Becca Sherman is the co-founder and COO of WorkWeek, a new media company that puts creators first. By giving creators all the perks of a full-time gig (salary, PTO, parental leave), the tools/ support to grow their brand, and access to new forms of revenue, WorkWeek hopes to build a next-generation media company and have others follow suit.
Boost chatted with Becca to learn more about WorkWeek, its creators, and what it means to be in the business of business.
How do you describe WorkWeek?
People ask us this all the time. Are we a media company? An agency? A co-op? Yes, we’re a media company, but we operate in a nontraditional way. Our goal isn’t to put WorkWeek at the forefront, we’re much more interested in building the brands of our creators and putting their faces, personalities, and brands first.
The power of WorkWeek is that we have great individuals who do incredible things on their own, but they can do even more incredible things together by sharing resources, sharing knowledge, building together, and lifting each other up.
I really believe success isn’t a zero-sum game. If we can be the tide that lifts all boats, we can build something a lot bigger and expand our reach.
What qualities do you look for in a creator?
We try to be creator-first in every way. The most important thing for us when bringing on a new creator is listening to what they’re passionate about, what they value, what they want, and what they need. We want to be aligned with our creators.
The qualities we really look out for are personality and voice — a creator who is passionate and excited about what they’re making has a voice and is willing to use it.
We often use the term B2B2C when discussing creators. This just means they talk like humans in a way that b2c creators or influencers would talk, but they provide something seriously valuable to the business world.
Ambition is another important quality to look out for. We want to know:
- How big do you believe you can scale?
- Are you excited to create and host events?
- Do you truly want to build a community?
Asking these questions are important because we’re excited to build something big and build a brand around you.
What types of creators are you focusing on?
We expect to work with hundreds of different creators over the next few years, but right now we’re focused on B2B creators. That means creators who are subject-matter experts or focus on a specific niche that they’re extremely passionate and knowledgable about.
We have some really exciting announcements coming up with creators that are well known.
Does WorkWeek receive a lot of inbound requests from creators who want to be a part of this?
Since our launch we’ve received a lot of inbound outreach. In the beginning, it was definitely Adam (my co-founder) and I reaching out to people on Twitter that we admired and DMing them.
WorkWeek has creators in the following verticals: startups, fintech, healthcare, media, cannabis, and VC. Why did you choose to start with those categories?
When preparing to launch WorkWeek, we made a dream list of industries for the first couple of months, first year, and over the next few years. Then we tiered it out by priority and sub-niche. We also identified industries that were exploding in popularity and already had a lot of creators and news.
Obviously, fintech is huge right now. We currently have Nicole Casperson who makes WTFintech, and we have plans to add some more creators in the fintech vertical as well.
There are some verticals we rolled out that we didn’t expect to tackle right away like cannabis, but we happened to find a creator who was awesome and we wanted to build something with them.
Cannabis is hard to advertise in publications due to a lot of weird regulations, but Matthew O’Brien created a great cannabis newsletter and podcast that’s really valuable to the industry. When we met Matthew, we knew we had to work with him.
WorkWeek dropped a $100K Startup Founder Giveaway that also gives founders access to incredible mentorship. Can you tell us more about this?
How it came about was really important to us because the crux of what we’re doing is distribution. We’re so excited to work with founders, executives, leaders, and investors across industries and give them a platform to share their work, and we want that to be the same for WorkWeek creators.
Part of the reason you join WorkWeek is for the positive network effect. As our creators build their audiences, they can give shoutouts to other creators and help them level up while also growing their own audience.
We wanted to do something incredible when we announced the launch of Joe Sweeny’s platform Just Raised. This drop is an exciting way to build Joe’s audience and celebrate his launch.
Joe’s mission is to help founders of newly minted startups succeed. New founders need resources, capital, support, mentorship, press and distribution. With this drop, we set up a killer group of mentors that I’m really excited to tap into as well as investors who will hear pitches, give feedback, and potentially invest.
How does WorkWeek help creators avoid burnout?
When we were thinking of starting WorkWeek, we weren’t necessarily sure what it would become, but we knew what kind of place we wanted to work at, the people we wanted to work with, and the benefits we wanted to provide.
One of the first thing that Adam and I did was outline our Culture and Benefits statement. Burnout was one of the most important things to address.
Adam and I previously worked at Hustle, a daily newsletter. I was the General Manager of our daily newsletter — not the writer — and I even felt burned out. Writing something daily, every day, and not taking breaks is a serious grind. It burns you out, and you have to take breaks. Adam and I have spoken/ advised hundreds of creators over the past two years. We kept hearing creators say they can’t take parental leave, vacation, a sabbatical, etc because if they stopped writing or posting their audience will go away.
We wanted to solve that. WorkWeek provides creators with the security and resources they need to take breaks to make sure they don’t burn out.
We offer 200 hours of PTO per year and 10–16 weeks of parental leave which people can spread over a year or take all at once.
Another way we address burn out is by helping creators build out their team (i.e., guest contributors, freelancers, hiring additional people, etc), so it’s not just one person all the time.
How does WorkWeek make money and provide creators with all these benefits?
We’ll start with advertising. If you’re a journalist at the NYT or WSJ, you’re not getting revenue share from the ad revenue.
It was important to us to set up revenue and profit sharing with everyone. I think advertising, when done right, can be a powerful tool to drive revenue which will let us build other things like educational courses.
A sensible next step is also offering subscriptions to private, creator-led communities.
We have a lot of announcements coming up over the next year, but advertising will be a tool to help us get started and hopefully drive a lot of revenue for creators on a personal level too.
