Dave Gerhardt (4:08)

It's a great intro. Thank you. You caught me taking a note because the marketer in me anytime. I've always kind of like kept a swipe file and anytime somebody explains the product that I'm doing or working on in a good way, I like to write it down. And so I like what you said about it's like LinkedIn for VDB marketers, except nobody's trying to do it for the engagement and I just added like or like dunk on you. It's much friendlier. I'm going to keep billing you. You're welcome. By the way. I'll keep billing you $10.

Podcast Interviewer (4:32)

Awesome. Is there anything else in your background that you would like to double click on, expand upon?

Dave Gerhardt (4:36)

No, you did a really good job. I can tell you're actually familiar with the story. I think you nailed it. We can talk a lot about this. I actually think there's a alternate path in life where I think I could have gone deeper on the founder brand thing. And I've gone in fits and starts of like, is there a business I should be creating around this? Because there's a lot of momentum here. I've seen lots of people kind of create their own businesses around here. So it's a topic that has been hot. Been back on my radar a lot. I kind of wrote the book and then for two years kind of just. Was just whatever, done with it. I wrote the book. I got that out of my system. And it keeps coming back in ways. And I've enjoyed chatting with you in a couple times that we've done it in the past. So when you reach out to say, come on the podcast, I'm like, you know what, let's do it. It's always fun to not be host, to get to hang out and sip my tea and go on someone else's podcast and talk about a topic that I know and love. So I'm happy to be here.

Podcast Interviewer (5:25)

That's awesome. We can dive into the book a little bit later. And also maybe some things that didn't make it to the book or you learned after the book was written. But before we get into your LinkedIn journey, I always like to ask our guests, tell us something about yourself that the audience couldn't learn about you from your LinkedIn page or the content that you put out every day. Twice a day at that.

Dave Gerhardt (5:42)

Oh, geez, once a day now. The algorithm is messing with me. Once a day now. I live in Vermont. I have a beautiful wife and two children. And that is kind of the majority of my life. Outside of the computer, Outside of the B2B marketing day, my number one priority is my family and my kids. That takes most of my time outside of being on Slack right now. So it's not the coolest fun fact, you know, like, I didn't backpack through Italy for 18 months, you know, when I was 19 years old or anything. I don't really have anything fun like that. But that's my story. I live up here in the B2B marketing mecca of the United States, Burlington, Vermont.

Podcast Interviewer (6:14)

That's pretty funny. Well, and also touching. I'm a family man, too. I have two kids and I'm starting to re engineer my life.

Dave Gerhardt (6:22)

Around that, I mean that that's also cool is like this. You've been able to create a job and create a business where you can do that right. Both things can be true. You can be a successful entrepreneur and, and be a good father and husband.

Podcast Interviewer (6:31)

So some of that in part to you and your book. Let's get into the journey. You started investing in LinkedIn publishing long form and status posts before anyone was doing it. There were no case studies. Who did you see doing this and what motivated and inspired you to start doing this?

Dave Gerhardt (6:51)

It wasn't really a person per se. I think a lot of it was shaped by my background in the way that I got into business was working in prior I worked at a tech PR firm where the companies at the time were like storage companies, security companies. It was like kind of high, you know, deep tech, high tech. It was a company called Lois Paul and partners in Woburn, Massachusetts. This was in 2009, 2010. Social media was the new thing at the time. And so a lot of the, there was a lot of trainings at the company for clients to like kind of teach them Twitter and LinkedIn and other social network. And that was kind of like the 2009, 2010 was like, you know, like the Gary Vee Wine Library social media influencer era started to become a thing. And I ended up going from that PR agency where I was literally like writing, I guess I was an OG ghostwriter. Like we were writing tweets. My job as an intern and then eventually a full time employee was to write tweets for clients. So they would send us over docs and I would write tweets and I would send them back and they would be like no, you didn't use the right hashtags. And I, you know, we'd use all these tools like research the right hashtags. I guess looking back now that's a threat. And I went to this software company called Constant Contact because I wanted to leave an agency and go to an in house company and there was 1500 people. They're making an email product. They're a publicly traded company. It was really cool because I got to go inside of a company and see all the things. But I worked in PR and the product that I was responsible for doing the PR around was their social media products. Constant Contact was a email marketing company and they kind of at every company's quest is to become a multi product company. So they were expanding from email marketing to social media. So my job was literally I was glued to TechCrunch because this was the time of all of the social media apps and social media agencies and Facebook walls and pages and all stuff was happening in the era of social media. Constant Contact acquired this company called Nutshell Mail and they were like a social media aggregator slash email company. I got to work directly with the founder of that company to basically help grow his brand, ghostwrite for him, get him speaking, appearances, travel, do that stuff together. So I kind of started my career at this like intersection of PR comms and social media. I've been on social media doing marketing since that time. Fast forward to when I went to Drift. They hired me as the first marketing person there and they were a little bit early. They were pre, they weren't pre product, but they weren't ready to like have the website up and say like, you know, go start a free trial on the website. They were looking to basically get some awareness and build the brand first. And looking at all the ingredients from. For marketing. I had these two well known founders. I had David Cancel, who's the founder of Drift, he had just come from HubSpot. He was chief product officer at HubSpot. He had, I don't know, 50,000 followers on Twitter. He was famous on social media. He was speaking at Harvard Business School. He was, people were clamoring to get him on their podcast. Like he was a big deal. He had his previous company acquired for 30 million by HubSpot. They like transformed the product or get HubSpot. He was a celebrity in the SaaS, you know, B2B SaaS space. So when we were looking at the ingredients to like put this company on the map, it was like so obvious that pre product, wait, we have this kind of famous founder but they've done nothing for him. That was the first playbook was his tweets. He, he would write out it, he would write a tweet and the tweet would go viral and we'd be like, hey, that's a great idea for an article. Let's turn this into an article. Let's turn this into a podcast. First month working at Drift, he was like, I want to start a podcast and can you help me do it? And so I helped him do it. So basically like the first year of my job was kind of like PR ing David. And it was a new playbook of pr. It was not write her press release, put the press release up on the wire. We were pring him through Twitter, through podcasts, and then he was the one that really put me on LinkedIn. Because at the time we saw LinkedIn shifting from this, like, social Rolodex where, like, I'd only connect with you, Brad. Like, you and I actually met and we shook hands at a meeting, and then after the meeting, that's when I connect with you. He saw it going to become a content platform and people posting there. All of our customers were on LinkedIn. So we started writing on LinkedIn and we kind of had this inkling of, like, let's make LinkedIn. Like, that should be our social channel. We did it and it worked. So the combination of like social media and podcasts and creating content with him as the focal point of that as the founder was the thing that helped drift grow from a million dollars to $10 million in revenue in a. In a couple years. Obviously there's other things that happened, but that was, that was the thing, like getting him on stage and speaking at stuff. It. It led to so many opportunities. Did it again on a smaller scale at Privy with Ben, who's the founder there. I kind of wanted to just take a step back. After I left those companies, I was like, I want to write a book. There's people who are much worse than I am as a marketer who put books out in the world. I want to put my name on something. I have a. I'm a creator. I have a philosophy. I was really thinking about, like, what is my philosophy? I just talked to Chris Walker yesterday. Like, I'm not the, like, MQL waterfall demand gen CAC to LTV ratio. I'm a more of a creative, a writer, a social media creator. That's the stuff that I love, the PR stuff, the positioning, messaging narrative, the megaphone. And I was like, that's it. It's building this megaphone. It's using the founder brand, building, like this personality for the founder. Like, all these founders are crazy. Crazy in the good way. Same way you and I are crazy for starting our own companies. Like, everyone starts up. No one starts a company because they're like, oh, I want to wake up and get rich. They have some story, right? And in David's case, it was. He's been building SaaS products for 20 years, and they realized this thing was broken, so they're going to build it on a new way. Doing chat, right? Ben, his parents were, you know, small business owners and entrepreneurs, and he built this, you know, app for Shopify. There's always a story there. So I was like, there is something here and I want to put this into a book. And I wrote it. That was kind of the Thing, it just came from my experience. It wasn't necessarily that I saw someone or like, you know, admired Elon Musk. And so I wrote this book about founder brand. It just, it was kind of like a. I see it more as like the new playbook for pr and I think that's why it works really well for companies today.

Podcast Interviewer (12:36)

I think you make a great point there that I guess as all this time, you know, there are people that have stories to tell and people inside businesses that use story to compel people to buy something. Right. The channels just change over time. LinkedIn became something of a conduit for that message and work rate. I'm kind of curious. When you and Dave first started transitioning over LinkedIn, were there challenges to get the motion going?

Dave Gerhardt (13:00)

No, it was natural. We were good at it from the beginning because he was like a prolific tweeter. So I would see one of his tweets, you know, he would just send off some, some tweet that's like, you should never hire an mba. And I was like, whoa, that tweet just goes viral in like the business sphere. I was like, let' expand that for LinkedIn and let's write a version of it for LinkedIn. So I think I was very fortunate to work with someone who was like, so a social native. It was not like the can't get this guy to say. So we had all the right ingredients. Like, he would say things. He had strong opinions, right? He had strong opinions. He had like a tier one network of like, you know, Sequoia, mit, Harvard Business School, HubSpot level folks, right? He knew how to say stuff and he knew how to say and write catchy things. So there was no roadblock. I think the bigger thing was like, you don't realize that how many people don't like you because of that. And I think that people just project their things onto you. It's a really funny story. I've never shared this and I'm going to tell you because I think you can appreciate it. I became known as like the LinkedIn guy. Like Dave, like, he writes on LinkedIn, like, who does that? It's insane to think about now. Like, it's just a social network. Imagine being like the TikTok guy. Like, who makes TikTok? It's like it just is a social network. It just is what it is, right? I went to a different company and one of the executives at the company basically plagiarized somebody else's LinkedIn post and like posted it completely. And the Woman who she plagiarized didn't yell at her. She called, DM'd me and said, this woman plagiarized me. And I know it's because I know it's from you because no one wrote on LinkedIn at this company until you joined. And I've never liked you, Dave Gerhardt. And you told this woman to copy and paste my post. It was like the most insane thing. My wife and I still talk about it today because this person, out of nowhere accused me of encouraging someone else to plagiarize someone else's post. Like, I was the only one who. Who did this. Horrible. Like, I teach people how to write on LinkedIn. And you must have brought this toxic element to this company. So the only hard part was, like, there's just like, some of that stuff early on, but, man, we had the wind in our backs. Nobody was posting there. I'd post a video of me, like, drinking a smoothie, walking to work, like, with a marketing tip, and It'd be like 100,000 views. And today I have a video team that makes, like, a highly edited video clip that costs real money to make, and it's like 6,000 views. So we had a lot of advantages. I think that often happens in the early days of social media. It's like, if you can be early on a channel in marketing, you get a lot of the advantages. The only downside was the. The negativity that comes from posting on social. But I've learned how to deal with that much better as I've gotten wiser.

Podcast Interviewer (15:23)

All right, you mentioned Dave was a social native, even a serial entrepreneur. He knew how business worked. What do you tell people who are wanting to do this now and their CEO is not that they're not on Twitter. They don't get it. Maybe they don't have that media coaching to have a strong opinion or narrative. What is your advice there?

Dave Gerhardt (15:41)

I would say suck it up, buttercup, because here's the thing. There are so many advantages to it beyond, like, direct sales. And so, like, when you work for someone who is a socially native person, like, all day he'd be sending me screenshots of, like, someone DM'd him, some conference organizer DM'd him to invite him to speak at a thing. Right? Tier 1 investor reaches out because they want to be in the next round. Key employee reaches out because they want to work at the company. It's not just a sales tool. It's the best, like, employment brand. Like, if you run a business, it is like, you Almost have a responsibility. Like you want to grow the company, right? Yeah, of course I want to grow the company. Well, there's a channel today that allows you to connect directly with your customers. Doesn't cost a dollar, just costs your mind. And you're already using your mind to like push this business forward anyway. And what if I told you that all of the things that it takes to say on this channel, you're already saying them? Like you're writing Slack messages internally, you're writing quarterly updates and memos, you're talking to your employees and your customers and you're writing, you're thinking it's just about taking that stuff and translating it into something that is more appropriate for an external audience. Because what's amazing about social media is there are billions of users on all the platforms today, so lots of you. Some, there are some people that can say my customers aren't there. But I'd say for most people that's just not, that's not true. When you start writing about something online, every pocket of the Internet, man, there are people for you, right? My wife is into pottery. She's become into pottery. Her TikTok and her Instagram feed is all people making pots. Whether you're into pottery or golf or sales technology or PR or HR or AI, there's a pocket of people for you. We'd rather do all the crazy stuff like get on a plane and travel and go to events and hire a PR company and have them spend $20,000 a month to like write these nonsense press releases. When like, if you can be relevant and interesting online, you can build a following of like minded people in your industry that you can use to basically be a cheat code to yes, generate sales for your business. But it's the feedback loop. Like you can basically test ideas. In the example of I use with David, like we would all the time he would write a post and that post would blow up and we'd be like, boom, we just found the hook for our next announcement. So then when we go to do an announcement, we've kind of already done message testing. Gary Vee talks about this a lot in like in his latest book, I forget what it's called, but it's basically like every social post you're putting out there is a way to like generate feedback whether you have, you know, one follower or a million. So it's this amazing feedback loop that allows you to be, to build an effective content machine. It also improves your employment brand because people want to see, like I want to know the People I'm going to work with, I want to know the founders. I want to feel like I get to know them. And so there's so many benefits. It's like the one, it's one of the few marketing channels that has three or four or five benefits. And so do you want that? Like, if we gave them the classic, like sales training, you know, you get those. I get these emails all the time. Like, dave, do you care about growing your business in 2025? And also it's like, especially on LinkedIn, it's the best one because you don't have to be good on camera, you don't have to do silly dances. For TikTok, it's like literally just using your fingers and typing words and having a strong opinion, which you probably started this company for a reason. You have strong opinions, you have industry perspective. You've been in this industry for 20 years and that led you to solve a company. You have all the ingredients to do it. Do you want to do it? Do you want to create an advantage for yourself? But I also understand that it's not for everybody and not everyone's going to do it. And that's actually why I think you should, because maybe your competitors are not. And there are so few advantages in business. If one of the advantages can be you sharing your perspective and your personality online, like, man, it doesn't get much better than that. Do you want to try to do this? Let's do it.

Podcast Interviewer (19:07)

Well, when you put it that way so hard.

Dave Gerhardt (19:09)

I mean, you live this, right? You have clients in this space. Like, this is what you do.

Podcast Interviewer (19:12)

Yeah, some of them are very hard to convince even today. Right. I'm going to take that, you know, four minute dialogue right there and I will send it to every process.

Dave Gerhardt (19:20)

But I mean, with like podcasting, it's also one of those things that, like, you just gotta do it and then you will know. And how many clients do you have? Or I have founder friends who like, they don't believe in it. Three months into it, I'm like, what's the ROI of it? They're not like, oh, the ROI is, you know, 3.7x. They're like, oh. They say things like, oh, dude, I got two of my best new employees came in because they, through LinkedIn and I met a key partner. It's like, it just becomes so obvious. It's funny. We had this joke at Drift about our podcast. In particular, we would joke because everyone would say, well, how are you going to measure the ROI of our podcast? We had so much of this, like these inbound signals in our face that the whole company became a meme within the company. Fortune 500 customer would come in because they listened to our podcast, which was not even about marketing and software. We would post it in Slack. It would be like one of our enterprise account reps would be like, hey, I just had a meeting with like the CMO at Box and she like loves your guys's podcast. We would take that screenshot, we'd put it in Slack, and we'd be like, how are we ever going to measure the ROI of our podcast? It's like that's because we always want some number. We want it, we want it to be in a spreadsheet. And it's like we just know. I'm sure you feel it with the people that you work with, but it's like, man, if you can just commit to doing this and like not just half assed writing, not just taking AI copy and slapping it up on LinkedIn, but if you really want to become a thought leader and have a perspective about your industry and start sharing it online, I promise you that the benefits are going to be all the things that we mentioned.

Podcast Interviewer (20:41)

So true. I want to get into systems and resources, but I do want to. You mentioned AI. You know, it's like the buzzword bingo, right? You in particular are very public about writing your own content, but you've been posting for seven years, so you have a library of two to three thousand posts. You also have on occasion, AI sponsors who are like, hey, I'll give you this product, why don't you try it out? Is there a world where you upload all the 2 or 3,000 posts, which probably is, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of words. What do you think about tinkering with putting these ideas into a Dave GPT?

Dave Gerhardt (21:12)

Yeah, I've done it and I have it with Claude.

Podcast Interviewer (21:14)

Oh, okay.

Dave Gerhardt (21:15)

I did this a couple weeks ago. I went into SHIELD and I exported. You know, with shield, you can export all your post history from forever. By the way, this is all kind of new for me. Like, I'm very much a. I'm not a. I'm not an analyzer, I'm not an optimizer. Like, I, I'm not kidding. I just kind of like for seven years I just have kind of just been writing on LinkedIn. And the way that I do it is I have post ideas, I try to write once a day in the morning, I have post ideas. If I've. I either start my day with writing A post and if I have an idea, I open up LinkedIn and I just share it. Or I have like a Google Doc or Apple Notes where. Which I just call my LinkedIn backlog. Which is like, if I thought of an idea right now, I've already posted for today, so I'm not going to use it. I just put it in there and then I just kind of reference that. Other than that, you know, there's people out there with like crazy LinkedIn systems. I, I am not that guy. If you knew me in real life, like, that's just not my personality. I'm very much like a standing in line at Starbucks and just like ripping off a LinkedIn post about like, you know why traditional PR is dead, then that's who I am. But I do see a lot of potential with like, exactly. What you said is like, I had that thought the other day, which is like, maybe don't be such a Luddite dude. And you got seven years of content. Like, there's got to be some trends. So I exported from shield but I could only get a year's worth of posts into Claude like that. That was the max context window. I basically built like a writing guide and I wrote like, here's what a good headline looks like. Here's posts that I like. Here's top performing posts, the post that it has generated for me. They're good, but they don't. I'm not saying I don't believe in a. I'm all in. I'm bullish. If I was running your business or if I was ghost writing, like, I'd absolutely be using these tools. I have a founder friend of mine that I'm helping out and I have some like Claude kind of like recipes that I've helped him and it creates great content. But this is just what I do. Like I can sit down and I can just rip out a post in a minute. And I don't know if it's better than Claude or Chat GPT, but it just feels right. So I'm using it more as like filler. And so like, if I don't have an idea, that fresh kind of idea I have, I will always write it and I might take it to Claude and I might say like, how could I make this better? How could I tweak the hook and headline? I think that's valuable. But I haven't like, really just like copied like, I've never actually taken a post that was completely written by AI and copied it and posted it. That just doesn't it doesn't work for me. I think you could do it as a ghostwriter and you could do it for a CEO. Absolutely. I just am like, this is kind of like what I do. And I'm. It's natural and it's easy and I enjoy writing it. So I like to do that process.

Podcast Interviewer (23:26)

You know, I've tinkered a little bit, but I think it really only works. You can't copy someone else's stuff and do it. You have to copy your own stuff or feed it like some foundation similar to you. I put in like a year's worth of posts and I'm like, what happens if I put in my old stuff for the style and some knowledge about me and I ripped a new idea into a voice memo, transcribe that and throw that in there and have it merge the two.

Dave Gerhardt (23:48)

Now, my opinion about that aside, if I was doing marketing inside of a company or if I was running a founder brand type of business, this is exactly what I would be doing, which would be like a couple times a month, interviewing the founder, getting all this, getting the transcripts, using the transcripts to like create some type of style guide using Claude or ChatGPT, like, let's meet all the time so we get transcripts so I can get fresh content. Send me voice notes, send me all that. Let's take your top posts, let's analyze them, let's break down what a good post looks like that we like. Let's use Claude as an example and basically build like a writing assistant so then I can write a prompt and say like, hey, I just got this 20 minute rant about agents and why the future of the SDR role is going away. And I'm a sales tech CEO. I would absolutely be using Claude to help me flesh that out. Because I feel like one of the things that I struggled with ghostwriting for founders is like, I just don't often have. There's only a few things that I know a lot about and ChatGPT and Claude and these AI tools are like an amazing research assistant. So it's like, hey, I want to make the case, like, I want to make the case that like SDRs are going to be replaced by AI. Here's some data points. Can you help me frame that? And it's going to do a much better job of like adding the meat to content. I think as a writing tool, as a writing assistant, it's absolutely a tool that I would be leaning on. I think where the magic still happens though, is sprinkling in the True personality. That is what makes founder brand. Founder brand is like yeah, if everyone just starts pumping out chat GPT and claw generated like content, it's gonna suck. But if you can find a way to maybe use that to help you get going. But how do we make that Brad, you know, why do you Brad. Brad's got a yell beanie on like a funky button up shirt. He's got a fish mug, a fish poster that has to be injected into your content. That is what makes it good. I actually think there's going to be a new wave because of all this AI stuff that like made by a human is going to be a thing. It's why I kind of been messing around in my post. I'm saying like yes, this post was actually written. This is an old copywriting technique. I've used it for years that I learned where like it's a way of doing personalization without doing like insert token name. It's like, like hey, Yes. I wrote this email from a flight I'm currently 37,000ft up in the sky on a JetBlue freight from Boston to Orlando. I don't ever drink soda, but why is it that a Diet Coke tastes so good on, you know, in the airplane, right? Like sprinkling in little nuggets like that. I think you've got to be able to do that to have a brand and have an identity. So that stuff is really important. That stuff's not going to go away. This episode is brought to you by a team that I've personally hired twice, Compound Growth Marketing. And they're smart enough to sign up as a sponsor for us here at Exit 5. I work with John and the team at CGM, both at privy and Drift. And if you're trying to figure out demand gen, they're the team you should call. Especially in a world where so much is changing. With AI, they know what they're doing. They're grounded in first principles. But they're also fast and adapting to what's changing with technology today. They've managed over 50 million in ad spend for fast growing startups and public companies. But here's what really sets them apart. They don't just run campaigns. They build systems that scale. Computer Growth Marketing has leaders and consultants who've been in the trenches at companies like hunt club, goto, workable, monster.com and IBM. So they show up like true operators, not vendors. They understand what it's like to have the pressure to hit pipeline targets and to be accountable to the sales team inside of your company. And the biggest unlock, they blend demand gen with something that they call GTM Engineering. It's a mix of low code automation, AI workflows and systems thinking that helps drive more revenue. It's not just about leads, it's about building smarter, more efficient go to market market machines. Most agencies are still stuck on cost per lead models but Compound focuses on full funnel roi, pipeline creation and long term growth. If you want a partner that understands your goals, moves fast and can actually help you win, go to compoundgrowthmarketing.com that's compound growth marketing.com and make sure you.

Podcast Host (27:41)

Tell them that I sent you there.

Podcast Interviewer (27:44)

Yeah, that's really interesting. To be honest. I feel like this is an area that's like the true wild west. Everyone's experimenting. Let's get back to reality. What is your system to you know, manage your presence and you're doing it yourself.

Dave Gerhardt (27:57)

So yeah, a hundred percent, 100% me. So I write once a day, usually I did twice a day for a little bit but it just, the afternoon post just didn't work. So I found that the best time to post is like 6 to 8am in the morning, 6 to 9am in the morning. It's usually I just treat it like to the point about like a founder, like how do you make time for this? I've just like it has helped my career and my business so much that it's like quite literally the first thing that I do every day. You can check your inbox every day. You can check Slack every day. Like I open LinkedIn and so lately my routine has been I try to wake up a little bit before my kids so I can have some time to myself. I build a fire, I'm sit there, have the fire. I do some stretches, I have a drink of water, I have my coffee and I open up my calendar and I stopped using the LinkedIn native scheduler and I stopped using using any scheduling tools because I found that they don't for some reason the engagement isn't the same. I don't know if that's a placebo or not. So I use my scheduler which is my calendar. So every day in my calendar I have a post like today we have this salaries report that we published. So on my calendar at 5:45am this morning it says LinkedIn O post about salaries report. I have the link to Slack where we have the content about it. I have a Google Doc and I opened up Slack and that was the thing that I needed to post today. And so I try to plan out my Content for the week. If I don't have a calendar reminder on there, it means that day is just open for me to write about whatever's on my mind. Try to organize my content in that. Like I found that and I'm working with a founder who does this. You have a great idea and you want to just go to LinkedIn and post it right now. But as you know, it's like patience is your friend. You need to like understand what the algorithm wants as far as timing. And so you have that hot idea now, but you already posted today, hit pause, put it on your calendar and publish it tomorrow. So I try to post every day during the week and sometimes I'll write something on Saturday or Sunday, but it's not scheduled. Then I kind of mix it up. So we do some sponsored stuff with Exit 5. So we have like eight to 10 sponsors and as part of their sponsored package, like we do a sponsored post for them where like we have a video clip, but that's once or twice a month. Then I have some stuff that I have to promote, like our newsletter or we have a webinar. Other than that, I try to have a mix of one out of every five posts is like an Exit 5 promo related thing. And then the other four are usually about my life or about marketing. Then I have a backlog. So I just have, right now I have an Apple Notes file that is just backlog ideas. I might not even get to them because if I look at my calendar right now, I have basically content on the calendar through mid January. Every couple weeks I'll go into Shield or I'll go into LinkedIn Analytics. You can just do this and you can look at top performing posts. This is a hugely underrated thing. The, the LinkedIn feed is so ephemeral. Like all social media channels, right? Which it just like, it just goes away. And I have 175,000 followers. But like on average my posts probably get between 10 and 30,000 impressions. So it's a massive portion of my followers who never see my post. Never have I reposted a post and someone's been like, dude, you posted this six months ago. No, it just, it works again. And so I try to go through and like replay the hits. So I'll look at top posts and I'll just take them again. So I have stuff like I actually have a post next week. That's about why I think LinkedIn is a great PR strategy for startups. I've kind of posted that like three times a year for the last four years. Every time I posted it, it goes nuts. So I think there's an element to that that I also sprinkle in. But. But that's pretty much it. I have an advantage though, which is I have a very clear niche, B2B marketing. I have a large audience in this niche. So we have a community, we have a newsletter. Like, I'm flooded with insights and I have my finger on the pulse of like what the audience of readers wants. I feel like I know what will land with people and I think that is kind of like the secret sauce and the special ingredient. And on top of that, it's in an industry I've been working in for over a decade, right. So I think those are the factors.

Podcast Interviewer (31:28)

There are major knowledge bombs in there. Just try to tease some of them out for people who are listening. So maybe I'll work backwards, you know, niche down, know your audience and write to that time box. Kind of like working out, right? It's not gonna happen unless you do it. And sure, you can have like someone on the team work with you and help you be accountable, but just putting the time on your calendar, doing it, that's the only way it happens. There's people though.

Dave Gerhardt (31:50)

I see them out there. You could read somebody on LinkedIn and they're like, here's my 15 step process for generating a LinkedIn post. And it's just like, no, I've been just doing it for a long time so I can just sit there and like pull open LinkedIn and just like rip off a post. And I think it's just like anything in marketing. It's very easy to over engineer it when like the real, like the 80, 20 of this is like, do you have something interesting to say? It's not about how you automated it, which posts you scheduled, what time of day you posted, like what the headline was, what the third line of the copy was. That's not what matters. It is like, do you have something, do you have something to say? And then there's lots of things I want to write about. I want to write about my life, fitness, sports, politics, climate change, whatever, right? I want to write about all that on LinkedIn. But that doesn't work to grow a following. It's strategically advantaged it, it's advantageous for me to build a following like of marketers because we're building a business in this space. So that's the audience that I want. If you want to build a following, which, that's the goal. It's not a vanity metric because if more people follow you, more people are gonna see your message. If more people see your message, more people are gonna go to your website, buy your product, see your stuff. It's just like having people opt into your email list. You have a bigger audience. Right. I found that when there. There was a time in my life when I was writing on LinkedIn, I was kind of writing about everything. I wasn't growing, my engagement wasn't growing. Going. Now, you know that when you see a post, for me, it's most likely going to be about marketing. That's what you want to be. What is the topic that it's valuable for you to be known about? You know, whether you're. What's the woman you used to work with? Kate.

Podcast Interviewer (33:09)

Yes.

Dave Gerhardt (33:10)

Right. What was her thing? E Commerce. Like, you know, Omni Channel Mark Omnichannel marketing. Right. Like you. You need something like that. Adam Robinson. When I see him in my feed, I know what he's going to talk about. It's not, build a founder brand and tell everybody about how you went to yoga and you like to eat this and you to sprinkle that in as like the little dust to make things more interesting. But you gotta have. You gotta be like, what's the topic I want to be known for? And that's what I'm gonna create content around. And my friends and family know that I have more substance in real life than just the B2B marketing guy. But for the sake of building an audience on LinkedIn, I'm the B2B marketing guy. And it worked.

Podcast Interviewer (33:41)

Yeah. Like a product, you need to position yourself and build a story around it. So makes perfect sense. One idea, actually, I think I just wanna pull out that was in that barrage of tips, all amazing. The swipe file I think is critical. You know, a lot of my clients kind of run in the beginning. It's really easy. The idea is really flow because they have a lot kind of piled up. But eventually, if you're not kind of reflecting, you hit the wall. Yeah, you got stockpile.

Dave Gerhardt (34:04)

It's like a. Yeah, maybe it's like a.

Podcast Interviewer (34:05)

You gotta write from abundance.

Dave Gerhardt (34:06)

It's like we have a. We have a. We have a fireplace. Right. You gotta have the wood stock for all winter long, so you gotta have the reserve pile out back. And so there's the days that the inspiration strikes and I don't need a backlog, but it's important to post consistently. If I rolled a Monday and I'm like, damn, I'm depressed today, I'm in a Bad mood. My kids piss me off. I got to do this nonsense meeting for work. I got nothing to write about. Oh no. I have a Google Doc filled with 500 posts ideas. Great. I got one. I'll copy it, I'll edit it. Like, that is a huge thing. Especially if you're trying to coach a founder or yourself to like, how do you build this muscle? You need the stockpile. It's very hard to do it on demand. You got to build that stockpile of ideas and you got to switch your brain on to know, like all day, what are the activities that could be LinkedIn posts? Like, I just wrote this like long rant to the team about what's changing with SEO and chat GPT and I'm like, oh, that'd be a great LinkedIn post. So I copy that and I kind of edit it and I tweak it. About two hours ago, I did a chat with a marketing team for like an internal marketing meeting. I was like a guest speaker and they sent me over 20 questions yesterday and I wrote out my answers to those 20 questions. I have that Google Doc and it's literally a to do item for me next week that I'm going to chunk them out and I'm going to make LinkedIn posts because I've already done the work. So my brain is just now kind of always like, what could be content for LinkedIn from this? I think that's a great thing that you can steal.

Podcast Interviewer (35:23)

Always got to have ideas. I want to switch gears a little bit. I feel like we got into a lot of things that were uncovered in the book. Fantastic, really. But I want to talk about impact. To be honest, a lot of the impact we kind of covered almost in the intro, business wise, I'm kind of curious more the unexpected impact of all this work that you've done. Most people do this for business purposes. Drive awareness, drive revenue, and whatever opportunity that comes with that. What else has happened to you as a result? Maybe adrift? Are some of the other companies you worked at unexpected benefits or just crazy stories that happen when you happen to be all over LinkedIn?

Dave Gerhardt (35:56)

Yeah, I mean, I'm. I'm a billionaire, in case you didn't know. I drive a RAV4, but you can't afford that. No. You know what, I like to joke around, so apologies. But one thing has been like, people like to say, like, oh, it's just marketing. It's just B2B marketing, but man, I could fill a whole wall with people who have been like, hey man, that thing that you wrote like, you helped me get a job. You helped me get promoted. You helped me do this at work. Like humans, we. We put a lot of stock in what we do for our job. You go to a party, you meet somebody, what's the very first thing they ask you? Oh, hey, Brad, I'm Dave. Nice to meet you. What do they say after you get to kind of shooting shit, what's the very first question they ask you?

Podcast Interviewer (36:31)

So what do you do?

Dave Gerhardt (36:32)

Right. I didn't make us that way. I don't know why we are that way. It just is. So what do you do? So whether you work in sales or marketing or finance, you're a teacher. We put a lot of, like, our identity becomes, you know, like what we do for work. And so, yeah, it is just me writing like posts on LinkedIn. But I have so many messages from people over the years who have, like, man, I love your stuff. Or I had somebody message me the other day and I wrote something about. This was. This was about like working out and family and stuff. But I kind of, I think this makes the point. This guy messaged me, he's like, hey, man, I've been in a rut. I've been kind of depressed. I haven't worked out in like a year and a half. I got two kids. I'm very similar position to you. I just read your post and I'm like, I'm stopping this tomorrow. I'm going to start running again. How would you start? And I went long back and forth with this guy. I'm like, start. Just run five minutes. You can do five minutes. If you do five minutes, you can do seven. If you do seven minutes, you can do a mile. Then run it a mile every day. That's what I did. I started running every day. December 2022, I ran 1 mile, 20. That we had this amazing exchange, like, human to human. That was an amazing thing that happened. We didn't talk about marketing, but that happened because of marketing. Like, because we're like, we like friends. It's like, I don't know you, but I bet we'd hang out in real life and be able to shoot the shit and have a nice time because our work lives are very similar. So, like, it's just like, why are you friends with people at work? It's like a therapy and camaraderie. Like, we have the same job. Nobody else in my Life cares about P2B marketing, but we all work in the same world, so. So it's been those personal stories and I think that to make the point for, like, what's possible. This is beyond, you know, LinkedIn famous or. Or beyond the value of a foundry. Getting on LinkedIn, it's social media is for all of the nonsense and the dunking and the bots and the politics and all that crap, it's an amazing way to connect with people. Like, I can't even. It's given me such an advantage in my career, the people that I've been able to connect with from across the world, around the world, literally, because I write about marketing on LinkedIn. Like, are you kidding me? That's. That is amazing. I've met so many people. I met Exit 5 members. As one Exit 5 member. She sent me a Christmas card like a holiday car. It's hanging on my fridge with a nice personal note. Because we met through LinkedIn. They came to our event. She's grown her career through this thing. It's like. So whenever I'm having a day where someone's like, oh, cool, bro. Another bro. Another LinkedIn tech bro writing about marketing online, I'm like, yeah, you should see the other side of this. There is a real human piece of this, and it's pretty damn cool. So that. That's, like, the one thing that I'm most proud of. One more. This used to happen a lot more when I lived. I lived in Boston, but I lived in Boston and Drift was in Boston and. And there was a lot of attention in, like, the tech space on us. So I was literally really. He, like, recognized. It was like the most embarrassing thing. Like, I'm in. I'm in Whole Foods and it's. It's some guy come up to me. He's like, yo, Dave Gearhart, right? And I'm like, yeah. He's like, oh, man. I look, I follow you on LinkedIn. I'm buying groceries with my wife on a Sunday. But this was. I'm up in Vermont now, and we had an event at this event space up here called Hula. And my kids weren't old enough or even alive when we were in Boston. And that stuff happened. I'm in Hula in Burlington, Vermont. I took my kids there because I had to pick them up from school and I need to go visit this venue. I brought them with me. And I walk in the door at Hula. It's a co working space in Vermont. This. This lady comes up to me. She's like, dave Gerhardt. She's like, you're up in Vermont? And I'm like, yeah. She's like, oh, I'm Becky. So. And so I'm a head of marketing at this startup. I'm like, wait. You know, me and my kids saw that it was the coolest thing ever. It was like, my daughter's 7 and my son is 5, and they, like, they don't know what I do, but that some stranger, like, recognized me and knew my name. My kids, like, my daughter still talks about that. It was the cutest, like, coolest thing ever. And I was like, all right, this is. This is beyond just, like, you know, writing on LinkedIn. So that was pretty cool.

Podcast Interviewer (39:56)

That is awesome. When worlds collide. So we're nearing the end of our amazing conversation here. I have just a couple more questions for you. The first I want to ask is, you mentioned when you started LinkedIn that it was the gold rush. You posted about drinking your smoothie, walking down the block. A hundred thousand views. What do you say to a founder who wants to get started now? Do you think there's so gold and them are hills?

Dave Gerhardt (40:18)

Yeah, absolutely. I see it every day. I. I think you see a post in your feed. I think it's social media. Maybe you don't have the early mover advantage anymore, but this is kind of the opportunity that you get from social media, where it just takes one post to kind of pop off or go viral, whatever that means in your world. Because unlike having an email list, for example, where you have a hundred people on your email list, kind of the max of the reach of that is going to be a hundred. You could write the one post that just like, like, gets sucked in by the feed. This guy, Ding, he goes by Sales rapper, you know. Ding. Right, okay.

Podcast Interviewer (40:48)

Of course.

Dave Gerhardt (40:49)

So he texted me the other day, and we share a love of, like, music, particularly hip hop rap. And he sends me. There's this, like, Dr. Dre song, and it's like, ding, ding dong ding ding ding ding dong. Keep the bells ringing. Ding. And so I sent him that, and I was like, dude, you got to rap over this. And he did, and he rapped over it and he made it. He sent it to me the next day or two days later. Later, the post had, like 70 likes on it, but it had 350,000 impressions. Okay, so the way that I read that is like, Vertical Video, they have that video tab now. It got sucked into that, that feed, and it went nuts. So he doesn't have a big following. He was not an early mover, but it just took that one post to get him, like, thousands of new followers. And, like, that. That Snowball effect. So I think that's one. The other thing is, like, don't do it for that reason. Do it for the like. Like, I'm gonna commit to doing this. Like, I don't want you to treat it as like, short term results. I want you to treat this like a habit. Like, I'm gonna work out and run and lift and do that for the rest of my life. I'm not doing it just for sick. Like, there's some people who. I'm going on vacation in three months and I want to look decent in vacation. So I'm gonna go work out now. I know do for the rest of your life. Because it's like an amazing business channel. Beyond the followers, beyond the metrics is an amazing opportunity to like, network, to meet other people, to test messages. So I wouldn't do it for the followers and the virality. I would do it as like, messaging is the most important thing for your business. This is a channel to like constantly be testing and tweaking your messaging. So it's an amazing feedback tool. I would do it even if there was no followers that came with it.

Podcast Interviewer (42:15)

I love that. I also think about it as like, almost like a journal and lac to kind of help you think about work things out in your head.

Dave Gerhardt (42:23)

Yes. It's amazing.

Podcast Interviewer (42:25)

Even you know, when I'm gone, my. My kids could probably go look at it and know the story of my work life.

Dave Gerhardt (42:30)

Somebody export dad LinkedIn profile.

Podcast Interviewer (42:34)

No, but.

Dave Gerhardt (42:34)

But you said it's also. Yeah, like, who cares? Like, I would be doing it as a daily. Like, it helps me clarify my thoughts on stuff. So if nobody followed me, if I had no engagement, I promise you that I would still do the same writing. Because it's like, it's a daily practice of like, having to write a hook, having to write a headline, having to write something, having to have something to say, I think is very valuable.

Podcast Interviewer (42:53)

That's awesome. You inspire people every day. One of my last questions or second to last question, who Inspires you on LinkedIn? Who are you learning from on LinkedIn these days? I assume you're not spending much time on Twitter anymore.

Dave Gerhardt (43:04)

Twitter, man. I don't know what to make of Twitter. I want it to be. I am. It's like, where I get my news, but it's like, it's also the worst. It's like, I gave up on it. You gave up on it?

Podcast Interviewer (43:14)

You gave up on it? Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt (43:15)

Let me.

Podcast Interviewer (43:16)

Too much noise.

Dave Gerhardt (43:17)

Yeah. But you know, it's weird though. I get DMS. Like, I do connect with people, and I'll get DMs from people and for, like, calls and interesting things. I don't know. You want me to Recommend somebody on LinkedIn that you should go follow or something?

Podcast Interviewer (43:28)

If you're not learning from any, who do you just think is crushing it? A good example for other folks out there who want to do some founder brand and learn and get inspired.

Dave Gerhardt (43:36)

Okay. All right. Yeah, I got you. I'll give you a couple. There's a guy called Eli Rubel. He runs a design and creative agency, and he's been posting a lot on. On LinkedIn, just, like, kind of sharing his story and sharing his journey. He's a good person to follow. I don't know if you follow Alina Vandenberg. She's the founder of Chili Piper. Her. She's a great example.

Podcast Interviewer (43:57)

She's gonna come on the podcast.

Dave Gerhardt (43:58)

Oh, is she? All right, great. Tell her I said hello. You know what? I actually made a list a while ago because people ask me this question, and I. I should know who it is. You know what I'm trying to do more? I'm trying to comment more. I think commenting is a very underrated way to, like, create your feed. There's a girl called Christina Lee. She runs marketing at a company called Plot. They're like a social media company. She's great. Devin Reed is a good guy to follow. He just recently quit his job, and he's kind of going all. All in on this. And then from a content standpoint, I've been following Kieran. So Kip is a CMO at HubSpot, and they. They have this podcast called Marketing against the Grain, and that's where I've been getting a lot of my AI knowledge from. They talk a lot about, like, AI and writing and what's possible over there. That I think is really good. Yeah, I don't know. I don't have that much interesting stuff. I've actually been. I had a period of my life where all I did was read, like, business books, and now I just read. I read fiction, and it's made me a better writer more.

Podcast Interviewer (44:48)

Cool. I need to do more of that.

Dave Gerhardt (44:49)

I love reading at night in bed on my Kindle. I found that, like, if I'm laying in bed reading, like, you know, founder, brand, at this, my brain just starts spinning, and so I. I need something else. But I. I think ultimately I'm just a curious person, so I see everything as marketing. My wife will be like, check this out. Because we bought this couch, we got a Free table with it. And I'm like, no, that's marketing. That's just marketing.

Podcast Interviewer (45:10)

Oh, man, it's been amazing chopping it up with you, you know, to wrap things up. Is there anything interesting going on at exit 5 that you'd like to share with everybody out there?

Dave Gerhardt (45:19)

Everything. Yeah, Interesting. We've got a real business. We've got a real company. It was one person a year ago. We're about to make an offer to our sixth person to join the team. It's not going anywhere. This is what kind of fell into. And it's. We've built an amazing company, an amazing business, and I'm having a lot of fun. Like, I feel like I was letting my muscles atrophy in, like, what should be the prime of my career by kind of, like, toiling away, being like, I'm a solopreneur forever. This is the only way I can live. We have an amazing community, and I'm having a lot of fun building, like, this media company. I feel myself getting better from that. So. So you can check out Exit 5 or just follow me on LinkedIn and you'll see all my nonsense about it and you won't miss it.

Podcast Interviewer (45:56)

Yes. Everybody go follow Dave on LinkedIn. All of you who are living under a rock and don't know who Dave Gerhardt is, Dave, it was so great having you on. Thank you for being generous with your time and perspective. Until next time, let's stay connected on LinkedIn.

Dave Gerhardt (46:11)

All right. I'll wear my LinkedIn famous hat and send you a picture. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? 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 Exit 5 is to. 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. Today's episode is brought to you by ahrefs. You probably know Ahrefs as an SEO tool, right? I've been using Ahrefs personally for over a decade to see how we rank and see what's driving traffic to our site. Content marketing has always been a big part of the playbook. I use their product at Drift at Privy and now we're using it at exit 5. But over that time, Ahrefs has evolved a lot and they're not actually just an SEO tool anymore. They're a full on marketing platform built for marketers like you and me who want to grow traffic, understand our audiences and make smarter business decisions in the AI search world. Their marketing intelligence lets you see what's driving traffic to your site, to your competitors, understand top performing content, paid keywords, backlinks, and you can even understand how much or your organic traffic would be worth. Put a actual dollar amount to all that organic traffic that you're driving. They've also got tools for AI powered content and keyword research, 24, 7 site monitoring, real time analytics, backlink tracking, brand mentions, you name it, you can do it all in one place. With Ahrefs. It's really a marketer's dream. If you're a marketing nerd like myself. One of the coolest features in my opinion is their new brand radar tool, which allows you to explore what people and AI says about your brand, topic or niche. You can do this to do amazing research to help understand what's actually happening in AI search today and just what the conversations are online about your brand. Plus you can try their free analytics tool to show you how many visitors you're getting from AI search like ChatGPT or Perplexity. And look, as a firsthand user of this, so much easier to use than something like Google Analytics. I love it. We use it on our site. I've used it for exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we've got 105 visitors to exit 5 from AI search, 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore. It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you got to go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a h r e f s.com today. Go check them out.