Erik Jacobson

@andrewfoxwell Thanks, email sent!

@erikbison I heard we need to talk! HMU andrew.foxwell@gmail.com

@SamShepler One massive advantage of this is pulling many months of future MRR forward into a single upfront payment today. Funding the business this way is a very powerful tool (gotta be careful to budget correctly though).

Most people’s unwillingness to start a *project / package based* productized service can be your opportunity.

@jamespotter Oh wow didn’t know that we were the first! That’s dope. We gotta catch up one of these days 💪

@erikbison Hey great to hear from you! You were my first ever customer 😊 It's hitting a lot of different use cases but booking guest appearances is the main one. Also general research, finding cross-promos, sponsorship.

It's in many ways accidental that I ended up here, but Rephonic is the perfect kind of indie business I think: - B2B, high margin - Not mission critical (if it goes down for 30 mins, it's not the end of the world) - Not high traffic so scaling is pretty easy - Low-touch sales - Single platform (it only needs to work well on desktop browsers) - Minimal platform risk (it's aggregating data from dozens of sources) - Podcasting is a fun industry to be in And the podcast industry is a size that's fine for indies but pretty rubbish if you need VC-sized returns, so it's not ruthlessly competitive. If you enjoy working with data I highly recommend applying a similar playbook: - Find an industry that's messy and decentralised with many disparate data sources - Organise the data, make it useful and actionable - Zig-zag until you find customers that really need it (in my case I thought that would be podcast ad agencies - I was completely wrong)

@jayclouse congrats man!

I just became a dad 😊

@russellscrolls @sobedominik Thanks Russell appreciate that!

@sobedominik @erikbison and Hatch are the 🐐- been building stuff for chris walker and lots of big b2b brands

Anyone here has a guide or tips & tricks on how to create engaging and hopefully converting short-form content for B2B? Any particular companies I should look at for inspiration? Super new to this, so shoot whatever you have 🙏

@tclarkmedia @alexgarcia_atx Fire let’s gooo

starting to cook a little nice few takeaways: 1) went more top of funnel on topics to get momentum early. other stuff was way too niche (has a purpose, but not good for IG audience too early) 2) listened to @alexgarcia_atx and made my hooks not garbage. first 5-8 words gotta be dialed 3) listened to @orenmeetsworld and ditched the dark office for green screen with thought-out visuals shoutout Cut30 (recommend if you wanna get better at video) still early

@tclarkmedia Combo: How to grow an audience on LinkedIn (without being cringe)

Workshopping YouTube titles for this week's video. I need some input (aka roast these please): A) How to build a personal brand (without being cringe) B) How to do founder-led content (without sacrificing your reputation) C) How to grow an audience on LinkedIn (without sacrificing your reputation) Which one is the winner? Some combination of the 3?

@davegerhardt @exitfivemedia Never let a good tweet go to waste! 😂

@erikbison @exitfivemedia And if not I can tweet it either way!

No surprise. Already the biggest month in the history @exitfivemedia. Hype tweet.

@iamshackelford Record

I Think Best When It's A Deck and Presentation to Support it. Currently I'm generating 1 million impressions a month on Twitter and another Half a million on Linkedin. I'll Cover: Where the topics come from What cadence of the posts are working best Examples of what is performing best Frameworks to create more of what you have People to watch and follow I'll deliver it to you by end of this coming week to everyone that comments - "Record" Below

@davegerhardt @exitfivemedia Love this behind the scenes, more more more 🔥

Building a B2B Media Company: Behind the Scenes #1 The more I write about my business (@exitfivemedia) the more it seems grow - so I'm going to try to do a bit more of that this year and document what we're doing. • We'll see how long I do this, but for now - here's the first edition of Behind Exit Five. • Or maybe it should be called The Rest Stop since Exit Five is an exit off the highway. Recapping this week: 1. The first week back after Christmas/New Years. I did a bit of work (most planning, thinking) over the holidays but everything else was slow and silent. Community activity drops. Podcast listeners drop. Sponsorship conversations go silent. Contractors and freelancers are off. It was a good time to get some planning and long term thinking in (mostly in the early mornings or when my kids were watching a mid day movie). But once the kids were back in school Tuesday I felt like I had all the time in the world (not true, the day goes by fast). Most importantly though I am finding myself EXCITED to work on Exit Five eery day. I've been finding it easy to get up early and get an hour of work done before every wakes up, sneak in a run, and hang out with the kids before school. I love that 1-2 hours in the morning. I often feel like I can get a full day of work done in that time. Rip through email, get a bunch of writing done, work on that one big rock for the day. 2. Planning + Goals Because I am self-funding aka bootstrapping this business I feel a lot of pressure to get budgeting and planning right, and I think one of the keys there is to nail the GOALS. What gets measured gets managed, and incentives drive behavior. Goals act like a roadmap, and I spend a lot of time thinking about what what the right goals are. The exciting thing about Exit Five right now is that a lot of things are working; there's a lot of paths we could take. But that also presents a challenge: there can be a lot of distractions, we can go in a bunch of different directions, and that can hurt. Focus is the key. And I'm trying to keep things simple. I am also the number one offender here - I have so many ideas and directions and I can often be a distraction and get excited about new ideas or things I see. FOCUS Dave. FOCUS. Bringing on @_danieljmurphy as COO has give been a big boost -- he's been able to take a big portion of the operational work off my plate and free me up to write, to think, and to spend time where I am best: creating. • This week we talked daily and that is important with a small team. I shared my vision for this year, we talked through budget and committed to some goals and plans for 2024. • I had initially taken a "let's figure it out as we go" to the budget but that was a mistake. I needed to set a clear budget for the year so we have guardrails for what we do. We now have two clear revenue plans for the year (a low one and higher one) and a budget that will help us get there. We have the goals, we have the budget. Now we can go and execute. 3. Community and Social. At first I was going really hard on thinking we needed more content - but there is so much content already here with 3+ years of me building Exit Five. After lots of customer conversation and reviewing churn notes it became obvious that what we have really is a product marketing problem. Most people don't know how much there actually is in Exit Five, and we need to do a better job with discovery and awareness. The most important role for us right now is a hybrid of community manager and social media manager, and we're working with a contractor to execute on some ideas so we can learn and figure out the best path to scale the community in a way that drives engagement, keeps the quality high, and brings in new members (the best source of new members is happy existing members who want to go tell their friends how awesome the Exit Five community is). 4. Content. We have some weekly systems and routines with content that have really been working: • #1 is the Exit Five podcast. We're on episode 110 now; this has been a great channel for a handful of reasons. It's the number two source of new members beyond LinkedIn; it creates valuable sponsorship inventory; and it helps me stay on top of what's happening in the industry. Each week I'm spending 1-2 hours recording new episodes and spending time with experts, guests, and thought leaders in marketing. In 2024 we're doubling down on the podcast, and I'd like to put out a few more episodes/month - maybe go from 4 episodes / month to 6. • #2 is email. We started a successful newsletter last year and the response has been awesome; I am very bullish on email as a driver of growth for this type of company, so we need to get GOOD here. We're investing in creating an awesome newsletter and experimenting with content formats. We need to get great at the content *and* the marketing - newsletters don't just magically grow if the content is good. We need to be great at distribution and conversion to grow the newsletter list. • #3 is LinkedIn. LinkedIn has historically driven about 70% of new members, and there's just so much that comes from there - DMs from sponsors, from people who want to work with us, feedback, ideas for content and more. I've always written on LinkedIn but lately I've been doing it very ad hoc. For 2024 I'm going much harder and creating a consistent system for publishing. This means hiring someone to run the Exit Five LinkedIn content, but also my personal page has been a big driver with 160,000 followers. So I'm now blocking off time each week for a few hours to write - and committing to publishing 2x/day. Consistency matters. The more I write there, the more traffic we drive to Exit Five. This also accelerates the feedback loop -- all of the signs for what we should be creating more of as a media company are right there on social media in the comments and based on the reactions/engagement. #5 Sponsors. Outside of the community, sponsors are the other big revenue channel for Exit Five. We saw a ton of demand for sponsors (that came inbound) last year and started to find new ways to work with them: webinars, newsletters, podcast advertising and more. There are a lot of creative ways we can work with sponsors here that add value to our audience *and* drive business for sponsors -- and sponsors are a great fit for a "media business." We have closed a few good sponsors for 2024, but the reality is things disappeared over the holidays. Conversations that were hot and heavy before December slowed down - and we're dealing the with the "let's circle back after New Years" lull right now. *** Thanks for reading this edition if Behind Exit Five aka The Rest Stop. Do you mind dropping a like on this post if you're still reading and a follow for me @davegerhardt? You can also follow @exitfivemedia (the business page) PS. Can you leave me a reply if you think I should write more here weekly? I just wrote 1200 words while my kids were watching Minions on a Saturday morning and I want to make sure someone is reading 😄

@_mjpsmith Via implying whatever marketing strategies the CMO’s are doing is wrong (and will only be correct if they do what the strategy that the agency owner is selling)?

I’m obviously biased, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an industry collectively talk down to its customers the way agency owners like to talk down to CMOs 🤔

@mijustin I sent you a DM just now about this :)

@davegerhardt @exit5marketing yessssss 🔥 Excited to hear more about this!

I'm retiring the solopreneur narrative. It's been an unexpectedly exciting week here at @exit5marketing HQ. I made a big-time hire. We're building a company 😊 More to come at the end of the month.

@conorconaboy Congrats man, first of many more to come!

My first million view video 🥹

@davegerhardt Big respect for showing people how well a different blueprint can work. Rogan said something similar years ago - that if he needed a bunch of "handlers" and agents to help him with his show, guests, etc. then it would mean he has more on his plate than he should/wants.

Building My One Person Business: - My current philosophy on life + business - VA's and EA's and what I work on myself - Team Builder vs. Lone Wolf - Time vs. Energy vs. Income - It's often changing, but here's where I'm at today:

@MarketingMax Congrats man! You are prolific! Fun to watch 🔥

Just sold one of my portfolio companies 🎉 My second largest exit to date :) Details coming soon...

@MarketingMax Lfg!!!

My podcast launches on Sunday evening! Subscribers to my newsletter get first listen 🥰🥰🥰🥰😋🥰🥰🥰🥰

@davegerhardt The "key topics and bullets" feature of this tool I've found is really good: app.castmagic.io/presets/podcast

Is there a tool that lets you find clips/search/conmand F type thing for podcasts? To get video clips