Building a Marketing Machine from Scratch (with Erin May, CMO at User Interviews)
The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
How Erin Picked a Niche Audience First
Erin explains choosing researchers as the minimum viable audience and why focusing there made scaling possible.
#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
- (05:16) - How Erin identified the right audience to go all in on
- (07:18) - Building the UX Research Field Guide and the early SEO strategy
- (09:47) - Why she went ungated and still captured 13% email conversion
- (13:28) - What she'd do differently with content strategy today
- (16:04) - Stacking channels one at a time instead of doing everything at once
- (18:43) - How to plan for the next phase of growth before you need it
- (21:14) - Introducing Bangers: the quarterly marketing OS
- (23:42) - Top of funnel vs. bottom of funnel Bangers
- (30:25) - How LinkedIn and employee advocacy fit into the Banger playbook
- (34:44) - Why Erin started a podcast seven years ago when no one else was
- (38:07) - How to think about podcast ROI when attribution is fuzzy
- (40:59) - AI expectations for her marketing team
- (45:27) - Why the brand vs. demand debate is stupid
- (48:39) - The real secret: making your customer the hero
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