---
title: Exit Five — the B2B community + podcast | RGM® Glossary
url: https://realgrowthmatters.com/glossary/exit-five/
updated: 2026-06-10
source_html: https://realgrowthmatters.com/glossary/exit-five/
---

# Exit Five

/ˈɛksət faɪv/proper noun

B2B marketers finally got a locker room — the highway exit became the industry's inside joke.

Founder
:   Dave Gerhardt

Was
:   CMO at Drift, Privy

Form
:   Paid community + podcast + newsletter

Focus
:   B2B marketing careers and craft

## Forms & parts of speech

Exit Five · proper noun

The community-brand itself.

"Ask it in **Exit Five** — someone's CMO has already solved it."

## What it is

Exit Five is the B2B-marketing community business Dave Gerhardt built after marketing-leadership runs at Drift and Privy — a paid member community thousands strong, plus the podcast and newsletter that feed it. The subject is B2B marketing as practiced: positioning, demand gen versus brand, hiring, board decks, and the unglamorous craft between them.

## Why practitioners listen

Gerhardt's Drift years made him B2B marketing's best-known brand-builder (the podcast-and-personality playbook most B2B brands later copied), and Exit Five productizes the network effect: the answers live in the community, with the podcast as its public broadcast. For B2B marketers it functions as the industry's staffroom — career intel included.

## How to get the most from it

Treat the podcast as the free sample and the community as the product — the highest-value content is members comparing real numbers (budgets, salaries, conversion benchmarks) that never reach public feeds. If you're a B2B marketing team of one, it substitutes for the colleagues you don't have.

**Worked example.** A first-time head of marketing at a Series A SaaS faces a board asking for a demand-gen plan in two weeks. Instead of guessing alone, she posts the draft in Exit Five, gets line-by-line teardown from three marketers who presented the same deck at the same stage, and hears the podcast episode on board communication. The plan that ships is her third draft, pre-tested on peers — and the board meeting is the easiest of the quarter.

**Failure modes to watch.** Lurking without asking — the community's value is the question you're embarrassed to post; copying playbooks across stages (Series A advice at seed); and confusing community consensus with your customer's data.

## Synonyms & antonyms

### Synonyms

Exit Five

## Origin & history

Gerhardt left in-house CMO life and converted his audience (built at Drift, where the podcast-personality playbook was his) into a community business — launched as Patreon-style membership in 2020, renamed Exit Five after the Massachusetts highway exit, and scaled into B2B marketing's reference peer network.

Etymology: [source](https://www.exitfive.com/).

## Usage trends

Search interest for this term over the last five years:

[View interest-over-time on Google Trends →](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=exit%20five%20b2b&date=today%205-y)

## Common questions

What is Exit Five?
:   Dave Gerhardt's B2B marketing community, podcast, and newsletter — a paid peer network for B2B marketing practitioners.

Who is Dave Gerhardt?
:   Former CMO of Drift and Privy, known for building Drift's category-defining brand, and author of Founder Brand.

What is it named after?
:   A highway exit near Boston — Gerhardt's inside joke that stuck as the brand.

## Related tools & calculators

- tool[CAC calculator](/tools/cac-calculator/)
- tool[LTV-to-CAC ratio](/tools/ltv-to-cac-ratio-calculator/)

## Resources & people to follow

- referenceExitFive.com — community + podcast
- book*Founder Brand* — Dave Gerhardt
- referenceApple/Spotify — the feed

Curated, non-competitor resources verified per term.

## Related training

- module[B2B SaaS growth](/training/b2b-saas-growth/)

## Disciplines

Areas of marketing where exit five is a core concern:

[Content strategy](/training/content-marketing/)[Brand strategy](/training/growth-marketing-foundations/)

## Read next

## Related terms

[Category design](/glossary/category-design/)[Thought leadership](/glossary/thought-leadership/)[Content marketing](/glossary/content-marketing/)[Elena Verna](/glossary/elena-verna/)[David Skok](/glossary/david-skok/)

## Sources

1. trends[Google Trends — "exit five b2b"](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=exit%20five%20b2b&date=today%205-y)