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

The Exit Five CMO Podcast (Hosted by Dave Gerhardt)

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#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
(04:04) - – Exit Five’s approach to community
(06:34) - – What it means to treat community like a product
(10:34) - – Why audience is the foundation of community growth
(13:34) - – How Exit Five builds and converts audience from LinkedIn
(16:34) - – Using content tripwires to drive signups
(18:34) - – Offers that work: Why we use a 7-day free trial
(21:34) - – How Exit Five got started as a paid community
(24:34) - – The product mindset: build, test, iterate
(29:50) - – Using member feedback to drive product decisions
(31:50) - – Real example: member matchmaking feature
(33:50) - – Promoting new community features like product launches
(36:50) - – How we drive 40% monthly active usage
(38:50) - – The value of member-led events and how we do them
(41:50) - – Other plays: tagging experts, matchmaking, onboarding
(44:50) - – Why self-promo was hurting our community and what changed when we cut it
(46:50) - – Final takeaways + advice for small communities
(50:50) - – Audience Q&A: re-engagement, matchmaking, content cadence

Send guest pitches and ideas to [email protected]
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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Today’s episode is brought to you by Zuddl.

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Events are a core part of our playbook this year at Exit Five. So far, we’ve hosted two virtual sessions each month, one large virtual event, one in-person meetup, and we’re deep in the weeds planning our Drive conference coming back to Vermont this September.

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Head over to zuddl.com/exitfive to learn more.

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