Replacing LinkedIn One Profession At A Time

Back when I got my first real job as a writer at The Hustle, Adam Ryan was my boss (or more accurately, my boss’s boss).

Becca Sherman worked there too, but I didn’t meet her until months into my tenure, as she was in charge of that mystical part of the publication that writers hear about but never fully understand: Namely, making sure the business actually functions (Operations).

Today, the two of them are co-founders at Workweek, a company that publishes specialized newsletters for senior-level business operators in several different fields, cultivates online communities for those operators, and designs the software to power it all.

You could say they’re building an ecosystem of professional networks, but I prefer the line in Adam’s own LinkedIn bio: “Replacing LinkedIn one profession at a time.”

“When you start a company, you have to have, like, one fundamental belief,” Adam told me in a recent interview. “No matter how things change – evolutions and pivots and new things – that belief has to always be there.”

Their belief was that trust was shifting from large well-known corporations towards individual people, and that the media/marketing landscapes would change alongside that.

They had watched it play out for a while in the consumer space, where terms like “influencer strategy,” were increasingly used in the boardroom. But the B2B world was struggling to make the transition for two reasons.

One was what Adam and Becca referred to as “The Knowledge Expert Problem.”

“If you’re actually an expert on some type of business knowledge, everyone wants to know what you think,” he told me. 

“Everyone wants to pick your brain and take you to coffee… But you’re probably working fifty-five hours a week; You’re probably fifteen or twenty years into your career; You might have family, or other commitments – the last thing you want to do is sit down and talk to people consistently, or write a newsletter, or do a podcast.”

Even if you want to write, the financial incentives often don’t make sense either. A senior-level operator is guaranteed a healthy income on day-one working their W2. The same is not true if they try going the typical solo creator route. 

That brings us to the second problem: Even if you can win readers’ attention, it’s not immediately clear how to build a huge company on a niche audience of business operators, which often lacks the scale or quick buying cycle that allows other media companies to thrive by selling subscriptions to readers or ad space to the brands that want to reach them.

Companies like Industry Dive had found a way to pull it off. But they were built before the shift to “individuals over institutions,” and it wasn’t obvious their success could be repeated.

Still, having come up as B2B operators themselves (and media operators, no less), Adam and Becca knew the audience was there, and that if they could win them over, it’d probably pay off. So, in the summer of 2021, Workweek was born.

They spent the early years of the company experimenting with a slew of content verticals and monetization models. They sold ads, yes. Millions of dollars in ads. But they also tested recruiting services, verticalized SaaS offerings, and more. 

By 2023, they were running several specialized publications, including one for HR operators. They tried building an online community for readers of that publication, and that’s when things really clicked.

“It was just so clear that community unlocked even more of the Knowledge Expert Problem,” Adam told me.

Not only were the conversations taking place within the community content in and of themselves – the life blood of any media company. But members were able to help each other with very specialized problems, delivering beyond what even a well-written newsletter or blog post can expect to do.

They found themselves in an interesting position too.

Up to that point, business operators typically had two options for community: There were high-end peer groups, which were high-trust but often cost thousands of dollars, and so, were out of reach for many. Or there was LinkedIn and Twitter, which were more accessible, but low-trust and simply can’t host a lot of the most important conversations.

“People don’t go on LinkedIn and say, ‘Hey, I’m prepping for an RIF. Can someone help me?’” Adam said in a recent appearance on TBPN. 

Workweek could bridge that gap, providing a space that was highly accessible to operators in a field, and yet, walled from the bots and prying eyes of the public. 

Doing that well meant they’d need to rethink every aspect of the typical online community though, from the onboarding to the feed.

“To build a social network for a certain type of operator,” Adam said, “you have to not just make the people there trustworthy, but the environment has to be trustworthy too.”

For Workweek, that meant two key things: They would verify every member (basic access to their communities is free, as long as you go through a verification process) and they would build the environment from scratch, rather than hosting on Slack or other existing platforms.

“We wanted to build the platform that allowed each operator network to be built for that kind of operator,” Adam said. “And that was something that we just couldn't find anywhere.”

Beyond that, they saw value in  fully owning the data and reader relationship, and wanted to build something that fundamentally re-thought the incentives behind most social media. For example, follower count.

“Part of trust is knowing who is an expert,” Ryan said. “And if someone starts to think you're an expert because of how many people follow you, we're creating the incentives around quantity, not quality.”

Also, the “like” button.

“If someone posts ‘Hey, I'm doing this hard thing tomorrow. Does anyone have advice?’ What the fuck does a like-button do,” Ryan said. “It signals nothing.”

So, in 2024, they raised a $12.5m Series A, and got to work completely reimagining online communities around concepts like this.

Today, they’re a house of brands, with custom networks built around five different verticals – ecom, HR, fintech, marketing, and healthcare executives – each with its own specialized newsletter, led by an operator in that field. 

“Multivertical is definitely probably the craziest thing we decided to do,” Ryan said. “It’s a huge challenge operationally [because] you’re world-building. There’s lexicon, there’s visuals, there’s value differences – there’s so much, and we have to be so good at that.”

The secret sauce has been their foundational creators – the voices behind each publication. People like Ari Murray, chief growth officer at Sharma Brands, who writes the DTC newsletter, Go-to-Millions. Or Hebba Youssef, Workweek’s own chief people officer, who is the face of their humorous HR publication, I Hate It Here, and its related community, Safe Space.

Often, these are the only names and brands readers recognize.

“I don’t expect any of our members to be like, ‘Oh I'm part of Workweek’s operator network called Safe Space,’” Adam said. “That's not the language that they use. They say, ‘Hey, I'm part of Safe Space. I'm a member there.’”

Creators spend 15-20 hours a week producing content with Workweek, and also serve as a kind of in-house customer, helping guide decisions on how each community should be tailored for its readers. 

In exchange, they’re some of the highest-paid people at the company, which it turns out goes a long way in solving The Knowledge Expert Problem we mentioned earlier.

While there’s a paid element to many of Workweek’s professional networks, basic access is free, and the company’s main form of monetization continues to be B2B advertising, where they’ve built a platform that’s genuinely unique for marketers.

“We kind of see it as the Facebook business manager of B2B,” Adam said.

Google and Facebook have dominated the ad space over the last ten years, and if you ask people why, most will say it’s because of scale and engagement.

“But the actual thing that they've done is they created a closed loop attribution system,” he said. “With consumer marketing, that's actually really easy to do because the buying cycle is, you know, minutes. [But] no one's really thought about a closed loop attribution model for B2B.”

The main problem is that the sales cycle is so long. Most B2B marketers just give up on the concept of getting any real attribution.

But because readers are spending so much of their time inside Workweek’s ecosystem, they’re able to show much more nuanced attribution data over multiple touchpoints and a much longer timeframe.

A few weeks before I wrote this, Workweek hosted its second-annual Upfronts event – a three-day gathering in Austin, where they fly in dozens of advertisers to preview new tech releases, meet with creators, and talk about scaling opportunities.

“We think B2B marketers are probably set up to fail more than almost any other group of people,” Adam said. “They have to present to the board constantly about dollars-in, dollars-out. But they don't know who their ICP is normally and they don't know who clicks on stuff,” he said.

“That's why Google and Facebook have dominated. Because it helps them save their job. It shows them something,” he said. “But we think we can do it a better way.”

You can find out more about Workweek at their website, or follow them on Twitter. Also, connect with Adam and Becca on LinkedIn, or keep an eye out for them around town