March 31, 2025

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

1 hour 1 minute

#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

(03:38) - – Exit Five’s approach to community

(06:08) - – What it means to treat community like a product

(10:08) - – Why audience is the foundation of community growth

(13:08) - – How Exit Five builds and converts audience from LinkedIn

(16:08) - – Using content tripwires to drive signups

(18:08) - – Offers that work: Why we use a 7-day free trial

(21:08) - – How Exit Five got started as a paid community

(24:08) - – The product mindset: build, test, iterate

(28:20) - – Using member feedback to drive product decisions

(30:20) - – Real example: member matchmaking feature

(32:20) - – Promoting new community features like product launches

(35:20) - – How we drive 40% monthly active usage

(37:20) - – The value of member-led events and how we do them

(40:20) - – Other plays: tagging experts, matchmaking, onboarding

(43:20) - – Why self-promo was hurting our community and what changed when we cut it

(45:20) - – Final takeaways + advice for small communities

(49:20) - – Audience Q&A: re-engagement, matchmaking, content cadence

Join 50,0000 people who get our Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter
Learn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/

***

Today's episode is brought to you by Knak.

Email (in my humble opinion) is the still the greatest marketing channel of all-time.

It’s the only way you can truly “own” your audience.

But when it comes to building the emails - if you’ve ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know how painful it can be. Templates are too rigid, editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever.

That’s why we love Knak here at Exit Five. Knak a no-code email platform that makes it easy to create on-brand, high-performing emails - without the bottlenecks.

Frustrated by clunky email builders? You need Knak.
Tired of ‘hoping’ the email you sent looks good across all devices? Just test in Knak first.
Big team making it hard to collaborate and get approvals? Definitely Knak.

And the best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time.

See Knak in action at knak.com/exit-five. Or just let them know you heard about Knak on Exit Five.

***

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