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💛 Top of Mind

Adam Ryan

Apr 18th, 2026

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Hey all,

This week we have another two guest contributors with Ramya and LQ. They are A+ writing and I'm grateful to them for the time. The third piece is from yours truly.

Thanks to everyone who hung in there through our OKRs. I believe we're about to have some of the most impactful quarters in the company history and alignment towards those goals is the key starting point.

With that, let’s dive into it.

WHAT'S TOP OF MIND

1) All em dashes are my own

By: Lindsey Quinn

These words were written without the use of AI. Why is that important to say? Is it? It gestures towards a controversial idea. The idea that the process is the product.

We can argue back and forth all day about whether this is true. Or whether Paul Shirley, the guy who coined the phrase, was just trying to sell a book. But it’s an alluring idea: The idea that how something was created is inextricably linked to the nature and value of the product.

That’s not to say that a product that takes more time and more care is inherently better, merely that they’re inseparable. Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden by going, as the kids say, “monk mode” for two years at Walden Pond. Spike Lee wrote the screenplay for “Do The Right Thing” on notebook paper, in just two weeks.

Some of our favorite works were created in anger (see: Basquiat) or passion (see: Jackson Pollock), or while sniffing glue (see: The Ramones). John Harvey Kellogg said corn flakes came to him in a dream (see: Wikipedia’s list of “dream-based works”).

Art has always evolved to meet the mediums, tools, and sensibilities of the day. Business adds a larger wrench in the works: namely, the wrenches of profit and productivity.

At the same time, the most fulfilling moments I have had, as a writer and a person in the world, are when I take a moment to take stock of how something came to be—be it a particularly hairy piece of writing or making a new Claude Skill to scrape my Slack for tasks.

I sat down at my computer this morning with a cup of coffee and typed this out in a word document, just like in the Old Country. For a minute, I thought about writing it by hand. But frankly, the sun is shining and there’s life to be living. So the tools of the day will suit me fine.

2) Rediscovering how to be bad at things

By: Ramya Varma

In my first job, one of the partners I worked for had to gently and consistently remind me that the balance sheets in my models didn't, uh, balance. I mean, it's in the name. You see the problem.

Today that would make me crawl into a hole and die, but back then it barely fazed me, because I wasn't expected to be error-free at that point in my career. I just went back to building another Excel abomination and battled the #REF until my balance sheets balanced one day, and every day after that.

When things have "just worked" long enough, you forget what it's like to run into a brick wall over and over. You forget that most of us were laughably bad at something before getting good at it. So when I go ten rounds and six hours with Claude Code and end up with a result I could've accomplished manually in 45 minutes, or get gaslit daily by Claude chat telling me it can access Google Sheets data for an artifact (it can't), my reaction is less patient perseverance and more cursing my laptop and its grandchildren (Mac minis?) for eternity.

There are a lot of overwrought systems out there built by people whose job it is to breathlessly tell you "NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME!!1!1!!" every week. You're going to see someone build a dashboard and think you should build a dashboard. Someone's going to build an app and you'll think you need to build an app. Don't do it. Run your own race. Find the things that drain your time and your sanity every day and start there.

For example: I spend half a day every month fixing coding errors in the financials. Some software bill ended up in column A instead of column B. A basic cost allocation between departments showed up ass-backwards. I've ended up on hours-long benders in QuickBooks dealing with these issues because it's just too annoying to create the detailed feedback necessary for someone else to reliably do it right.

Creating a long list of accounting rules for Claude to absorb, iterate, and get a little less wrong each time is really not the flashy AI use case I had in mind. But that's the foundation: naming small frustrations and putting them into a form that lets the machine make sense of them. You might feel like you're moving at a pace that seems simple, boring, and obvious compared to what people around you are doing, but it's that bit-by-bit experimentation and context-building that slowly unlocks fluency.

We're all new here. Take the opportunity to be blissfully ignorant and fail a lot. Spend your time learning to do the things that matter to YOUR work in the highly specific ways that only you have insight into. (And then in two weeks go write your own LinkedIn AI expert psy-op to keep everyone else off our scent.)

3) The leverage point of Workweek

This week someone asked me a great question.

If we had to focus on building for just one thing at Workweek, what would it be?

It's a fair question. We have advertisers. We have subscribers. We have members. We have contributors. All of them matter. All of them are part of the machine.

But the real answer is none of those.

The answer is creators. Tomorrow at all hands we'll get into the difference between contributors and creators, and why that distinction matters more than ever for where we're going.

For now though, here's the thing I keep coming back to.

Every single part of our business works better when there is great content being made. Advertisers want to be near it. Subscribers show up for it. Members stick around because of it. Creators want to be around other creators.

Think about it for a second.

If you LOVE reading someone's stuff, what would you do to read it? Would an annoying UX stop you? If you respected someone so much that you wanted to meet them, would waiting in the rain stop you?

No chance.

And if we're home to the most valuable contributions in the verticals we're in, we can win, despite any shortcomings. Every single time.

Here's the part I think is hard for people to sit with.

In the short term, we might not immediately see the needle move on key metrics. Maybe the person using our newsletter platform for free decides to run their own ads, so it doesn't create more ad inventory. That's ok. Maybe someone reading a newsletter on our platform never signs up for the community, even though they're totally qualified. That's ok too. There are many more examples like this.

That's ok because those are points in the user journey we can optimize and improve. Those are levers we know how to pull over time. A bad conversion rate is a problem we can solve.

What we can't solve with optimization is a room with no content.

You can't optimize your way to great content. You can only be the best possible home for the people making it, and let the gravity do its thing.

Workweek has always had a focus on being the best place for creators in the B2B lens. Going forward, that focus has to get even more sharpened. Tomorrow we'll talk more about what that looks like in practice.

Contributors and creators are the unlock. Everything else is downstream of that.