175: Treat Your Community Like a Product (w/ Dave Gerhardt, ExitFive)

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Dave Gerhardt built Exit Five by treating community like a product—not a side project.

In this episode, he walks through how the Exit Five team runs community with the same rigor as a SaaS org: dedicated product roles, roadmaps, feedback loops, NPS, and sprint cycles. He also shares why most B2B companies shouldn’t build a community, and what to focus on instead.

We also dig into how to justify the ROI of brand and community work, why direct traffic is your best brand metric, and how AI is reshaping what lean GTM teams can do.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why Exit Five runs its community like a product org
• The biggest mistakes B2B companies make when launching communities
• How Drift’s podcast helped drive $1M in pipeline – with no attribution model
• Dave’s take on brand, content, and the new AI-powered marketer
• The exact metrics Exit Five tracks to grow and retain members