Workweek's Adam Ryan on why B2B shouldn't be boring

Adam Ryan, former president of The Hustle and cofounder of Workweek, wants to rethink the B2B model. Workweek is banking on finding individuals – creators, if you will – to build audiences around. The bet is that individuals, particularly but not exclusively those who are practitioners in the field, can build deeper connections with audiences while benefiting from the infrastructure, services and halo effect of a parent media brand. Some highlights from our discussion:

Don’t raise too much money. Adam spent part of his career at Spiceworks, a professional network for IT professionals. The company identified an underserved community and executed on the opportunity, only to have an unsatisfying outcome. “It was a great company, bad cap table,” Adam said. “They actually made a ton of money. They didn't need to raise that much money. And then because they did, they made terrible decisions, long term.”

You can be professional and have personality. Workweek is leaning on its network of 19 creators to be front and center. It doesn’t have an editor-in-chief and instead relies on its newsletter writers to chart their own path that hews closely to what motivates them. Nicole Casperson, for instance, writes WTFintech and focuses often on diversity and inclusion issues that are important to her personally.

Sector expertise is critical. Not all Workweek creators worked in the fields they cover, but many do. Workweek writer Nik Sharma, for instance, is a DTC marketer. This hands-on familiarity with the issues in these fields in invaluable, so long as it is also married with the ability to clearly communicate and consistently produce valuable pieces.  “The reason why [B2B content] is kind of boring is because you have a lot of people that have never done those jobs,” he said . “They're just like listening and regurgitating. They're not like coming from a point of action.”

Paid acquisition is more than a shortcut. Publishers used to have an aversion to admitting to buying traffic. I can remember BuzzFeed making sure to point out it only bought ads for its sponsor content, not editorial. But Adam saw how an effective paid audience development strategy can accelerate growth. For instance, Workweek’s The Marketing Millennials property grew by 7,000 newsletter subscribers organically in seven weeks while paid acquisition added 20,000. So long as a company is confident in its cost per subscriber number, and is focused on quality of acquired subscribers, paid acquisition is an important tool. Overall, Workweek pays to acquire nearly half its overall list at an average cost of $10 per subscriber.

You need connective tissue. Workweek has cast a broad net in its first eight months of existence, with newsletters focused on everything from cannabis to fin tech to memes to franchises to marketing. It has since refined the model around “pods” of core categories. Workweek has clusters around areas like startups and investing, health, marketing and fintech. “​​It just allowed the business to focus on marketing allows our business to essentially have more efficiencies,” Adam said.