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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 5,000+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
If I'm trying to drive people to a webinar and I write a post that's like zero click content, how are.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:04]:
They going to register for the webinar?
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:06]:
But I feel like you've driven massive results to your content by doing this. Can you talk about that?
Amanda Natividad [00:00:11]:
I feel like when people question it, they take this all or nothing approach where they're like, how am I going to get people to join my webinar if I never drop a link? Where I'm like, I'm not saying never drop a link, I'm saying give standalone value so that they don't have to click. So with that it would be like, we'll give an insight that you're going to cover on the webinar. Because I feel like I see way too many marketers promote webinars by saying, what are you going to do about your content strategy? Find out in our webinar where you're like, I don't know, anyone could write that. Do this one thing to make sure you have a really solid content strategy. By the way, we're also going to give you four more pieces of advice in our webinar, so join it. There's that give actual value in the promotion for it. If you work really closely with your blog team or some kind of organic content team, then you can find ways to embed that webinar link into your blog post. Wasn't even like I sent a bunch of extra emails, right? It was just, I just did this extra thing totally organically, just embedded it in the blog post.
Amanda Natividad [00:01:12]:
Didn't even require an additional manual touch point, and it just very naturally drove the extra registry.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:30]:
All right, Amanda's here. This is your first week back at work and I'm lucky enough to get you for about an hour for the exit five podcast.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:38]:
So thank you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:39]:
Congratulations.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:41]:
You're not a new mom because this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:42]:
Is the second time around, but you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:46]:
Have a four month old, you're back at work, and you got a big smile.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:51]:
You look great. Everything's going good. I'm happy to have you back. And I emailed you last night just to make sure you still want to do this and hang out. And you sent me an awesome email.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:02]:
Which is like, you're such a content wizard.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:05]:
I feel like you just seeded like 15 of your own future pieces of content in what you wrote to me. But I'm happy to have you back and it's always good to chat with you.
Amanda Natividad [00:02:14]:
Yeah, thanks for having me. And you know what, maybe selfishly I'm just really excited to have a conversation with another adult. So there's that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:22]:
I know that feeling. I know that feeling. For me, when my second kid, my son was born, it was like, Covid happened right after that. And so we spent a lot of time. There was a good year and a half where it was just me and.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:40]:
My wife and a three year old.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:43]:
And a one year old. Like, not a lot of adult conversations happening anywhere.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:51]:
I describe myself as an extroverted introvert.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:57]:
In that my default state is introverted. I'm good being by myself, but I enjoy conversations with other people, speaking, presenting, stuff like that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:07]:
I feel like since the last three.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:09]:
Four years, though, that's flipped. And I'm like, I'm ready to have grown up. I'm ready to have adult friends again.
Amanda Natividad [00:03:14]:
Oh, yeah, totally. I think I'm pretty similar. I get very much into, like, I don't know. I think part of it, too, is once I'm in introvert mode, it's kind of hard to break out. But then once they do, I'm just happy to have more interactions, talk to people, present, network, all that good stuff.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:32]:
So one thing that we had traded.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:35]:
In the email that I think was interesting is.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:37]:
So at Sparktoro, you are the sole marketer.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:42]:
You are the marketing intern and the CMO.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:46]:
You do the whole thing. What was that like, leaving, going away.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:52]:
And having a kid, which anybody who's gone through that process knows that it is the furthest thing from a. It is the furthest thing from time off as possible. It is so much harder than work in so many ways, but I'm just curious to hear about that experience.
Amanda Natividad [00:04:06]:
Yeah, I mean, honestly, it was pretty stressful, I think, especially because I went into labor about a week earlier than I was meant to.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:18]:
So you write up all the plans. You got all the plans. Here's what's going to happen. And then all of a sudden, it just goes out the window.
Amanda Natividad [00:04:24]:
Yeah. Or like, here are the plans, but I still have to do these three more things and then I can go. And then, of course, went to labor a little bit early and was like, oh, shoot. These, like, three really important things that I should not have left until this week. I should have gotten them done. So it was stressful in that sense of, like, I'm the only person on my team who's leaving. But on the other hand, I obviously work with very competent people. Right.
Amanda Natividad [00:04:54]:
So I'm not worried about, like, oh, everything's going to go to shit. It's not that. It's more of like, oh, no, I hope. I feel badly about leaving this extra burden on rand and Casey. And then we also had hired Brendan Hufford of growth sprints to help fill in for me while I was out. And so then I was kind of worried about, like, oh, no, is Brendan set up for. Is. Does he just have all his crap dumped onto his plate? And he's like, thanks.
Amanda Natividad [00:05:22]:
So that was stressful. But it's.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:28]:
That I've heard that a lot of people who've been in a similar situation are. And I even remember feeling this, and I wasn't the one who gave birth, and it's much harder on the mother.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:41]:
I remember a feeling of like, am.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:44]:
I still going to be needed when I come back? Am I going to get lapped here? And did you have any of that feeling at all? Whether obviously that's not going to happen and not the case, but it feels like a pretty natural thing to take yourself out. When you're out for three months and you realize that the company goes on without you. Do you have any feelings of, like, wait, are they going to need me when I come back?
Amanda Natividad [00:06:04]:
I mean, totally normal feeling. I didn't have that this time around because we're such a lean team, but I definitely had that feeling the first time around when I was working at a bigger tech company and had a lot of time to. And that was also when I had a team reporting to me. So I really had to make sure that everything was buttoned up and that I had a good plan going out. So that was a time, too, where I was really nervous about essentially getting replaced. And then it kind of happened to some extent. I mean, when I got back from leave, I was laid off from my job a few months later, and it wasn't because of my parental leave, but I couldn't help but feel like, well, I created the infrastructure to not work with me, and so the team theoretically knew how to work without me. And so if they had to cut someone, it made sense that it was me.
Amanda Natividad [00:07:05]:
Even though that's a terrible thing to happen to any new parent coming back to work, of course.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:11]:
Yeah, there's lots of ways that that could have been flipped. And what about your mentality heading back to work? I know that for me, after my.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:23]:
First kid and my second, a lot.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:26]:
Changed in how I thought about my career and work life. And you just had your second child. Has that changed anything in your mind? You're four months in. There's a lot going on still. Has that changed your career goals? Like how you think about work, your passion for marketing.
Amanda Natividad [00:07:45]:
A little bit, yeah. So a couple of things have changed, and I'll be very curious about how you think about this, too. The first thing is probably like, ten years ago, I was so set on being on the CMO track. I was like, I want to be a CMO of a big team. I want to work at a big company, the stuff that we're all supposed to want, and I'm putting supposed to in air quotes, because that's kind of the only way we know, right, the traditional path. And it wasn't until maybe just before I started working at Spark Toro three years ago that I started to really feel like, oh, I don't want to be on this track. I actually don't think I like, like, I realized I don't actually like being a people manager. I'm not actually that interested in all facets of marketing.
Amanda Natividad [00:08:40]:
I think I'm interested in many facets of marketing. But there's a certain mastery of performance marketing and demand generation that I don't love, frankly, and that I do think is really necessary to becoming an effective CMO. So that I had to be honest with myself about, like, well, I don't really want to do those things, and maybe CMO is not for me. So I was kind of already in that feeling of like, I don't think I want to do this. And I also just realized I really like doing a lot of the work, like, rolling up my sleeves and being the one to write the blog posts or write the newsletter, and that's not for everyone, right? I'm sure there are a lot of marketing leaders listening right now who'd be like, oh, my God, the last thing I would ever want to do is write a blog post. I don't blame anyone, but I like it, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:31]:
Well, it's all different, right? Like, a big part of the CMO and marketing leader job is people management. And so instead of writing a blog post, I got a one on one in 30 minutes, and I got to have a hard conversation with somebody on my team, and that person is not going to like what I have to say, and I got to deliver hard feedback, and that's going to cause a ruffle in the team, and there's a lot more of that. And I think what happens to a lot of people is you get into marketing because you like the writing and you like the creating. You're good at it. It drives results for the company or wherever you're at. Obviously, when that happens, hey, more thing comes your way. Hey, Amanda, you're really good at that. Why don't you take on this? Sure, I'll take on that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:13]:
Eventually. You're the hub and you're doing a lot of things. The natural progression is to then say, like, yeah, why don't you lead this team? And I think in the short term, it's easy to be like, yeah, that sounds awesome, and let's say, yes, and like this thing. But one topic that I like to.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:26]:
Talk about on this podcast a lot.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:28]:
Is people who, look, we do podcasts where we talk to cmos, and I think it's very important to lay out, like, here's what a great CMO does. Here's what that job looks like. But I really want to, through this podcast, also lay out the other side and show people that there's both career paths. So we'll have content about helping you become a CMO. But there's also like, hey, there's people like me. There's people like you, Amanda. There's many other people who are like, I kind of like the writing and creating part, and I'm going to try.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:54]:
To carve out a career in that world as opposed to just being a CMO.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:01]:
And I've always said, I think before you, there should be like a quiz. You have to take an assessment. Like, are you sure you want to be a people manager? And do you know what that entails?
Amanda Natividad [00:11:11]:
Yeah, there totally should. And I think a big problem, too, is that every employee, right, like white collar worker, everyone's incentivized to become a people manager regardless of how much they actually like it or regardless of how good at it they are, right? That's kind of the only way to make more and more money. You don't know a lot of people who are individual contributors, who are also well compensated. I feel like that tends to be more so in technical roles. You might have a senior software architect who does all the work, but there aren't a lot of vps of marketing who don't have any direct reports. That'd be.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:54]:
Like, how does this work with, for people that are listening, that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:57]:
Might not be super familiar, tell us, what is Sparktoro?
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:03]:
Is the team going to be small all forever? What the makeup of marketing looks like there? I think that's helpful. Context. I want to keep going on this topic a little bit with you.
Amanda Natividad [00:12:10]:
Oh, yeah, for sure. So Sparktoro is a B two b SaaS company where we have an audience research tool that other marketers, entrepreneurs, whatever, can use to better understand their audience. So you can search for things like, well, we're also relaunching the product. So soon everybody will be able to see the keywords that your audience is searching for. So if your audience is cmos, you can see what are some popular keywords among cmos or people who self describe as cmos. You can also see the influential podcasts, social accounts, YouTube channels, subreddits among any given audience. And we do this. Historically, we had been doing this largely through social network data like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and more.
Amanda Natividad [00:13:03]:
But with the relaunch product, we're also going to be leveraging search data and clickstream data. You'll get more insights on the keyword stuff on lookalike audiences based on who visits certain websites.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:19]:
Okay, and the team is three people?
Amanda Natividad [00:13:22]:
Yeah, three of us.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:24]:
You're a vp of marketing, you own.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:26]:
All that, the company. Are you going to stay at three people?
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:36]:
What does the hiring and growth plan look like?
Amanda Natividad [00:13:38]:
We don't really have one yet. I mean, a lot of it is like, it's just going to be the three of us for a while. But we do hire a lot of agencies and consultants to help us. So we've worked with Gia and Claire at forget the funnel. We've worked with Asia Arangio at Demand Maven, and most recently Brendan Hufford at Growth Sprints. So we hire highly, highly competent senior people to work with us. And then as far as full time employee goes, we don't think. I think the next hire that we would make would probably be someone on the technical side to help share Casey's workload.
Amanda Natividad [00:14:20]:
Casey's our co founder and CTO before we hire another marketing person.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:25]:
Cool. And how do you describe the things you own as VPA marketing?
Amanda Natividad [00:14:31]:
I guess I would describe it as I definitely own all the top of funnel marketing and organic marketing. Casey and I tag team on the metrics stuff because a lot of it is reliant on me asking him like, hey, can you pull this report on this audience? Or can we see how many people have logged into Sparktoro and run at least two queries in the past month? So I lean on Casey for a lot of that. But day to day I manage our email marketing social channels, mainly LinkedIn, because that's our largest kind of most engaged, most relevant audience as well as our event program. Those are kind of my three main priorities. Event as defined by digital and physical events. So we do like a monthly office hours webinar. And this year we're going to take our annual summit spark together to an in person event. So we're really excited about that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:31]:
Nice. I really want to do an event this year.
Amanda Natividad [00:15:36]:
Yeah, an in person one or, yeah, in person.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:39]:
The gravitational pull of it is quite strong and I think there's just something when you get everybody together in person. I also think that just given the.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:50]:
Nature of the exit five business, it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:52]:
Can be an awesome day to create content. And so if we had a bunch of interesting sessions, I want all those.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:59]:
Videos, I want all that stuff could be podcast content.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:02]:
And we get so many one off messages of like, hey, when are you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:05]:
Going to do an event?
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:06]:
When are you going to do an event? There's just something about being able to high five someone in person or whatever.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:12]:
That I think is tough to replicate online.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:15]:
We've been doing a bunch of webinars, too, and those are good, but there's something that's a little bit more intangible that comes from the in person thing, and I think that will give us a nice little boost this year.
Amanda Natividad [00:16:26]:
I think so, too. You have a really engaged community, so I really would imagine that they're pretty hungry to go to an in person event. Yeah, that would fresh.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:36]:
I bet it would. I feel really good about. I feel really good about how it would be. It's more just like, I have a lot of scar tissue from doing events in the past and I don't want to self inflict. I have a nice life right now. I don't want to cause a lot of self inflicted pain. But I just hired a coo. He's awesome.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:59]:
We have the budget to, we could bring on an agency to do a lot of the heavy lifting. And so it's been like two years of this marinating, and I'm like, dude, you should just do it. It's not going to be that bad.
Amanda Natividad [00:17:11]:
I know, but I get it. It's really expensive. Not that you can't afford it, but it's a lot of money to handle.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:19]:
And it's a lot of money.
Amanda Natividad [00:17:20]:
A lot of work.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:21]:
Yeah, it's a lot of money. And even though I think there's ways that we can do it through sponsors, we have a lot of demand for sponsors, for digital, and sponsors love events. And so I have no doubt that we could find, call it three to.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:38]:
Five sponsors who could basically help us.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:41]:
Make sure that it generates revenue. It still doesn't make it any less stressful because just the sticker, even if you have the budget to do it, the sticker items of paying a designer, finding a designer and paying them $1,200 to do some design project is different than like, well, just to hold this space, it's $150,000.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:03]:
It's like.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:06]:
Yeah. And so that's a hard adjustment. I've only worked at companies that have raised VC money and have had big budgets and grown really fast, and so it shouldn't be this way, but it is. It's like, yeah, that was someone's money at that point. That money mattered for sure. But it is much different when it is physically my bank account and the money is coming right from there and we're writing a check to someone.
Amanda Natividad [00:18:33]:
Yeah, totally. Since everything is done at scale, even seemingly small things are so expensive. Like, you'd think, like, oh, we're just going to order a bunch of water bottles, and before you know, it's going to be $20,000.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:46]:
Why would you say that? Right. We want to buy lunch. Let's say we do a small, relatively small event. Let's say 100 people, right? We buy lunch for everybody. That's $10. You can't get lunch for $10. It's got to be 20, maybe, probably $30. That's 30 grand just to feed people so they don't complain about it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:06]:
So anyway, I think there's something to an event.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:10]:
I need to just put this on.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:11]:
Tape so when Dan listens back later, he'll be like, okay, we're going to do an event. I was actually going to ask you not to transition. I think we kind of made the point on the CMO piece. I think one thing that you said in your note to me about this, which I think is really important, is like, a big part of the CMO thing is chasing status. We all chase status in some way, but maybe now there are different ways to look at status. In the old world, status equals title and money. Maybe now status equals time spent. How you want it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:41]:
Do you feel like being the sole.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:42]:
Marketer gives you a little bit more.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:46]:
Control of your schedule in that you got a list of things you have to do, whether it's write that email, write that article, create that campaign. You can do that whenever. Versus if you're a CMO and you're a people manager, and it's know Nancy on your team wants to have a meeting and needs to talk to you about you, you got to be there for her, and you can be a little bit more control. Am I right in making that assumption?
Amanda Natividad [00:20:09]:
Yeah, totally. And that's the biggest thing for me. Yeah. Because that's what I've really realized over the past couple of years. And this is especially with having kids. How do I make this full point? I'm thinking about, because I have kids, right? The time that I spend with my kids is limited, but the time is spent with myself is also limited. And since I work from home and everything, I think about things like how do I want to spend my whole day? Whether it's work, family life, personal time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:50]:
Those hours fill up really quickly.
Amanda Natividad [00:20:52]:
They fill up so fast, right? They really do. Especially when you factor in like morning drop off and afternoon pickup, and then you got to make dinner and put the kids to bed. The time goes quick. And for me at least, I've asked myself, how much of that limited time do I want to spend in meetings? Not a lot.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:17]:
No, absolutely not.
Amanda Natividad [00:21:20]:
I like to have a couple of meeting free days each week. It used to be I would hope for one meeting free day, but now I'm like, maybe I could have like two where I just do my work, do some writing stuff, jam out some projects and call it a day. And I feel like. I don't know. And look, this is probably just like me in my bubble of. A lot of the people that I talk to now are like other entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, consultants online, where they mostly get to spend their time, how they want it, where I feel like that seems more desirable to me. So as we talk about what status looks like now, where before ten years ago, me was like CMO, that's an important job. Important, powerful.
Amanda Natividad [00:22:10]:
You make a lot of money. I want that job. But more recently I've thought if I wanted to be a CMO, yeah, I probably would make more money. But at what cost? Because at some point you got to ask yourself, what are you going to do with that money? Granted, if it's the change from making a couple hundred thousand per year to making millions, that's different, right? That's a big jump. But in general, it's like if you're already making a pretty good amount of money where you have a pretty comfortable life, and it comes down to making what you make and making like 1520 grand more per year. I know this is very first world problem of me to say. I know, but it's true. If you're comfortable enough and you think about making fifteen, twenty k more, you quickly realize that after taxes, that doesn't really change your life that much.
Amanda Natividad [00:23:10]:
That allows you to go on maybe like one more nice vacation in the whole year with a family, right? So that's when I really think about, well, what am I going to do with this? Extra money? Is it going to give me anything that I don't have right now? Is it really, truly going to change my life? And then that's when I just kind of go back to, I'd rather just get to choose how I spend my time than make an extra twenty k or even an extra thirty k today because I'm just like, I'd rather just keep my existing schedule where I work like 30 hours a week. I have like two meeting free days, and I still have time to do my personal creating stuff. Right. I still get time to hang out with my kids, cook meals now and then and enjoy my time. I'd rather have that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:02]:
Yeah. It's really wise of you to walk through this path.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:06]:
Also, I would argue that most people.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:09]:
Who listen to this are all in the first world problem bucket. Like this is people who work in B two B SaaS.
Amanda Natividad [00:24:15]:
Yeah, it's true. Think about it. You actually have done the real CMO thing. Do you ever think about, do you think you would go back to being a CMO, maybe at a bigger tech company or something?
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:32]:
No. That would be like, no, absolutely not. And I don't mean that in a disrespectful way.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:41]:
I just mean I've built a business.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:44]:
Now where I don't have to go do that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:46]:
And I would do that if all.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:51]:
Of my current exit five business, if it went to zero and I was looking for work, that would be one.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:56]:
Path that I would consider, right? And I could go to LinkedIn and.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:01]:
I could say, hey, I'm available to be hired as a CMO and maybe there'll be some inbound.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:06]:
Now, the further I, and I don't know, who knows?
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:09]:
Hopefully that won't ever happen. But the further I get away from being a CMO 5678, 910 years, maybe the less appealing I would be to get hired in that role. And so there's a risk there, but.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:23]:
I think that's a fallback path for me.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:26]:
I also just kind of feel like.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:28]:
And from what I know about you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:30]:
You'Re similar in this sense. I feel like I'm always going to find my way to create something, whether that's start my own business, start a.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:40]:
Podcast, start a blog, buy a small.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:43]:
Business, build a small business. I have no idea. I just feel like that's more my dna of creating and I'm going to find a way to create income through that path. I was just going to say also on the CMO thing now, and this is not going to be the case for everybody, but I make more money from exit five than I did as.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:08]:
A CMO now, kind of.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:12]:
I worked at two companies where there were acquisitions, and so I made some money through those acquisitions, and that was significant. Right. However, to your point earlier, the only way you're going to make those millions in the CMO role is four, five, six years at a company having equity. So you're going to have to put in. It's not going to happen overnight. From a straight up salary standpoint, I think you can make more than your CMO salary on your own. If you have half a percent in a billion dollar company, obviously that's going to be a bigger lottery ticket.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:50]:
But now I can make more money.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:52]:
Than I made as a CMO. Plus, I'm building an asset. I own a business. I'm hiring people. Instead of owning a tiny equity stake in somebody else's company, I now own 100% of my own business. And that's how I'm thinking about it, at least today.
Amanda Natividad [00:27:10]:
Yeah, I mean, that obviously makes sense. So what was that transition like for you in going from traditional CMO to going full time solo creator, and then that transition from solo creator to now hiring people again? What was that like?
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:30]:
It's tough because one of the things. So what happened to me was I.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:36]:
Had been building, unintentionally, audience building, and we should talk about this topic at some point, but started to build a following online. I was at a company that was growing really fast, and the company got a lot of attention, and I was the one who was leading the marketing efforts at that company. And so by osmosis, your brand kind of grows with that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:57]:
And so I launched my first paid.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:01]:
Channel while I was still a CMO.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:05]:
And so when I decided to go.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:08]:
And do that full time, I already had a pretty strong stream. I initially started this thing on Patreon, and I had a couple of thousand paying members, a couple of thousand members paying $10 a month at the time on Patreon. And so I was making between ten and 20 grand a month through paid content while it was still a CMO. And so when it came time to decide that I wanted to do that, there wasn't a worry about, like, well, where is income going to come from? Right? Most people that I talk to are like, hey, I want to leave my job. I want to become a solo creator. I want to do consulting or whatever, but I don't know. I don't have any clients lined up. It's kind of risky, three to six months.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:51]:
So I'm very fortunate that I didn't have to go down that path. Also, though, in addition to starting that, look at this cat right now. In addition to starting that, I'm sure you get this, I'm sure other people listening get this. I would get inbound messages all the time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:10]:
Maybe not hundreds, but like a couple of messages a month from some company.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:15]:
Being like, hey, do you do any consulting? And I started to realize, like, there is life beyond the company that I'm working at.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:24]:
And people want me.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:26]:
They want my experience, they want my advice, they want my knowledge. And I started to get enough of them where I'm like, wait a second. I didn't say yes to any of them at the time, but I started to see them all where I was like, there's something here where I'm getting asked to do a lot of these pick your brain things. Or like, hey, can we meet with you for an hour? I read this amazing book called Million Dollar Consulting by this guy, Alan Weiss, which gives you basically a framework to justify. I think this is a hard thing that people have a hard time getting over. How do you justify charging for your time? But he's like, look, if you're a knowledge worker and you've built up knowledge in this, like, that is your product.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:06]:
And so I started charging for my.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:07]:
Time, and people said yes. And so I started to realize, like, wow, I have another income stream here.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:15]:
Too, which is like, people can trade.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:18]:
Money for my ten years in this industry and knowledge. And I was able to start doing a little bit of consulting at the same time. And so when it came time to go work, like, go fully work for myself, I had a little bit of consulting.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:35]:
I had some of this content business bubbling.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:38]:
And so it was like, let's just go full in on this. The first year that I worked for myself, I did both.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:44]:
I did consulting and I did content.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:48]:
And a year ago, I lost all my consulting clients. The economy, I was thriving in the tech bubble of 2020 to 2022. There was just consulting coming out the ears. There was a lot of demand for that type of stuff, and people had very budgets and whatever. That all went to zero. And so last year, well, this is probably two years ago now, I had this decision of like, well, what should I do? And I decided to say no to all consulting. And I said, I'm going to go all in on this content business. I see a lot of similarities between other businesses that whether it's HubSpot acquiring the hustle sales hacker selling to outreach, I see a lot of even things like in the past, like content Marketing Institute.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:35]:
I saw a lot of those threads. I was like, I'm going to go all in on this business. I'm going to rebrand it. So it's not the Dave show. I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to talk about marketing for the rest of my life. I'm going to shift into running a company that is a media company. And so I rebranded from DGMG to exit five, and now I'm hiring people and bringing on a team, and I had to do all those things to get away from this being the Dave show.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:01]:
I was very talking about this narrative of solopreneurship, and I see lots of people talking about that. The hard part about that is it can be a great way to make a bunch of money, but you're stuck on that. I would be stuck on that hamster wheel forever, right? If I needed to dance monkey, have a take about b two b marketing to get new clients to sell a course to do whatever. I started to see the seeds of like, oh, no, you have a very interesting business if you go all in on this exit five thing and create a media company. And that was my realization, and that's kind of what I've been focused on for the last year or so. I'm very hard headed. I'm seeing this in my daughter now, who's six.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:42]:
I need to do things when I'm ready.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:45]:
Meaning, like, if we want to get her to ride her bike, take her training, no, I'm not riding my bike one day. If we can't force her to do it, out of nowhere, she's like, dad, today's the day. Okay, let's go ride that. And that's exactly me. I've known for a year that I should be hiring people and I should invest in this business. And I don't have to have hot b two b marketing takes anymore. I can shift into be more of the CEO and build this media company. It just took me, like, waking up three months ago to being like, wait a second.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:11]:
I already know who I should hire. I should just hire this person. And I called Dan Murphy, who I used to work with.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:16]:
I hired him twice at my last two companies, or worked with him, hired him the second time, and I just.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:23]:
Didn'T believe that he would come here and do this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:25]:
And so he said, yeah, man, you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:27]:
Have an amazing business. I'd love to work with you. And that's kind of changed my life in the last 60 days. And now it's given me this new.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:34]:
Energy and to what we talked about.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:36]:
Earlier, with time and everything, hiring him has been like the obstacle. The obstacle is the way bringing on a partner and a CEO has allowed me to spend more time. I can hang out and talk to you and do this podcast now. So this is turning into a narrative. But there's just a lot in there that I thought you could appreciate and I wanted to.
Amanda Natividad [00:33:56]:
Absolutely. Well, it's also cool is like, you got to enjoy the solopreneur life, right? Like having no one to answer to or worry about. Right. But now you've basically kind of hired your friends, right? And I mean that in a great way. Your friends who, you know, can do the job well and who you like working with.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:16]:
That's why I put off hiring for so long, because I had a completely free schedule in that I could just do things when I wanted on my terms. And I was like, I've been working this way for a while. I have a way of doing things. I like to move really fast. I'm very direct in feedback. I had such a clear vision for what I needed to do for this business. I didn't want to go the more junior route and hire someone much more junior, where I would have to train.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:48]:
Them, I would have to coach them. And not that I don't think that's.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:51]:
Valuable, and I could help somebody grow in their career, but I've already done that. I've already managed a team. I don't want to do that anymore. And so I was like, you know what? It's easier for me if I just do it myself. Then when I find out that somebody's available that I know and like and trust, and they know my working style, and if I tell them, like, hey, that thing that you did is not good, let's do it again.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:10]:
They're not going to go off in.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:12]:
A huff and not talk to me for three days. And we don't have to have all these one on ones and meetings. It brought a lot of comfort. And I was like, yes, this makes a ton of sense. And he is really good at the operating stuff and managing people and hiring and running systems. And so it's allowed me to basically.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:30]:
Have best of both worlds now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:32]:
We can go hire people, we can invest, we can hire agencies, we can hire people. We can do everything. But it doesn't have to all be because I wanted to do it.
Amanda Natividad [00:35:40]:
That really mean you've basically hired a peer, right? Someone like, you don't have to talk to Dan every day or check in and be, hey, like, what's the status? Right? I'm sure you probably even go days without speaking just because you're both doing your own thing. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:56]:
And I can message him and say that, hey, I hate this, and I think that's so important. It's just like a relationship, right? Like, whoever your partner is, you need to be able to be direct and life is short, and you need to be able to just make decisions and move fast and not get so offended about everything.
Amanda Natividad [00:36:15]:
Yeah. And I think a lot of this is why the three of us at Sparktoro work so well together, in that we'll talk a lot about how we don't really have a meeting culture. We all kind of do our own thing. I definitely go days without talking to Rand or Casey. They go days without talking to each other. Now, I think it's a unique kind of where, you know, you think about, like, they hired me as the only marketer, but I wasn't coming in at marketing coordinator or marketing manager level. Right. I didn't need to join and be taught what email is.
Amanda Natividad [00:36:53]:
It was more of like, hey, here's mailchimp. Here are the two quirks that you should know, but you got the rest, right? That was a lot of it. And it works really well for us because we're each really independent in what we can do and we each have our own pretty senior skill set. So, yeah, it's only three of us, but we probably have the same output as like a team of twelve or 15.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:18]:
I love that. That's exactly how I feel. And I haven't been able to articulate.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:21]:
That we can move fast.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:24]:
You remove a lot of the bs in between. You don't have to have lots of meetings.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:28]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:29]:
I bet you don't talk to them for days, but I bet you that they're also not wondering, like, what's Amanda doing right now? And we're paying her all this money and I don't even know what she's get. You can't have that. That will be toxic and that will never work out. Right. And so what's worked for you? Do you share what you're working on?
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:48]:
How do you build that trust?
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:50]:
Because you didn't know these people coming in, right? And so how do you build that trust to not have somebody on your ass asking you where you're at, what you're doing? Are you really good at internal communication? What's your trick?
Amanda Natividad [00:38:05]:
I think the big thing has been having a couple of programs that I own fully so the two examples of that would be our monthly ish office hours webinar and our email newsletter, which goes out about twice a month. So with that, I say that I call that out because those are some deliverables that they know I'm kind of always working on. They're probably not thinking every week, like, when's that newsletter coming out? But they kind of see it come down the pike. They might see that I've started a draft in mailchimp like things like that, so they know that it's happening. The other thing is, we do have strategic meetings probably a couple of times per year. And these are the things that's like, here's what we have to work on for the next six months. So these are like, big picture things. One example would be, like, the spark together event.
Amanda Natividad [00:39:05]:
Right. We started to work on that as an in person event, so we know that's happening. So I think it's more that at a very high level, we all know what the other is doing. They all know what I'm doing. They probably won't know what I'm doing on a Wednesday morning, but they know in general. In Q one, some of the things that I'm working on, and they don't really care about the nitty gritty details.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:32]:
I was making notes because I don't want to jerk this conversation, but you mentioned something really interesting, which I want to go down. So I make some notes during this and I want to talk about specifically.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:44]:
Maybe we can shift away from.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:45]:
Let's talk about marketing. You mentioned that it's a lot of top of the funnel and it's email.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:52]:
It'S LinkedIn, it's events.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:55]:
Can we talk about that email strategy that you mentioned?
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:00]:
I'm trying to figure out what the.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:01]:
Right email volume is for us, and my hunch was like, oh, we could be sending more email, but we're sending a couple emails a week and it's okay. I think we could be doing better. Then I hear you saying, like, you're only sending two emails a month. How do you think about your email strategy for Sparktoro?
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:19]:
What's the goal of it?
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:21]:
You're only sending two emails a month? Like, what are you crazy? Talk me through.
Amanda Natividad [00:40:26]:
Yeah. So we do send more emails in a given month. So we do have an onboarding sequence for everybody who sign ups for the product, whether it's free or paid. So we have this automated sequence that I think it lasts about three weeks or so. So people will get a product email every couple of days. And it offers tips, introduces our newsletter, that kind of stuff. So there's that. We also do two email newsletters per month and then probably two emails per month that promote the office hours series.
Amanda Natividad [00:41:06]:
And then we might do like one or two other emails in a given month that would promote the product. It might be some kind of nurture campaign to get people to go from free to paid. So I guess the way we see it is because I know that we have, however, amount of automated product emails going out any given time. I just don't like to send more than two emails per week in general. So, like, for instance, if I know the newsletter is going out with it is going out tomorrow, I definitely won't schedule another email that goes out tomorrow. The other thing is we also have a separate email list. There's a little bit of overlap for people who subscribe to our blog. So this is purely just people who signed up to read blog posts or get alerts for blog posts.
Amanda Natividad [00:42:00]:
So our main list is, I think today it's around 60,000 people. The blog list is, I think is around 12,000 people. And the blog list grows very organically. We don't do anything to promote it. It's just whoever comes to the blog and decides to sign up, they get it. There's some overlap, not a ton. And last thing I'll say is we're pretty aggressive about removing cold subscribers from that main list. So, yeah, I'd say every three months we go in and send an email campaign that says like, hey, we really want to make sure that you actually want our emails.
Amanda Natividad [00:42:40]:
Looks like you haven't opened one of our emails in the past month or the past couple of weeks. Click here.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:46]:
I just do that because I'm cheap and it saves me lots of money in HubSpot also.
Amanda Natividad [00:42:49]:
Honestly, that too. Yeah, because we're kind of like, why are we going to pay this extra money?
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:54]:
It's crazy. It's crazy how much money? Yeah, for sure. So you feel like two emails a week is right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:02]:
Yeah, I agree with that. We just started doing two emails a week.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:08]:
We came up with something called like a snack. It's like a marketing tip. And then we have a newsletter. The challenge is we often have other stuff that we need to promote. We need to drive attendance to a webinar or we need to promote something within the community. And then all of a sudden someone gets three, four messages. And I think for a lot of people it's not a big deal, but then you always have that one person who's like, you sent so many emails and I'm like, well, you can unsubscribe, you can, it's okay. But it's something that I think about a lot.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:37]:
And I'm just curious and I'm trying to figure out what the right balance go. Do we send more emails and be a little bit more transactional and make quick hits or do we do, like this, two emails a month and they're like, super well researched. I've seen some of the content that you all put out. And when Amanda writes, amanda likes to go deep and I like that strategy.
Amanda Natividad [00:44:01]:
Yeah. I will say we never send email to fill a quota. We only send email when we really have something to say. And that's something to say. It might be an idea that we think is important and worth sharing, or it might be like, we really want to promote and promote the product and get people to go from free to paid. That's worth saying. Right? So we'll never just be like, we should just send an email. It's been a while.
Amanda Natividad [00:44:28]:
I don't know. Let's put something together. It's always going to be like, we really need to drive more customers or we really need to share this idea, or we really need to get out this survey and ask people their thoughts on this thing so that we can create more content.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:43]:
That's great. That's a good frame to think about it. I just lost my note. But never send an email to fill a quota. Like, send an email when we have something to say. It also makes it easier to stand behind that email. Like, if someone is like, hey, you're sending too many emails. I feel better about that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:00]:
If it was like, if that kind of just felt yucky, we need to send that email to fill a quota. That feels different than like, whoa, hold on. No, I really wrote this. This is something that I wanted to say. And then how do you figure out, is there a cadence for free to paid? Or is it just kind of like we should do a free to paid email?
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:19]:
Or is it like a system that's.
Amanda Natividad [00:45:22]:
Always going, I think there's a system that's always going, see, I don't even remember, but there's an automated email that's like, hey, if you paid for this product, here's what you'd get. And then we do a couple of one off things, but we tie those one off things to product launches. So we'll do one when we relaunched into v two, we'll do it again when we launch new features. But, yeah, so there's always some kind of cadence. It might be like once a quarter that we have a good product or feature launch, that we make sure we promote to our audience.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:57]:
Let's talk about LinkedIn.
Amanda Natividad [00:45:59]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:00]:
How would you articulate your strategy for LinkedIn?
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:03]:
Is it based on the company page? Is it the three of you posting regularly?
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:09]:
What's working for you all on LinkedIn? And I know you're coming out of your four months post, baby, so I'm sure you haven't been going hard on LinkedIn.
Amanda Natividad [00:46:17]:
Yeah, that is true. Honestly, I've actually used a framework of something you've said. I think maybe you've repeated it, but you've said this. I think it was like three years ago. It was a long time ago that you said this, because I remember it. And it was essentially using your company page as like the company newsfeed, and then using the employee page or your personal page to amplify it or to talk about a personal connection to it. So for that, it means anytime we have a webinar or anytime we have a new blog post, all of it will get promoted on the company LinkedIn page. I try to pick out a standalone idea so that anybody scrolling through gets that zero click content.
Amanda Natividad [00:47:01]:
Where they get that discreet takeaway, they're like, great, got it. And they can either choose to click or just move on with their day. Everything gets shared there. And then for us, then rand or I will repost it with our thoughts, or at the very least, we'll engage with it. But what I like to do is from my personal page, I like to write my personal connection to a given piece of content. Like why I am excited about an upcoming webinar, or why I wrote a blog post, why I chose a certain topic.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:38]:
The engagement on the company page is pretty good. I just was looking at it and it's clearly like, I'm glad that you referenced that because I think it's like.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:46]:
I like to think about it like.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:47]:
That news ticker and people, but it's a one two punch. They have different purposes.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:51]:
Right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:51]:
Like, people want to know that the business exists, that content needs to be relevant. You're going to share different things there. You can add a little bit more personality from your personal pages. I see that you all repost other people, which works really well. You mentioned your thing, so you reference my thing. I talk about your thing all the time, which is zero click content. And this has become more important than ever because LinkedIn punished. Like, you can't put a link on LinkedIn and get high engagement, they reduce the reach of a link in a post.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:23]:
The thing that kills me is that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:25]:
They don't just give you a comment. Like if we could just pin, I want to be able to pin a comment. They had that feature for a while because then you could do something, you could write great content and then be like, hey, here's that link. I could write something about this interview and then in the comment, I could pin that comment and be like, hey, here's the link to that conversation that I wrote about in this post with Amanda. If I do that in the comments, it goes all over the place. That's one of my biggest frustrations. I don't need that many additional tools from LinkedIn, but just to be able to pin a content, but pin a comment. But your thing with zero click content is genius because it's like you're giving somebody everything in that post without having to click.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:02]:
And it's going to work much better with the way that the algorithm works. And it produces better results because it drives more engagement.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:11]:
More engagement equals more reach. More reach equals more followers. And you just kind of like keep this loop going.
Amanda Natividad [00:49:16]:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:17]:
I didn't really have a question there other than like, it's a good strategy and more people should do it. It's hard, though, because a lot of marketers get stuck on the, well, hold on. If I'm trying to drive people to.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:32]:
A webinar and I write a post.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:34]:
That'S like zero click content, how are.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:36]:
They going to register for the webinar?
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:39]:
But I feel like you've driven massive results to your content by doing this. Can you talk about that?
Amanda Natividad [00:49:44]:
Oh, yeah, definitely. I feel like when people question it, they take this all or nothing approach where they're like, so how am I going to get people to join my webinar if I never drop a link where I'm like, I'm not saying never drop a link, I'm saying give standalone value so they don't have to click. So with that, it would be like, well, give an insight that you're going to cover on the webinar. Because I feel like I see way too many marketers promote webinars by saying, what are you going to do about your content strategy? Find out in our webinar where you're like, I don't know, anyone could write that. But what it should be is like, do this one thing to make sure you have a really solid content strategy. By the way, we're also going to give you four more pieces of advice in our webinar. So join it. So there's that.
Amanda Natividad [00:50:32]:
Give actual value in the promotion for it. And then also, if you can bake that, if you work really closely with your blog team or some kind of organic content team, then you can find ways to embed that webinar link into your blog posts. One of our best attended office hours series was about audience personas, and it was something where I did a blog post on it first, and then when we decided to turn it into a webinar, I included the webinar sign up page on my blog post. And so a bunch of people were going to this blog post over the course of a couple of weeks, and at the very top it was like, we're going to cover this in a webinar sign up here. And we got hundreds more extra sign ups for that. I believe at the time we were averaging like 500 or 600 registrants per webinar. But when I did this for this particular webinar, we got almost 1000 sign ups. So it wasn't even like I sent a bunch of extra emails, right? It was just, I just did this extra thing totally organically, just embedded it in the blog post, didn't even require an additional manual touch point, and it just very naturally drove the extra registrant.
Dave Gerhardt [00:51:49]:
You mentioned a really important thing at the beginning of that, too, which is.
Dave Gerhardt [00:51:52]:
You can do that. But also, if you create value, create.
Dave Gerhardt [00:51:58]:
Value, create value, give away value, give away value. When you do have something to promote.
Dave Gerhardt [00:52:02]:
And you're like, hey, we're doing this webinar tomorrow.
Dave Gerhardt [00:52:05]:
Sign up here. That actually does work. It drives a ton of registrants. Right? I notice this all the time. If I am promoting too many things on LinkedIn, I feel that I can be a case study of this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:52:15]:
Like, if I write ten posts that are like, sign up for our thing, go to this thing, blah, blah, blah, it's not going to work, right? If I just write like, good content.
Dave Gerhardt [00:52:24]:
Good content, good content, good content. And then I'm like, by the way, we're doing a webinar tomorrow. You should sign up. That post will drive hundreds of registrations. That always works. And so I think that's another very important side benefit of zero click content. Okay, we got to wrap up. I could talk to you forever.
Dave Gerhardt [00:52:38]:
I wrote a ton of notes. I try to write a ton of notes during this so I can do less work later, because we're all about working smarter. Hashtag, we're growth hackers. We're parents. We're growth hackers. We're marketing experts. We're LinkedIn thought leaders. We are zero click content gurus.
Dave Gerhardt [00:52:53]:
We are LinkedIn page versus company page personal strategists. Amanda, good to see you. Good to hang out with you. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Everybody that's listening, go follow Amanda on LinkedIn. Send her a message. Tell her it's nice to have her back on the pod and wish her a warm welcome back to Sparktoro.
Amanda Natividad [00:53:13]:
Thanks, Dave. It was so fun to be here.
Dave Gerhardt [00:53:15]:
So fun to be here. Thank you. It's.