Episode 18 – David Berkowitz – Serially awesome community building

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

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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 Li...