Hey there,

Today's newsletter was written in our latest editor, which will be rolled out to the creator's soon. It's a huge change. I cannot wait for people to get their hands on it.

It also is us truly testing our own product. Something probably won't work. Something is probably good be improved with design.

But that's why we do it this way, in this process. Lmk if you see anything as a reader you think we could make better.

With that, let's dive in.

Top of Mind

1. The Boring Stuff Was Never Boring

Everything exciting in media points one direction. Consumer brands. Pop culture. The stuff that gets written about, funded, and argued over at dinner.

B2B sits in the corner. Boring, necessary, and ignored.

Think about how the industry has historically made decisions. B2B media hides the good writing behind a gated PDF nobody finishes. It runs banner ads people trained themselves to skip years ago. It makes you fill out a form before it hands over a single useful sentence.

We think that’s insane.

B2B is where people spend most of their waking lives. The work that actually runs the world happens in these “boring” categories. The machinery under everything, and nobody bothers to make it beautiful.

And somebody out there is obsessed with each one.

They’ve read everything in the space and met half the people in it. They catch patterns the rest of us walk right past. For years, the world told that person the thing they loved was too small to matter.

They were never boring. Nobody had bothered to give them a spotlight.

Until we decided they deserved to be the stars of their industry.

That belief does not just apply to the creators we work with or the industries we cover. It applies to the people we hire, too.

I get asked in interviews a lot: who is successful at Workweek?

It’s not a straightforward answer, but the qualities are usually similar.

The person who is too ambitious for the average B2B shop. Too focused on the business to last at a creative agency. A writer who also loves a P&L. A community lead who has product ideas. A designer who gets excited about conversion rates. A salesperson who cares as much about the data as the creative pitch. An engineer who cares about their work being loved by users.

We attract people who have the kind of range nobody knew where to file. The world kept telling them to pick a lane. We built the place where not picking one is the entire point.

We get thousands of applications for a single role, and the best people for us aren’t always the ones the AI says are the best fits. We bet on the people who believe in what we’re doing. The people who live our values. The people whose confidence and conviction are the score that matters to us, not a test score or an AI ranking.

We’re also honest about who this isn’t for.

It’s not for the person who prefers to deliberate instead of take action. It’s not for the pessimist. It’s not for the person whose pride won’t let them change their mind. It’s not for the people who hear “nobody has ever done this for the pest control industry” and say we shouldn’t either.

Because of who is here, we've been able to build our blueprint.

We showed that transparency and honesty are how you win in advertising.

We showed that B2B is a part of the creator economy.

We showed that B2B can be fun.

And that’s what we do. We go to places most companies don’t care enough to explore, and if they are, they are too afraid to push the boundaries. companies are too afraid to go.

That’s where our moat lives.

B2B was never the boring part. Neither were the people who love it.

They were both just waiting for someone to take them seriously.

That someone is Workweek.

2. The enshitification of the internet

By: Daniel Reece

The internet used to be a lot more fun.

When we were younger, it was way decentralized and it basically felt like the wild west.

Going online felt like you were actually exploring something, going out into uncharted territory.

I think we can all agree...that's a far cry from what the internet is now!😵‍💫

Between every single company begging you to use AI companions, the flood of ragebait content online, and growing list of content creators who gain popularity through artificial popularity, there's a lot going on these days.

The easiest way I can explain it is that the internet got ✨ 🌟 by big corporations, simply because it was the next opportunity after colonizing the earth.

Those corporations want every single free second of your life. Yes, literally.

Every time you're bored (if such a thing exists anymore) is a moment you could be looking at a screen: your phone, tv, or laptop...and now in your car, watch, or microwave. This is where corporations can target more ads at you.

That's become even easier to do now that ads have become extremely optimized and hyper-specific to their audiences.

For example, before I got into marketing many years ago, I had this convo with a friend, wondering if there was such a thing as "fart blocking underwear." Yes, there is, and YES, I was served ads for it for days after looking it up.

💡Fun fact: the average person actively notices and registers between 75-100 ads in a single day, and subconsciously filters the rest of them out completely.)

You may still believe that you're responsible for a lot of what your algorithm serves you, but guess what? 😉

Corporations have cracked the code on how to game the algorithm too!

The craziest part is that this is still an industry in its early stages.

They acquire enough deeply detailed data on people to know they can gradually push the limit on the amount of ads you receive online, and even if you despise them, you'll still tolerate them to see pics of your friends and family inbetween all the "suggested content" you definitely don't follow, from people you've never heard of.

This is also why you can learn a WHOLE LOT OF SHIT about people like Clavicular, Andrew Tate, or Adin Ross against your will, without ever going out of your way to look for any them.

In short, there are entire marketing companies out there that farm engagement by creating hundreds of "fan" accounts that hire people from developing nations to clip and post content hundreds of times on behalf of creators, which is why you'll see a viral video posted over and over- the contractors doing that work tend to receive a % of the revenue that is worth their time.

A lot of those clips will have a sponsored logo in them too. Stake is one I see everywhere at the moment.

It's kinda hard to blame them too, when they can work remotely and make better money doing that than what a traditional job offers.

Currently, algorithms reward quantity over quality, so the clients of these marketing campaigns achieve omnipresence and the perception of popularity almost overnight.

Now, it's hard to trust reviews because blogs/mags stopped making money so journalists now get paid off by those companies.

Comments are increasingly botted, music streaming numbers are increasingly botted, and now 40 to 44% of ALL daily music uploads on streaming platforms are AI-generated.

I know that all sounds doom and gloom, but my point is this:

Community with actual humans that you know and trust has always been important, but it's literally more important than ever, especially with newer generations interacting less and less with each other in real life.

Building that community is paradoxically both easier and harder to do now, depending on how much authenticity matters to you.

At Workweek, we get to keep those kinds of communities alive, but online and in person...and in some ways, they remind me of the simpler, older days of the internet.

As the demand for these communities inevitably goes up, we'll be able to say we prepared before most folks, and we did it in a way that respects peoples beautifully unique humanness, rather than hacking an algorithm that mostly has bots in it anyway.

3. Ramp is incredible

We’re moving Ramp to next month. But I started messing around with it this week and was kind of blown away.

Not just because it works well. Because it feels like a company with really high taste built it.

The design is sharp. The product is fast. The workflows are obvious. The little details are thoughtful. And somehow it has a ton of surface area without feeling messy or overbuilt.

Especially in finance software where the default is usually complexity, clutter, and making the user figure it out.

Ramp feels like a culture thing as much as a product thing.

You can tell they care about speed. Taste. Utility. Saving people time. Not making finance feel like homework.

The whole thing feels like it was built by a team that kept asking, why is this annoying and how do we make it disappear.

That is great product culture.

Question of the Week

Have you ever used a piece of software or tool that made you truly stop in your tracks?

Thanks for reading and make it a great one.

Adam