This company is building a Substack competitor geared toward B2B creators

When Adam Ryan launched Workweek in 2021, the thesis was that some of the most valuable voices in B2B weren't professional journalists or full-time creators, but practitioners who had spent years accumulating at expertise inside their industries. Rather than asking those people to quit their jobs and become media entrepreneurs, Workweek would give them the infrastructure to turn that expertise into newsletters and other content, then help them grow and monetize their audiences. Over the past several years, however, that model has evolved considerably. What started as a tightly curated group of creators is increasingly becoming something much closer to a network and publishing platform, built specifically for business professionals. I recently spoke to Ryan about how the company arrived at that model and where it goes from here. We discussed why Workweek believes B2B newsletters are better monetized through advertising than subscriptions, how its homegrown professional communities are designed to replace some of the functions once served by trade associations, and why the company is now letting far more practitioners launch their own newsletters instead of hand-picking a small roster of creators. Hello, I'm Simon Owens and this is the Business of Content, the show about how publishers create, distribute, and monetize their digital content. If you want to listen to an audio version of this show, subscribe to the Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're watching this on YouTube, gently tap on that subscribe button so you can watch more interviews with the world's most successful media entrepreneurs. Okay, let's jump into it. Hey Adam, thanks for joining us. Yes, I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me. So, super excited to have you on. You are the co-founder of a company called Workweek. There's actually been some new developments with your company that I really want to dive deep into. You've recently taken on some funding, you're launching some new products, but you've never actually been on the podcast before, so I just really want to get my audience up to speed to what it is, its history, some of the things you've learned along the way because I know there's been some pivots and some changes in how you approach things. So, for my understanding, you launched Workweek in 2021, is that correct? November 21, correct. Yeah, and you actually had a lot of experience in kind of the newsletter world. Like, you were an employee at the hustle right even before it was acquired by HubSpot. I was the first hire and then our president during that duration so oversaw the company and then left a few months before that acquisition was announced. Yeah, so you really saw that newsletter rise and become the behemoth that it became and obviously now it's even more successful under HubSpot. So, you were the president, so you were seeing every aspect of that company, basically. Yeah, the sales marketing editorial, our events, our community subscription product, kind of all that. And before then, I was at a company called SpiceWorks, which was a professional community in network for IT. So, like a vertical social network for IT leaders and I was, I was like the probably 300th employee there, but we had raised like over $130 million from Goldman Sachs to build out this social network for IT. So, if you think about Workweek and a little bit of that, I was at a combination of SpiceWorks and the hustle kind of led to what we do at Workweek today in a lot of different ways. Yeah, and so even though you don't really have what I would guess called traditional media experience, you have a lot of experience working with large audiences and the specifically kind of business oriented B2B type of audiences online. Yeah, I mean, I was at SpiceWorks and then I was at my fitness pal and then the hustle. So, all three very media adjacent to all ads, businesses, all audience forward. But I'd say particularly SpiceWorks was more around like social network, my fitness pal was more around product of like we had an app and the hustle was all kind of newsletter based. So, different lanes, but always, always media for like the last 15 years. Yeah, and so you start Workweek in 2021 and let me give you my kind of idea of what the thesis was and then you can correct me. But it was, it kind of fit into the same cohort that I might be putting like Puck into where we had this like veritable trend within the creator economy of like sub-stack and B-hive and stuff like that. Of these creators going out and launching their own newsletters and building their independent media businesses and kind of the thesis of Workweek was that like instead of you going out and trying to build your own media business, we're going to identify these like these creators that have a lot of potential and we're going to help them grow. And we're going to provide all these behind-the-scenes services, whether it's marketing, whether it's some base compensation, whether it's tech and stuff like that. And by lifting this all together, we're going to make it easier for them to succeed. Was that the original thesis that you thought of when launching Workweek? I think that's a downstream just a step. Puck launched in September, we raised our money in August. So like this was all kind of fairly new. But I would say like the thesis was actually more macro than that that I really believed that consumer behaviors are moving of trust from kind of faceless institutions to individuals. But that's really what I believed. Rebecca, my co-founder, I, we wrote a memo in July of 2021 that basically was like we see a world where Gardner no longer actually has the credibility and trust of execs. It's other execs and leaders that have created content and go through that space and this shift is already happening consumer where you believe the Kylie Jenner's of the world about their beauty products because they're the expert and they're the seen as that person. And they have enormous influence over that space. But in B2B, no one had really focused on that type of creator, the person that was doing the job and creating content. And even Substack at the time was really focused, I mean still focused on politics and journalists and culture. And B2B in my experience in general is just very overlooked. It's tickly set as boring. But that type of creator puck went for more journalists. I think they have like the greatest journalists on the planet. That was a different lane. We're kind of going for more of the person that's doing the job, the practitioner in the space. And we believed at the time that the needs for those people are quite different than any other type of creator. We didn't know exactly what that meant. And so it took a lot. It still takes like lots of iterations and learnings of what that is. But for a while, it was, you know, hey, what can we do to help you stay in your job? What can we do to help you grow? What can we do to help you make money? And the belief was that ultimately if more people like this created content, they could become the most influential people in their spaces. And that probably would be a very valuable business. We don't know how, you know, A to Z, but that was kind of the start of it all. But like, where is the hustle like that? That the hustle brand was paramount. And you could probably swipe in writers and people would even notice if a writer had quit and another writer had been replaced with them. Yours was of yours and puck and some of these other companies like it, I think every might be another one. It's very, it's very creator forward like that these, these people, they're, they're entrepreneurs that, and yeah, they're affiliated with your company, but they have some kind of equity. They have some kind of revenue share, like you were leading in with the, with the personalities. Yeah, I mean, one of the insights that we had was we had a, we still work on today. I love them to death is this guy named trunk fan is one of the funniest people on the internet and writes a great newsletter. You know, I'm a pretty data oriented newsletter operator. And when we hire trunk and we put him on the newsletter, now we did sign their names and had that in the bottom, but like, you know, to your point, not everyone always knew who was, who was doing what at the hustle. But I could see almost within weeks of trunk starting, our unsubscribe rate went down, our retention went up, our organic growth went up, every major metric that drives a business forward got better because he was phenomenal at the job. And one of the things that we believed at the time was like this is the power of what like the best content creators can do. And in HR, there was no one doing that. There was no one creating like amazing HR content from a practitioner ones. And as valuable as general business content can be like the hustle had super niche HR content that's highly sought after valuable is really, really a great commercialized business. And so the learning of working with trunk of like, wow, you really, it's not brand that people really are caring about, like you can move the needle for a business media business, particularly with amazing content. How do you reward those people and attract the best types of people to create that type of content. And that's that was like one of the many influences from the hustle that I had around making sure that we built the business around attracting a type of creator that we thought was overlooked and underserved, but if great could create a huge business. So that initial cohort of creators, because I think you've expanded your roster creators and maybe shrunk it down again as you became more focused. How did you, how did you approach those? What was kind of the value proposition of like how you were attracting those creators into your into your stable. Yeah, so I've told this story a few times, but you know, I told our original investors, I said, you know, I want to go after this new type of creator, no one's really like done this before, I think it might take four or five months to find four people and it took three weeks. And then we had like over a thousand people reach out the day we launched and and said, hey, I want to do this. And it was insane. And the message resonated like, hey, if you're someone that has been asked to get their brain picked, you should be writing a newsletter. And people understood that, and they had a lot to say. And at the time, we were a month old company. You're surviving and doing what you can. So we started saying yes to as many people as we could. And the reality is like all those people that we said yes to are amazing. And even the people who said no to are amazing, we needed to build the infrastructure to support that. And the other kind of lesson that we always knew, but we didn't really-- we always believed, I should say, but we didn't always know-- is that we think the in B2B for this type of crater, the way to win is not through subscription, but through advertising. That if you have that much influence, it is way better influencing a multimillion dollar deal than it is trying to drive a $400 subscription annually and keeping up with that. And so what we did throughout that next year, within a year of launching, essentially, we identified what vehicles, so HR or e-commerce, had the advertising capacity to support the growth. And so that was kind of the evolution there of like, how do we make sure to keep running a good business and growing and supporting these craters that in a way that we believe that their best interest and financial upside is rewarded. And that was us-- we didn't really cut craters. Really, what we did was we focused on verticals that had the advertising dollars to be able to support that influencing growth. For that initial group, were you looking for craters that hadn't already existing following? Like, maybe they had like 20,000 followers on LinkedIn, or maybe they had their own newsletter already that you wanted to pull into the fold? Like, what was your criteria that you were looking for back then? No, almost-- I mean, to this day, the vast majority of the people that we work with never created content before, publicly. And I think that when I say overlooked is like, I'll use one of the HR craters who now is our chief people officer at work week. But when I was interviewing her to become the chief people officer at work week, she made this incredible document, strategy document of how she built culture and she sent it to me. And then we talked for like two hours. And I was interviewing an executive position in our company and spent a lot of time. And I realized I was like, this is truly some of the best content I've ever read about HR. And I asked her, I said, have you ever-- she was ahead of people at Axios in a couple of other places. I said, have you ever created content? She's like, no. I'm like, you are creating content. This document you just sent me would make a world class newsletter. And that is like this overlooked space that we see, we don't need you to be this like star with a huge following. And honestly, most of the time, that type of person isn't necessarily the best fit for us anyway, because they're not in it as much. They're more aggregation and curation, which is great. It's got its own lane. But that type of craters my favorite to work with, because they still have this like authentic insight. They create content all the time. But it's just within their org chart and not publicly. And that's really the persona today that we still operate with and go try to find, because we think that's how this category can grow immensely. And obviously, probably how you work with these people kind of varies on a case by case basis. But what was kind of the support, what kind of deal were they signing into, what was work week providing? They were providing the content. What were you providing behind the scenes for them? So today, and we'll talk about this. But about a month ago, we launched our newsletter platform within our networks. And today, basically, the way we work with almost everyone is the exact same. They can write their content on their own timing and their own pace. And our job is really to do three things. Give them the confidence and environment that they feel like they should create this content. Example of that is like, you could post the smartest thing on LinkedIn. And you're like, man, this is really-- I wish someone told me this 10 years ago, and it gets like four likes. And that's the negative feedback loop that keeps really smart people away from posting on socials. And we needed to create an environment that did the opposite of that, that rewarded quality over quantity and who, not how many. And so that was the first thing that we promise, folks, is we want to give you the trust and the environment to create in this way that you know you're being rewarded. The second is growth. These folks, I mean, they work full-time jobs. Most of them, they're very busy. They tend to be a little bit-- they're not 23. They tend to have families and other obligations. We need to make sure that they can grow without wasting in tons of their time. And then, lastly, is financial. It's not what I've learned with this type of creator is like, they do not want to quit their job. They want to write about their job. So it's not our responsibility to be, you know, none of our messaging, unlike a lot of the other kind of creator platforms, are all like, hey, let's go-- let's earn enough where you can stop working. The best people we work with are like, I literally would never quit my job. I love my job. I just want-- I love it so much I want to write about it. And our job is to value their time. So if we can help make them the most amount of money on for the time that they spent, maybe it's 10 grand a year, maybe it's $300,000 a year, which are both situations that we have. But I want their time to be valued and not have them feel like they're just doing this for nothing. And I think that's what happens when you work with business kind of folks is that's kind of how they see this. It's not about building up a huge nest egg to quit their job. It's about like, I just want to make sure that my time is valued properly. So you said growth. What does that mean? Are you doing-- are you allocating paid media? I know the hustle, the morning brew, 1440. Like these all use kind of paid media, a mixture of partnerships with already existing newsletters and also just paid like meta ads and stuff like that. You said that like some of these creators, when they're starting with you, they're never actually-- they don't have an already existing audience. How are you helping them grow? Well, number one, they have to create great content. This is what I've learned. And I just like to start conversation like this, because I've probably overseen $15 to $20 million of paid growth spend for newsletters at minimum, like a lot. More than most people probably. And in the end, everyone can ask me all the tips and tricks. And I'm like, have great fucking content. That's what actually makes this all work. You're not replacing great content. You're putting fuel to something that already exists. And that's wonderful. So that's number one is we want great content and can see that in the data. And then the second is, I mean, today we basically have every avenue possible to grow. If they are in our community, to be a creator, you have to be accepted into our communities. So you can't just kind of walk off the streets and get in. You have to apply and get in. And then you can create content. And then there's an app, mobile app, and a feed kind of similar to like Twitter or a substack. And if you post there, people can one click subscribe into your newsletter. We have recommendations, kind of-- but it's all for that category itself. And you can hand pick them. We have paid media that we've supported on. We've done newsletter swaps. I mean, our job as a company is to find ways to grow, just like every other kind of platform has had to do. And at this point, in 10 years in the newsletter business, there's not a lot of stones that I haven't turned over to try to see how we can grow. But is there like a growth person on your team? That's their 100% their job is like, we're going to decide whether we want to create videos on Instagram or something like that for-- or help you do that. Or we're going to put some LinkedIn ads to help you acquire email addresses. Across all-- so we have five verticals-- dozens and dozens of creators at this point in the platform. Workweek as a brand, we have a whole ads business. We have a lot of things to market. Internally, we have one marketing person. So we do not have a huge marketing team. That doesn't mean that we don't use agencies and contractors and things. But I think if you just look at that compared to how other companies have been set up, we're pretty lean. And rely on things that one, we just know how to do really well and don't need huge teams. But also, when you have what we believe the best content in a single vertical, it does make it a lot easier to market. And you mentioned, do you pay some kind of paste stipend or something like that to your creators, especially when they're starting off, or is it pure revenue share? Everything is very different. I'd say, when we first started five years ago, we really leaned into kind of paying a base salary guarantee. And we've done those things before. That still works, that could work. Today, what we found is a lot of creators, particularly the ones we work with, they already make a lot of money. They're not trying to just do this for money. What they want is just to grow. And all the other parts, besides creating content, is where they want support and help as a platform. And so, we've shifted a lot of our arrangements to fit that style. but I tell every creator. or all the time, like it's my job to, we focus on this practitioner creator and any needs that they have, like I want to hear it. And so we heard it for a while, hey, it'd be great to have this and that. We tried it. We did it. Sometimes it was great. Sometimes we got rid of it, but that's kind of our attitude all the time, experimenting and meeting the needs of this type of creator that we're focused on. And correct me if I'm wrong, you sort of hinted at this, but was it kind of like a subscription oriented company to start with? Never. Never. It was always be the advertising focus. Yeah. I mean, ads is kind of our thing, never, I was encouraged heavily by many people to create that athletic for B2B and refuse to do that. It was always my belief that like the business and commercial opportunity is that B2B advertising dollars about 40 billion a year, about 15 billion of that is still in trade magazines and publications with very little ways to track ROI, 10 billion of that, or so is in LinkedIn. And I think there was a new way to capture a huge part of that budget. And that's what we're pursuing. So we've always been very, very ads first. Interesting. So did you build out a sales team? Yeah. So we have an entire ad platform, B2B ad platform. Our clients can come in and connect their CRM to our ad platform. We have built a big part of what we used our capital for was to build our identity graph. And so our differentiator, in many ways, from an advertising perspective is that we identify about 81% of every newsletter subscriber we can attach a company entitled to. And then what we're able to do with that is actually show our why. And if you have the CEO of one of the top 10 health systems that is literally doing hundreds of billions of dollars a year and they click an ad, that ad, that click is worth 30, 40,000 dollars. And most platforms not only never track that, to be honest, they don't care to track that. They care about volume, they care about consumers and mattress selling mattresses and selling Netflix subscriptions. And you're in the business of B2B health care, like I care about that click. And so we've built our entire ad platform around that. Today we have about 35 different people on our sales team working across our five verticals, working with ad partners across the board. And so like if I sign up for a lot of B2B publications, like an industry dive or something, it's like requiring me to put in my name, my title, my job, you know, what company I work for, stuff like that. But you're trying to track something even more granular than that. Well, our strategy always was that we don't do that today. But you can apply to be in our networks. And our application is quite extensive. And people want to get in and they want to be part of the home for HR and Safe Space today is an enormous community for HR leaders and it's free to join, which is we're essentially from a strategy perspective. We're about the only place in the world that is a B2B group that you have to apply to get in, but it's free to join. No one's really done that combination. And our application is a way to capture information in a way that most companies really struggle to receive. Yeah. So like because they're filling out like more like to get access to sign up for the newsletter is relatively low lift for them. But in order to get into that deeper community, they have to give you more information. Yeah. They have to apply and get in. Correct. Yeah. And so for the ad buying, what are you mostly selling? Is it mostly like newsletter ads where what kind of ads or is your sales team selling? I mean, I could be wrong on this, but from all the things I see, I think we've created the first ever B2B newsletter ad network. So the vast majority of our ads are in newsletter. They're copy. They're text, not banners or images. And we work with advertisers to do target account lists, account based marketing. All of the things that B2B marketers know and want to do and have never been able to do it in email and that's really what we've enabled. And how targeted are the ads, like can you insert a ad that only goes to people with the specific title or is it more or is it more just vertical base? Like if you want to reach our HR audience, this is this is your option, that kind of thing. We can we can have a different ad for every single person if we if it wanted to. Okay, so it's like dynamically inserting the ads, like as the as the newsletter is sending. We can't do that correct. And so most of our customers come to us and they give us a target account list of, hey, I have these 800 target accounts. This is who I want to reach. This is the this is the buying group for that group. Here's the decision maker, here's the champion, here's the legal review, and we can start to build the creative. So the way that we believe that we allow creators to capture the most revenue is by having the very best B2B ad platform. And that's also a way for us to maintain that relationship with them. And so we've invested, you know, that's the last four years. That's what we've been working towards and most of my background are teams background. And today our CPMs are, you know, eight to 10 times higher than most other newsletter ad networks. And minimum and more importantly, our advertisers are incredibly happy. And so that's that's kind of like what we've been able to do on the on the monetization side. And is most of the content you're prioritizing on the old and operated platforms that you that you run, like the newsletter, like the community, like the website or if one of your creators comes to you and it's like, I really think a podcast would be good for me. Or I want to like, I want to spend more time creating essays on YouTube, like would you provide support to that? Or would you be like, you know, it's great that you want to do that. But that's kind of your, that's that's not what we do. We're focused on our own platform because that's the way that we can help our advertisers be successful there. So today we have, you know, integrated newsletter platform as we launched a month ago. We have, we have an event platform. So instead of using Luma or event bright, we last may, we built our own event platforms. So if you want to host in-person events or virtual events, you, we can not only host that for you and do that work for you, but also help you drive people to that really successfully. And we see it in the near future, supporting more mediums, potentially like audio and video, etc. Yeah, but you're not going to try to figure out, like you're not going to try to create a pipeline for how to sell B2B ads inside of a podcast right now. Like on a bespoke, on a bespoke basis, like, you know, based on the creator who's doing it. I see a world where we could host podcasts and that could be the case in the near future, but that would be us being the host of that, not necessarily creating the content itself if that makes sense. Yeah. And so you've seemed to have like leaned into this community function, almost like the news and correct it if I say something and it's wrong correct me, but it sounds like the newsletter is kind of like a top of funnel to get people into this deeper community. Would that be correct? Yeah. I don't really, I mean, like does it as a mark from a marketing lens, of course, that's like a, it's one of more popular doorways as well as the events, right? Like those are, those are really popular doors into our, into our networks. And so in that capacity, yes. The reality is it's also the way that the vast majority of people consume content. So if you're in our, you know, if you're in our safe space app on your phone and you're scrolling the feed, you're seeing tons of articles and content and those were also newsletters created by creators. So it's, it's, it's top of funnel to bring it in, but also it's very much where it's the, the consumption that that folks and how we drive engagement for creators is through that, through that app. Because it kind of can do both. So when did you start building this, this community functionality? So we, we launched, we built our own platform completely from scratch. We announced that in June of 2024. So it was, it was always pretty clear to us that we believe that we're in this connection economy that folks in business are more isolated and lonely than ever before. And there's also this, you know, thing that's been dying slowly, which is trade associations and it's sad, but it's just true. They stayed fairly analog and, you know, there's a lot of groups of people that are feeling isolated. And so we started building our own platform and the idea was kind of like if you create a social network and community all in one for a very specific group of people. And so today we have five of those live. And that we knew and we announced this back in 2024 that it would become the home for these different kind of applications, like a newsletter platform application and, you know, other other areas as a, as a surface area to help people create more content, connect with each other. We have an introductions app in there and really ways to kind of meet and learn and connect all for your industry. And are all these communities hosted on one central platform? If you have a HR newsletter, are they sending it to the same platform that the marketing newsletter is sending it to or those two separate communities? Yeah, it's a great question. So we're a house of brands. So RHR network is called Save Space. It's completely different than our marketing one, which is called Marketing Land, which is different than Fintech, it's called Affinity. So yeah, we're a house of brands and that really speaks to the relevance. One thing I learned at SpiceWorks. It was this, it was very similar to what we do now at work week, but it was only for IT leaders. And one of the things that always stuck out to me when I would go talk to users and meet people is they're like, "Oh, I love SpiceWorks." I'm like, "Why?" And they're like, "Well, like all of the website and all of the pictures have IT folks in Star Wars shirts." And they're like, "All the other marketing Thai tea is like in suits." And they like realize that like, "We don't wear suits. We wear Star Wars shirts." And our mascot for SpiceWorks was an orange dinosaur. And like, it very much leaned into this relevance of, "Who is IT? What is their values? What is their culture?" What's that like, if you know you know of that field, and if you look at how we've built all of our verticals and the networks around them, it's very much that way. Where everything from the topography, to the branding, to the names, it's really trying to speak exactly to the pain point and relevance that that person experiences that they're like, "Wow, this was made for me." And so that's really where, you know, how we've built it the last few years. And so you send them to an application form. What criteria are you looking for? Like, are you just merely verifying that they actually work in that industry, or is there something else you're looking for on top of that? Yeah, I mean, we have different levels of access based on people's experience, and we've created models around to help that. So an easy, excuse me, an easy example of that that I like, I mean, this like really kind of silly and simple, but makes people realize is like, in e-commerce, you do not judge a company by their size, by their employee count, you judge it by the revenue. But in HR, you very much judge that type of role by employee count. And so we've created different ways to assess people's seniority and their experience levels by a bunch of different factors that we've identified and focused on, and all that allows us to kind of create the right access for the right people within our app. And are you requiring that they use their work email address, or are you letting them use their Gmail address so that if they move from role to role, they don't have to reapply every single time or anything like that. So you can subscribe to the newsletter with any email address you want. Part of the application is we have to know where you work. So we don't require that you give us your Gmail or not, but we do because of our identity graph, we have been able to unify a lot of personal emails and work emails. And let's say you get into this community, what is the experience like in there? Is it kind of like a slack or a discord where it's like a real-time feed, or is it kind of like a Facebook feed where it's like a social network where people are posting their content and then you could like follow people or interact with people in a kind of more asynchronous kind of manner. It's a little bit of both. Last week we hit an all-time high of DMs in the platform, so people definitely like connecting one-on-one. Most people don't know each other, right? Like it is you are joining essentially a trade group in a way, right? And you might know one or two people, but most of the time you don't know everyone there. But there's also a feed. But I'd say this spirit, you know, we kind of refer to it externally. Most of the time is kind of our these kind of vertical professional networks, and that's really kind of like the language and the category that we see ourselves in, and a lot of people feel like we're better in the community, they're like, wow, this is so much I rather spend my time here than LinkedIn. So that's kind of who the time that we're eating away from. But the difference, and it's kind of hard to put into words, but because we've put so much thought and honestly love and care into the names and the branding and, you know, we have custom emoticons that like we built that are animated and like in safe space, there's like a dumpster fire in econ. There's like a black Friday cyber Monday kind of one and so in that way it's kind of like slack, where it's like custom, but the spirit is very much feels like a community. So there's 20,000 plus people in our HR community. It's very active. There's tons of people, but the spirit feels very intimate, and that's really kind of like the unique space that we get to live in. What are kind of like the things that you could, because like anytime anybody's trying to build a community, they're like, do I build on an art exhibit, do I use a white labeled product, or do I build on an already existing social network? And obviously the upside of the white label product is you have 100% control and ownership, but the benefit of building on like a Reddit or something like that is that like people are already going to Reddit every single day anyway, so they're going to see your, they're more likely to see your post to participate. What are the ways that you get people turning these communities into an actual daily habit so that you don't have the ghost town problem if they sign up, look in there once and then never come back. So I think communities are really hard word to use, like I consider like beehive communities, which are great if you're trying to do a community that they have a great tool, that's very different than what we do. Like that mean if you're a media company trying to build a community, it is a lot of work. It's a ton of work. We try to do it with the hustle. We did it on Facebook to your point. It was easy. It was a wreck. It was a mess. It's really hard. I don't really believe in doing one-off communities. I mean, everyone should try it. I can't speak bad about something I've done. We see it, I mean, we see it as we're taking on in very much like the reason why we refer to as a professional, you know, vertical professional network is like you have to build tools to have people build a habit and notifications and newsletter tooling and, you know, create interact. We have interactive podcasts in the feed and event platforms that drive people back. And like, I mean, we've had to invest a ton of time and resources. If we didn't do that and we just were in Slack, I think no one would ever come back. Like, and it's not about anything you do, it's that to build habit is really, really hard to do. And to build habit with people that work 55 hours a week and have a lot of other outside applications, even harder to do. And so, you know, the way that you do that is you solve their problems. Hey, let's be the place where they show up. If they're going to go to an event, they're going to go to event with us. If they're going to read a newsletter, they're going to read a newsletter on our platform. If they have a question, they're going to come here. And like, you start checking those boxes and you check one, maybe it gets them to log in once a week. You check two, maybe it gets them log in three times a week. Right now, we're averaging 3.5 sessions a day with our users, because I think we're solving a lot of problems for them. And that's we're going to continue to do that day and day out, but my honest suggestion is not out of my own selfishness, but out of the failures I've had. Like, if you're a media company trying to launch a community, like buckle up. It's a lot of work. Yeah, I mean, it's something I've read about my newsletter is like, how do you how do you create those formats? And you know, one thing I always suggest is is make sure that your kind of creators or your journalist or whatever are actually in that community interacting with people so that because those are kind of like the celebrities in the in the group. So if you can have that one-on-one interaction with the creator, then that might make you that by itself will give you a lot of incentive to go into there. Yeah, I mean, in the end, like, habit is created from solving problems. A lot of people, we can solve problems with content, right? And so, of course, like, if you if you're Pock and you have the best journalist or if you have these star people, like, I still don't think you're going to get them to do it three times a day. But, or more, but like, to put that into context, like, we're not even like our, you know, time per month per user is like not even 20% of what TikTok has, right? Like, it is like really, really hard to win people's time. And, but you know, we see a path where if you listen to the users, you speak to them in this really direct way. And, you know, we see a lot of people who are in content and go to creators, you support them, you make it free. Like, people overlook this a lot, but like, we're free. Anyone, like, if you're accepted, you can join it, makes it a lot easier to get people to do it. And so we've built everything around kind of scaling accessibility. And I think that's like one of the one of the driving forces of why why we're in the position of rent. You monetize the community because you were talking before about sitting newsletter ads and stuff like that. Are you are you able to monetize the community directly like it's free to join? Like, what you create your newsletter is from the community. So, like, similar to substack if you ever like logged in, you're in the substack app, you can create your newsletter from substack. And then there's also the feed there. And so our community is where you also create your content. So, today, we don't have ads in the feed or any kind of situation like that. We could do that in the future. We don't do it today. But we very much use that. it as the place where our content creators can go and actually share and create their content. So by that, you mean that when they're putting together their weekly or daily or whatever newsletter, they're somehow pulling into our platform and sending it through and it's they're logging into safe space and it says create and then you choose create newsletter and then you're you're often running. So the community isn't monetized directly. It's like helping you in terms of like brand affinity and like the like pulling in content, but there's no ads that are in the community itself. Well, I'd say that the network exists to help our creators. So you know, we have 20,000 people in our safe space mobile app. By far the largest dense HR, you know, network that exists. If you're going to create your newsletter, you create your newsletter, the newsletter gets sent. It goes out to your subscribers. That's wonderful. Then you make a post in the feed and people see that they subscribe and one click, you're helping grow. So we really built it, you know, for us, this is all I mean, we're not successful unless creators are successful. And so everything we do, including, you know, building mobile apps for five different networks, which is a lot and all the things we do is to help our this practitioner creator be successful. But the ad isn't being inserted until it goes out as a newsletter to people's inboxes. The today, I mean, we monetize our event platform and our newsletter. We don't monetize the feed. So like if we think about the surface areas, those are those are kind of the main surface areas that we have today. We see in the future, you know, audio and podcasting is something that we get asked a lot to build and host. And so we will probably consider that in the future. But that's those are kind of the main use cases today that that we could monetize. So I know you raise some money in that you're going to allow people within the communities to launch their own newsletter. But prior to that, how many creators do you have operating in each of the communities? Like the ones that are actually like, we had about, we had about 10 creators across the five verticals. And they're sending separate newsletters, they're not like trading off-sending to the same email list. Yeah, correct. Now today, I mean, we're adding, we're adding new creators every day. We have like more than five times active than that within the last month. Yeah. So, and I do want to talk about the you opening it up a little bit to more creators. But for the events, how did you have you historically approached events? Like are they, they're in person events that people are actually showing up to? What's the strategy there? So there's two different kind of lanes. So we have our platform, event platform where members can just throw their own events or virtual events. And we are serving an opportunity to help them discover. So again, this is setting up creators to be successful there. We also throw events for our communities. So we have the Safe Space Summit, which is essentially like a dream force existed for HR. It's kind of a big user summit in conference. We do that for our verticals. We do virtual events as well, community where once a month or so, we, we will host our own virtual event through the platform and have kind of conversations. And then we also have essentially community meetups in person that, you know, will we have a bunch of folks that are really active and we will essentially put some dollars behind that to just create engagement in community for creators in all the cities across the country and the world. And so those are kind of the events that we do. Really, the main goal of those is to build community and connection advertisers do love events. And it works really well with our app platform. So that's, you know, there's opportunities for sponsorships there. And then in person, you know, I just think you can't replace in person. And so having our Safe Space Summit or hospitality here are our high point retreat for healthcare. It allows folks to come together, see presentations here, panels, but also like have this opportunity to just kind of have fun and we do massages and healthcare. We have a golf outing that day. So it's a little mix of both like fun and fun and learning. So for this, for like the summit, for instance, that's where your, your team is picking like a city, getting like getting a hotel space or some kind of event space, selling high-price tickets, selling high-price sponsorships, what you would think of as a traditional kind of. We don't really sell high-price tickets because our incentives are a little different. So I think our highest paid tickets like 500 bucks, most of the time, you know, we will encourage and invite our creators to come, our most influential members and, you know, part of our flywheel as a business is that we've seen through the data that in person events, drives online engagement. And so I want people in person connecting because yeah, can we make money on that of course, do I want to make money on that of course, I don't want to lose anything, but also I don't need that to be a 50% margin business like most kind of traditional media companies because what I'm seeing on the back end is that they're coming in, they're creating more content, they're creating more engagement and that's ultimately our bread and butter for, for monetization. So for the in person events, like how big of that is like in terms of your overall business, what portion of your business is that versus like the strictly online stuff? Last year is like 15% this year is like 10% is kind of shrinking as we go, as the need to monetize that shrinks as we see more and more downstream monetization digitally. We get to make kind of like less emphasis on trying to do it, but we still, you know, we have seven figure events that are not small, but they very much are less and less kind of the goal to become an events business, but more become this network and home. And part of that, we're not going to make the mistake and I tell the team all the time this is, I think like trade associations should have built what we built, like shirms should have built exactly what we built for HR, they had the audience, they have all the people, but they just couldn't move off of their analogue tactics and they couldn't get out of the space of like, oh, we're an events business and we do this like website and trademark. And but we're not going to be digital only. We got to meet the needs of our users where they're at and having a mobile app is great, meeting them where they're at, but also having like one amazing event a year, but everyone gets to come together is also what people want. So we're going to, we're going to do that to continue to support our users much as possible. And the virtual events is that B2B lead generation where they thought RCP and give their email address and then you turn that over to a sponsor of that, that event or how does that work. So about 80% of our attendees for virtual events were already a member. So they can, you know, we already have all the information on them. So they can one click register, which makes our platform really helpful to drive registrations. But and then if it is sponsored, there's options, some of our events have, I'd say a lot of the sponsored events have a lead generation component that's very transparent for that event if it is the case. And then there's other like brand did virtual events where people kind of have a logo on there and don't get leads, but our platform is kind of set up to be able to support both of those. Now you just raised some money and now what you're trying to do is kind of scale your kind of creator operations to where people within your communities can basically do the things that you're kind of chosen creators, your small group of chosen creators were able to do. So I know that there's a vetting process to get in the community. So it's not like anybody, it's not like sub-stack where anybody can sign up and launch a sub-stack. You have to be vetted. But is there any criteria beyond that or can literally anybody within your community start to launch their own newsletters on that? No, if they're accepted in, they can, it takes about eight seconds to start a newsletter if you're in the community, if you're accepting the community. Yeah. And so then what happens from there in terms of, okay, it's like a newsletter platform, but like, how do you monetize that? Is that just all kind of programmatically inserted B2B ads that your sales team is trying to sell in? Is there some minimal threshold before you even try to start selling ads on a particular newsletter? How do you actually monetize that? Yeah, we'll have a, it's in beta now and then we'll roll it out into one of 27, but yeah, we'll have a, we'll roll out the B2B ad network where, but we will not have a minimum threshold. And I think that's like a, it's a perfect example of how every other platform isn't built for B2B. If you have 50 people on your list and 30 of them are sea level staff, I'd love to monetize your newsletter and I will make you a lot of money. And so yeah, we, we don't care about how many we care about who and that's like what makes the entire platform different and we enrich the list for all the folks who write newsletters on the platform so they know who those people are, they're incentivized and rewarded by visual graphs of like, hey, this is like the open rate and engagement of this cohort of people compared to everyone else. You know, that's not in that cohort that you're writing for. And so that's really how the platform is set up. And if people don't want to turn on the ad network, they don't have to. And but we've really worked through this. Where if you-- we have a creator that is the head of content at Clavio, she can block the top three competitors to Clavio to make sure that she never has any ads from them in her newsletter. And so there's things like this that we've had to think through for this type of creator that's a little different. And our ad network allows us to do that. Have you settled on like a state or guys like revenue share percentage or something like that? We haven't yet. I probably-- where we-- I mean, we've been testing a lot of different things. Where we will probably end up, though, is guaranteeing a CPM versus doing a rev share, I think, for our type of creator. It's really helpful, one, I think our guarantee CPMs will be 8 to 10 times higher than anywhere else they can get it. So it's great. But it also makes-- part of the reason why I think, in the end, if someone wants to monetize with us, the way that we earn that is by they create great content, they are in the trust and the influence. It's our job to show advertisers that. And we do that in our ad platform. And if we can pay them a rate that they're really happy with, that they can not get anywhere else in the market, then I want to take the risk that, like, let me try to prove that ROI is much as possible by making sure we have the best data, by making sure we have the best connections and security to allow our advertisers to see that performance. And if it performs, then we'll collect whatever's on top. And if it doesn't, then that's the risk that we're willing to take. And so I think that's probably where we're leaning. Yeah, I know that there's some vetting for the community, but that's a lot of risks in terms of, like, you think about quality control, like, if anyone can start-- anyone who's gotten into your community can start a newsletter. And you having a guaranteed CPM of, like, you generate this number of impressions. But there are tens of thousands of people in the community. You don't think that that's too high risk that you can keep that quality control great for advertisers and produce enough demand to meet that kind of guaranteed CPM. I mean, it's not-- I think that's a little blow to our proportion. The guarantee is for the who. So for example, I say this example. We do a huge event every year for advertisers. We would call our work week-up friends event. I use the example every year, but, like, my dad clicked on every item my newsletter when I was at the hustle. And it was amazing. Thanks, dad. And no one knew the difference. No one cared. If my dad clicks a newsletter now, it literally doesn't even show up in our platform. He's a retiree. We won't show it. And so if someone is driving no engagement, of course, I think I can adjust the CPMs up and down. But, like, the reality is-- and I think this is, like, what's so overlooked-- is there are the last eye counted. There are just about 1,000 different journalists dedicated to cover federal politics in DC. In general, there's a lot to cover. And-- but, like, there's normally-- It's an oversaturated market. This is something that's out a lot, yeah. Substack had 20 HR newsletters. I believe HR is as big of a category of content, of choices, of perspectives, of situations, of business types, health care to e-commerce, of startups, to scale-ups, to SMB. It is an insanely big market. And there's 20 newsletters. So do I think the market could afford perspectives from hundreds and hundreds of people? Absolutely. And then, luckily, when we're really fortunate for this, we have a really smart crowd. If that content sucks, they're going to unsubscribe. They're busy people. They don't get fooled into subscribing to 10 newsletters like other platforms. They know what they're doing. They control their inbox. They live in their inbox. If the content sucks, it's not going to-- that person is not going to be rewarded with more subscribers. That's an easy supply and demand that will happen. So I think, generally, saturation-- if there's a world where people are like, wow, safe space has too many HR newsletters now, we became probably one of the most valuable business on the planet. And so I think-- and we change the entire industry. So I think that's a really good problem to have. And generally, don't really concern it. And luckily, there's also nothing faceless. So anyone that writes a newsletter, it's their name. It's their title. It's where they work. And we've always had this approach. I've never ever-- we have no editors on the team. People can write whatever they want. They've been able to do that for five years. And when I first started, everyone criticized. I was like, well, what happens if they do this in this? And I'm like, these people have a reputation. They have a job. This is not to quit their job. This is to keep their job, because they love it so much. I'm pretty sure that they're not going to write something terribly bad, because it's a work email. And like that, and people still have their personalities for sure, there's definitely huge disagreements about viewpoints. But from a moderation perspective, we don't have to do with that. And there's no politics in sports. That's not what we do. And that's part of our values of our community. It's like, hey, we don't have those conversations here. We have these conversations about your workplace, and people love that. It's a breath or fresh air. And so it sounds like the guaranteed CPMs are based on quality, or verified impressions from actual. It's not like I can get 5,000 people, or 5,000 bots to sign up and open every email. It's like only people are opening it. Literally in the analytics of any creator in their growth dashboard, we show them engagement of all subscribers, and then engagement of all people in their category, and then in the vertical, and then engagement of decision-makers in that vertical. And just to show them, like, hey, your open rate is only 30%. That's bad. That's what every other platform will tell you. But hey, actually, your open rate of decision-makers in health care is 70. Your content's doing really well. You just have a bunch of people on the list who shouldn't be on there, and that's fine. That's what happens sometimes. But don't stop doing what you're doing, and that's the type of reward mechanisms that our focus allows us to do that a lot of platforms just can't do. - But your guaranteed CPM is only based on those 70% of decision-makers, not the raw numbers, is how you're thinking of it. - Yeah, absolutely correct, yeah. - So when you look ahead two to three years from now, you started with this kind of tightly curated cohort of like a handful of creators, and you still have that to a certain extent. But like when you're looking ahead three years from now, do you want to think of yourself as more, almost like 100% of a platform company versus what we would traditionally think of as like a media company, like a puck where it's like very based on the small amount of talent. Like, you know, I think you dinged me a little bit 'cause I compared you to a sub-stack or a beehive. And obviously these are more qualified than a sub-stack or beehive. But do you think you're gonna be kind of like the B2B version of that where your focus is less on signing these bespoke deals and it's more about the network than it is about these individual creators? - I mean, our goal always was to support this type of creator. And to, I believe the world and business is a much better place when people who do the job create content. And that group, no one supports. Sub-stack beehive, no one supports them in the way that they need to be supported. And so I hope in three years from now, as many people who do a job that we support at the verticals, that they write a newsletter, that they create content, that they respond to a DM from somebody asking the question, you know, that they just start to share. And I think, you know, there was this magic of trade associations 30, 40 years ago. And then there was this magic of social media 15 years ago. And both of those have gone to the wayside because everyone has worried about volume and algorithms. And honestly, what has come down to is that they're trying to serve too many types of people. And when you serve so many different types of people, you just mute out all the magic that existed before then. And I think what we have the opportunity to do is kind of taking this baby approach, this kind of combining trade associations and what they brought to the table and social networks, what they brought to the table. And then this ease of content, which Substack has really has done an amazing job of, like it's so easy to create content. But combining all those things is what we're focused on. And I think, you know, in the three years from now, I hope anybody that's in any of our verticals is like, man, I really gotta get this out of my brain. I wanna write this thing that they come to us to do it. But you want that growth to come organically out of the community versus you hunting down a person on LinkedIn saying, I think you'd be really great right for work week, which is sort of like what you were doing before, where you were going, you were we're targeting on a more individual basis, but you want someone who maybe you don't even know of today to start a newsletter in your community, grow it, get it to 20,000 subscribers, like that's kind of the future of work week of this, like of these creators growing organically out of your community. - Yeah, I mean, I would say that that, I mean, that's what happened when we added all those before. I mean, I didn't know a thousand people who applied to create content with us in November of 2021. They just, it just happened. And I think that demand is there everywhere. All we did was build tooling to make that happen and to be able to say yes to those people instead of no. - Yeah, but like those thousand people, you had to evaluate on a case-by-case basis, whereas now those thousand people could just go ahead and launch our newsletters in the end. - No, I still evaluate them, they have to apply. - Well, yeah, yeah, you apply, they, but, but your criteria is a strict-- - Our acceptance rate. - Our acceptance rate's less than 30%. So I mean, it's like, it's not that different, generally. - Yeah, but before you were doing like maybe 10 creators out of those thousand were became-- - That's only because, but that's not because I said, I said no to those people, right? That's because I couldn't take them on. There's a difference, right? And so I think I would probably have said yes to probably 30% of those thousand if I could have, and today we can. - Yeah, that's sort of what I'm arguing. Is that like that now they can, they can like test their wares within your community itself, rather than you having to hand-pick and annoy them? - Yeah, and I think that's a great, that's a great thing for everyone. And more importantly, I think that kind of process, the whole stupid thing around do things that don't scale, I think very much what we learned the first three years of this business, I wrote my end of year letter in 2023, going into 24 was we're kind of moving from a publication business to a platform business. So this is a many years in the making of going that, but what we learned in those first few years of working with individual creators and creating those publications was not about how to run a newsletter business. We knew how to do that. What we learned was our HR creator being like, there's no HR for HR. We kind of hate our job sometimes. And we have no place that we can go that feels safe for us to share our thoughts. Well, that's how we came up with safe space. And our Fintech person saying like, it's so fragmented, banking and Fintech never talk. I wish there was this like proximity where everyone in financial services could like, get closer together and come together and unified first being fragmented. And like, Fintech is financial services and proximity combined in a word. And that's really what we did those first few years was like learn these true ways to build the credibility with this group and the trust that now, not only through the application and getting accepted, but like they know that this is the environment that they should create content, which is one of the key three things that we focus on. Okay, Adam, those were all the questions I had for you. Where could people find you online? - I'm on Twitter, Adam. You can look up Adam Ryan and I'll be there on LinkedIn and then workweek.com. If you're a potential somebody that has ever been asked to have your brain picked by somebody to get coffee, go to our site, sign up and apply. If you're one of our verticals, if not, fill out the form for a potential new vertical that will be launching new ones next year that we're really excited about. And then if you're an advertiser, workweek.com also has information for how we can help you drive more revenue for your business. - Awesome, it was a lot of fun, thanks for joining me. - Thanks, Simon.