Exit Five’s Journey from Solo Operation to Multi-Million Dollar Vision

By: Christiana Sciaudone

Dave Gerhardt, a former chief marketing officer, first named his nascent media company the Dave Gerhardt Marketing Group.

After getting 1,000 followers paying $10 a month to read his musings on B2B marketing, and then another 3,000 to join a paid private community, he realized the brand needed to stand on its own if it was going to go anywhere.

He changed the name to Exit Five for the exit he would take in Vermont to get off the grid.

“I wanted to name it a place like it’s a community, it’s a place you go to learn to invest in your career,” Gerhardt told AMO. “Once I decided to rebrand it and reinvest in it, it became more real. It became not the Dave show, it became like a separate brand. It became Exit Five, and it’s a place you go to learn, invest in yourself, grow your career.”

A year ago, he realized he needed to hire someone to manage the business, which he alone owns, if he was going to expand, so he brought on a former colleague as chief operating officer. Last year, Exit Five—bootstrapped and profitable since day one—brought in $800,000 and is set to double that for 2024, and to possibly double it again to reach $3 million next year. The current profit margin is 60%.

Exit Five is a prime example of a burgeoning market of individuals scaling in digital media and beyond as traditional outlets lose relevance. Subject matter experts, be they former journalists or executives, are tapping into their years of experience and networking to build companies that users are hungry for—paid subscriptions, and all.

Community is the key word

The scenario at Exit Five today is as follows:

• 5,000 paid members
• 200 podcasts hosted
• 50 webinars held
• Two events held in 2024; several more planned for 2025.
• Four new hires made in 2024
• Revenue breakdown: 60% sponsorships, 40% of revenue subscription memberships

Gerhardt said: “We need to do more. We want to grow more members, but we want to do it responsibly, like every community eventually kind of goes to zero, because it just becomes a place to, like, spam people. And I think that’s one of the unique things about us having a paid community, is it keeps that kind of how people want to pay and invest.” 

At a time when AI can create content in a heartbeat, publishers have an opportunity by creating community, according to Madeleine White, vice president of marketing at Poool, an audience conversion, management and retention platform. White said:

We can read content anywhere, but people are what publishers need to put at the forefront of their brand. And if you’ve got people that are connecting with other people and kind of building relationships over this shared interest that then is feeding into the journalism and making the journalism even higher quality, that then is bringing more people to the site and making them more attached.

Exit Five is keenly aware of that and recently added a new tier of membership at $79 a month, higher than the annual $300 for regular membership, specifically focusing on CMOs and marketing leaders who are seeking peers to network with. Prices may rise in the near future.

It is also creating content, including articles and newsletters, by plugging in conversations from its community and pieces of its podcasts into artificial intelligence.

“We’re building a curation business, not a creation business, right?” Gerhardt said. “Our content is going to be powered through the voices of our members and B2B marketers, and so we can scale very efficiently that way.” 

Gerhard said: “We have this amazing content flywheel where we can go and look at, okay, we want to write an article about SEO. Let’s go in the community and see what people are saying about SEO. And then we can take that content. We can grab three podcast episodes on SEO. We can feed that content and transcripts to, like, ChatGPT or Claude, and edit it.” 

He’s also psyched to be doing it all with a very small team that can help maintain profitability.  

“Realistically, [we can] be a $3 million to $5 million business in the next one to two years,” Gerhardt said.  

What could go wrong?

The potential to thrive is real, but so too is the reality that we can’t always get what we want.

“A couple things could go wrong: number one is like sponsorship revenue could dry up, the economy could go bad,” Gerhardt said. “We could do too much of it, and it hurts us and doesn’t have as big of an impact, or we don’t grow our audience big enough.” 

Gerhardt rattled off a list of things that could go wrong on top of the cut budgets: community members could churn and the competition like Pavilion and Reforge could become fiercer. But with a focus on B2B marketing, he thinks Exit Five has a differential.

“We’re very good at content and social media, and we have the right ingredients to be able to, like, be good at this type of business,” he said. “That is something that is harder to replicate, like we have a little bit of the secret sauce.”

Should the business work out, what most excites Gerhardt is the endless possibilities for building. 

“There’s an infinite list of things that I think we can do,” Gerhardt said, citing recruiting and geographical and/or language expansion. With “more time in market, more time in the business, these ideas just kind of present themselves and become obvious. And I think there’s other things out there that we’re not doing that will come across for sure.”