Exit Five
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
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.
Synonyms & antonyms
Synonyms
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.
Usage trends
Search interest for this term over the last five years:
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
- toolCAC calculator
- toolLTV-to-CAC ratio
Resources & people to follow
- referenceExitFive.com — community + podcast
- bookFounder Brand — Dave Gerhardt
- referenceApple/Spotify — the feed
Curated, non-competitor resources verified per term.
Related training
- moduleB2B SaaS growth
Disciplines
Areas of marketing where exit five is a core concern: