Serial Marketer and former CMO of Publicis MRY David Berkwitz shares how he built up a thriving invite-only 1500+ member Slack community for his marketing consultancy serialmarketer.com

This site uses services from YouTube. By clicking on “Show” the content is loaded and data is transferred.

more information

show

PGlmcmFtZSB0aXRsZT0iRGF2aWQgQmVya293aXR6IC0gU2VyaWFsbHkgYXdlc29tZSBjb21tdW5pdHkgYnVpbGRpbmciIHdpZHRoPSIxMjAwIiBoZWlnaHQ9IjY3NSIgc3JjPSJodHRwczovL3d3dy55b3V0dWJlLmNvbS9lbWJlZC9tNFNhZ1JFMzlLZz9mZWF0dXJlPW9lbWJlZCIgZnJhbWVib3JkZXI9IjAiIGFsbG93PSJhY2NlbGVyb21ldGVyOyBhdXRvcGxheTsgZW5jcnlwdGVkLW1lZGlhOyBneXJvc2NvcGU7IHBpY3R1cmUtaW4tcGljdHVyZSIgYWxsb3dmdWxsc2NyZWVuPjwvaWZyYW1lPg==

Links

Find out more about Serial Marketers and join the Slack community here.

Transcript

Mike 0:04
Welcome to The Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things quizzes, marketing – and everything in between. We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets, plus share our story… the highs (and the lows!) of scaling his successful startups since we launched way back in 2014.

Boris 0:34
Hello, and welcome to The Quiz Makers podcast. Our guest today is David Berkovitz. David was the former CMO of MRY, a huge marketing agency and has now moved to running his own company – Serial Marketers. Hello, David, thanks for joining us in the podcast!

David 0:52
Thanks for having me Boris. It’s great to be here.

Boris 0:55
David, the first question that I’ve actually always wanted to ask you and never gotten around to somehow.

Just how did you decide to move from being a big corporate CMO? You know, that’s a very well respected job at a huge company to being self employed. That’s a huge step.

David 1:14
Yeah, it’s a it’s a big step. And and some of it wasn’t entirely the plan.

Look life within Pubicis was a wonderful experience. So with the team and MRY, they’re kept shifting, like the organization, kept drifting considerably within Publicis. And so ultimately, they needed to step back from what they were marketing and kind of retrench. And then as I was taking some time off, there were just a lot of the companies I was initially talking to on the tech and product side.

Then I thought – let’s start doing some consulting… then in that four year span I’ve gone in and out of some of these in-house roles, but all of them have been a lot scrappier; it’s been fun being in the this building mode. And really, across the board, I’ve just been just been attracted to these entrepreneurial roles.

So that part has stayed fairly consistent. And a lot of it is even at MRY. We didn’t have a CMO before I joined, right so there was still room to just create things and build. It’s really appealing to track it, you know, going over to that startup front and having those as most of my clients day to day.

Boris 2:46
So but instead of going the usual route where you got to know a lot of people in your previous roles and you then set up consulting gigs.

You went a slightly different route as well. You started with a small Slack channel, I guess to keep in touch with people – which has now grown into a huge and thriving community of well over 1000 members.

Tell me about how that how that ideas started to build that community and how you manage to grow with that fast.

David 3:18
Well, the idea started pretty much the day I left MRY. It’s all very connected because I was I was going to be speaking at an event and after that transition, I wanted a company name associated with. (There’s a bigger sort of back story on the company name itself serial marketer.)

Once I decided on that, I thought, “Well wait, a lot of people identify as serial marketers. No one uses that term. Then I Googled it – and saw, right, barely any search results associated with it so there’s something thing to it.

And then I got to this point where I wrapped up this engagement with StoryHunter, this video production marketplace and in July of 2018, I started the community with a LinkedIn post. Yeah, I thought slack was the right place to try this then, like “Slack for business professionals”.

It was still very unusual for those outside of the startup community to have a Slack account. But it seemed like it was in that right place and something that you can customize a lot more than the Google, Facebook and then LinkedIn groups.

I just started posts connected to Google Forms and got some idea for this community, which is ways to share things like jobs, events and news updates. And who wants to give this up, right?

I didn’t know exactly what it would be. And right away, I got 100 people filling out that form. So like the initial early adopters, and I’d estimate about half of them actually went and created an account. Then it was just a matter of it’s fun.

Now it’s nearly 1500 members. And it feels like it happened both very slowly and very quickly.

Because it’s not one of those things where it’s like, “Put this thing on product and tell everyone you know.”

I’ve seen some communities that are like, very aggressive of having the community name on everyone’s LinkedIn profiles just to have that viral effect. And six months in, where the people join in, we’re much more likely to…from being my first or second degree of connections, some of its come from my third degree.

That to me was a really exciting pivot when I saw that people I didn’t know were giving this a shot.

Boris 6:18
Now, I say we tried to copy the Serial Marketers Slack community at Riddle in try to build a real quiz maker community. It completely failed.

And I think we failed for one one reason – we couldn’t figure out why people should join. So when you mentioned there’s a lot of communities that pop up on Product Hunt and they get lots of members, people register, but they never log in, they never contribute.

I think I’ve been a member of at least 10 or 20 of these. But Serial Marketer, I check every day. From your point of view, what do you think? What did you do differently than all these communities that makes your community really work. It actually really, really works.

David 7:07
Well, thanks.

You know, I mean, it’s gratifying to hear because because like you said, my initial goal once it was actually sustaining itself after the first few months, then my initial goal for the community was very simple. Don’t die, right?

And if it did die, by the way, that was okay. It was good experiment.

Then there were some nice little milestones along the way, like when I realized I could take a week off on vacation and the community would still be there when I got back. And actually, one of the reasons I hesitated to launch a community is because look, I’m in marketing. I know a lot of people were awareof communities and other related endeavors as their vanity project.

I did not want this to be the David Berkowitz community. And I want to be something where, like, say, I got involved with something else that was just going to take up all mine. I could basically hand this over to some other folks and say, “Can you just run with this?”

Now it’s at the point where I even know who those people are in the community who I could do that too if I needed to and it and have some confidence that a year from now, we’d actually thrive more, right?

A lot of it benefited from that organic build of you know, finding those right members is and i and i gotta say, some of it is what was the most unpredictable thing that I you know, where like, you’ve got like the luck and skill parts of any degree of success. And so for me, the luck part came overwhelmingly from the people who I call the ‘capitalists of the community’ – there are people who some I knew fairly well like Valaria Maltoni.

She is a wonderful writer who I’ve been on the speaking circuit with – I’ve known her for a very long time. She never was like my closest friend in the industry; she’s based out in Philly so not like the person I’d have a beer with day to day but she was someone I knew fairly well – so it wasn’t surprising that she’d be as active and just enthusiastic as she was.

There are people like Weston Woodward and Chris Gorges, Shira Abel, and like Peggy Anne Salz who I met in Germany.

I knew her before but sat down with her in the DEMEXCO press room,