March 12, 2026

Building a Marketing Machine from Scratch (with Erin May, CMO at User Interviews)

46 minutes

#337 | Dave sits down with Erin May, CMO at User Interviews, who joined as the company's first marketer with a two-page website and zero recurring revenue and helped grow it to $20M+ ARR over eight years. Erin breaks down how she picked one niche audience and went all in, why she led with ungated content, and how she built a quarterly operating rhythm around "Bangers," tentpole marketing moments that get the entire company involved. They also get into podcasting ROI, what she'd do differently with AI-driven search today, and why she thinks the brand vs. demand debate is just noise.

Timestamps

(00:00) - Intro: 8 years, one niche, a two-page website, and $20M ARR

(03:58) - How Erin identified the right audience to go all in on

(06:00) - Building the UX Research Field Guide and the early SEO strategy

(08:29) - Why she went ungated and still captured 13% email conversion

(12:10) - What she'd do differently with content strategy today

(14:46) - Stacking channels one at a time instead of doing everything at once

(17:25) - How to plan for the next phase of growth before you need it

(19:56) - Introducing Bangers: the quarterly marketing OS

(22:24) - Top of funnel vs. bottom of funnel Bangers

(26:41) - How LinkedIn and employee advocacy fit into the Banger playbook

(31:00) - Why Erin started a podcast seven years ago when no one else was

(34:23) - How to think about podcast ROI when attribution is fuzzy

(37:15) - AI expectations for her marketing team

(41:43) - Why the brand vs. demand debate is stupid

(44:55) - The real secret: making your customer the hero

Join 50,0000 people who get Dave's Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter

Learn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/

***

Brought to you by:

Webflow - A website platform built for the agentic web, helping modern marketing teams build fully custom sites—no developer needed—that perform in AI search. Learn more at webflow.com/for/exitfive.

Markup AI - A content quality platform that scans your content against brand voice, preferred terms, messaging standards, and AI-search readiness before it goes live, right inside Google Docs. Learn more at markup.ai.

Optimizely - A no-code AI platform where autonomous agents execute marketing work across webpages, email, SEO, and campaigns. Learn how to deploy agents on your marketing team at Agents in the Mix. Learn more at optimizely.com/exitfive.

Walker Sands - An integrated B2B marketing and growth services agency that helps marketing leaders turn strategy into measurable business impact through their Outcome-based Marketing model. Learn more at walkersands.com/exitfive.

Knak - A no-code, campaign creation platform that lets you go from idea to on-brand email and landing pages in minutes, using AI where it actually matters. Learn more at knak.com/exitfive, or check out the MCP server by clicking this link.

***

Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.

They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.
Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.

Visit hatch.fm to learn more

...more

View all episodes

By Exit Five

4.7

4343 ratings