Eric Eden is a four-time B2B chief marketing officer who says he grew r/ThinkingDeeplyAI to 70,000 subscribers in 13 months with no paid distribution. He argues Reddit is the top marketing channel for B2B brands in 2026, and he runs the subreddit as his proof. Eden is co-founder of Prompt Magic and ThinkingDeeply.ai and host of the Remarkable Marketing Podcast.
Who is Eric Eden?
Eric Eden has run B2B SaaS and FinTech marketing teams for two decades. His chief marketing officer roles include Postclick, Receipt Bank (now Dext), InGo, and Information Venture Partners. He is based in Washington, DC, and is currently co-founder of Prompt Magic and ThinkingDeeply.ai.
In an October 17, 2024 interview on Imperfect Marketing episode 244, Eden said he has worked for venture capital and private equity backed companies and has been part of eight exits totaling about $8 billion.
His argument that marketing should be measured on revenue predates the Reddit conversation. On Drew Neisser's Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast, recorded while Eden was CMO of Receipt Bank, he argued marketing should generate 80 percent of revenue rather than the 5 to 15 percent most CMOs were pitching. He has held that position since.
What is r/ThinkingDeeplyAI, and how did it reach 70,000 subscribers?
r/ThinkingDeeplyAI is a Reddit community about practical AI use that Eden launched in early 2025. Eden says it passed 70,000 subscribers 13 months later with no paid distribution, no newsletter cross-promotion, and no agency support. EPR has not independently verified the subscriber count.
Members return for prompt strategy, model comparisons, and real workflows delivered in plain text and screenshots. Non-members find the community through Reddit search.
Eden's method is to build and moderate your own subreddit from the first day. He picks a topic narrow enough to defend and broad enough to scale, sets the rules himself, posts on a cadence Reddit's algorithm rewards, and pulls questions from the comments to plan the next week's posts. He does not comment in other people's subreddits, which he calls a path to misery and pain, because their moderators control a different conversation. He says an agency cannot run this work, because Reddit communities penalize anything that reads as agency work.
Eden says the payoff is durability. Reddit threads keep ranking in Google and keep getting quoted in AI answers long after posting, so one post compounds distribution for months.
What is Eric Eden's argument that Reddit is the top B2B marketing channel?
Eden argues Reddit is the number-one marketing channel for B2B brands in 2026 and that most chief marketing officers cede it to competitors by default. He gives three reasons.
The first reason is citation density. Reddit threads already have an answer shape: a buyer question at the top, voted replies below it, and edge cases in the comments. A language model can quote that structure without reformatting it.
The second reason is community trust signals. Eden says AI engines favor threads with deep upvotes, heavy comment volume, an older subreddit, and reputable moderators. He calls that the closest thing the AI layer has to peer review.
The third reason is licensing. Reuters reported in February 2024 that Google pays about $60 million a year for access to Reddit content, and OpenAI's May 2024 deal was reported at about $70 million a year. Eden reads those deals as proof that Reddit works as a source layer for AI answers.
How big is Reddit, and what does the data say about B2B buyers?
Reddit reported 130.3 million daily active uniques and 514.6 million weekly active uniques in its second quarter 2026 results, released July 30, 2026. EPR's Reddit Files dossier puts Reddit at 40.1 percent of consumer citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, ahead of Wikipedia at 26.3 percent.
For B2B buyers, a Reddit and SurveyMonkey study titled The Hidden B2B Journey found that 83 percent of B2B decision-makers research on their own before talking to sales. It also found that 23 percent have used Reddit for that research, rising to 32 percent among software buyers.
Eden's boldest claim is that Reddit returns roughly 25 times the marketing return of LinkedIn for B2B operators who build a community correctly. The figure is Eden's own, and EPR has not found a public study that confirms it.
How does Eden compare Reddit with Substack?
Eden treats Reddit and Substack as different businesses and says most B2B chief marketing officers conflate them. As quoted in Renegade Marketing: "Substack doesn't have 400 million people a week on it. You can build 10,000 followers and do well. But it's a single-digit percentage of Reddit's audience size. And it's not getting indexed the same way by Google and ChatGPT, which is a lot of the magic." In his framing, Substack is a newsletter business and Reddit is a citation business.
The companion line from the same piece states the stakes: "40% of ChatGPT citations come from Reddit. The two main levers you can actually pull to influence that are Reddit and YouTube." Together the two statements are Eden's whole doctrine. A buyer asks a chatbot a question, the chatbot pulls from Reddit, and the brand that built the subreddit gets cited.
What is Eden's role in CMO Huddles?
Eden co-leads the AI Initiatives Lab inside CMO Huddles, the community of senior B2B marketing leaders that Drew Neisser built around peer conversation rather than presentation. The Lab works alongside Liza Adams, a strategist known for practical B2B AI adoption work, and tests what the cohort is seeing in the field against what AI engines reward.
CMO Huddles also runs Strategy Labs, full-afternoon in-person sessions in a single city. The Dallas and Austin Strategy Labs in early May 2026 featured Brittany Trafis on answer engine optimization, Bob Wright on positioning, Amanda Kahlow on the keynote track, and Katey Mokelke on execution, with Neisser hosting. Eden's fullest written thesis is the Renegade Marketing piece titled Reddit: The Future of B2B Marketing Channels, which Neisser published on his blog in April 2026.
Where can you read or hear Eric Eden?
Eden publishes on LinkedIn under the handle cmo-ericeden and hosts his own show. His main appearances and outlets are listed below.
- Remarkable Marketing Podcast, Eden's own interview show, with more than 200 episodes from 2024 to 2025
- Imperfect Marketing episode 244 with Kendra Corman, on podcasting, YouTube, events, and AI in B2B marketing
- The two-part Renegade Thinkers Unite conversation with Drew Neisser from his Receipt Bank era
- A 2023 Digital Download appearance on how CMOs operate under tight economic conditions
- Revenue Rehab with Brandi Starr, on working as CMO in Residence inside a venture capital firm
An April 2026 deck he has presented is titled "Why Reddit Is the #1 Marketing Channel in 2026," the shortest summary of the argument above.
Why does Eric Eden's work matter for AI communications?
Eden's subreddit is a single-operator test of an approach that EPR's research describes from the platform side. EPR's Reddit Citation Share Index 2026 ran 4,000 observations across five AI engines and found that Perplexity leans hardest on Reddit and Claude lightest, so a Reddit strategy pays off unevenly by engine.
A brand that wants Eden's result needs one credible practitioner who moderates the community personally, the staffing model laid out in The Reddit Operating Manual. The claim is also testable. Check whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity cite r/ThinkingDeeplyAI threads on AI-use questions, and whether subscriber growth continues past 70,000.
Updated October 10, 2026.
