How Dave Gerhardt 10x’d the value of Exit Five overnight with Circle Plus
“If I had learned what I was going to build, I should have started [with Circle Plus] from the beginning.”
Dave Gerhardt
Founder, Exit Five
Overview
Challenge
A generic platform for a burgeoning business that didn’t reflect the high quality of the brand or content
Solution
An end-to-end, white-labeled platform and branded app that transformed a Facebook group into a media company
Meet Exit Five, the bootstrapped B2B marketing membership
Dave Gerhardt didn’t set out to create a B2B media company, membership, or community.
He was a CMO at a startup when his daily musings about B2B marketing on LinkedIn got enough traction to gate them via a Patreon membership. He called it Dave Gerhardt’s Marketing Group (DGMG) thinking it was only ever going to be a side-project with 20-30 listeners—and then it blew up, fast.
“I got like 1,000 members in the first couple months, and early on, one of the members was like, "Hey man, it's cool that you send us all this stuff, but now that you have 1,000 members, we all want to connect with each other."
And I was like, "Oh my God, that's a genius idea." And that was the first real epiphany of, oh, there's something bigger here.”
As a scrappy, responsive, but part-time entrepreneur, Dave quickly created a free Facebook group to give the people what they wanted.
“Why [Facebook]? No idea. It was the easiest one to pick and my wife and I were active in some parenting Facebook Groups and they seemed to work great. I never evaluated multiple tools.”
His expectations of the platform were low (“Who even used Facebook anymore?”)—so he didn’t expect what happened next.
“The Facebook group quickly became the value prop for joining Patreon. Instead of, "Come get Dave's hot marketing takes," it was like, wait a second, we now have 2,000 members. They all work in B2B marketing and they're all in this community.
I would go away for a week and I'd come back and there'd be like 50 new posts, and I didn't start any of them.”
While the growth was fast and furious, the experimentation never ended—as it often never does for entrepreneurs (or marketers).
After seeing the success of the Facebook community, he had an epiphany: “This is actually much bigger than me, and it can be much bigger if I remove myself from the face of it.”
So he rebranded and relaunched the community as the core offer for Exit Five—and quit his job to focus on building it full time.
He was all in, which upped the stakes astronomically high to make this a wild success.
Challenges: A disjointed business that didn’t reflect the founder’s commitment, traction, or revenue
Even after he devoted his full focus to Exit Five (and despite the thriving 3,000+ member community), Dave was struggling with the inconsistent, patched-together management of everything under his business umbrella.
He kept running into practical limitations that either prevented him from growing (like tools) or processes and experiences that slowed him down, and made his business look amateur.
This is when Dave realized that he had impulsively put all his eggs into the Facebook basket as a well-intentioned quick fix for a member's request—but it didn’t live up to his current commitment to and investment in Exit Five.
“It became a real thing, a real business, but I felt like where it was at didn't feel professional enough to me. And last year, I started to poke around and think about, ‘Okay, well, I want to move this off Facebook.’”
One thing kept gnawing at him: Maybe a real, professional business shouldn’t rely on a free Facebook group to keep its community together—especially now that his business became the main source of his income.
Even though he knew moving 3,000+ people to a new platform would be difficult, he was convinced that the experience on Facebook didn’t live up to the brand and business he was building.
He didn’t have control over his member’s data, which prevented him from creating the sort of seamless member experience that marketing professionals expect.
Not only that, but it prevented Dave from easily marketing to his B2B marketing community. This was a massive weak spot for someone who built his career on marketing advice.
“One of the challenges of being on Facebook is, I have 3,500+ members, but I don’t have their contact information. It’s not easy to market to them, and it’s not a clean membership management system.”
For example, when somebody churned, Dave’s team had to manually boot people out on a monthly basis. While a relatively small issue—it’s one that would eventually slow his small but mighty team down as the business grew.
He also found that engagement was very surface-level and discussions were easily lost in the constant flow of new posts. Members were accessing this professional group in the same personal flow of information as family updates from their Aunt Jane and funny cat videos.
Plus, there were no ways to organize content, pull people deeper into the community, or shut off the noise of everything else on the social media platform.
“With Facebook, [members] never went deeper than the home feed. And so people would ask the same damn questions over and over and over.”
Ultimately, even though Dave was investing heavily in content and resources, it was impossible for members to find the information they needed. Even as the community expanded and started offering templates, decks, videos, etc, all he would hear were the same questions asking for resources.
Dave even tried pinning posts to keep important content visible, but his community quickly started to look more like a listicle rather than the media empire he envisioned.
“I'd have to write a Facebook post, upload a PDF, star it, and then it would just be one of 70 starred posts and would be impossible [to find].”
Most importantly, all of these frictions put together didn’t live up to the powerhouse B2B education brand he wanted to build.
What he really wanted was to become the go-to resource for people whose boss had just asked them a tough question: both in terms of valuable community feedback and support, and full of tactical, useful, searchable resources. Not just a passive discussion forum that pops up on your phone when you’re trying to look up a recipe for dinner.
“It was a gut feeling and a gut decision. A big part of this was me wanting to make a change.
And strategically, this was like, hey, this is becoming a business. You have the wrong foundation to build this business on. You can go and keep building on this, but eventually there's going to be something that's going to break or be an issue here that you're going to have to deal with.”
He knew that if he wanted to turn his business into a true asset, he had to trust his instincts and invest—so, he turned to Circle Plus.
Solution: A cohesive, premium member experience that instantly upleveled the business—thanks to an always-on branded app
Once Dave decided to invest in the true potential of his community as a linchpin of his B2B media empire—which included community, content, events, and more—he knew he had to double down to set up the necessary foundations and avoid bigger headaches down the road.
He had to make both the management and the member experience of Exit Five seamless, and level up his capabilities so he could offer members more, and do more.
With Circle Plus, Dave was able to capitalize on his momentum with a branded Exit Five app—in 4 weeks from idea to app store—that gave him control over his brand, his data, and his members. Now, not only can he market his business to his heart’s content, but also build something he truly owns for the future that will scale as he grows.
“We have a job board, we have a podcast, and we do webinars and other content. But what's cool about this is that all of those properties also drive back to the Exit Five membership on Circle… I think of it as ‘Circle Plus is like the behind-the-paywall version of Exit Five.’”
He sees Circle Plus as the one tool that brings all of his future plans together in one place, and lets his core offer (community) be the hero and the engine to his empire.
“The fact that we have a custom app is great, and that you can download it from the Google or Apple store makes it easy. [The branded app] basically removes… the middleman.”
Circle Plus also gave Dave the ability to create a full-stack membership site that unifies his content and community, increases engagement—and attributes it to his brand.
“Lately, I've been thinking more about the idea of a membership site than a community.
One of the reasons that Circle's such a good fit for us is that I see it more as there is a discussion forum and there are discussions, but the value is in this: It's in the videos, it's in the templates, it's in the resources and the things that you can fill this site with that makes it go beyond a community, which is one of the reasons why we wanted to move off Facebook.”
He has a full content management system that consolidates a bunch of stitched-together tools and processes, and gives members a unified experience where they can experience continuous, undistracted value.
“I feel like now with [the branded app], it's like, people are getting stickier, they're getting deeper into the product.”
Now, instead of a Facebook ping on their phone, his members get a branded Exit Five notification whenever someone messages them, or there’s a new video or live event in Exit Five.
The branded app from Circle Plus helped Dave elevate his member experience and strengthen his brand image for investors, partners, sponsors—as well as cut out the noise.
“The dedicated mobile app just feels like a level-up and there's a lot more going on there. Where I'm at today, I'm so happy because everything's back to where we had it. We ripped the bandaid off and the business has never been better.”
He went from…
- scattered, buried resources to being able to expose community genius in an organized way
- distracted daily engagement to deep, long-term investment from members
- procrastinating about moving off Facebook to concierge support migrating his community to a custom, branded app in 4 weeks flat
Dave’s magic wasn’t just in organizing B2B marketers in one place. It was in investing in the growth of a full-fledged B2B marketing empire.
“I think over time we can add more value with the way that content works in Circle Plus.
Because when you start building a community, the wisdom comes from hundreds of people and all these different little pockets, and you want to try to expose that.”
Results: An intentionally elite experience, YoY growth, and highly engaged members
What began as an impromptu, part-time Patreon/Facebook group has evolved into a dynamic, centralized media company, anchored by the Circle Plus mobile app.
“The business has 10x just because the quality of the community and engagement is better, we're attracting more of our ICP members, and the conversations and types of content and questions people ask and the value they get from the community is much, much better vs Facebook.”
Before, his members toggled between disjointed tools and had fleeting, surface-level discussions.
Now, they explore a centralized resource hub, engaging deeply and seamlessly with the content and with one another. This profound transformation has powered Exit Five’s strongest growth driver—word of mouth.
“I think the best opportunity we have is to just invest in that product and continue to help people be successful in their careers. We're thinking a lot about content and the member experience and feeding that, because what's amazing is that's also going to be the best marketing to help grow the business.
What's going to be the best way to get more new members in is to make the existing members happier and rave about it. And we see it all the time, somebody gets something out of value out of Exit Five, what do they do? They go write about it on LinkedIn. And what does that do? That gets three new people to come sign up.”
With Circle Plus, Exit Five leveled up into a media company rather than just a hobby podcast or paid community group—and has been growing 87% year-over-year—with 2023 marking their first million-dollar year.
“If I had learned what I was going to build, I should have started here from the beginning.”
Dave’s biggest confirmation that he made the right move? Testimonials like this:
“It's like LinkedIn on steroids but better because people aren't trying to drive engagement here. They’re commenting & posting because they genuinely want to help or get help with their marketing problems."
While Dave may not have set out to build a business—he had to take advantage of the success he found to build something future-proof.
“My metric [for Circle Plus] was:
- Does it just feel better to me, that feeling of leveling-up?
- Does it feel higher quality? Is it not so much the transactional discussions?
- Do members like it more?
You just have a sense for like, ‘okay, the quality in here is good.’ The content was good, the onboarding of it was better. All the steps were better. That was the check for me.
For everyone who told me that they were canceling because it wasn't on Facebook anymore, we got hundreds of new members who were like, "I'd never joined because it was on Facebook.”
