Building a Community for B2B Marketers - with Dave Gerhardt, Founder and CEO Exit Five

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions.
Now on to today's show.

**Dave Gerhardt** (0:26)
Thank you.

**Ray Rike** (0:37)
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Dave Gerhardt, the founder and CEO of Exit Five, former chief brand officer at Drift, and former chief marketing officer at Privy. Today, we'll be covering four primary topic areas with Dave. First, the evolution of the SaaS chief marketing officer role over the past three years.
Second, the role of building a community for CMOs.
Third, the role of a broader community for B2B marketers. Is it different than a community for chief marketing officers? And fourth, the opportunities and challenges that go along with building a professional marketing community. So Dave, with that, would you mind taking a brief moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming my guest on the Metrics and Measure Up podcast?

**Dave Gerhardt** (1:29)
Sure. I made a coffee a couple of minutes ago, and then I walked over into my office, and now I'm here.

**Ray Rike** (1:34)
You have a long history of getting on the podcast.

**Dave Gerhardt** (1:38)
So yeah, like you said in the bio, but the quick summary is I spent about 10 years working in B2B SaaS.
I went from PR intern to CMO over that time, about 10 years.
I worked at Constant Contact, I worked at HubSpot, and then I was the first marketing person at Drift, and that's where I really got the big boost in my career. It was the first opportunity that I had to do all the marketing, and I learned so much during that time because the company grew really fast. And so I grew from marketing manager to CMO, to chief brand officer there. And then after four years at Drift, I left to go to Privy where I was CMO, and they eventually got acquired by Attentive. After that, well, in parallel to that, I started writing about B2B marketing and marketing in general, on LinkedIn, and I had a podcast. I started to build a following of my own, and I decided to launch a paid marketing community where people would pay $10 a month to join, get access to exclusive content, private podcasts.
And I expected that to just be something that I grew to 10 or 20 members. I'd have a little kind of side group of people that I talked to marketing about, and it would kick in a couple hundred bucks to my rent, and I'd be happy. Within the first 60 days, I had a thousand members at $10 a month, so I was doing $10,000 a month in recurring revenue. I was still a CMO at the time, and I was like, whoa, holy cow, I think I just found my next career move after this, and so I did a little bit of consulting for a while. I had a lot of like interest in companies that wanted to do the things that the companies that I did were at, and so I had a lot of demand for consulting, but I didn't really love the consulting. I didn't really like having clients. The same time, I had this budding content business, and so I launched a community, I had a podcast, we started to get demand from sponsors, and about a year into this thing, I was like, you know what, I have something really unique here. This is something like a pavilion, like a saster, and nobody's really doing this for the niche of B2B marketing, and so in 2022, I decided to make this my full-time thing. I did it solo for the first year, and then about six months ago, I decided to hire, and now there's a team of three, and we're building Exit Five. The way that I think about Exit Five, it's a media company focused on B2B marketing, so Ray, you've built an awesome podcast, and you have this benchmark site, and you're doing a lot of interesting things with content. There's a lot of overlap there, and so we have 3,000 members in our community, and I spend most of my time working on that, working on our podcast, doing webinars, and creating content, and that's where I spend my time today.

**Ray Rike** (4:14)
Well, we're going to dive deep into your community and the content, but before you do that, I think you have 4 members of your team because I know Boots, your cat, has joined us today.