💛 Top of Mind

Adam Ryan Mar 28th, 2026

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Hey all,

Thanks to every one for the great responses last week. SO many of you want to connect with each other. Don't be afraid to, just say hi on Slack, talk for 5-10 minutes, and keep in touch.

Tomorrow we will have a mini showcase with AI/Claude again. If you want to share something, let me know and we'll make sure we give you time!

With that, let’s dive into it.

WHAT'S TOP OF MIND

1) 3 Stakeholders. $40 Billion.

Holy cow its Q2.

We're finalizing goals and OKRs and as I was going through everything it just hit me. What we're building is so much bigger than we talk about day to day.

Start with our creators. We are helping people with real perspectives and real experience share what they know with the people who need it most. No one at our scale has really tackled this with a B2B lens. No one. But enabling creators is probably the hardest part of what we do. These are busy people with full time jobs and families. They have a thousand reasons to not write on a Sunday night. Their motivations are all different. Some want to build a brand. Some want income. Some have some shit to get off their chest. And they need real a platform and support to do any of it well. Tools, feedback, audience growth, monetization. You cant just hand someone a login and say good luck. We're solving that better than anyone else and getting better every quarter.

Then think about our subscribers. There are 30M+ business leaders in the US. Thats a massive market. But heres the crazy part. Almost all modern, relevant, expert driven content is built for founders and CEOs. Theyve ignored everyone else. The VP of HR. The Chief Digital Officer. The Director of Strategy. The healthcare exec trying to figure out whats changing. Nobody is serving these people the way they deserve to be served. We are.

Then theres our advertisers. B2B marketing is a black box. Its all lies and bullshit. We're doing everything we can to change that. Being transparent. Fighting the good fight. Telling great stories. Leading with trust. The B2B ad market is $40B a year and I actually think that number grows because of companies like us. When you give marketers certainty that their spend is actually working they dont spend less. They spend more. We're not just capturing share of the existing market. We're expanding it.

I deeply believe that in the same way Facebook owns 30% of digital consumer spend we can own 30% of all b2b spend. Thats not a typo. Thats the opportunity.

But heres what makes this so hard and so rare.

We dont have 1 customer. We have 3.

We need creators to attract and retain subscribers. We need subscribers to attract and retain advertisers. We need advertisers to attract and retain creators. All three have to work or none of it does.

Most businesses serve one stakeholder. We serve three. Thats not common. And thats exactly the point.

Every company that has solved a 3 sided marketplace has created tens of billions in value. LinkedIn was a $25B exit. And they only scratched the surface of what business leaders actually need.

We're going after something bigger than that. And Q2 is where we prove it.

2) Just ask.

I've noticed something lately that I want to talk about. And it's not a critique, it's an encouragement.

I see a lot of questions flying around Slack. Someone needs to know how a process works. Someone wants an opinion on the best way to structure something. Someone asks a teammate a question that, honestly, that teammate might not even know the answer to better than anyone else.

Asking a person feels natural. It's what we've always done. You don't know something, you find someone who might, and you ask.

But we have Claude now. And I don't think we're using it enough as the first step.

If you have a question that isn't uniquely about someone's personal experience or judgment, Claude probably has a really solid answer. And even if it doesn't nail it, you now have a starting point. You can bring that to a teammate and say "here's what I found, does this track?" instead of starting from zero with them.

That's a completely different conversation. One respects their time. The other puts the cognitive load on them.

Think about how it feels when someone asks you something and your first thought is "you could have just looked this up." It's not that you don't want to help. It's that the question didn't need you. It needed information.

Cognitive load is real. Every question someone fields that they didn't need to is a small tax on their focus. And those taxes add up across a day, a week, a team.

I'm not saying stop asking people questions. When you need someone's judgment, their gut, their experience with a specific situation, ask them. That's what teammates are for.

But if the question is "how does this work" or "what's our process for X," try Claude first. Get 80% of the way there. Then bring the remaining 20% to a human.

It's a new form of respect. Showing up having already done the legwork signals you value that person's time. Always try to reduce the cognitive load of those you work with.

And right now, the easiest way to do that is sitting right in front of you.

3) That was different

I'll be honest about something. I'm a really bad 1:1 manager.

Not in the sense that I don't care. I care a lot. But I don't prep enough, I have too much going on, and I forget follow ups. Intention and impact are two different things and the impact has been me walking into 1:1s underprepared more often than I'd like to admit. If you've ever been managed by me this is not news to you.

That bothered me so this week I did something about it.

I built a 1:1 skill in Claude.

It started from something simple. Michael posted a skill in #general to help everyone build an "about me" file. Basically a deep dive on yourself, like a mini therapy session. How you work, how you think, where you fall short. One of the things that came out of mine was this gap between the manager I want to be and the manager I actually am day to day.

So I built a tool to close that gap.

Heres what it does. It pulls my Notion meeting notes (use these by the way, theyre amazing and free with our plan), Slacks with that person and the rest of the team, emails, and our shared 1:1 doc. Then 45 minutes before the meeting it sends me a prep document so I know what we should talk about and dont forget anything.

But the part that really got me. It found patterns in our conversations over 3 months. Ongoing threads I should've been tracking but wasnt. Stuff I had completely lost track of.

I tested it with one person this week.

Their reaction: "This is the best 1:1 we've ever had."

I updated the skill after to send me daily reminders of my follow up items until theyre done. And I dont have to check a box. It figures out whether I've done the thing by reading my Slack and email. So now I have days to prepare instead of 45 minutes. And I actually do my to do list.

I have the skill saved and happy to share it. But heres my real challenge to you. Think about the thing you know you should be doing better. The thing where your intention is there but the follow through isnt. Could you build something to close that gap?

Dont know how to make a skill? Ask Claude. 🙂

QUESTION OF THE WEEK

If you had to write one mini-essay about something you're passionate about within your role or professional experience what would it be?

PEOPLE

This week was Tyler Williams last week with the company. Tyler and I had countless laughs at The Front Page and I'll always be gratetful to him for those moments and his contributions to Workweek.

Thanks for giving it a read. Make it a great one.

Adam