Market for a year before you sell anything

The Framework

"Before you sell anything, you have to be marketing for a year."

That's Rick Knudtson's rule, and he ran Workshop on it from day one. Most early playbooks go the other way. Build the product, find someone to sell it to, start publishing once there's budget for it.

The problem is timing. Content takes about a year to compound, so if you start the clock at the moment you need leads, you'll quit in month three when nothing has happened.

Workshop started the clock before it knew what the product was. That turned out to matter more than anyone on the team expected.

The Three Steps

1. Publish something weekly from day one, to nobody. Workshop built a newsletter on day one, the Happy Monday Club, with zero subscribers. The angle was an optimistic view of HR, picked because most HR content is negative. It has 50,000 subscribers today and it has gone out every single week for five years. The mistake to avoid is waiting until you have something to promote. Rick had no product.

2. Borrow other people's audiences. Workshop's early subscribers came from the founders' own networks and from co-branded work with other newsletters and community operators. Same rule on webinars: "you invite other people on that are way smarter than you, that are in the industry, that have an audience, so you can co-market." Workshop runs one a month, sometimes two.

3. Give it twelve months before you judge it. "You can't try it once and say, man, it didn't work. You literally have to do it for like a year." Workshop's first webinar had five people show up.

Real Numbers

Happy Monday Club: 0 to 50,000 subscribers (day one to year five, weekly, no gaps)

Webinars: 5 attendees to 500 attendees (first one to most recent)

Unpaid design partner: Hudl, the Nebraska sports tech company, about 1,500 employees plus roughly 4,000 more globally in India and the Philippines. They worked closely with Workshop through year one as a design partner and paid nothing. Rick picked them because their org structure was complicated enough to teach him the problem properly.

Then there's the number that ties it together. When Workshop finally emailed the market to say it was building the email product, the hands that went up came from a list that had been growing for months. Nine months of selling the intranet produced three customers. The rebuilt product signed 10 in 30 days.

The build took a month. The audience took a year.

When It Fails

If you need revenue inside 90 days, this is the wrong plan. Workshop had raised roughly $3 million and could afford twelve months of publishing while selling almost nothing.

It also fails on inconsistency. Rick's whole case rests on doing the same thing every week for a year. Two newsletters and one webinar in a quarter isn't the strategy, it's a sample of it, and it will produce nothing you can point at.

Your First Move

Pick one format you can genuinely repeat every week and send the first one this week, to whatever list you have, even if that list is twelve people from your last job.

Then message two people in your market who already have an audience and ask them to co-host something with you. Both of those fit in one afternoon.