Your funnel isn’t broken. It’s just getting in the way.
Welcome to Day 20 of the 30 Days of Growth.
This is a pop-up newsletter put together by Chenell from Growth In Reverse. I’ve pulled 30 creators together to help give one short, actionable way you can either grow or improve your email list.
You can view all past issues of the 30 Days of Growth here.
Here’s a growth lesson that sounds counterintuitive: stop doing so much.
Dave Gerhardt, founder of Exit Five, realized his marketing had gotten too complicated.
The newsletter was good, but all that extra stuff was getting in the way. People were missing the actual value of it because there was so much other noise going out.
So instead of optimizing, he stripped everything back.
What They Did
Exit Five had what most “mature” marketing systems look like – especially ones run by marketers.
For context, Dave Gerhardt has been in B2B marketing for over a decade. He knows how to properly build complex funnels and marketing workflows. So he had a lot of marketing best practices in place:
- Multiple landing pages
- Different lead magnets
- Layered email sequences
- Ongoing nurture flows
On paper, it was sophisticated. In practice, it was creating confusion.
So, he cut almost everything. Dave didn’t try to fix each piece individually, he went in the other direction. Exit Five moved to one simple landing page with one clear value prop.
He drove all traffic to that single page. All of the ads, social posts, and other mentions now point to one place. There’s no split attention, and there’s just a clear, focused, message.
Without having to spend time building and maintaining complex funnels, Dave put that effort into making the Exit Five newsletter insanely valuable:
- Sharper insights
- Better writing
- More relevance to what his readers actually wanted
He built the kind of newsletter B2B marketers actually look forward to opening.
Why It Works
When your marketing gets complicated, 2 things happen.
First, you and your team spend more time maintaining systems than improving the product.
Second, your audience gets confused. If someone’s seeing multiple lead magnets from you, they might tune out the one that matters.
Dave’s insight was that the newsletter itself was the growth lever, not the funnels around it. Dave is speaking my language with this one!
The timing matters too. In a world filled with AI-generated content, a newsletter that’s clearly written by someone who knows what they’re talking about stands out.
Quality is becoming a competitive advantage again (YAY!) and every minute you spend managing your funnel is time you can’t spend on quality and actual growth.
Results
- Exit Five is on track for roughly 50% list growth this year – Dave wanted me to be very explicit in saying that this isn’t the only change they made, but he knows it’s had a big impact on that number.
- Simplified from dozens of landing pages and sequences down to one clean funnel. That’s gotta feel good.
- Freed up significant time to invest directly in newsletter quality
- Clearer messaging across every channel
How You Can Implement It
Step 1: Audit your current setup. List out every landing page, email sequence, and lead magnet you’re running.
Step 2: Identify what’s just adding noise. If a sequence or page isn’t clearly driving results, it might be distracting from the thing that does. Be honest about what’s actually pulling its weight.
Step 3: Pick one primary path. Make it dead simple for someone to understand what they’re signing up for.
Step 4: Kill the extras. Pause or delete the sequences, tags, lead magnets, and funnels that aren’t earning their keep.
Step 5: Reinvest that time into your newsletter. Better writing, stories, takeaways. Make every issue something people would forward to a friend or peer.
Step 6: Point everything to your one page. Social, ads, partnerships, all of it. Let that focus compound.
Is this going to work for everyone? No. But sometimes when you overcomplicate your workflows and marketing things become very confusing.
Tools
- Your ESP – one clean landing page and welcome sequence
- Patience – this stuff isn’t easy, but the clarity and simplicity you gain from it is worth it.
Growth doesn’t always come from adding more. Sometimes it comes from stripping away the parts that are getting in the way and building back up around what actually works.
Dave bet on simplicity and quality over complexity and volume. That bet is paying off.
See you tomorrow,
Chenell
P.S. Dave runs Exit Five, the best community and newsletter for B2B marketers. If you’re in the B2B space, it’s worth subscribing. Check it out at exitfive.com.
