#232: Inside Exit Five: How We Doubled Community Growth in Under a Year (with Matt Carnevale)

#233: Inside Exit Five | In this episode, Matt Carnevale (Head of Community at Exit Five) joins the team at Circle to break down how we’ve doubled Exit Five community membership and boosted engagement—all by treating Exit Five like a product. He shares our playbook: audience growth, engagement systems, how we use member feedback to shape what we build, and why “curate, don’t create” has been key to scaling. If you’re running (or joining) a B2B community, this is how you make it work.

Matt covers:

• Why we think of community like a product, not just a channel
• How Exit Five grew community membership over 100% in under a year
• The systems we use to drive 40% monthly active user engagement
• The power of “tripwires,” onboarding, and member matchmaking
• How feedback loops shape what we build

Timestamps

• (00:00) - – Intro to Matt
  
• (04:03) - – Exit Five’s approach to community
  
• (06:33) - – What it means to treat community like a product
  
• (10:33) - – Why audience is the foundation of community growth
  
• (13:33) - – How Exit Five builds and converts audience from LinkedIn
  
• (16:33) - – Using content tripwires to drive signups
  
• (18:33) - – Offers that work: Why we use a 7-day free trial
  
• (21:33) - – How Exit Five got started as a paid community
  
• (24:33) - – The product mindset: build, test, iterate
  
• (28:37) - – Using member feedback to drive product decisions
  
• (30:37) - – Real example: member matchmaking feature
  
• (32:37) - – Promoting new community features like product launches
  
• (35:37) - – How we drive 40% monthly active usage
  
• (37:37) - – The value of member-led events and how we do them
  
• (40:37) - – Other plays: tagging experts, matchmaking, onboarding
  
• (43:37) - – Why self-promo was hurting our community and what changed when we cut it
  
• (45:37) - – Final takeaways + advice for small communities
  
• (49:37) - – Audience Q&A: re-engagement, matchmaking, content cadence

Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.com
Join the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter
Check out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/
Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership

***

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:00:17]:
Excited to have Matt here who's the marketing manager at Exit Five. We're going to go through the engagement and growth tactics that they have experienced. So welcome, Matt.

Matt Carnevale [00:00:26]:
Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:00:27]:
Yeah. Okay, so you are running slides today, so you are steering the ship. If you want to go next, we can do a quick intro into who we are and then we can jump in.

Matt Carnevale [00:00:36]:
Let's do it.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:00:37]:
So a little bit about me. My name is Alexis Teichmiller. I am the senior Brand Partnerships Manager at Circle. I have worked the last decade now in the online entrepreneur, creator economy on the tech side and as well as an entrepreneur myself. And so I've been at circle for almost 3 years. Love all things community and love like digging into the weeds on what makes a successful community and Exit Five surely is that so hand it over to you, Matt, if you want to do a quick intro.

Matt Carnevale [00:01:06]:
Yeah, cool, cool, cool. Yeah. So, hey, everyone. My name is Matthew Carnevale. Most people call me Matt. Currently the marketing manager at Exit Five, which is the number one community for B2B marketers. Prior to joining Exit Five, I was in sales for a short stint and then spent about five years in B2B marketing. And I was a big member and fan of Exit Five before joining the team.

Matt Carnevale [00:01:28]:
So it's pretty cool to work with them now and get to help them build the product that really helped me grow my career.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:01:34]:
That's amazing. And you've been with Exit Five for five or six months now, or has it been almost a year?

Matt Carnevale [00:01:40]:
It's been since February is when I started full time, so around there. Yeah.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:01:45]:
Amazing. Time is flying.

Matt Carnevale [00:01:46]:
Yeah. In startups it's like dog years, Right? It's like one month is like seven months, so it feels like a lifetime.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:01:52]:
I know my almost three years of circle feels like like 15.

Matt Carnevale [00:01:55]:
Yeah, yeah, it is, if you do the math. Cool.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:01:59]:
Okay. I was just going to go over a quick agenda for the day. We're going to Talk through how Exit Five drives member growth, why they treat their community like a product, and some ideologies and strategies of why you might want to start viewing your own community as a product too. And then what they specifically did to drive 40% monthly active users. Really like one of our highly engaged communities on Circle and they have a community of over 4,000 members. So with a community that big, how are they driving such high engagement? So we'll get into some of the weeds there.

Matt Carnevale [00:02:30]:
Sweet. Sounds good. Nailed it.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:02:32]:
Yeah. So I want to kind of kick this off by asking what community means to you. So there's a lot of different. I know that community is a buzzword right now, and I'm curious, like, when you think of community in the lens of your business, what does it mean to you? Just drop it in the chat. And while you are, Michael, I want to answer your question. Yes, we will send a recording. This is being recorded, and we'll send the recording in the next 24 hours. Yeah.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:02:58]:
When you think about community, is it about retention? Is it about providing a specific transformation? Is it about just connecting with your customers? Okay. Cassandra said community equals connection, shared experiences and transformation. James love that Community is about connection and action. Yeah. I think it's a great blend of the two. So kind of be thinking around, like, what community looks like for you. Peter says inspiration. Paul said connecting with clients and prospects.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:03:27]:
Okay, Matt, if you want to go to the next slide, this is great.

Matt Carnevale [00:03:31]:
I'm sure a lot of good stuff in there.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:03:33]:
So our philosophy at Circle is community unlocks transformation. And a key part of bringing people together is to help them achieve something. You're helping them transform an aspect of their life. And so when we think about a community business model, when we look at all the thousands of communities on Circle, the core focus is they're helping a member transform an aspect of their life. And so we kind of whittled that down into three core buckets. So you're either helping someone improve their life, which is a little bit more lifestyle, a little bit more general, you're helping someone learn a skill or up level an existing skill, or you're helping someone build a career or a specific network in their career industry. So if you go to the next slide, just giving you some examples of just thinking through, like when you are looking at the community that you're building for your business, which one do you think right now you really fit in? You're helping people improve their life. Maybe that's a parenting community, Wellness lifestyle, fitness communities.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:04:32]:
That's a big one. Whether it's learning a skill. So you're teaching people about business, pricing, coding, sewing, writing, like something very specific, or building a career, like a professional network. Which Exit Five the place or B2B marketers. That's exactly the bucket that they kind of fit into. So if you go to the next slide, I just want to give a very, very quick overview of some of the community business models that we see most commonly when you're talking about monetization. So we'll go to the next one and then we'll send it over to you after this.

Matt Carnevale [00:05:01]:
Sounds good.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:05:02]:
The three most common community business models are paid membership communities like Exit Five. These are communities that are providing consistent ongoing support or ongoing resources to their members. They're billed either monthly, quarterly or annually. And again, these are evergreen and perpetual. Another really popular community business model for monetization is limited time cohort based communities. And so these are communities that exist for a fixed period of time. Whether that's a four week course or an eight week experience or a ten week group coaching program, it doesn't matter. But it exists for a set container of time to help a member achieve something very specific in that set period of time.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:05:41]:
And then there's product centric. So if you are a brand or a startup, then you might have a physical product or a digital product and you want community to come in and sit alongside of that product and act as a way to educate lower churn, keep retention high. So for example, not to get too meta, but Circle has a Circle community for Circle customers that exist to help educate Circle customers on how to use the product and how to set them up for success. So just kind of want to like lay the groundwork. And obviously Exit Five fits into the paid membership model, but there's a lot of different ways to do community. And so when you're thinking about different ways you want to monetize and different ways you want to support and add engagement tactics to your community, the options are endless. But we want to zero in really on how Exit Five is doing it. So with that handing it over to you, Matt.

Matt Carnevale [00:06:32]:
Cool, cool, thanks. That was great. Awesome overview. And yeah, we're definitely a paid membership community. And it's funny recently in the last, it hasn't started yet, but we've launched it publicly. We actually are doing a limited time cohort based community community aspect within Exit Five. So we're doing something called Marketing Leadership Accelerator. It's like an eight week program to help you get smarter about becoming a marketing leader.

Matt Carnevale [00:06:55]:
So it's pretty cool. You could be a paid membership community but also run these limited time cohort based things as well.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:07:01]:
A great call out.

Matt Carnevale [00:07:02]:
Yeah, cool, cool. So I already mentioned my name is Matt from Exit Five who is Exit Five. So Exit Five overall as a brand helps B2B marketers get smarter and grow their career like Alexis had said. And we do that through a number of different ways. So we have a really popular podcast, we have a popular weekly newsletter and then we have a private online Community, which is the subject of today's topic, which is the number one and largest community for B2B marketers on the Internet and within the community, we have a discussion forum so, you know, marketers could ask other marketers questions about anything related to B2B marketing. We share resources, so we have videos, templates, a swipe file for marketers. We do events, which I'll get into later as part of our engagement playbook. And then we also have a matchmaking program so we match members one on one, which I'll get into again.

Matt Carnevale [00:07:54]:
We have, as of this morning, over 4400, almost 4500 members. And it's a private community, a paid one, so you have to pay 30 bucks a month or 300 bucks a year to be a part of it. So with that being said, first agenda item, which I'm really excited to talk about, this is one of my most favorite topics, is community growth and how we drive community growth. So. And by the way, Lexus, jump in at any time if you think there's a question or anything, but I'll just keep ripping.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:08:20]:
Love it. Take it away.

Matt Carnevale [00:08:21]:
Yeah, Cool, cool. So the first part of it, and I think one of the most interesting concepts, is that audience is actually the building block of community growth. So if you want to grow your community, you need to grow your audience. So what I mean by that is think, for example, of somebody online who, you know, creates a lot of content about bodybuilding. For example, example, they may have a hundred thousand followers on YouTube. They create a bunch of great videos, and it's much easier for them, somebody who has a hundred thousand followers on YouTube, to funnel a portion of those people into their community. Whereas if you have 0 followers online, it's much tougher to go to people cold and ask them to be a part of your community if they don't know who you are and what you stand for. So it's just like marketing anything, really.

Matt Carnevale [00:09:08]:
So for us, audiences are building block for community growth. But how do we grow our audience? So I try to distill it down to the most simple principles as to how we actually grow the people who follow Exit Five outside of our paid private community. And it's really down to these four steps. So the first one is developing some kind of interesting point of view. And if you started a business or working for a business, it was started for some kind of reason. So the point of view does already exist somewhere. It's just a matter of wrangling it. The second thing is choosing a platform to Post on which I'll get into.

Matt Carnevale [00:09:46]:
The third thing is actually posting and sharing content on that platform, obviously. And then the last one is just analyzing what works the best and doubling down on those messages. So with that being said, let's go into each one by one and look at how Exit Five does it. So Exit Five's point of view is because nobody goes to school for B2B marketing. So again, we help B2B marketers get smarter about marketing. We've all been in B2B marketing, everyone who works at the company. So we know how complex it could be and how little good information there is out there online. So that's why we created Exit Five.

Matt Carnevale [00:10:18]:
So that's our point of view on it. And then where we choose to share that point of view, the platform is the platform where majority of our customers hang out. Right? So for us, that platform is LinkedIn. Because we're a B2B. You know, we serve B2B. And pretty much if you work for a business, you're on LinkedIn, like everyone's on LinkedIn. If your customers are not B2B, let's say they're people who like to do gardening. Maybe that thing could be Instagram, TikTok.

Matt Carnevale [00:10:48]:
So whatever it is, choose the platform where your customers hang out. Ways to do that, I mean, you could speak to customers. There's a bunch of different ways. If you ever want to hit me up on LinkedIn after this, we could chat about it. I'm not going to get into that now. Then once you have a point of view, you have a platform you're going to share your stuff on. You actually need to create content for that platform and share that stuff. Right.

Matt Carnevale [00:11:05]:
It's the most obvious step. So you can see here is an example of me creating a LinkedIn post about company versus personal pages and which one you should focus on. That's a really, really popular topic in B2B marketing. So wrote some content about it, and as you can see by the results, you know, the post popped off performed really well. So, you know, that's garnering attention from people in B2B marketing, because I'm talking about the things that they care about, right? So it's bringing attention to me and our brand. And then the last part is just analyzing which posts actually work the best and doubling down on those topics. So, for example, what I just showed you before was a post about a LinkedIn post about LinkedIn which performed really well. Well, because it performed really well.

Matt Carnevale [00:11:46]:
Maybe I'm gonna go deeper on that topic. And create more content around that. So at a high level, that's how we create, that's how we build audience. And you can see here, the proof is in the pudding. We ask every single new member how they heard about us, and 60% of them said LinkedIn. So as you can see by more than a factor of three, it's the most popular way that people are hearing about us. So our audience building strategy and our strategy to convert those people into members, which I'll show you in a sec, is working.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:12:15]:
Okay, question about this one. This is amazing. And I'm curious, for those of you watching live, what social platforms or specific audience growth platforms are you posting on right now? Like, where are you trying to grow an audience? Or have you grown an audience? I'm really curious to see where you're at, what's working for you. You mentioned, Matt, that you ask every new member where they hear from you. Is that in an onboarding survey? Can you just quickly share, like, where you're actually getting that information from?

Matt Carnevale [00:12:42]:
Yeah, so what we do is it's a step that happens the second somebody joins. Circle is, I think it's a type form, pops up automatically and it just asks them like a couple questions, maybe three or four. And one of them is how they heard about us. So it's set up through circle and collected in type form.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:12:58]:
Got it. Okay. Thank you for clarifying.

Matt Carnevale [00:13:00]:
Of course. Of course. And yeah, one thing I will say about platform, a lot of people are sharing it. Like, we post and I'll share in a sec. We post across a bunch of different platforms, but it's important to have one that you go the deepest on, and that's like your workhorse platform. I think, for every industry, like, there's definitely a platform where your customers hang out the most online or at least would pay the most attention to this kind of content. So if you're like, oh, yeah, we have five places that we do this, but none of them are really working that well, I would challenge you and say maybe it's better to just pick one out of those five, put all your efforts into there, and try and grow there first before putting a lot of effort into the others. Cool.

Matt Carnevale [00:13:38]:
A lot of good answers coming through. Yeah, like I had mentioned, we build our audience in a lot of different places. Podcast, newsletter, Instagram, YouTube. But LinkedIn is by far number one for us, and that's where we put all of our effort.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:13:50]:
One tiny question. Which of these platforms requires the most work for your team? Like, which one would you say is.

Matt Carnevale [00:13:56]:
The most time intensive LinkedIn just. And that's intentional. Our YouTube is pretty much just recordings of our podcasts that are edited. So they need to get edited, but once they're edited, we just throw that up on there. So we're not necessarily creating native YouTube content. I mean, the second one I'd say is like podcast, but podcast isn't, is just a thing to create content on the mediums. It's not the channel per se. But yeah, LinkedIn is where every single one of us on the team writes an original LinkedIn post every day.

Matt Carnevale [00:14:26]:
So.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:14:26]:
Okay, yeah, amazing. Continue.

Matt Carnevale [00:14:28]:
Now, at this point, you know, we have an audience, hopefully. But once you have an audience, you have to do this thing called setting up tripwires. And for non marketing speak, a tripwire. An example of a tripwire is like a bear trap. So a bear is walking through the forest and at some point they step on something and it captures them and pulls them up into a tree or something. I don't know, I've never set one up, but that's how I think they work. But essentially the concept of a tripwire is you're creating this audience and you're getting traffic to your stuff. Well, along the way, as these people are coming towards your stuff, they're maybe landing on little things that'll get them to the next stage or get them to that next thing that you want them to get to.

Matt Carnevale [00:15:06]:
So you can see here an example of a LinkedIn post that our founder Dave wrote. And you can see right above the LinkedIn post, not too in your face. It's just view my newsletter. So as you're looking at his stuff over time, you may get curious and be like, oh, let me just click this and see what his newsletter is all about. Right? And then from there that allows you to capture the person's email, get them on your list, and then once you've got their email and they're on your list, that's when you can organically promote your stuff. So this screenshot is actually a screenshot from our weekly newsletter and it's a section within our weekly newsletter. It's not like the first thing you read, it's all the way at the bottom. But as you're scanning our newsletter, you may see this thing every once in a while that says join us and Exit Five.

Matt Carnevale [00:15:49]:
So it's a promotional thing, but it's not in their face. It's just something that they organically are going to stumble upon because they follow our stuff. They went to our newsletter and now because they're part of our newsletter. They see stuff like this. And then the last step, so we have audience, we set up the tripwires, we've got people on our list. The last step is actually giving people a good offer to join the community. So in our case, as you can see, we have, you know, multiple different value props, affordable expertise, community access, et cetera. But our big thing is seven day free trial to grow the community.

Matt Carnevale [00:16:21]:
So it's 100% risk free. You check out the community and if you don't like it, you get out. If you like it, you stay and you get all the value. And in the event where you're like, hey, Matt, but my community isn't paid, so how would this work for me? Like, what's an example of a good offer? Well, you can do a bunch of different things. Like obviously you need to get creative, but like a really cool one could be like some kind of lead magnet or some kind of magnet to join the community. So let's say your community is like the number one community for people who like to grow tomatoes in their backyard. I don't know why I chose that. I like tomatoes, but maybe it's because I'm Italian.

Matt Carnevale [00:16:55]:
I don't know I really like tomatoes. But anyways, let's say that's your community and you don't charge people for it. It's just a thing that people join. Maybe if someone joins your community, you're going to send them the ultimate guide to growing tomatoes, 100 tomatoes per month in their backyard or something like that. So those are ways that you could do it.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:17:12]:
Question on this really quick, Matt, for that seven day trial, because I know that that's become more and more popular as a way to get people in. Sometimes trying to showcase the value of community and talk about it is different than someone actually experiencing it. Which is why free trials are becoming more and more popular. Do you give them access to the entire community on the trial or. Or two? Because I know some people give just access to certain parts that are on the trial and then in order to see other aspects of the community, it's gated. What's your methodology there?

Matt Carnevale [00:17:43]:
Yeah, we give them full access in the seven days and rip it away if they don't continue their trial or if they cancel the free trial. But yeah, we get full access just because it makes sense to. Maybe for some people the objection is like it's more of a freemium model and it's an upsell. For others, maybe they're scared of like people. I Don't know, downloading some of the resources or videos and then leaving. But for us, it's just like, here it is, if you like it. If we give away all the value, there's a higher chance that they'll stay. So that's why we do it.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:18:11]:
Got it. Thank you.

Matt Carnevale [00:18:12]:
No problem. And questions that are coming up in the chat, I'll just leave them toward the end, right?

Alexis Teichmiller [00:18:18]:
Yes. I am pulling them into a separate Google Doc as you speak. So we'll get to all of them once you're finished.

Matt Carnevale [00:18:23]:
Okay. Amazing. Cool. I'm not ignoring you guys are just instructions. Cool. So just to summarize, audience is a building block of community growth, and we do that in a number of ways. We do the point of view, to platform, to post, to analyze method. We set up tripwires and give people a good offer to come on board and join our community.

Matt Carnevale [00:18:40]:
So with that being said, do you want me to handle these slides? Alexis, are you gonna.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:18:45]:
Yeah, I put this in here because I'm curious for people that are watching live, what kind of offer or product you're building and like, how you want community to play a role in that. Are you building a paid membership? Do you have some sort of program that you're bringing people through? Is it digital? Is it physical? Like, we just love to hear where people are in their product creation process. But also, one gives us a lot of context to Matt, but, yeah, what kind of offer or product are you building? And then maybe while people are chatting. Matt, I know that you weren't necessarily there for the early, early days when Dave was building out Exit Five, but did he always know that it was going to be a paid membership model? Like, what was those early decisions that he was making as he was trying to build out this product?

Matt Carnevale [00:19:30]:
Yeah, it's a good question. So Exit Five kind of happened by accident, which I think is how a lot of good things start overall. And it doesn't have to be by accident, but essentially what happened with Dave is he was building his audience online through LinkedIn of B2B marketers. And then he had started this Patreon group, which was essentially just access to his private content. And then he was adding a bunch of cool stuff in there. And then people in the Patreon were saying to him, like, oh, we would love if we can chat with like some of the other people in the Patreon group. And then he was like, oh, okay, like, why don't I turn this into a community? So that's how it happened. And I Think it's interesting how it happened that way.

Matt Carnevale [00:20:13]:
And I think like the takeaway for that is to just keep giving cool stuff away until people kind of ask. Right. It's like if you're creating enough attention online and building audience, eventually people are just going to say to you, like, hey, can you do this? Or like, can you write a playbook about this or start a community about this thing? And those are usually the things that perform the best because people are literally asking you for it.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:20:34]:
Yeah, you're kind of like seeding it and then waiting for people to say, this is what I want. Okay. In the chat, Roxanne says they have a digital SaaS platform community. Sherry said that she has a paid membership as an extension to a physical event. That's cool. These people are focused on purpose driven personal brands and financial services. And Sheri thinks community is the next thing in our industry. I agree.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:20:57]:
Richard said we're creating a paid membership community focused on small business owners, marketing professionals. We'll offer cohorts, courses, monthly consulting and more. Amazing. It's really helpful to see. Okay, so Asia said curriculum program. Jamie is creating a community for wellness experts to help them grow and scale their business. Oh, okay. Lauren.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:21:18]:
I'm building a chocolate Discovery club.

Matt Carnevale [00:21:21]:
Okay.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:21:22]:
With a target audience of consumers. I love this. So you can get as niche or as broad as you want. This is great. Okay, Matt, keep going.

Matt Carnevale [00:21:29]:
Yeah. Lauren, by the way, if you need an in house tester, I am open, willing to take on that role.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:21:36]:
Yeah. I'll send you my address if you need, you know, to send that. Love that. I would love to join the tester community.

Matt Carnevale [00:21:42]:
Exactly. Free of charge.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:21:43]:
Free.

Matt Carnevale [00:21:43]:
I won't charge you anything. Just cool. So next part of the agenda was why Exit Five treats their community like a product and why you should too. Cool. So why you should treat your community like a product. So I have a tendency of viewing things from a marketer standpoint, but I'm going to try and strip away the marketing talk and just talk about it broadly. But where I originally thought of this concept was that marketing doesn't help a shitty product. So if you're like me, you may have been in companies or roles before or maybe built your own thing and the product kind of sucks.

Matt Carnevale [00:22:20]:
So you try and market the crap out of it and get people to use it, but the thing sucks. There's no product market fit. People just really aren't going to want the thing. So no matter how much you market, how much you try and grow your thing, if your thing sucks, then people aren't going to want it. And if people don't want it, they're not going to buy it, or they're going to buy it and quickly not use it anymore. The second thing, the second part of that as to why you should treat your community like a product is that it's the inverse is that a crappy product creates crappy marketing. If you have a good product, you likely have strong fundamentals of the business and of marketing. You have strong product marketing, and if you have strong fundamentals, you have strong marketing.

Matt Carnevale [00:23:02]:
But if you don't, you could see how that breaks all the way down the chain. So if your product sucks, your marketing is going to suck, your marketing sucks, your product is going to suck. So it's all going to suck. You need a good product. And then the last thing is that it's just no fun. So like I said, I've been in situations before where I was working for a company and deep down I knew that the product was no good. But you just kind of have mandated to try and sell it, right? So you're trying to push it either way, but that's no fun. I don't know if you guys have been in that situation.

Matt Carnevale [00:23:30]:
I know I have. But you got to create a good product. It's a lot more fun to sell. And your confidence goes way up when you have a good product. I guess one thing to reflect is like on yourself. It's like, is it the marketing? Is the tactics, is the engagement, or does the product itself just kind of suck? Something to ask yourself. Cool. So what does it mean to actually treat your community like a product? So I'm not a product manager, but generally speaking, what product or builders do is they have a hypothesis as to what they think they should build.

Matt Carnevale [00:24:01]:
They go and test that thing, right? So they run some kind of test and if the test is successful, they build the thing. And then once they build it, they keep collecting feedback and iterate and then re hypothesize and test and build and do all that stuff. So it's the same with a community, is you may have a hypothesis as to what can make your community better, right? Maybe you've had this idea like, okay, we think monthly events based on this topic would really hit. So we're going to maybe go run one next month. And then if that thing is good, we're going to build a whole calendar of monthly events. And throughout this calendar and us running these monthly events, we're going to collect the feedback and iterate and maybe Run them differently. Maybe we're going to bake in a Q and A or fireside chat or do more tactical stuff. I don't know, whatever that is.

Matt Carnevale [00:24:46]:
So how does Exit Five treat their community like a product? So the first thing and you maybe you've heard this advice like a hundred times and I hate saying it, but actually go speak to some of your members. I know it's one of those things where it's like, you know you have to do it but don't. But if you can, you know, try and do one maybe every two weeks. Some people do like office hours, so they allow members to come in and talk to them about stuff. I do like the one on one. I think the one on one is where you'll get the deepest insights. And a lot of people have similarities with one another. So even in a 4,000 person community, like you can still get a lot of value from just talking to one person.

Matt Carnevale [00:25:23]:
And you know, you can see in this screenshot, this is an example of Dan from our team doing a call with a member typing up all the notes in Slack and sending it. So now all the stuff that I learned here is programmed into my brain forever. I read it once and I could always think, oh yeah, I remember when that member said that this thing happened. Maybe this new feature could help them solve that. Second thing that I do that works really well is analyzing trends in Circle. So Circle has this cool thing in the back end in their analytics which shows you which posts have been the most popular over set timeframe. So that really helps me look at what are our members most concerned about and thinking about right now. And it also goes back to that first one of building audience.

Matt Carnevale [00:26:05]:
Like if you want to build audience, this is a good way to look at which topics are popular within your niche. So you can see in this screenshot like a lot of people or two of them ask questions about LinkedIn. So you know, that's why I create a lot of LinkedIn content about LinkedIn and it works really well. But even from a community perspective, like if you were running a marketing community, maybe it would make sense for you to do one event every quarter on LinkedIn because obviously your audience cares about that a lot, which just makes your product better because it's solving the needs of your customers. And then another thing we do is we use community signals. So sometimes you will literally have people say to you, you should do this thing. And that's a great time to think, oh, maybe I should do this thing. Or at least you record it.

Matt Carnevale [00:26:50]:
So that when you're building out the product roadmap, you can look at these things and say, okay, here's the 10 requests we got these last six months. We're going to go work on these two because we think they're the best two to work on. So you can see here, this person actually asked for some kind of mentorship or matchmaking program. So that gave us a good hypothesis, and then we actually went and built that thing. So we actually went and created a member matchmaking program based on what members told us they want. Right. And the members were happy about it. Yeah.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:27:23]:
I want to just call out the value of this because when people are investing in Exit Five and they're paying 30 bucks a month, they're not just even. And this kind of iterates on this. They're not just paying for what they have now. They're also investing in the product that you are continuing to build and iterate based on their feedback. So the product's only going to get better and better and better. And so it's like they're obviously needing to get value from that month, but then they're also looking at, wow, okay, every month or so they're listening to us, they're building more, they're making this even more valuable. Higher quality. And so I think it also helps with retention when you iterate and listen.

Matt Carnevale [00:28:01]:
Yeah, thousand percent. Very well said. It reinforces their desire to give feedback to. Right. It's like if you're using something for a year and you keep shouting about what they should do and they never do it. Either your idea is terrible or they're just not listening. And if you show people, hey, we actually listen and we implement stuff, then they're going to want to speak up and give feedback. So, yeah, on this topic, you know, you can see here, proof is in the pudding.

Matt Carnevale [00:28:25]:
I had somebody literally email me when we introduced it and said, such a cool idea. I love that you're incorporating so much from our member calls. Looking forward to my match. So people are literally remembering telling me the stuff, I'm building the stuff. And then they're actually going back and saying, thanks for listening and building it. So really cool loop there. And another part of this is to actually treat your launches of new features like a product launch. Right.

Matt Carnevale [00:28:49]:
So when you do something new, you could just go to your community and say, you can now do this. But we actually promote it publicly, even to people who aren't part of our community. You know, we promote the things that we're doing that are New to pull new people in and to also get as much air cover as possible. So you can see here, here's three LinkedIn posts of people from our team writing about this new thing that we're launching. And since LinkedIn is like our megaphone, we do a lot through this channel, even when we launch something. So if Your channel's like YouTube or Instagram, launch through there, like do stuff on there to show what's new inside the community. Cool. And then one other thing I wanted to show you is Circle has this cool feature called the Weekly Digest which is like you just open it up, you write what you want to be in your weekly newsletter to members and then it gets sent out automatically, which I love and use all the time.

Matt Carnevale [00:29:38]:
And within there we treat it like a mini product newsletter. So you can see here like we promote any upcoming events we have and we promote, you know, just like number three is like a pro tip, it's like use the search before you ask the community. Right? Because these things are features. Even though it's a circle built thing, it's a feature of our community, so we're treating it that way. And even our events, you know, even though it's an event, it's still for us a feature of our community. So we treat it that way. So going back to the whole thing of treating your product, treating your community like a product. Awesome.

Matt Carnevale [00:30:10]:
Moving on to the last part. What does Exit Five do to drive our 40% monthly active usage with a 4400 person community? So first things first, why does this matter? So obviously we're a paid community and for us it's pretty obvious it's high engagement equals low churn or you know, low engagement equals high churn, whichever way you look at it. So we're highly incentivized to get people engaged because it means more money in our pocket. But if it's not a paid community, if people aren't engaged, they're just going to stop using it and never come back. Like it's so hard to re engage people if the first week or first month in their community is not good. So it's really important to get engagement. Right? You know, it's better, in my opinion, it's better to have 10 engaged members for the next couple of months than it is to have a hundred disengaged members in the next month. And just to back that up, this is a screenshot of our subscriber Churn rate.

Matt Carnevale [00:31:09]:
It doesn't look that drastic except for that beginning because Churn is a small Percentage. But, you know, we've been slowly chipping away at our churn and knocking it down by, you know, at least half a percent every single month ever since our engagement started to go up. So there is a direct relationship between the two things. As our engagement goes up, our churn starts to decrease, which is obvious. People are getting more value out of the product, so they're not leaving. And another cool concept I want to introduce you guys to on the topic of engagement is that you really only need to provide value on the frequency of your billing plan. What I mean by that is if you bill people monthly, and I'll get into what you do, if you have a free community, it's the same thing. But if you bill people monthly, then you want to provide them value at least once a month, but not much more than that.

Matt Carnevale [00:31:55]:
You just want to provide them value once a month. If you bill people yearly, you can do more than once a year, but you got to for sure at least provide value to them once a year. And the purpose of this is a guardrail to not overwhelm you. So if you charge people monthly or have this community and you're like, I need to do all these things this month. I need to run four events, I need to do 20 pieces of content, I need to do matchmaking, program this, this and this. That's just too much. You don't need to boil the ocean. Instead find maybe the 1, 2, 3 things max that really move the dial in terms of engagement and just keep running those plays and run them well.

Matt Carnevale [00:32:32]:
That's really all you need to do. So it's better to do one or two things really good every month than it is to do 10 things that are meh every month. And if you have a free community, the concept is still the same. It's like give somebody reason to come back at least once a month and pop in and something. So in terms of how we do it, the first thing that we do is member led events. Nothing groundbreaking. But you can see this example here. You know, I talked a lot in this presentation about LinkedIn being a hot topic in B2B marketing.

Matt Carnevale [00:33:01]:
So we have an example of an event we're actually running this week which if you're part of the community, you can join the event and you could submit a link to your LinkedIn profile. So you know, in LinkedIn you just have like your profile link, you just submit it in the comments and then this person which is a member, she raised her hand to do it, is going to tear it down. Is going to say, you should change your header to this, you should change your title, change this part and this part. In this part, they're going to tell you how to make your profile look better and optimize it, and they're going to do the same for your posts. So even if you're somebody who, like, you're an Exit Five member who isn't going to log in every day and look at the feed and go through all the posts, which I don't expect everyone too, for something like this, you'll probably want to at least come in once a month, submit your profile, get that feedback, make those changes, and boom, now you got value once this month. So when the subscription is coming up or you see the charge on your credit card statement, you're like, okay, makes sense. I'm cool with paying 30 bucks. They're still providing me value, right?

Alexis Teichmiller [00:34:05]:
One thing I want to mention about member LED events is one, you're sharing your platform. So members are excited to be engaged and to connect with you because they want an opportunity to potentially speak or teach or have these different events. But also, I think one of the pressures that community managers and community builders can feel is that you need to create all the content yourself. And so if you kind of reframe and think of like, okay, maybe, and you could also be a facilitator. And so in this case, Matt is facilitating events and other people are coming in and adding value with the content. And I think, again, like, there's so many ways to do this, but if you are feeling stressed about, oh, I got to teach, I got to go live once a week or once a month, can you lean on your network? Can you lean on members to come in and add that value? Again, you're facilitating. You're still working on the programming and building this ecosystem, this container, if you will, that has a system to it, but you are leveraging your network to come in and teach and just go a bit deeper on different topics that maybe you might not be an expert in, and maybe they are. So I think that's something that we see a lot of like, okay, maybe you don't want to create all the content.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:35:16]:
You can invite people in who can help you do that and you can pay them, you can give them free membership. It can just be a way for them to grow their network. There's a lot of different ways to incentivize people to do that.

Matt Carnevale [00:35:27]:
Yeah, that's honestly such a good point. The way we say it internally at Exit Five is to curate not Create. So we just curate these things together. So that's such an amazing point. And one other thing I'll mention with this is like, we've gotten to this point now, now that we bring members up onto the stage and let them do these events, they actually raise their hand every month and say, I want to do one, I want to do. And we have events scheduled all the way to February of next year because it's like, again, I don't do too much in a month. I just do one or two. So it's like, if you want the slot for November, cool, I'll put you down.

Matt Carnevale [00:36:01]:
And then if you want, another person wants to, they do it in December and yada yada, yada.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:36:05]:
So really quick, just like a small question before we need to move forward. Becca had something around this. How do you trust members will give good advice? Do they have to apply to do this? Like, what's the format of them actually raising their hand and then you qualifying whether it's a good fit?

Matt Carnevale [00:36:21]:
Yeah, that's a really good question. I'd like to say I had some kind of fleshed out process. I really don't. It would make sense to maybe set up some kind of form where people can submit what they want to talk about. I think that's a fantastic idea. And you probably just gave me an idea as to what I should do. But honestly, what happens with us is people will just DM me and say, like, hey, Matt, how do I get involved in this? And then I just say like, what do you want to talk about? Send me some more information. Like, do you have a deck or do you have like LinkedIn posts or something that vets it? They send it to me and then I just say, yeah, cool, let's do it.

Matt Carnevale [00:36:52]:
And you know, I know that some of them will be worse or better than others, but I'm okay with that.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:36:58]:
So right now your system is intuition. And I love that.

Matt Carnevale [00:37:01]:
This thing right here.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:37:02]:
Okay, moving on.

Matt Carnevale [00:37:04]:
All right, cool. So, yeah, another thing we do, like I mentioned, monthly matchmaking. So if you're not somebody who actually is going to log into the community and write, post and comment, you're going to build your network by default just by being part of the community. And then the last thing we do is we tag the experts. This isn't necessarily a monthly thing. Like, we're doing this almost every single day. But like, you can see in the left, somebody asked a question about brand campaigns and then I just go in and I tag the person or people in the community. That are smart about brand.

Matt Carnevale [00:37:35]:
And I just say to them, hey, you got any campaigns you can think of? And what this does is this not only brings the experts in at least once a month, it shows the people that post that experts will chime in and answer their stuff. So the next time they think they have a problem at work, it's like, I know I could ask these questions because I know experts are going to help me. Which. Oh, you have this question. I had a slide after this, but.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:38:00]:
Yeah, I was just curious what kind of value you want to add inside your community. So earlier I heard some people mention workshops, I heard some people mention cohort programming. Are you interested in doing accountability, member matching? Like what specific pieces of your product feature, if you will, do you want to include in your community? And as people are sharing, we can move forward. Because I. We have so many questions actually, Matt. So let's keep cruising.

Matt Carnevale [00:38:26]:
All right, let's do it. Cool. Yeah. So that kind of drives home the point which Alexis already mentioned earlier, is leaning on community members to drive engagement. You know, we're a 4400 person community. I would burn myself out if I tried to be the creator of all this stuff. So if you're going to scale in any way, you pretty much have to lean on members. And to me, that's just the definition of community.

Matt Carnevale [00:38:48]:
It's like people helping others based on a shared interest. So it's an essential step to scaling engagement. Cool. And then two other things I want to show everyone. A big thing that's helped us improve our engagement is removing the opportunity for self promotion. So in a lot of communities, you'll have people that'll promote their own stuff. Right. So we're a marketing community.

Matt Carnevale [00:39:09]:
So you'd have people promote their webinars, blog posts, LinkedIn posts, whatever it is. And for most of Exit Five's lifetime, this was a regular thing that happened in our community. We had a space for it for self promo. But when I was making updates to the product maybe three, four months ago, and I was going through our feed, what I noticed was that a lot of people, there was a lot of self promo. And I was like, hey, if I'm a member and I gotta sift through all this crap just to get to the good stuff, like that's kind of a bad experience. So what I did was I just removed the. The opportunity for people to self promote. So we removed the space completely.

Matt Carnevale [00:39:45]:
And also now anybody who does self promote, I just take down their content or people report it and we take it down. So we don't even allow the slightest tidbit of self promo, like nothing even close to it. And the last thing that we do is we set the stage for engagement during onboarding. So this is an email that goes out from me to all our new members which tells them, hey, if you want to get value from Exit Five today, go ask a question, use our search or join our member matchmaking program. So we let them know right away what they should be doing, what the engagement playbook is. If you want to be successful, do this stuff, spell it out for them. Cool. I think that's we've hit our end there.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:40:22]:
We have, yeah. So curious, what's your biggest takeaway from today's workshop? Sheri said, this is so fabulous in all caps. Thank you very much. She said that. Thank you for sharing this insight and the focus on this. Yeah, curious what your biggest takeaways are. And then if you want to go to the next slide, just kind of want to share some steps on how to make the most from this workshop. The first one is the replay.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:40:45]:
We'll be sending out the replay in the next 24 hours, so that'll be in your inbox waiting for you. For you to go back through this content anytime. Also, if you are not already using Circle and you're curious about how to build this out for your own business or brand, we actually are offering a 30 day extended trial. If you go to our homepage, there's only a 14 day trial, but we're partnering with Exit Five just to offer an extended 30 day trial. So you can scan the QR code on the screen right now to access that. We'll also include that in the replay email, so don't stress. And then the third step is if you have questions about Circle and you want to talk to somebody on our team if you go to Circle. So forward slash pricing, there's a button that you can actually like talk to sales and you'll fill out a short form and book a call with our team.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:41:32]:
So if you have like specific product questions or you're moving platforms, I know that there was a couple questions about platforms specifically wanting to migrate to Circle and you have those technical questions. Our team is here to support you and just want to offer that as an opportunity for you to connect with them further. Okay, so with that let's keep the screen up and I'm going to just rapid fire some questions at you, Matt, because we've got 13 minutes and we've got nine questions and I'm sure more Will roll in as we get going. Okay, so the first one is from Facundo and I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly. So they had a question around. So for starting a community under around 30 people, how much content should we drop into the community? Weekly, slash monthly? And what do you consider is a good balance between posting content often while avoiding overwhelming the community with too much content? So for a smaller community, like, you know, for Exit Five, you have thousands of members, so your members are posting content already. But for a smaller community, when you're just getting started, what do you think that balance should be?

Matt Carnevale [00:42:38]:
Yeah, I think it's tough to say. Like I don't have like a baked in number framework, but for me, if I was just starting out, you know, I'm at a point where I'm trying to get this thing off the ground, I would err on the side of more is actually better in this case when you're really small and starting out, because what you're trying to do is you're trying to put enough shots on goal for one of them to eventually go in and be like, ah, that's the thing that people interact with the most or care about the most. So hypothesize as to what you think are the content types or posts, rapid fire those off maybe for a month, two months. So you may need to grind it out for a bit and then once you see the one that hits or sticking, then you strip out the others and just do that thing once a month.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:43:20]:
Yeah. Are there specific rituals too? Or maybe you post a poll where you're polling the community once a week. So it's like all they have to do is click a button and engage. Or is it just posting a simple question versus hosting workshops? So there's different levels of posting content and different levels of engagement. Some require obviously more prep and some don't require very much prep at all. Next question from Juan. So he said I need to get over the famous cold start problem. So essentially he has a circle community where they offer a course called the growth course and a different space that's more oriented in like helping people connect.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:43:57]:
But what's happened? And Juan, please correct me in the chat if I'm not interpreting this correctly, but what's happened is people have purchased the course but they aren't necessarily engaging. And so he has set up different daily discussions in different spaces. But he's struggling for people that they're going through the course content but they aren't then going into the other spaces. To actually comment and like he's wondering how does he take an audience that he has already in his community and start re engaging them and getting them building the habit of actually posting and talking with each other and not just responding to things that he's posting?

Matt Carnevale [00:44:33]:
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it's tough to say because in our situation, like for us that is community. Like to me, community is people helping one another. So why that's not happening in your case? It's hard to say. It's like, is community what people actually want in that case or do they just want the course? But if you find good engagement with the course content and the things that you're doing in the course, maybe you need to stretch out what happens in the course a little bit more. So maybe it's like, okay, this week you have, it's a growth course. So I'm just gonna maybe assume there's something on paid advertising. Maybe it's like you do the session on paid advertising, but how after the session there's follow up stuff.

Matt Carnevale [00:45:15]:
It's like, hey, we did the session on paid advertising, we did Google, but we're going to do Facebook offline. It's going to be this course that we do in the community. The expert that teaches it is going to be facilitating discussions for that week and we're going to share one of the lessons every single day and we're going to create some kind of buzz or conversation around it. And I don't know, maybe if you're one of the top five most engaged members, you get the course totally for free by the end of it or something like that.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:45:43]:
Yeah, I love that. Are there ways that you can use gamification? Which Circle just launched this past month. Are there ways that you can use gamification to get people re engaged? I love the idea too, Matt. Maybe at the end of each module you have a question that links to a space that you say, okay, now that you've learned, you know, module seven, go to X space and this is your homework and go write this thing in this space. So I think there's ways to draw people from the course into spaces. One last thing, potentially do a re engagement campaign. So could you do like a seven day challenge or a two week re engagement campaign where you are doing some sort of container inside the community that gets people re engaged around the course and around the course content?

Matt Carnevale [00:46:27]:
Yeah, there's also the element of like in the onboarding. Can you make it clear to people that talking to other members is part of the ethos of the community. Right. So it's like you need to teach that behavior for it to happen too. Yeah. So it's okay that you're in there doing a bit of the work, but teach others that. It's like, hey, like, you're a director of growth. Like, there's a VP in here.

Matt Carnevale [00:46:46]:
Like, you probably want to talk to this person and ask them questions. Right. So teach that behavior and spell it out for people.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:46:51]:
Okay, so speaking of matchmaking and tagging people in, there's been a lot of questions about that. So there was kind of two questions. How did you build the matchmaking program? And what tool did you use for the matchmaking program?

Matt Carnevale [00:47:04]:
Yeah, so our matchmaking program was built on this tool called Matcha. You know, like Matcha Latte, Like Matcha. And within that there are parameters. So when somebody joins the program, I ask them a set of questions. It's like, what's your job title? Company size, specialization? And then the tool matches people based on those criteria. So it's actually pretty low lift. Matcha does all the heavy lifting for me.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:47:28]:
I love it. And actually someone I think dropped that in the chat earlier. Yeah, Luke said Orbit AI and then Matcha, So love that.

Matt Carnevale [00:47:37]:
Nice.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:47:38]:
Very helpful. Okay, next question around posting daily. So you mentioned the whole team post daily. So there was a question from Lillian. So is your whole team a part of marketing or is there just operations management? So is it the entire Exit Five team post content and then kind of a sub question. How do you determine content? That's for LinkedIn and what contents for newsletters. So basically, like, what is gated and what isn't.

Matt Carnevale [00:48:05]:
Okay, so to tackle the first one, no, we're not all in marketing, but we all have the same goal, which is to A, grow the business and B, grow our personal brands. So for me, it's probably a deeper question, but I don't think creating content on LinkedIn is the job of marketing. I think it's the business's job to create buzz and to create brand. You want to show everyone that you guys are experts at what you do. So I think that can come from everywhere. But we're all savvy in marketing, if that. So it probably helps for sure.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:48:36]:
You're all B2B marketers.

Matt Carnevale [00:48:38]:
We're all B2B marketers.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:48:39]:
Well, except for those is helpful. Okay, there was another question on.

Matt Carnevale [00:48:43]:
You said the other one was newsletter versus LinkedIn?

Alexis Teichmiller [00:48:45]:
Yes.

Matt Carnevale [00:48:46]:
Yeah. Newsletter versus LinkedIn, gated.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:48:47]:
Like, how do you determine what content's gated? Even let's say inside the community versus what you're sharing on socials or in a newsletter.

Matt Carnevale [00:48:55]:
Yeah. So for community, we don't create as much content anymore. A lot of it is member led for the newsletter versus LinkedIn stuff. I mean, don't get me wrong, you can share similar stuff on LinkedIn and newsletter, but the way to think of it is like, you know, I think LinkedIn usually is a bit of a shorter, easier to skim version as to what's in a newsletter. Like, usually people sign up for a newsletter, they're expecting a bit of a longer read. But with that being said, like, I don't really know. Depends what people want to get at your newsletter. For us, what we typically do is LinkedIn is like whatever is topical and relevant for that time.

Matt Carnevale [00:49:33]:
So maybe I read something in the community the other day that was about LinkedIn and I want to go share it on LinkedIn. But for a newsletter, what we do is we take our most recent podcast episode and we just dive deeper on that topic. So we have some kind of cadence that we go through. So maybe that's a good way to look at it. Is like LinkedIn is like the what's top of mind, what's relevant right now mixed in with some other stuff. Whereas our newsletter is like more of a deep dive on a topic that we know hits and you could take the signals from social. So maybe you write on LinkedIn and you know that when you talk about this one thing that really pops off it's like, okay, now I'm going to go into the newsletter and go deeper on that topic.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:50:10]:
Yeah, it's also like what's trending versus expertise. Yeah, so like expertise and going a bit deeper into like what you're known for usually like podcast newsletter and then you're pulling that into like what's trending and relevant. So yeah, that's a great advice.

Matt Carnevale [00:50:25]:
Cool.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:50:25]:
Okay, Coley, and I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly. Said on member led events, do you have a specific space for it? I know Exit Five has community spaces and dedicated spaces. Is there a member led event space where they're posting their own or are they submitting it to you and then your team is manually going in and adding to the event space?

Matt Carnevale [00:50:48]:
Yeah, good question. So the event space is managed by Exit Five. We set it all up. All the member does is host the event, but they don't set up like the title description or any of the backend stuff. We're doing all that stuff.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:51:01]:
Okay, super helpful. Someone also asked how searchable circle is. So our videos, searchable conversations, PDFs, et cetera. Yeah, it's all searchable. There's a top search bar that you can search, you know, any keyword and it's going to pull up post articles that you might have videos where that's mentioned all in the search results.

Matt Carnevale [00:51:23]:
Yeah, exactly. We actually have for us, obviously we have the conversations that happen, but we also have a space for videos, templates, et cetera. So somebody could search content marketing and then they could toggle the videos space and they could see all the videos we have related to content marketing.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:51:39]:
So yeah, I love it. So last question was around generating income from managing a community. So the question is around like how are you generating revenue essentially from managing the community? I think this is kind of like two parts and I'm gonna, I'm going to put my own spin on it. I hope that's okay. Paul. So there's an aspect where the community is the business model and then there's an aspect where the community sits alongside of an other business model. So can you kind of walk through like that philosophy of right now, like how Exit Five views generating revenue from the community?

Matt Carnevale [00:52:17]:
Yeah. So for us the most obvious answer is we just charge people to be a part of our community. We're a media company and like any media company, a lot of the content you create you give away for free. So you know, our podcast, newsletter, all that stuff is just stuff we give out for free. We're not a SaaS company where we have some product we're selling to drive people to, but our product is a community. Like that's the next step to becoming a better, smarter B2B marketer is getting into the community and actually interacting with others in your space. So I think that's the first part of the question. The second part is how do you generate income from managing community? Well, another thing that we're doing right now, and I could see us doing this, whether we are running our community for free or paid, is to do offshoots.

Matt Carnevale [00:53:06]:
So right now we're doing something called the Marketing Leadership Accelerator, which is an eight week live program to help marketing leaders specifically so VPs, directors, C suites become better leaders. And it's starting in like a week. As of today we have like maybe 150 people signed up. So think of it, we have a 4400 person community, but we shrunk down the offer to a small sliver of our community and charged them for access to that thing and charged Them a good price too. Like something that made sense for a business. So what I would say is, like, if you have a free community, can you shrink it down and find a really small subset of people that are thirsty for this thing and can you charge them for access to that thing?

Alexis Teichmiller [00:53:49]:
I love that. One last question from Becca.

Matt Carnevale [00:53:52]:
Yeah.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:53:53]:
So how do you communicate the value of your membership? We get told that we're too expensive, but we charge less than X at 5. So it's less than $30 a month. And they're offering a lot of the same similar things as you courses, online events. How do you communicate the value of a membership? This is a bigger question. I feel like we should probably have a whole other conversation about this. But yeah, what's your take on this?

Matt Carnevale [00:54:16]:
I mean, it's a big question. There's a lot of layers to that. We don't overcomplicate it. I mean, you can go to our website and go to exit5.com and you can see exactly how we do it. I would just steal that, honestly. We don't try and blow the ocean with how we explain it. We do use a lot of social proof though. So when we talk about our community and why people should join, it's usually not coming from us, it's usually coming from our members.

Matt Carnevale [00:54:42]:
So what we'll do is we'll take screenshots of what's in the community and then we'll share that maybe in an advertisement or we'll share that in LinkedIn post. And we also have a channel in our Slack where people send all positive quotes about our community too. And then we just go and pull those and we showcase them. So we're using a lot of social proof to do it. And if you don't have that social proof, just go ask your members. Go ask your most engaged members, like, why do you love the community? I'm collecting some testimonials and then go and showcase those.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:55:12]:
I love it. And yeah, Honestly, go to Exit Five's website. I just dropped it in the chat. Really great overview of social proof. Like, social proof is baked into almost every single module that you have on your website as well. So not only what you're sharing on social media and in ads, but you also have it here on your website too, which I think communicates that really well. Roxanne, I'm taking notes. Next webinar how to communicate the value of your membership.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:55:36]:
I love it. Well, we are at time. I want to be respectful of your time, Matt, and everyone that's with us Live. Thank you so much. This was incredibly valuable. Loved learning from you and what's working at Exit Five. So thank you so much.

Matt Carnevale [00:55:49]:
Of course, yeah, happy to do it. It was a lot of fun. If you guys ever have like follow up questions, my LinkedIn is my full name Matthew Carnavale, so you can connect, shoot me a dm. I'm happy to answer anything you guys want to ask.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:56:01]:
Awesome. And if you I know there were some technical questions too about circles and even like the member matchmaking. So if you have further questions you can always just email our support team, supportircle Co and they can answer any technical questions you have about the product. In the meantime, check it out. We'll send the replay out in the next 24 hours. And thank you for spending some of your Tuesday afternoon with us. I hope you have a good rest of your day.

Matt Carnevale [00:56:26]:
Thanks everyone. Thanks Alexis.

Alexis Teichmiller [00:56:27]:
Bye Matt.

Matt Carnevale [00:56:28]:
See ya.

Dave Gerhardt [00:56:32]:
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 Five. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exitfive.com our mission at Exit Five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit Five.

Dave Gerhardt [00:57:01]:
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 exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the community.

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