This company is building a Substack competitor geared toward B2B creators

This post is auto-generated from a public YouTube interview for personal study notes. It is not an endorsement. The transcript is machine-derived and may contain errors; refer to the original video for accuracy.

About this video

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 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 handpicking a small roster of creators.