're investing in this channel. It's awesome. And the reason why, it's just like the connection you create from a Podcast is like nothing else. And you never know who's listening. We just got a note last week that this CMO of a multi billion dollar, I don't know, probably Fortune 100 company is listening. That's not even a flex. I hate when people do that when they give you. They don't tell you the actual source and anyone could just lie about that. But I don't care if you believe me or not. I know the truth and it feels really cool. And I don't know, you just never know who's going to message you and be like, hey, listen to the podcast. And these little solo episodes are fun to do. We're going to have guests. We're to have people from interesting companies. The sunglasses are back on today because they made me feel great and super confident last week. And then also everybody's sick in my house. I feel like I've been sleeping. Like I look like. I like to keep a clean, shaved head so it doesn't look like I'm just, you know, balding guy. Like to just own it and be bald. And I haven't shaved and I'm still recovering from this hip surgery thing. And so I'm going sunglasses on. And so doesn't matter to me if you like this or not, if you're watching on YouTube or not. It feels great. It feels great to me. I'm not even going to lie. The shirt, if you're wondering, is from Buck Mason. Shout out to Leah. She keeps me proper. She's buying me nice clothes, which makes a. A nice difference. Let's see. So, personal updates. 25 recording this. 25 days post hip surgery. I got so many messages, but there's so many people. You know who I'm talking about? You. You messaged me. They're like, how old are you? Like, you had to get your hip fixed. And I'm like, this is a very common injury. Look, look it up. Fai, hip impingement, torn labrum surgery. It is frequent in a lot of hockey players. Not a hockey player. Frequent in athletes. Maybe. This is typically. It's something that you're. You're born with. You have like this kind of pinching in your hip and then you jam on it over time. And that's what I've done over the last 10 years. And I've been putting this off forever and finally decided to get it done. The first two weeks were brutal. I never thought I would be on the other side of this thing. And today, here I am. I'm back. I did five days in a Row at the gym. I can't do lower body, so I'm just spamming upper body right now. And it feels amazing. And I'm just so happy to be able to move and to walk. And it really just makes you appreciate your regular life. You know, it's like when you have a sore throat and you're like, you can't remember what your life was like when you could swallow normally. So. And yesterday I'm able to walk a little bit more. I took the dog out, was able to get a little snowshoe here in the woods. And I, I do really live up here in the, in the woods. It's. It's cold. We're in the woods of Vermont. And then the other thing that I wanted to mention, so over the last week, we announced dan as the CEO of Exit 5. And like I said in the announcement, you know, you get paid for the job you've already done. Dan's been amazing as my COO and promoted him to CEO to more formally run the business every day. Because, you know, I kind of, I got. I get paid the big bucks. Like, I get to just sit here and talk into a microphone and write cute little posts on LinkedIn. And so this is, this is really important. But what's really funny about that is it. It made me think because I'm. Maybe I'll pull this up real quick. Everybody. You know, you see all these comments about, like, the LinkedIn algorith, and a lot of that is valid. There's a lot of beef that is valid there how, like, you see posts from three weeks ago and, you know, they don't know what they're doing and da, da, da, da. But then I post this thing last week about Dan. This was on Friday, Friday morning, which is typically not the best time for me to post, and I announced Dan as CEO of Exit 5. This post has 1426 likes, 218 comments, and 25,000 impressions. And so, like, all week I've been trolling our team and everybody internally. I'd be like, I thought LinkedIn is broken. It just turns out, like, you just usually need better content, myself included. Right? I post a lot of things that flop out there, but it's true that, like, it's not just the algorithm. It's like a lot of times, like, you just need better content. And obviously we can't do this all the time. A CEO announcement is a perfect example of great content. And that broke through and worked, and it's still an incredible channel. So for these solo episodes, I'M going to like, do a little intro, which I just did. Talk about one big idea in marketing every week or as frequently as I do these, and then take a few listener questions and get out of there. So that's the agenda for this episode. So the big idea for this one and if you know anything about me, like, I'm not always into talking about, like, the latest and greatest hacks and, and tips and tricks and all that, like, my stuff is really rooted in what I would like to think is timeless. I feel like you, once you understand the game of marketing and business, a lot of this stuff can be applied forever. And the big idea for today's episode is the concept of attention. And I was listening to a podcast at the gym this morning and it was an interview with the founder of the Savannah Bananas. A podcast was my first million to properly shout them out because, you know, we don't need to do anonymous sources here. And it was a great interview and I've seen their stuff everywhere, but I've never actually sat down and listened to him. Dan was like, yo, you got to listen to this. This will totally, this is totally right up your alley. And it was right up my alley. And the reason it was right up my alley is because he talked so much about how ideas are the most valuable thing. And I've always kind of said I've kind of taken the opposite. Even though I've considered myself like an ideas guy, I've always taken the opposite and said that, like, ideas are cheap. The real value is in the execution. But I think I'm willing to flip flop back on that because I do think that in marketing, in business, it's like it is those crazy ideas. It is those 10x ideas. You can find people to help and go and operate and create things, but it's really those crazy ideas and, and you should go and listen to the episode if you can find it. But. Or just look up anything about the Savannah Bananas. But they've, you know, created this whole new category of a, a type of baseball. Now, I'm not saying the lesson from this is don't go create some new category, some crazy new thing and B2B. B2B software. But he talks so much about how it's a core value for them to find inspiration from outside of their industry. And as someone who's been in this industry of marketing for like 15 years, and especially in B2B, I can't tell you that every newsletter, every podcast, every webinar, we all, there's all inevitably always Someone who says, like, yeah, yeah, cool. This is great, man. Cool ideas. I need B2B examples, and I understand why people ask that, but I don't feel like that's true because I feel like whether you sell to B2B or B2C, you're still selling to humans. And so the name of the game is still the same, which is to try to get someone's attention. And so I like to take inspiration from everywhere, and I think you should be able to do that too. Now we want B2B examples because we want to be able, like, to go back to the CEO or CFO and team and say, hey, look, the X company in this industry did this and so we're going to do that. But a lot of the B2B marketing example stuff, they're also. They're not as sexy to like, say, screenshot. They're like, you know, sales enablement plays and emails that are happening behind the scenes. But I love this idea of, like, let's get back to thinking about attention and how do we stand out, especially in a world of sameness and competitors and AI slop. Like, how do we stand out? And so I wanted today to be like, I want you to think about attention. I don't have all the answers to this, but I want you to just think about one thing today, which is like, how can you get more attention for your company, right? And if more people knew about your company and you could be listening to this and you could be in B2B, you could be that Fortune 100 CMO that was listening, or you could be my friend who, you know, shout out to my guy Seth, who's my accountant, or Ryan, who helps me with my money, that's listening to this, right? This could apply to any business, the local sandwich shop down the street. Like, how do you get attention? And. And would your life, Would your business be more successful? Would your marketing be more effective if you just had more people that knew you existed and paid attention to you? I've seen this play out. I worked at a company called Drift and we came into and created this new category. We basically created a new category of live chat. But live chat already existed. There was plenty of competitors and companies in the space, from Intercom to Zendesk to Live Person, whatever. There was all these companies, but we were able to come in and get more attention than everybody else. And so what happens is when you can do that, most people, they're not necessarily buying, they're shopping. And so they're going to pick between three or four vendors. So if I'm going to pick a CRM vendor, it comes down to HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever. Most of us are not going to go through every little feature. And obviously every company is going to publish all of their features and do that little feature checklist that makes it look like, you know, we have all the things but the competitors don't. Right. And so I want to be the first person to get into that, like, consideration set. And so if you are one day going to buy a CRM, I want you to pay attention to me and know that I exist. And so in the drift world, we won early on by getting a lot of attention, by sucking the oxygen out of the market. And we didn't do that through one super creative play. It was because of a culture that the founders guided around creativity, innovation, taking chances, doing things that stand out. And so we did some crazy stuff. Like, here's an example. This ended up failing horribly for a couple different reasons. But there was a big event in Boston and we were not participating in it, but we knew a lot of people in marketing would be. We hired a bunch of actors to go to the event and protest, and we had these like, no forms signs at the time, and we sent like 10 people to go down there and protest, and they ended up getting kicked out of the event. And actually for a bunch of differences, became like an internal situation at the company. But I'm not saying this was right or wrong. I'm just giving you an example of, like, things like that. Right. And that wasn't even a new place. Salesforce had done that back in the day. Another thing that. That we like to do, which was awesome, is basically this was some form of arbitrage. I'm not that smart, so I don't really know what arbitrage means, but. But instead of spending, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars on outdoor display billboards and all that, we would find areas where we could get like, one billboard. And so I remember one year we found this. There was like, an opportunity to get like a small digital. Digital billboard, like right outside of the Super Bowl. And for anybody that's ever done any super bowl advertising, you can't say super bowl and that. You have to call it the big game. And the founders were going to the super bowl, and we got this little. This real estate. They were able to go there. They took a picture of it, like, in front of. I don't know, maybe it was like the Superdome. One of. Does that even exist anywhere? Somebody fact Check me on that. The Superdome. Is that a thing? Is that or. No, what was the old one? The Georgia Dome, Whatever dome it was, it was so clear, like a million people outside. It was a Super Bowl. And there was this little ad from Drift, right? Or when I launched my book, founder brand. Everything was self funded and I wanted to spend a little bit of money on promo, but didn't want to break the bank on it. And so I think maybe for less than ten grand, I found someone. You know those like, album release posters that you kind of see all over town sometimes you're like, who put up the, you know, Ariana Grande or like, ASAP Rocky thing right there? Well, you can find people to do that. And so we found three locations. One was at like the top of Newberry street, one was in Back Bay. I was. Wasn't even living in Boston. Just knew that people in Boston would. A small group of people might recognize my name and take pictures and show the book and whatever. And it worked perfectly. And the company also, so they, they go and they kind of put these signs up and they, they got like, you know, this. I don't even know how they put it on the wall. And we filmed the whole thing. And so I was able to then turn that into marketing because we have a, you know, I have an audience on LinkedIn. And so we took that one small play of putting up these billboards all around town for less than 10 grand. You take them and you put them on LinkedIn and it can be 10 times bigger than that. Or before everybody did the Times Square billboard thing now, which is, you know, I wouldn't even do it now. I like, everyone does it. All right, actually, I'll take. I'll put exit five on there. I got, I got mad. I saw Circle, which is a company we run our, our community on. They put one of their customers up there. And I was like, what the. Why am I. Why are we not on that? I don't care. It's me. Put Matt's face on that. On that billboard in Times Square. So I still want that. But we were able to get the Times Square billboard for like an hour. You could buy it in our increments. So we did that. I went to New York, spent the night in New York. The next day. Was out in front of the sign, like taking pictures with us in front of it. And it was an amazing play. Like that. Or in the Savannah Bananas examples he's talking about, they came up all these crazy, like, daily contests to get people to the Game. Like, I forget what the town that he was in initially, but it was like, I'll use Burlington, Vermont. Like, if there was a baseball team there, it was like, tonight, this week, we're running a contest for the hairiest man in Burlington, Vermont. Oh, God, that's awful. But these are the things that, like, I love and gets me into marketing and makes this fun again. And so at Drift, we did, like, no, we International. Like, no Forms Day. Today is International no Forms Day. Or I remember seeing, like, Amazon had this big thing because it was Prime Day. Prime Day. And I was like, dude, this is genius. They're just making up a holiday where they, like, give you free shipping on this one day. And so everyone buys on Prime Day. You know, it's like Black Friday. Just another marketing ploy. And so I don't care if you sell accounting software, cybersecurity, manufacturing. Why can't you build some of these things into your business? B2B. B2C. These are the really fun things that I like to think about and stand out. And the way to get there is just push yourself to just come up with crazy ideas. It's okay to have bad ideas. You need to generate a list of 5, 10, 50, 100. Just have a list going in your phone of just, like, crazy bad ideas, and you will eventually find one or two good ones and you can execute on them. And by the way, when you do one or two of these things, the hard part is, like, you can't really, like, sell the CFO and like, all right, we're going to do this crazy thing and we're going to get three leads from this. It doesn't work like that. You need to be able to carve out some time and some space to kind of do these things and maybe sometimes ask for forgiveness instead of permission and do them. And those often become the multipliers is these big steps. And they don't have to be super expensive. They can be scrappy and creative no matter what scale you're at. And so I just wanted to, like, put something into the universe on this, because why does attention have to be a dirty word in marketing? Like, we are playing a game in marketing with the whole point of marketing is to get more people to understand that our product exists and that we can solve their needs. Right? Whether you're an accountant or an enterprise software vendor. And so I want more people to pay attention to us, because then if we have a good product, if we've built the right thing, if we have strong features and benefits and A compelling story, then people are going to say, oh, interesting. I've been paying attention to you. Okay, now then you earn the right to then tell them about the product later. So it doesn't have to be like, I think a lot of times with these, like, attention campaigns or some of the bigger brand plays we often default to, like, how can we tell our product story in this? And it's like, that's not going to be interesting to most people. I would run a play that gets people's attention and then let's use the attention to then turn that into an opportunity for our business. So if you're listening to this and you have specific examples, maybe we could feature you on a future episode of this pod. Email me davexit5.com or send me a DM on LinkedIn. Aaron and I will try to grab a bunch of examples, but I'd love to just be like, are you, Are you relating to what I'm saying? And how are you going to put some of this into play in your business? So forget about B2B. Forget about B2C. Just let's be creative and seek to get attention from the people that you're trying to sell to. Now. All attention is not equal, right? If I'm doing something for Exit 5 where we want to attract B2B marketers, then sure, like attention from my aunt and my former college roommate and that guy down the street. Like, that doesn't matter because that's not going to convert. But ultimately you're still selling to people. People have a set of needs and desires and wants and interests. And there are ways you can play into that and get attention. So let's don't make attention a dirty word. Like, you don't have to be a lunatic or be some or do some, like, insane smash and grab campaign to get someone's attention. There are ways to do it that are fun and effective and can work. And that's my call to action. So send me examples. Okay, that's part one. All right. It's that time of year. Everybody's scrambling to wrap it up, justify budgets, get those plans in last minute, and quietly hope that the numbers are going to hold going into 2026. But here's the uncomfortable truth. Most marketing teams still still don't actually know what's driving real results and what's just taking credit. There's a difference. And you can't make smart calls for next year if you're just guessing about what's working, what's not, and where to put your Next dollar. Paramark has built something to fix that.
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It's their free incrementality calculator.
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And it takes two minutes. And it's going to give you a simple reality check on one question. If you stopped a campaign, would the results still happen anyway? I can think of a few ideas in my head right now that I would like to run this through. Maybe branded. Branded search would be one of them. Anyway, that's incrementality and it's how the best marketers are cutting waste, tightening budgets, and figuring out which programs actually deserve to make it into next year. You'll get a quick read on whether you're ready for incrementality testing and how much money you could be saving right now. So go and check it out. Completely free, free tool from Paramark. It's Parama. Paramark.com calculator that's Paramark.com calculator the big idea today is attention. I meant to shout this out earlier, but I mentioned Dan becoming CEO. So I wrote him a little note, a love note, and I'm sending this to his house in Arizona. But my love language is. Is gifts and my love language is. Is sending books and knowledge and I don't know, does anybody else do this? I feel like I send these books to my team and people and they don't even care and they don't read it. But a few people will read them. And in particular, this is probably one of the best books on management that I have ever read. A lot of people recommend Andy Grove, High Output Management. And I've read that just didn't really hit the same as this one did. Newer, a little bit more modern. Ben Horowitz, the Hard thing about hard things. So I'm spraying my cologne in this book and I'm sending it to Dan for his journey as CEO and to be prepared and understand that. What does it say building a business when there are no easy answers? Facts. Okay, do we need some intro? We need like some intro transition music. Let's get into listener questions from this week. First one, we're gonna play a game right now called is this an AI question or not? So I solicited questions, I posted on LinkedIn and I asked for questions. I'll do this weekly if I can. I don't know why I couldn't, but sometimes you forget or I don't know. If these episodes flop and no one listens, then we'll stop doing it. I don't think that's gonna be the case. So first one, let's just get this out of the way. Is this an AI comment or not? So I asked for questions. I did ama. I said like, hey, send me questions for the pod. And this one said fun one. Solo episodes hit different because they feel like someone thinking out loud, not performing return. Something I've always wondered, Colin, what's the one marketing belief you used to preach that you no longer believe today? Feels like those answers reveal more wisdom than any playbook. Would love to hear it. This is a third degree connection. I didn't even know those existed. So I'm gonna say the middle content of this is pretty good. And there actually is a question. I'm going to answer this, but I'm going to say AI it's the solo episodes hit different part that. That said that. I mean, if it's not AI, sorry, that's the biggest, like the biggest offense someone could say in. In these times. Remember during COVID in these unprecedented times. All right, next question. This question is from Joe. This is a real person, definitely. It's always interesting to hear the thinking behind your marketing takes. What's one belief you held earlier in your career that you've changed your mind about? And so. Good question, Joe. For this one, I think one thing I've changed my mind about is I used to be obsessed over like having a playbook, like, oh, this person has this recipe. But the more that I've gone on in my career and it's actually not even part of it's from firsthand experience, but the other part of it is from hosting my podcast. And just because of Exit 5 meeting so many marketers over the years, like, it's just so obvious that there is not one playbook and every company is a different opportunity. It's like, let's use a food analogy. It's like there's always different things in the fridge. And it's like you still have to make the meal, right? But sometimes you go in the fridge and like all you have is like three eggs, an onion, a piece of sourdough, and some pickles. And you gotta make that the meal. And it's. And so it's like maybe the company doesn't have, you know, deep pockets, doesn't have a ton of budget and. Or doesn't have a reputation. So everyone's like, hire a players. But like, sometimes you literally can't afford to. You can't attract a players. And so it's like, we got to get. We got to get some B players in here. We got to. We just need some people. We got to get some C players. And I think that's super reasonable. And it's a huge part of the nuance that gets missed when talking about marketing online and giving out marketing advice. And there's just a bunch of variables there like the company, the industry, the stage, the size, the pockets, the funding, the who the CEO is and their beliefs, right, what industry you're in. So there really isn't one. But I've learned that the real marketers, the executive, this is what's fun to me. It's fun to like, I don't care what business I'm thinking about. I've done a lot of advising and consulting behind the scenes. I've helped out friends and people in my life with their, you know, personal small businesses. From the big corporations that I've worked with in my consulting world. To those people, what's fun is just figuring out those challenges. It's like, here's this, you know, Fortune 500 company, they're trying to do this thing, okay, cool, let's try to figure that out. Versus like, hey, my guy down the street makes a mean like bacon, egg and cheese and wants to get more people into his store. How do we do that? And so there's not one playbook. I like knowing the rules of the game, but then knowing like going in different companies, different industries and being able to take what you know and adapt. So that's one thing. The other thing is that you also have to understand that both things can be true. Meaning you need to find a way to deliver short term results and build a brand long term. And I know there's so much nuance in this and so it's hard to like explain perfectly online, but really you just. For me it's like accepting that both things are true. Yes, we need to deliver revenue now. Okay, that just is what it is. We have to deliver revenue now, this month, this quarter, whatever. At the same time, we need to be building a brand which is reputation awareness, you know, get people to know like, and trust us for the future. And a lot of times those things do not relate to the short term sales tactics and marketing tactics that you want to do now. But humans, we're complicated beings, man. We can believe this, that two things can exist at the same time. And so you have to be able to do both. Like I use this example all the time. I try to be a healthy person, I work out a lot. But like, come on man, like I'm eating some of my kids candy at night, you know, I'm sneaking a slice of Pizza. I'm sneaking a slice of Domino's at a kid's birthday party on a Saturday morning too. Like, both things can be true. That's a really important thing in marketing that I wish I knew earlier. And online in Exit 5 on LinkedIn, wherever. We often want this binary answer. We, we want to know that, like, well, 64% of your time should be spent on short term activities as defined by X, and 26% of your time should be spent. And that's. You have to use your brain, you have to use intuition, and you have to be able to do both. And a lot of times the hard thing is at a company, you don't get to take a lot of the brand risks and brand bets without first putting some points on the board. But I also like to double click on, like, what does that mean? What does brand bets mean? We use that term brand. What does that mean? You want to go spend a million dollars on billboards? Like, yeah, of course you're not going to be able to do that right away. But if brand is like, yeah, you know, in 20% of my time, I want to start like a YouTube channel and I want to like, start getting some guests and make some content and see if we can make that a thing. Like, great. That's not 100% of your time. Let's figure out how to do that. So that's a piece of it. And then the last thing I love this is classic Dave right here. This guy asked for one thing, I'm giving him three. But I was inspired. I'm feeling excited this morning. Everybody's out of my house. I'm having some nice quiet time right now. The other thing would be, Joe, you also need to be more than a marketer if you want to be successful in the company. I think the biggest mistake you can make is like, nope, I'm just marketing. That's my department, just marketing, but really good marketing. Like, marketing influences and is involved in so many areas across the company, from sales to product pricing, packaging, strategy, finance. Like, you can't just live in your bubble. You have to oversee marketing as a function. But really you have to be able to influence change and be a partner to the company. That's a super important thing that I wish I I knew earlier. All right, this question is from Craig. Since it's the holiday time, you're visited by three ghosts.
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Ooh.
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Those of marketing past, present and future, what do they show you about your life? About my life? I don't know. I'll answer this about marketing. Are there any wrongs you would write? What does the future marketing ghost show you? That should be a warning slash relief to us of all all Craig's looking for some relief here. All right, well, the Ghost of Marketing pass would tell me basically exactly what I just said, which is like, everyone is right. Everything can be right. Everything does work. TikTok works. YouTube works. Direct mail works, Ads work, events work, analyst, relations work, pr. Like, I've seen it. All right, We've seen it. Everything can work. It doesn't mean everything is going to work for your company. And so I think you can't just have one playbook. You have to use your brain and adapt to the stage and size and company and industry that you're at. Ghost of Marketing present, I would say we would be talking about AI. And understand that to me right now, AI is both super useful, super important, super impactful, but it's also not everything. Let's get that into our heads. There's a bit of a bubble on the AI stuff in my head where it's like, AI is amazing, transforming our business, right? Giving us all this time back. But I think there's this other voice in my head that's just like, I don't know, real people matter, authenticity matters. I've been noticing myself, like, more people on LinkedIn. It's sounding like AI slop. And my content is standing out more because I write like a maniac, right? Right from my phone. I use real words, there's typos, not on purpose. Like, I have my way of writing. And for some reason in the last couple months, my LinkedIn stuff has really been standing out even more. And I equate that in my head to be just like the rise of AI Slop. And so I think both things are can be true at the same time. Again, Ghost of Marketing future, probably related to that, would come in and say, like, hey, remember, brand is the only moat. It's the last remaining moat. It's always going to be that way. Your reputation, your attention being interest in building trust, that's always going to matter the most. Let's see, next question. This one's from Finn. What's up, Finn? What does it really feel like to be a LinkedIn thought leader now? It's amazing. Obviously. Usually I answer this with in a joke, but I decided I'm going to take this one seriously. And so the honest answer, that, and I've parodied myself, which is like classic marketing strategy number one, like eight mile, right? Like, if I say all the things about Me then like, what can you say? And so yes, I'm short, I'm bald, I'm one of those douchey bros who writes on LinkedIn, Da da da. Like what can you say about me? I've already said it myself, so usually I joke around and like, you know, I say thought leader. It's a joke. Haha. I'm a thought leader. But for this one I'll be serious about it. And the way that I describe it is like thought leader thing aside, imagine you had this one channel that was like so obviously and insanely effective and it just literally printed money, printed relationships always made something happen for you. It is an incredible tool to have LinkedIn at the place that, that I've been able to get it to. And I haven't, you know, I didn't have some master plan. I just keep writing content there for 7, 8 years now and nearing in on 200000 followers. The advantage that I have with that is like people are more likely to respond to my messages. We do cold outreach for our business or something, or just cold outreach in general. If I want to get somebody on my podcast or get an intro to someone, the page that effect that I have lots of followers and lots of page just gives me instant credibility. The fact that there are a lot of followers there, even though LinkedIn doesn't show the content to all my followers. If I post like a webinar that we're doing on LinkedIn, like we can drive hundreds of signups from that, which is really meaningful. People respond to our stuff. We get employees, candidates, investors, advisors. I've met friends through LinkedIn. It is an incredible platform. Dan and I were just talking about this today. We were looking at it last week, the last 365 days. My LinkedIn account alone, it says 17 million impressions like that is insane. Think about that. If you were a media company or what a blog would be from that. And that's with only quote unquote, you know, 200 000ish followers. I feel like this is more valuable to me in this world than if I had a million followers on Instagram because I was, you know, some super Jack dad, which I'm, I'm not. Maybe a million followers on LinkedIn would, on Instagram would be really valuable too. Of course it would be. But I don't know. This LinkedIn thing feels like a super advantageous channel. And the way that I treat, I don't even think of it as a social channel. I think of it as, as my blog Right. You know, Seth Godin had like, this is Seth's blog. I just, I write whatever's on my mind related to life and marketing and business on LinkedIn. I don't talk about everything there because everything doesn't work there. Truly. It's a business channel. It's a business blog, a business, you know, marketing, business and marketing and sales kind of channel that I write about that stuff. I sprinkle in my personality into that stuff. I'm not writing about it all the time. And I think that matters too. To become known for something. I think in real life, I like to say I have much more substance than what you might see online. Or I try to sprinkle that in. Like I care about a lot more things than marketing. But from a LinkedIn standpoint, I mostly write about marketing. So that's my answer. It's been really meaningful. It's awesome to be a thought leader. And then yeah, I just. Anybody who, maybe because I am one, but anyone, anyone who poo poos on like those types of people who write on LinkedIn, like, shut up, shut the. Respectfully, shut the fuck up. Okay. This question is from Tom. Tom Wentworth. Have you ever met Dave Portnoy and have you ever thought of moving Exit 5 outside of B2B SaaS into fitness, wellness, parenting, et cetera? I've never met Dave Portnoy. Have I thought about moving Exit 5 outside of B2B SaaS into fitness, wellness, parenting, et cetera? Follow on question you should. Why haven't you? I have absolutely had this thought. Absolutely. I do think there is. Not right now, but I think there's like a 10x type of play with the type of business that we're sitting on, where we have hundreds of thousands of people now in our audience. They all work in marketing, but they're all humans. Right. They are parents, they like to work out, they like to ski, they knit, they do yoga, whatever. I think that ultimately what we're learning is how to create a community based, slash interest based business. I don't see why this couldn't apply to other industries, other categories. I've thought we, you know, we've learned a lot about building community. Sure. Could we have a little dad fitness community right now and that could be its own thing. Absolutely. I just, sometimes I struggle with like, I feel like a lot of times when you have something that's working, the answer is to like do more of what's working. We need to double down. And this is a really special business that we're sitting on. But you also have to, like, take the next bed and disrupt yourselves at. At some point. And so I think about this all the time, Tom. I think that's the business that I'd like to be working on into my 40s and 50s and beyond. I think right now, whatever happens, Exit 5 will be the jumping off point for me and us in, in one way or another. So. And by the way, send me, text me, send me comments about that. I'm curious to hear what, what you think this could be. Last question. This is a hip hop question, not a marketing question from Jorgen. Is that how I say her name? Let me know. He's always. You're always commenting on my stuff with good hip hop and music and rap stuff. So this is the most important question. Reasonable Doubt or the Blueprint? And main reason why, with acknowledgement of the other side of the argument. Okay, so Reasonable Doubt or Blueprint. These are, for those of you who don't know, these are two albums by Jay Z. Reasonable Doubt was his first album. I think it was his first album. It came out in June 1996. I was nine years old. And then the blueprint came out in September 2001. I was a freshman in high school. And so my answer to this question is deeply rooted in nostalgia. I was not listening to Jay Z when I was nine. I wasn't listening to Reasonable Data at the time. And so I started to really get into music, probably rap, hip hop, in maybe seventh, eighth grade. And actually, this is a funny story. This album came out later. Blueprint 2 came out after Blueprint 1. And in that song, Dream, Jay Z, they have the Notorious B.I.G. verse from Juicy. It was all a dream, you know. And they played it in, in this song called the Dream. That was the first time I ever heard it. I didn't hear it initially on Juicy. And then they. I heard Juicy later. And I was like, wait, this is the Jay Z song and it's not JC song. And before you laugh at me for that, come see me. You don't want to see me with the discography here. So let's bring it in the. In the dms. So my answer to this is Blueprint because like, freshman year, like, I went out and got this album. This album. Well, I had to have someone take me. This album came out on September 11th. That's the classic story there. And so when I hear the Blueprint in my head, I think about playing basketball. I think about being a freshman in high school. I think about that. That got me into rap, that got me into Jay Z and then I went back and then went into all of his other albums and so I got into Reasonable Doubt. Second, Reasonable Doubt is obviously great. It's a classic, but it's a little bit more of the like vintage, younger Jay Z blueprint from the production. The production, the whole thing is just to me, it's his best album. Kanye west just blaze that type of production on there. It's great. So I'm, but I'm, I'm open to, to hearing your, your argument. Okay, that's it. 30 minutes, 35 minutes. Little solo episode. We covered a bunch of things. The big takeaway is attention attention today. So send me your messages back. And by the way, we're really investing in in my newsletter through Exit 5. And so if you like this episode, you want to get more content from us or just make sure you're on the newsletter already. It's called Dave's Newsletter. I know we're really good at branding these things. Go to exit5.com newsletter this one lady actually sent me a really nice message this week and she said just wanted to say I love, love, love reading your newsletter. I get inundated with emails daily. The emails from Exit 5, however, are fun and engaging without all the selling. Heck yeah. Thank you lady. Exit5.com newsletter to get our newsletter there approaching 50,000 subscribers, we try to reply to everybody, even the ones who say how did I get on your list? Or some guy just crushed me for the writing style a couple of weeks ago, which always feels nice. And then we're doing a marketing leadership retreat. For those of you that are VPs and CMOs, if you check it out, it's exit5.com retreat we're going to Arizona in March. We have this amazing all inclusive resort type of thing. It's you don't just buy a ticket to the event, you buy a ticket to be there on site. There's golf, there's spa, there's saunas, there's meditation, yoga. It's going to be amazing. Exit5.com retreat I could use some of that right now because it's zero degree here in Vermont. Let me know what you think of this episode. Send me a note davexit5.com and I will see you talk to you on the next episode.
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A
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast.
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B
If you like this episode. You know what?
- [35:51]
A
I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review 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 Exit5 is to help you grow your career in B2B market 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 a humble 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.
- [36:46]
B
Go check it out.
- [36:47]
A
Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community.
- [36:59]
B
This episode is brought to you by.
- [37:01]
A
Our friends@customer IO remember when a personalized message in marketing meant just putting someone's.
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B
First name into the email?
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A
And that was magic. Hello David or hello Gerhardt or whatever fake name I put into the form? Well, those days are long gone. AI has raised the bar for lifecycle marketing because now you can deliver smarter context aware communication that actually feels personal and you can do it at scale without hiring five more people. Today, personalization doesn't just mean using my name, it means actually having the right context. But there's a problem because even though this sounds great in theory, most teams can't actually do it because they're stuck with broken reporting, siloed data and outdated tech stacks. It's often easier to just keep doing doing things the way that we've always done them. So our friends at Customer IO recently surveyed 600 marketers like you and me to figure out what's working and what's broken in lifecycle marketing right now and how the best teams are actually solving these problems. The report breaks down 2026 priorities, where budgets are moving and how to tame the measurement mess that we're going through. Real world examples from brands like Notion and Monarch Money that are using AI personalization experiments and understanding the next chapter of AI what's on marketers wish lists and how customer journeys can get smarter just faster. So this guide is packed with examples, data and strategy that you can put.
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To work right now.
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If you want to get smarter about life cycle marketing, this is a great free resource. So where my email marketers at, my life cycle marketers listening to this, go and grab it right now. Customer IO Exit 5 and you can grab this and learn how to build lifecycle marketing that keeps up with today's expectations. That's customer I.O. exit 5.