This is B2BS
First-principles analysis on second-order effects – from one B2B independent to another
This is B2BS – a newsletter about the bullshit of business and the business of bullshit.
If you’ve spent a lot of time reading LinkedIn posts, trade publications, and business newsletters these past few years, you’ve seen how disconnected business-related writing has become from how business actually works. Empty motivationalism, self-serving elitist spin, and “hot” takes that are lukewarm at best.
I started this newsletter because I want to publish something nothing like that.
B2BS is a companion to help readers navigate a postmodern, late-stage-LinkedIn world and explore how business actually works – as opposed to how it is marketed, promoted, and justified as something functional.
If you work inside an organization, B2BS will help you (1) make better decisions based on something more than prevailing narratives (and AI slop) and (2) make sense of suboptimal decisions you’re expected to defend but don’t control.
Primarily, however, B2BS is for the independents (and would-be independents). Freelancers. Fractional professionals. ICs. Sidegiggers. Hustlers. Small employers. Solo investors.
Why?
Because if you’re an independent, you can’t afford to be wrong.
Business – and business media – has become institutionalized. So have the people in business and business media. And institutions exist to support themselves. Do bad business decisions, false narratives, laziness, incompetence, and apathy cost money? Absolutely. But they don’t harm the institution at large. They harm other people downstream – scapegoat employees and contractors, trusting investors, and unsophisticated buyers.
They most harm people like you and me. We have to work harder and be smarter because we don’t have a corner of bureaucracy and insurance benefits to curl up in. And we still have to do business with – and compete with – institutions.
If you work independently, or plan to, B2BS will help you better manage business risk, improve your operations, see problems (and solutions) that others don’t, and avoid hidden pitfalls.
Accordingly, most letters here fall into one of two categories.
1. Counter-analysis. Deep dives on companies, industries, trends, policies, and emerging themes – where the surface narratives collapse once you look at data, history, context, and incentives. This “content bucket” is where I’ll explore ideas and data while bitching about irrationalities and bad reasoning.
Investors, business decision-makers, analysts, consultants, and other readers will benefit from a well-reasoned, well-researched alternative view. Subscribers will learn to second-guess mainstream narratives in favor of first principles and pattern recognition.
2. Practical guidance. Writing about contracts, payment, pricing, business filings, marketing, client management, and other operational realities for the self-employed – fractionals, freelancers, and other people working independently or thinking about it.
This content isn’t of the “how to make five million dollars a month as a freelancer” variety (if you know how to do that, please let me know) or otherwise about finding wild success. Rather, it’s about setting yourself up for success and maintaining it.
I’ve spent about 20 years in self-employment selling and providing professional services to businesses of all sizes, spanning law, media, tech, telecom, commercial real estate, financial services, life sciences, nonprofits, and the arts. I’ve worked as a marketer, as a communications specialist, as a journalist, as an analyst, and as a lawyer. I’ve advised founders, CEOs, investor groups, marketers, operations teams, and agencies.
So I’ve seen how a lot of sausage gets made. And I’m immune to a lot of bullshit.
Some of the areas I expect to cover in B2BS in the immediately coming weeks include:
The future of VR/XR – at Meta and beyond
The latent talent-attrition crisis facing law firms
Whether independent contractors should charge late fees
The problems facing the post-COVID office real-estate market
Fighting for your contract terms
Why B2B thought-leadership content sucks
If there’s a unifying idea in all this, it’s that outcomes start making sense once you stop taking stated intentions at face value and start understanding motivations.
If that sounds useful, welcome.
If not, no worries. There’s a lot of very upbeat business writing elsewhere.
- Joe Stanganelli
