Why B2B Marketers Need to Start Thinking Like Media Companies with Melissa Rosenthal

Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Look, I hear about AI agents every single day on the internet, in the X5 community. But it's confusing. It's a little bit overwhelming, which platform should I be using? Which agents are actually worth building? How do I even set this up? There's a lot of noise out there. It's kind of hard to tell what's actually going to make the job easier, versus what just can be another thing to manage. Or is this just a cool little thing some guy wrote about on LinkedIn? Well, Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. You can build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. This is really smart. They also just launch virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that can learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your whole website Optimize. Humans, that's us, of course. We still get the final say over these robots, but this seems really useful. This is worth leaning into right now. Right? Agents have so much potential and using AI in a platform like Optimizely for the stuff that each or week, so you can get more time for the strategic thinking and actual fun parts of your job on into that. Let's make marketing about the craft of marketing again. I think there's something there. So go and check out Optimizely right now. See how their AI agents can help you with your B2B marketing operations. They purposely built this for B2B marketing. This is really cool. Optimizely.com/exit5. That's Optimizely.com/exit5. Go and check out their agents. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Webflow. Webflow is a website platform for the agentic web built for modern marketing teams to build fully custom sites that perform in AI search. No developer needed. Your website isn't just your homepage anymore. It's actually the first thing an AI agent is going to read about your company and from there, decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer before a demo, before a sales call, before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists, which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams used to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI search, govern your content, and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them out at webflow.com/4/exit5. That's webflow.com/FOR/exit5. You're listening to the Dave Gararcho. Ladies and gentlemen, we're back another episode of the Exit 5 podcast. My guest on this episode is Melissa Rosenfall. She is the co-founder of Outlever, where she's building the world's largest enterprise media company. That's what we talked about on this episode. For you, lessons in how to build a media company for B2B. We talk about how, look, the fact AI right now is commoditizing content. All this AI stuff has made it nearly impossible to stand out on product alone. What do you do? One idea, one path is to go and build a media company. She has done this. She worked at BuzzFeed. She helped launch Cheddar. She ran a bunch of the brand and marketing initiatives at ClickUp. Her whole thing is all about being a media company, but not in the way that I say it, not in the way of just write a blog post a week. I'm talking about, she told me she's sleeping four hours a night because she's just news-jacking and figuring out what's relevant and happening right now in all of these different industries. If you need a little boost in your content strategy, your marketing strategy, because you're tired of all the AI slop in your feed, I want you to listen to this conversation with Melissa and think about how you can apply some of these lessons to rethink content for 2026, 2027. He can't just be pumping out listicles anymore. So enjoy this conversation with Melissa. Go find her on LinkedIn. Follow her. You can see her whole content playbook play out in real time. This was a really good one. Get the notebook ready. You were telling me before that you moved to San Diego to work at ClickUp and I have known you in my head as BuzzfeedGal and now you're doing your own thing. I didn't realize you were at a ClickUp. Can you give me like the two-minute career story? Who are you? How'd you get here? What do you do now? Yeah, it's a little weird. So early days Buzzfeed, I started Buzzfeed when there were 10 people. So very early, the company kind of blew up, became a household name and media and my team there was all of brand, all of creative. I grew it to I think we were like 150 people globally. My team and the company was over a thousand by the time I left. That was like my education and to kind of everything that has gone into my career sense. It's the frameworks of why people share content, what resonates, how do you think about things and bucketize them into why people would share them and why people would engage with them to begin with. So I feel like that was my education in just psychological frameworks of things that work and why they work. So that just is the narrative that will guide this conversation because everything comes back to that. So after Buzzfeed, I went to go start a media company called Cheddar with my partner and former boss at Buzzfeed in John Steinberg. When we started Cheddar because we saw what was happening with distribution across live media. So people were cutting the cord with cable. That was a crazy thing. Everyone had a cable bundle and you had YouTube TV and you had Fubo and you had Pluto and all these new streaming OTT on demand services start popping up and we were like, oh, well, that's this huge shift that we need to capitalize on. So we started Cheddar, which was a, which I guess it is, but it was a live media news network for millennials about finance and tech and AI, not in the way that we know it. But very early, just like everything that we felt like wasn't being delivered on with the traditional cable and it was pretty successful. We were in every streaming service across the country. We had millions of viewers. We sold it to a cable company called Altice back in. I was just 2019. Yeah, right before COVID. I was like, well, I can't work at a cable company. That's just not who I am and it didn't really like jive. So I decided to just kind of think about like what I wanted to do next. And it's funny because at that time media from Buzzfeed to Cheddar, Cheddar worked because we were focusing on different types of distribution, but at that time Buzzfeed was already starting to struggle because distribution had changed quite drastically with like Facebook taking more control over ad dollars and kind of killing the feed. So yeah, it was just like, wow, media is not on this like upward trajectory. I should kind of look elsewhere. And I was always really interested in tech and like where that was headed. And yeah, I was serendipitously. I was a click up user and click up reached out and said, hey, we're looking for a CMO. And I said, I'm probably not your CMO, but I can probably do some really great work for you. And we met and it worked like it was a great kind of partnership. And I worked there for four years under ZAB, leading brand and creative and all the things that kind of go into marketing outside of performance. And yeah, it was awesome. And then I left click up and I was a CMO of this health and wellness app that I will not name for six months. And I was like, this is not for me. And then I launched my own company that sort of ties in, I think the convergence of where I think things are headed and my experience to click up and go to market and forward looking into what media should become. So that's the, I think like three minute TLDR of of it all. It's not only will you not name it's been scrubbed from your LinkedIn. So it doesn't never happen. It doesn't exist. Exactly. If you haven't had one of those and you're not trying hard off is my opinion. Fair. I've had that. It's okay. So I think the reason that I wanted to have you on our podcast is obviously you have incredible background. And I've seen a bunch of your content. I think you're super well spoken. And quite frankly, you just get it. I think from a content standpoint. And so the people that listen to this podcast are mostly B2B marketing professionals, execs, VP, CMOs, individual contributors. And the thing I want to talk about with you is content, right? And so there's so many things here. And I wrote down this word from the beginning, which I love. You said bucketize, which is great. We're going to get back to bucketizing content. But I want to hear so much of what your background is in at an actual media company. People like me for years have been parroting this thing that some people agree with or not, which is like every B2B company should be a media company. Really kind of what that means. It's just like you have to be good at producing content. You had a stint at ClickUp. So many people are doing content, but they're not actually getting business results from it. And then if you try to get business results from content, you like squeeze too tight and you try to like measure every article and video. I think you have an interesting point of view here. How can we try to unpack that? It's not even a question, but can we? That's the thing I want to riff on with you. I have you here. Yeah, we can do that. I comment things from like a very logical perspective. And maybe it's like because I've been in media and I've been on like the B2C side and I like understand how people think. And then you go to B2B and it's like, let's convolut everything. And then measure things that shouldn't be measured and measure them in silos and not measure the holistic thing of like what we're putting in. And that's like put in 5% of the effort that it actually takes. And then we want 150X the outcome. That's what I see with B2B. What would an example of that be? Like what's an example of something that we like spend 10 minutes on but then expect it to drive 10 million in pipeline? I think it's just the the breaking down of what a strategy is into one asset. That's what it is. The companies that are doing LinkedIn. If they don't see results in like two posts, well, this isn't working. That's the attitude of B2B. Like I'll summarize it in like that. And not everyone, there's definitely companies I think that are forward looking and like understand what it takes and our staff with the people that have that perspective on things. But I think B2B boils it down to like looking at two things under a microscope and say, well, these didn't work. So it's strategy doesn't work. Rather than like, we're really going to invest in doing this for like three to six months. Let's measure. and along the way, like, itery, but we're gonna look at it as a holistic program and not break it down into, like, post. I just think that is crazy. - It's mostly a strategy, it's a strategy thing. It's like not having a strong point of view about what we're gonna go do and why we're gonna do it, and we're not just gonna do it for two months. - I haven't been in B2B for more than, click up, right? So it could be just the sign of the times of, like, marketers are really afraid. I don't know. - The company that I run right now, X of five is a media company in B2B, and I want to shout about this more because it's actually in consumer, like, you have to have so much volume and so much reach and you have to reach hundreds of thousands of people to make the funnel math work on what the conversions are gonna be on that. In B2B, it's like if you're selling, oftentimes these companies are selling six or seven figure products, and so it's like, I don't actually need a million people to download my podcast. I need like a hundred of the right people, and you can actually live by that if you're willing to, like, lean into that as a strategy. It doesn't have to be this huge viral sensation. - Yeah, 100%. I just think that marketers don't think like that period. They're not, like, media folks. So, like, when you're thinking about the strategy, they're thinking about it in terms of, like, I don't know, white paper assets or, like, LinkedIn posts, and it's not this holistic thing. This is what we're building. This is our North Star of what we're building. I think if more people thought that way, and then, okay, this is the North Star, and then, sort of, start to say, all right, these are the pieces of it. This is how we're gonna execute there. It might just be easier to swallow. - So, we have a bunch of examples from you of people who do a good job of this. I just wanna list them out, and maybe you can kind of narrate them, but I think these are perfect examples of, like, what it takes to stand out today, and to build something meaningful and content versus writing listicles, right? But you have polymarket, built its own media, and the entity on LinkedIn is now heavily investing in becoming a media company. Bramp, I love this example when companies invest in, like, the subject matter expert to do the content stuff, but Bramp keeps an economist on staff that makes data-driven content to stand on its own. As journalism, Peter Walker, formally of Carta, he's been creating data-based marketing insights for years. Another one, a guy that I follow is Kyle Poyer. These people aren't even trying to be content people. Like, look at Lenny, what Lenny's done with Lenny's pockets. It's like, can you go super deep? Or I look at you, your content crushes on LinkedIn, and I honestly, I don't know how. Not 'cause it's not good, but it's like, everyone tells you, don't post images, don't post links, and like, your funnel is like, you post a screenshot of an article, a headline, and a long thing, and you're just crushing it. So is that the things that's like, we gotta rethink, it's not this world of, like, hire a bunch of junior bloggers to, like, make content for you. There's something different happening here. - Yeah, well, let me, I guess maybe I can explain what I'm actually doing, and that might help. So you think, okay, you're like, all right, Melissa's just like writing these posts. They've got articles, there's this format, but the reality is we're also becoming a media company. So we have state of AI, state of brand, and we're launching 10 other state-offs in the next three weeks. So these are run by myself, and right now, two other full-time people were becoming like an actual enterprise media organization. So the strategy there, like, ladder is up to something, right? It's every day I'm going to do this. We know exactly who reads what article. We iterate on the types of content that those folks look at. There's a funnel that drives them to us as our lover, which is my company. So there's a deeper strategy there. It's not like, let me just do this for fun. And I think a lot of people see it, and they're like, well, Melissa's LinkedIn strategy is great. And it's like, yeah, but there's a lot kind of going on behind the scenes there, which I think is like, what most people assume is a strategy, right? They're looking at the tip of the iceberg on something, and they're like, well, this is what this person's doing. But they're not like going a layer deeper to be like, what is this person actually doing, which is great for us because the people that actually find us to want to work with us already know what we're doing because they get it. They're landing on the articles and they're like, well, this is fucking smart. So they click on this and then they inbound us. So we already have this like very kind of qualified lead. But yeah, I think it's just like, it's people look at this one thing, and they think it's like the content performance is so much usually deeper than just like writing a post. The company said, I really admire. Even air doesn't a fantastic job. I would say for B2B because they understand their audience so deeply they're like, oh, we need to reach creative people. And what do creative people like they like good content? So we're gonna come up with some good stuff and act like a media organization that has something to say. And I think that's not the other thing. I think companies have just like lost the like, what do we say? So they just say the same thing and everyone is kind of the same company today. So that like makes it tough. - I'm interested in the content thing that you mentioned before. So you have two publications that you have today and you're gonna launch a bunch more over the next couple weeks. How do you be good at that at scale? I think with AI, you could use cloud and do a bunch of stuff and create a bunch of content. The volume is there. I've always struggled with hiring writers, training them. I'm like, it's never good enough. It's never good enough. You gotta find these unique people like a Peter Walker, but they're never gonna come work for you. How do you do it, Melissa? - Yeah, I mean, we're not publishing original insights right now. The insights are basically on BuzzFeedaFinding Enterprise where I think about the frameworks. - You're still turning something around. Like you're still saying something where you don't have to produce international insight, but if I read your stuff, I'm like, this is good. - But the perspective in the angle are the things that you have to train people on, which is the toughest thing to even be good at to start because if you don't have that perspective or that angle or understand like what the rallying cry is of that audience, then like you're kind of coming out from like an empty perspective which it's just not gonna go anywhere. I now understand every piece of content and who it will resonate with and why and how the framing affects that. And that's what I try to train the people that work with me on these publications around. Is it hard? Yeah, it's not like easy. But that's the beauty of it. Nothing good is easy, which is why the ones that do it really well will stand out. And it's not for everyone. It's for companies that like can have a perspective and can understand where they fit into that perspective. It is challenging to scale the 10 publications which is our goal in the next three months. We're hiring a bunch of people but they're going through like a boot camp which is like my own boot camp of BuzzFeedaFocation of Enterprise, which I don't even know. I just made that up. - Tell me what's in that. That's interesting. What's in the boot camp? - Well, first of all, we've built like a bunch of tools internally to make things easier. So we will have people basically like a lot of our product that we do for customers is interviewing executives. So like a GLG kind of type of a model is in a way. And we have them go through this interview process where they'll use our tool to interview. And the tool helps guide them based on my brain basically of what the questions are where the interview will be stronger. But then they come out of it and then it's basically there's like a Melissa on the side of their screen and it's like, hey, here are the frameworks and the angles of where this could had what do you think? And they have to pick kind of, it's like pick your own adventure of where this piece ends up. And then we just do that over and over and over in the repetition. Eventually they get it. They start to get it because these people are like coming from traditional journalism backgrounds. But then you can have like B2B expertise. And that's I think what we found has a really good to meet in the middle kind of, okay, we get I get where you're headed. But yeah, it takes it's a lot of repetition. Obviously I'm doing these articles and over time understanding the angles. And who will this reach and why will it reach them? And why would they care and why would they comment on it? And why would they share it? These are the questions that they have to answer for every article before they're set off and set free kind of on their own to do it. - Is this something that you all built internally? This tool? - Yeah, it's called Oliver. But yeah, it's Oliver's, it's everything. It's a CRM, it's an inbox, it's a brain, it's an interviewing tool. It's a sales intelligence tool. It's like a lot of things that like B2B companies do. But we use that to enable us. We don't sell that. So we sell that the end of what that result is. But that's for us specifically to allow us to do this, which I don't think anyone else will ever be able to build 'cause it's just like my brain. - What's a good example of what it takes to be good? It's like a lot of proprietary knowledge. - Yeah, all the stories we're covering are public stories. We're not just covering news though. We're then inflecting in a perspective in an angle in that of like this is why this audience should care about this thing. And the beauty of that though, is that Noah, like Media Company is really, I would say, Mish Creator is kind of arc for sure. And then Peter Walker and like the Ram folks and like people that are coming up with original data and forming perspectives on that are. But traditional media can't do that today because they're just focused on breaking news to get clicks. So then you have, that's why obviously the Media Creator economy has flourished because traditional media companies can't afford to exist anymore. I mean, BuzzVee just went bankrupt and got sold for 20 million oh my god. It doesn't work. So this alt model of where the actual perspective comes from when you're not chasing eyeballs and you're trying to really build an audience comes from like these unique perspectives. But I don't think everyone has that. So I think it's kind of like a finite resource. But you can train and with technology you can sort of start to build around it. I mean, it's definitely not perfect. But it at least has like, there's a starting point. - Do you have an opinion on where that content should be today, should it be on your website, should it be a podcast, should it be LinkedIn? You know, we've always been taught about owned media and you wanna remember the days of like medium and be like, well, medium's cool 'cause it helps with distribution but that's actually not gonna rank and it's just so much is changing right now. How'd you guide the VP of marketing and B2B thinking about their content strategy with this answer? - Yeah, I mean, great question. My like, if you can do it all, my question, my answer is like, kind of do it all. Owned media is like doing all of these things well and creating kind of like this little empire of successful franchises within your company under the same, I think, mast head actually, but successful franchises. For a lot of our customers, we build third party trade sites. So like, we run, try to think of one like cxcurrent.com for a customer, we run the datawire.com for a customer. So we're building out trade publications and then there's a lot of other properties that are happening. - Yeah, okay, so for my company, as a whole. an example, we sell to B2B marketers. Some guys trying to extort me via email and wants me to buy B2B marketing.com. We could own that, have a publication there, be the number one source on B2B marketing, and it happens to be brought to you by exit five. Yeah, I mean, that's what we sell. And then we sell other companies want to do it and build a hub on their own site, which we have a different strategy for. But that going back to your larger question, that is a part of it, for sure. Having like an adjacent arm allows you to do really, really cool things like a lot of our customers are like doing dinners with open AI and doing awards and conferences, but through their, through their media outlet now. And the ones that like get it, really get it. They're super leaned in on it. This is lightning in a bottle because we can capture an audience and actually earn an audience that is coming to us for information and not for product. Hey, it's me Dave. This episode is sponsored by Zoom webinars. Zoom webinars lets you host polished, engaging webinars that actually drive pipeline. We recently switched to Zoom webinars for exit five live. I don't know if you've seen this. It's been everywhere. I think our conversation about webinars, everyone's talking about webinars right now. Let's do great webinars. That's what we're talking about, right? I've been super happy since we moved over to Zoom. Just really the high quality. It just, some of it feels different. A webinars feel professional and polished. Our media team shout out to Marissa Maria. They've been putting a ton of work in behind the scenes to get this thing right. And it really helps us run these exit five live sessions and put on a performance. This is not a webinar. It actually feels like our performance and the results have been there. Our attendees and our teams been really happy. The platform gives you everything you need to run a real event from branded registration, built in promotional tools, live engagement features and post event follow up that helps you convert attendees into pipeline. That's a difference between hosting a meeting and running a great event. If you're a BDB marketer with a webinar program that needs a reboot or you're thinking about building one, you should go and check out Zoom webinars, right? You know Zoom, but go and check out their webinar product. And come to one of our upcoming exit five live sessions every other Friday. It's two Fridays a month. You can see it in action. Check them out. Check our sessions out. I think it really gives a good example of what you can do. Go and check them out zoom.com/exit5. That's zoom.com/exit5. Hey, it's Dave. This episode is brought to you by compound growth marketing. They're a full funneled demand-gen agency. Look, I personally hired them twice. I think I was the very first customer before I was even a thought leader just when I was a VP of marketing, a real marketer back in the day, right? CGM was one of the best agencies that I've ever hired. I think that's because they understand the job. The founder John came from this background knows what it's like, knows the life of a marketing leader. And they help high growth, cyber security, and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They offer the combination of AEO, modern paid advertising strategy, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by a former VP of marketing. Like I said, John, he really gets this space. I think that matters. By the way, for B2B tech companies, CGM has a special offer for people who listen to this podcast. You can get two free sessions focused on media planning to learn what channels are driving the best ROI, how much you should be investing in demand, capture, versus creation, and how to invest up funnel effectively. Hey, this is a really smart offer. So go check it out, compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5, go check this out. Get some free help. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. But then there's having that newsletter attached to that, building a podcast off of it, doing conferences and awards. The ones that see it working then extrapolate that out and build it into their own media empire, I would say. Okay. God, this is sick. This is so sick. This is so sick. Thank you. Thanks, thanks. Well, because you're not just making a blog for someone and you're saying like, no, we only want to, I only want to work with people who like believe this and the, because I was going to, I'm writing on a bunch of nonsense, but I'm thinking of all the objections people have, well, you know, we want to own that on our website. And it's like, well, it's the same reason why like the community gets ruined or this thing happens. It's like, there's a gangster move from the beginning by the way you said, like, nope, it's a company that's building their media outlet and it has a different name and a different place. And that's kind of like the 80% of why it's going to work, right? Yes, yes, but there is on. So we do also build from many of them now, like a complimentary hub on their own site too, where they can comment from the company perspective on their own news so that there's an interlinking. It gets a little complex because our media companies also play a role in this in which we're kind of building out this immense network of backlinking and taboo-less style B2B content where some of that stuff is featured. So it's become like a very complex web. But yes, it starts with having this third party adjacent perspective on things. We built one the other day for a company that we're working with called talentsignalnews.com and I'm super excited about that one because it's everything that has to do with the culture of hiring and what's happening within talent when resumes become commoditized by AI tools. So like there's two things that make me really excited about that one. It's one like it's such a hot topic. Everyone's talking about it be the rallying cry for people that are really great to try to get attention. And then for companies to try to figure out how to hire, it's kind of the convergence of like three things that I think make a media property really valuable. So when there's that and there's a clear perspective and a clear path, that's when I think it does the best. So yeah, I'm excited about that one. We actually launched it last week. All right. This is awesome. This is what people are going to want. So let's talk about the mechanics of building your own media media outlet. Who should do it? Maybe we could talk why too. Because how do I measure this? How do I turn the results into pipeline? Who should do it? This is riff on some of that. I'm into this topic this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's the logical question of why would you do this? And then there's, hey, how do we evaluate this and measure it short term versus long term? First of all, when you're you're building a media company, it's not just your own perspective. It's the perspective of others. So you're interviewing people within your ICP set. So you become like a GLG. And what happens with that when you're interviewing people editorially is like they're saying all kinds of really amazing things about what's happening with their companies, which effectively is sales intelligence, which allows you to kind of understand where they are in pot. You know, market, what a good BDR should actually be doing, which is intelligence on people and like understanding where companies set. So we just do that through an editorial lens, which was sort of like part of the sell into companies. It's like there's a short tail. Hey, we're actually talking ICP is and then there's the long tail, which is showing up in LLM's actually drinking and search, getting shared on LinkedIn because the content you're speaking on behalf of that company, getting syndicated on like hacker news. We've had a couple of our customers gets indicated there for some of the hot topics they've published. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of benefits, right? So like they start seeing, all right, there's leading and lagging indicators. You start to see some of the leading indicators and you're like, oh, I see where this is. All of a sudden they've built a community of people too that they can just get to a conference. They can do an award. You have power that you don't have when you're a company publishing a blog. No one cares about your blog. I have a question on this. Would you consider this a similar vein to like I have a friend who's a CMO. He was a CMO to cyber security company. It was called Recorded Future. You know them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tom Wentworth was a CMO and he was like, you won't believe this. This is working and I'm like, well, why is it working? He's like, well, they they went higher, spent a bunch of money and hired like a former NPR level journalist and they started a podcast and it was completely agnostic from the marketing team and it was like, well, that's why it worked. Really, you didn't hire some no disrespect, not being a just, but you didn't hire some 22 year old to write content that's going to appeal to CISOs, Fortune 500 CISOs. And back in the day, dinner interview with this guy, Ganto, he ran marketing at Auth Zero and he was an engineer and our content. He's appealed to engineers. So you know what I did in marketing. I just hired four former engineers to like write our blogs. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. All of those are parts of it. Recorded Future is a good example because they did it really well. Can you have a CMO or a leader that has a perspective on having like, hey, adjacency makes sense? You can also do this well like on your own site if you create a hub that actually like feels like it. It doesn't need to be off site. It's just off site. Usually isn't easier. There's an easier understanding and linearization between church and state for people where they they are okay with the off site content in certain instances. So just kind of depends. I think it can be done really well across the board. The thing that like need it needs is like perspective and buy in and a little bit of patience. I think people are just they're frantic these days for wins immediately. So we're trying to do that, but it's it's tough. I think patience is still underrated in what you're doing. And when I ever try to like tell people about this, listen, in five months, we've built two media publications that have multi million organic monthly uniques that drive all of our business. And it all just comes from that. And if we build on that, we are going to be incredibly successful. And the longer we build and the longer we do this, the better it's going to be. If you can take even a fraction of that approach and think about it, I don't know, do 10% of what we're doing, it'll work. It'll really work. So we try to be the best in class example of what this looks like at scale and what this looks like to actually do it well. Two things on that. Number one is I think a big part of the whenever I talk to someone about like the value of writing on LinkedIn or social, it is one of those things where you just have to start doing it because you don't know what's going to come in and everyone has an example of you post something and the post gets really low engagement, but some founder DMs you and was like, oh, I saw your posts. That was awesome. Where does that show up in the analytics? It doesn't. And so you have to just start doing that. That's number one. Number two, you slid in this casual, oh, we're doing multi million organic views a month on your content. How I understand you're creating good content. Is there a distribution piece here? Or is you just you're just hitting on these trends? You're like news jacking. What the heck is going on? It's that. I'm news jacking and I didn't know what was going to happen when we started this. When five months ago, I was just, all right, I'm going to create this new format. I haven't seen it on LinkedIn before. It's going to be our own content. So people are going to think, what is she doing? She's pasting like Wall Street Journal articles or like copying whatever. And then it's going to become really annoying. And then they're going to realize, Go! way they're actually building, like all of these publications are things that they actually own. So that's like where we started. And yeah, it was like, all right, let me just start posting three to four or five times a day. I'm going to ignore all these people that think they know the rules of LinkedIn and see what happens. And it really works. When we have something to go viral, I'll get 25,000 direct referrals directly from LinkedIn from the link that I'm putting under the post. That's crazy. People say, don't put the links in. Here's Melissa saying, I drove 25 thousands of views coming from that. And then what happens is one of those people has a great newsletter or is on Hacker news and we'll post it on Hacker news and then all of a sudden, oh my God, this thing is going viral. So LinkedIn is like, has become the hook to the virality. But now honestly, like sometimes I'll like, I'll post something on LinkedIn and it won't get traction and then I'll see it go viral in Japan. And I'm like, oh, this is really interesting. So I like have to trace it down and like figure out what's happening here. But I mean, now we have so much traffic, I won't even promote stuff and like people are picking it up. So I'm just coming to us to just see what's happening, which is awesome. That's the goal. I think we're just constantly iterating and figuring out what works. I think there's also just such a lack of good media across different verticals. We're going to take over all of those. I think that you're a perfect example of like you have to just do it all the time. If I just was trying, while you were talking, I'm trying to scroll through your posts and figure out where the hits were and it's like, okay, 41 likes, five comments, 34. Okay, 41 likes sometimes is 10,000 views and 50,000 impressions. Oh, so the metrics here can be met. I notice if I promote a webinar, right, it gets no clicks, but 200 people will sign up or something like that. And the people that are hitting on it are the people that I want for that post and that article. So I've like started to just like, I'm like, well, I don't care. I'm just going to post five times a day and I'm going to, I know exactly which ones are going to target which people. And then I get the data back and I learn and I, I move on. Like we, I had one, if you go a few days back, go to Friday, go down to post so much that one. Yeah. So that one took off. Yeah. That one generated about 200,000 page visits across the web. So I picked up across all this other stuff. This is why you don't listen to anybody. People that are listening to this podcast. People in Exit 5 tell me, don't tag people. Don't use images. Don't use the links. Don't tag more than one here, a one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. We tag seven companies, include an and a link and an image. And this thing went, went nuts. I love it. I love that you shut me up to your like 31. My point was I was going to try to scroll to get to the big one, but the hits aren't the hits. That's the thing. Well, this is why all of the judging someone's marketing by what you see them do. You actually have no idea, you have no idea what's happening until you see the performance. But my point was going to be though, okay, so yes, that's awesome. This is like show this to the CEO, even this post that has only 41 likes and five comments trove tens of thousands of views. But my point was going to be like, if you kind of look, it's like basically one out of every five, you kind of get like a mega, you get a super boners or something and that just shows you that you have to just be in the game every day, and then you're going to this one popped off. For there was another one after this. This was a longer time ago. But I think you wrote about like to click up hiring a CMO for a million dollars. Dave, we're like 50 push back at depth. Okay. Yeah. I was like 10 days ago. This was the other one, the reddit. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Why should I not go hire a person to just write about marketing trends every single day and hope we hit on one and that drives traffic back to my company? Like why would I not do that? Is that our tour of the question? There's not really an answer. No, I'm like, it's so obvious, like seeing this, it's like, oh my god, it's so obvious. But this is not what we do. We hire a blogger, especially inside of a B2B company, you hire a blogger and you're like just right in article a week and they can't keep up and you burn them out and you stress them out. How do you get the mentality? I guess I've built media companies, right? It's so funny, though, when we started this company, it's me and my husband actually were co-founders. And when I started this company, I was like, okay, I don't want to be a media company and I don't want to be a services company and we're just a media company and a services company. But it's the best thing because I'm really good at both of those things and it works. Oh my gosh. That's the takeaway. I don't care. I don't care what else happens in this podcast. Whatever your industry is and I know so many people that listen to this, it's cybersecurity, it's fintech, it's professional services, it's marketing, it's sales, it's whatever. There's something about just sitting there and be like, what are we going to write about today? That's the true media company mindset. That's not the B2B company, should be a media company, right? For sure. I think there is like an element of rigor here that like may not be across other companies. So right now I'm getting like four hours of sleep. I realize this is a sprint in my life and like, I will scale this and we're going to figure this out. But right now I'm not sleeping because I have to have for on a company and we have a lot of customers and then have for on a media company. So with my mind. But you're doing the writing. Are you not sleeping because you're new jack, you're doing the news jacking? I'm doing a lot of the writing and when I'm not doing the writing, I'm coming up with the angles and I'm feeding those to my team and it's just like I'm an editor and chief now of two publications that soon need to be 10. So yeah, it's a lot, right? So I think the one thing preventing like other people from doing this is you're not going to see my results if you do this once a week. That's why I'm posting five times a day, five articles a day. It's going to soon to be 25 articles a day, which I don't know how we're going to do it. But a media companies act like media companies, right? That's the thing. That is what they do. They're not a B2B company that decides to write one piece of content. So I think the mentality would need to change for this, the frameworks to work. But they do work. They do work. They just need, when I went to work to click on et cetera, I was like, okay, so I'm going to build brand, I built brand of B2C companies and I'm going to approach it like that. We're going to hire my Buzzfeed video team and we're going to create a media agency within the company and that's how we're going to create all of our performance creative and we're going to do versioning of it and we're going to build branded stuff and eventually we'll do a Super Bowl commercial and he was like, yeah, for sure. Luckily he was actually, he meant that because that could have backfired really poorly. But yeah, he allowed me effectively to build like a media agency within the company and act more like a B2C company just because like our town was effectively more B2C because it was teams of two to teams thousands across every vertical. So it made sense, but it took like, if he wasn't on board with that, like it wouldn't have worked. It's the same thing here. The way that I operate this company, I don't know. We do this for other customers and it works because we're at the helm of it. I don't know if I joined a company as a CMO that I would be allowed to do this. I don't know. Maybe it's the right, like I wouldn't be as successful as I am doing this outside of myself because I have this rigor and this angle and this understanding of things. So I think it just depends. I do think constantly when companies can get there. I mean, ramps the perfect example, like they're really smart. They're going to do this. I mean, they're already doing this. They also have money to play around with. They are taking huge vets. They're worth $40 billion. There's gambles that they can take that others are like, we're PE backed in like our investors don't understand thought leadership and we're going to go higher like a BDR. I don't know. Obviously, that's not really what we want to plan, but I think it's mentality to how you think about things. But this will outlast like every other company if you do it well, like you'll win for sure. Because all of the advancements in AI, could I build an agent that is doing media monitoring and is listening? How much of the secret sauce is you? I think you kind of answered this before because you have this system. Someone's going to listen to it and they're like, oh, cool. We're just going to automate this. We'll write these daily recaps about what's going on in the news. Yeah, it's, you can, you can get it to a pretty good place. It's so hard though. The media listening portion is also the hardest thing because I have to understand what to talk about across like a thousand of verticals. So we've been building media listening now for two and a half years and like we're getting there. It's like really getting there. It's like so close to being like almost perfect. Sorry. What does that mean? Media listening, understanding what trending topics are interesting. It's like what every single company is doing across at any given time, slotted into different what's happening in AI orchestration, how companies are building their own companies, what's going viral on LinkedIn, what changes are being made on websites. It's literally like how do we amass like any sort of a signal that can become a news story? Because it's not just news. Because if you start only looking at trending topics, then you're not able to like, we're kind of able to almost like break news because you're just listening so widely, which other companies and other media companies aren't really doing because they're not focused on that. They're just focused on scoops because everything's a signal for us when I write about how Uber is changing their company structure to align around AI goes viral. All right. Well, I need more of that because everyone cares about that. And here's an example. Like the CFO of click up, Dan, she's so, so smart and really now AI builds just insane. And she writes about how they're changing the company and all this stuff and I'll pick it up because I'm like, this is really interesting and everyone else will want to read this. But no publication is really picking it up, but I pick it up. So and then other people pick it up and then it gets shared. So it's just kind of like there is a sense of what can we find that others aren't finding that allows us to do this. And then we pass that down to our customers too. Like that's the media listening supports us and it supports everyone else that we we service. But yes, you can do it. You can do it. You can totally do it. I'm not saying this is a parameter thing. You can definitely set it up. It's takes a little massaging and thought I totally get it now. It's picking it. Go deep on an industry. The companies in the industry, you're understanding what they're all saying. And gosh, especially with you and the AI, what's your AI publication called? It's called the state of AI state of AI, which is really crazy because for some reason, well, first of all, I'm buying domains. Like I'm not buying a house and buying like fucking domains every day. But so much more domains, yeah, the really cool thing about it is we found a mast head that actually is also everyone else's state of report. Every company calls their thing the state of X state of fear. We have a sponsor in our newsletter this week, the state of B2B marketing, right? But we're now the state of because we own every single state of domain. So it's just kind of funny all of a sudden, I'm the captain now, yeah, kind of that. But yeah, it's a state of AI, the state of brand. Those are the two and number launching seven in the next couple of weeks. Okay. This is a sort of psycho. during these interviews. But this is great. I look, I wanted to have him list on because I think this perspective, I think we have this in our little intro in our prep and I'll just kind of close with this. But I do think that this, I don't know if you said this or Marissa wrote it or AI wrote it. So I'm just going to say it. But AI and content commoditization have made it nearly possible to stand out on product alone. Companies are realizing they need to control their own narrative rather than rented from algorithms or ad channels. And like, this is stuff I love about marketing. And I love that. Yep. All the AI is commoditizing demand gen and SEO and this, how can we, this concept of even if you don't go all the way in like Melissa and you're doing all this writing four hours night, even if you just take a little step in that direction and start writing about industry news and becoming an authority on the topic your customers care about. I think this is the most impactful marketing strategy that you could be investing in right now. I hope this was helpful. That's why I wanted to have Melissa on go follow her. You can see this approach first hand. We'll link to all of her stuff and it's fun to watch. It's like a little game now. I follow you and I see which one I have to follow you and see which one is super viral. But as you corrected me properly, you never actually know what's happening behind scenes. Thanks Dave. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit five and you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website exit five dot com. 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