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

#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
• (04:45) - – Exit Five’s approach to community
• (07:15) - – What it means to treat community like a product
• (11:15) - – Why audience is the foundation of community growth
• (14:15) - – How Exit Five builds and converts audience from LinkedIn
• (17:15) - – Using content tripwires to drive signups
• (19:15) - – Offers that work: Why we use a 7-day free trial
• (22:15) - – How Exit Five got started as a paid community
• (25:15) - – The product mindset: build, test, iterate
• (29:20) - – Using member feedback to drive product decisions
• (31:20) - – Real example: member matchmaking feature
• (33:20) - – Promoting new community features like product launches
• (36:20) - – How we drive 40% monthly active usage
• (38:20) - – The value of member-led events and how we do them
• (41:20) - – Other plays: tagging experts, matchmaking, onboarding
• (44:20) - – Why self-promo was hurting our community and what changed when we cut it
• (46:20) - – Final takeaways + advice for small communities
• (50:20) - – Audience Q&A: re-engagement, matchmaking, content cadence

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

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