Hey all,

What a week. You all should be incredibly proud of what we're doing and what we're building. 5 years ago this past week I started really pursuing the idea of Workweek. I couldn't be more excited about where we are at and what we're doing.

With that, let’s dive into it.

WHAT'S TOP OF MIND

1) What to listen to from this week

This week was a run. Media hit from every direction and the sentiment was loud and positive.

We landed on The Marketing Millennials and got a write up in the email on Thursday. We taped the ADSN podcast, which is one of the sharper ad tech shows out there. A Media Operator runs Tuesday. Rebooting drops in about two weeks. And we did LetterLand Live to talk about how this impacts creators writing newsletters.

On top of the named hits, we got picked up across a stack of other newsletters and outlets. The throughline everywhere was the same. People get what we're building and they like it.

Then the part that actually matters. The sales team fielded more CRM matching requests in two days than we got in the prior month. That is the market telling us the receipts story is landing, not just the press story.

Michael, Triet, Eric and the team have been the data engine here. They have done a great job of helping us work through the requests and get it all back into the hands of our customers as fast as possible.

And guess what... this week we announce Upfronts publicly. The momentum continues!

2) Capture the Value of Trust

Workweek started with one stubborn belief: creators capture trust, and almost nobody pays them what that trust is actually worth. Fix that, and you fix how creators make money. The best ones make exponentially more.

We've taken a wild road getting here. Rewind three years and we launched a hiring service, a franchise SaaS tool, a ghostwriting product, and more. Same logic every time. Own a high-value thing directly, capture the value. Every one of them came from the right instinct. And every one of them taught us the same lesson. This is brutal to operate, and no single product fit every creator the same way. Noble idea, messy execution.

But the goal never moved. The Partner Platform is that same belief, finally built right. Give creators the ability to prove their real value.

I have zero doubt Alex Johnson has driven tens of millions in decisions through his newsletter. Yet, the value capture from Alex, FTT, and Workweek hasn't matched it. Not yet. We're not doing too shabby, but the gap is real.

So what if we could prove it? Show that the best creators are influencing tens of millions in actual sales. Then we can raise prices. We can help creators make meaningfully more. Advertisers can still be happy. Everybody wins.

It's also a mirror. Strong value capture reflects a strong audience. Influence over entry-level employees is nice, but it doesn't show up in the decision to buy software. Influence over the actual buyer is the whole game. That's why we've obsessed over audience quality for two years straight.

We're years ahead of most people thinking about this. But being early means nothing without execution. The right story. Educating advertisers through the change. Building a system that scales. There's a lot more work to do.

We'll get there. We're locked in. And we'll win.

A race to the best, not the bottom.

3) WTH is AppLovin and why it matters?

This week I mentioned AppLovin in a few of my interviews and thought I'd take a section to explain what it is and why I bring them.

AppLovin started out as a mobile games company. They made games, bought other games, and ran a bunch of apps on your phone. But the games weren't really how they made their money. The real business was the advertising system running underneath all those apps.

Think about it like this. When you play a free game on your phone, you see ads. Maybe an ad for a different game. If you tap it and download that game, somebody made money. AppLovin built the technology that decides which ad to show you, at the exact moment you're most likely to tap it.

Here's why they got so good at it. They owned the games AND the ad system. That meant they could see everything. They knew when you downloaded something, how long you played, and whether you spent money. Most ad companies never get to see that. They show an ad and then just hope it worked. AppLovin actually knew if it worked, because they owned the game you landed in.

And that created a snowball effect. The more ads they ran, the more they learned about what people tap on. The more they learned, the smarter their system got. The smarter it got, the better the ads performed. Better ads meant more companies wanted to spend money with them. More money meant even more data to learn from. Round and round, getting stronger every time.

It went even further than just picking the right ad. Because they could see what actually worked, they started making the ads too. They knew which colors, which words, which first three seconds made people tap. So instead of waiting for advertisers to hand them creative and hoping it landed, they built ads designed around what the data already proved worked. The same system that picked the winners also learned how to create new winners. That's a huge advantage. Most companies guess what a good ad looks like. AppLovin knew, and then manufactured more of it.

That snowball is the whole reason nobody could catch them. A competitor could spend a fortune trying to copy it and still lose, because they didn't own the games and couldn't see what AppLovin could see.

The last piece is that everybody walked away happy. The companies advertising got results they could actually measure. The people playing games saw ads for stuff they might actually want. The game developers got a guarnateed and steady way to make money from their apps and find new players, so they could keep building. And AppLovin made money in the middle because they were the only ones who could prove the whole thing worked. Four winners. $100B business.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK

What is the favorite thing you heard or saw this week with all the press and converations?

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

Adam