This morning we announced the biggest thing we've ever built at Workweek. Before the what, here's the why. The creator economy has never been bigger. GRWM, lifestyle bloggers, the political podcaster, and more. We've never been interested in any of them. The creator we care about is the one who doesn't want to quit their job to make content. They want to make content about their job. The CFO who just ran a restructure. The Head of Product going from 10 customers to 100. The Chief Strategy Officer at a multi-billion dollar health system. We call them practitioner creators. There are far more of them than anyone realizes. Because they have been creating this entire time. They write the memo. They build the deck. They shape the decision. They just do it inside an org chart instead of a feed. So why haven't they made the jump? Every platform out there is built for volume. That isn't a knock. Volume is the right business for them and they are good at it. But if you want every Chief Innovation Officer at a bank on your list, that is fewer than 5,000 people in the country. No algorithm built for reach will find them. No business built on impressions will ever reward you for reaching only them. We don't ask how many without first asking who. So we built five networks for the people who do the work. Healthcare. HR. Fintech and banking. Marketing. Ecommerce. You don't sign up. You apply, and we verify your title and seniority before you get in. Today, every one of those members can build their own newsletter on our platform. Totally free. Four things make it the best place in the world for a practitioner creator to write: You launch into a network, not an empty room. Your first reader is already verified and already in your industry. We will help you grow your list, with the right people, better than any platform. The work is 100% yours. Your words, your list, your audience. If you leave, it leaves with you. You can finally see who you're reaching. We enrich your list with company and title the moment someone subscribes. So if you write for CMOs, we don't just tell you which readers are CMOs. We tell you what percentage of every CMO out there is already on your list, and how they engage. Our newly announced Ad Network allows creators to get paid on CPM, not CPC. You earn on the audience you built, not on how many people you can talk into clicking. Our CPMs run 10x what most email networks pay. Dozens of practitioner creators went live this morning. The Chief Strategy Officer at GE Healthcare. @FintechKristen. The former CIO at Valley Bank. And many more. We also raised $17M to keep building for them. More creator tooling. More networks. More reasons to create. Five years in and never believed more in what we're doing.

I lost too many ad deals to Facebook. Eventually I stopped being annoyed about it and started building the B2B version.

The people you most want to learn from in B2B have the least time to teach. They have a job, usually a family, and decades of experience nobody has written down. The more someone knows, the more people want it, and the less time they have to share it. I call it the knowledge expert paradox.

I taught American government to 9th graders. Still the best management training I ever got.

Your price is part of your story whether you meant it to be or not. Charge $10 a month and you're telling one story. Charge $300 a year and you're telling a completely different one, to a completely different person. B2B forgets this constantly. Everyone sprints to the cheapest CPM in the room like price is just a number on a rate card. It isn't. Come in as the cheapest option and you're telling the buyer exactly what you think your own work is worth, and they hear every word of it.

Half of "brand awareness" in B2B is just the budget that didn't survive contact with an attribution report.

Wrote something I was proud of. Six people liked it, and all six were exactly who I wrote it for. Every social platform would call that a flop.

Lenny Rachitsky writes one of the biggest newsletters for product managers. Last month he hosted his second summit, and close to 3,000 people applied for about 1,000 seats. The speakers came from Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe and Linear, and Stripe paid to be the presenting sponsor. His newsletter filled that summit. Paid subscribers got first pick of the tickets. Plenty of B2B companies still spend a fortune trying to get senior product leaders into one place. Lenny wrote for those people every week for years, so when he invited them, they were excited to show up.

I don't give a shit about click-through rates. I care about who clicked.

There's no single number that proves trust, and hunting for one is half the problem. Trust shows up sideways instead. It's in the retention that just won't drop, and in the rare reply that genuinely changes how I think about something. The clearest tell I've got is an advertiser who renews before I've even sent the report. I can't chart that, and I trust it more than anything I can chart.

Back in late 2023, when the New York Times first sued OpenAI, I went on a podcast and called it the Napster moment for AI. Napster was the most popular thing on the internet in 1999, got sued almost immediately, and was gone by 2001. The lawsuit didn't really turn on the money. It turned on the precedent: a business built to take everything first and sort out the rights later got ruled flatly wrong, and that ruling is what let every rights holder line up behind it to collect. Back then my read was that the AI companies would eventually license the material they'd been scraping, because fighting every rights holder one at a time is a worse business than just paying them. Since 2023 the licensing deals have stacked up, Axel Springer, the AP, News Corp, Reddit. The Times case itself is still grinding on with no ending. I don't think the real lesson is about AI, though. Any business built on taking something it didn't get permission for eventually pays for it or gets rebuilt around not having it. That's the actual reason we went the opt-in route on our data years ago, back when opt-in just looked slow. I've watched which side of that fight usually wins.

Before we switch on a new AI tool, I ask one boring question: when this runs, will I be able to see what it actually did? Speed is what every demo sells. A tool that moves fast but leaves no trail just means you find out what broke in production instead of in the demo. I'll take the slower tool I can check after it runs.

When a founder sets their price, they think they're just picking a number. They're actually picking who shows up. Go cheap and you pull in people hunting for a deal, the ones who leave the moment someone undercuts you. Charge more and fewer people come, but the ones who do are telling you they take the problem seriously. The price sorts your customers before any of them hear a word of the pitch.

Agencies keep buying each other to own bigger creator rosters. But a roster is just reach. One person's credibility in their field is what actually holds value in B2B, and no acquisition puts that on a balance sheet.

Early in my career I ran the old lead-gen playbook at a software company. Gate a PDF, make people fill out a seven-field form, count the downloads as leads. The form's real job was internal, though. Filling it out turned a little marketing activity into a row in the CRM a rep could forward, and a number I could put in a report. Whether the person downloading actually wanted to buy was close to beside the point. Manufacturing that CRM row is how a playbook this bad at predicting a sale survived for twenty years. The form was great at producing something you could show your boss on a Friday. The people actually about to buy were off reading someone they trusted and asking peers in private, where no gated form caught them.

In B2B you're almost never trying to reach a lot of people. You're trying to reach eleven people at nine companies, and most ad tech is built to help you do the opposite.

The inbox is about to get an assistant that decides what you actually see, and most marketers haven't sat with what that does to them. A promotional email was already fighting the spam folder. Now it's fighting a bot whose entire job is to clear the clutter out of your morning so you never have to look at it. The one email that walks straight through all of that is from a sender you chose, because you asked for it and the assistant isn't going to overrule you. For years the move was buying your way into an inbox you hadn't earned. That's the part getting automated out of existence. What's left is whether someone wanted you there to begin with, and now there's a bot enforcing the answer.

Following up on the one-tap subscribe we launched last month. Tap once on a post in the feed and you're on that creator's newsletter, no form, no landing page. A month in, the people who sign up that way are still opening at around 64%, roughly double a normal new subscriber. Turns out saying yes in the same breath as reading something you liked beats landing on a list off a popup you forgot about three weeks later.

The platform that runs your ad auction also grades how your ads did. You'd never accept that arrangement anywhere else in the business.

Most "thought leadership" budgets go almost entirely to distribution. Barely any of it reaches the practitioners who actually have the thoughts.

The best niche writing often only resonates with a few hundred people, by design. Most platforms reward the opposite, so the best B2B writing is often getting the least reach. An overly broad audience doesn't mean it's bad content.