10,000 (Thank You)

My all-time favorite posts from The Signal. Plus two asks.

Aug 07, 2026

If you were forwarded this newsletter, join 10,046* weekly readers—some of the smartest GTM operators & founders—by subscribing here:

Thank you—*all 10,000+ of you!!! 🤯—for reading this hand-poured, 100% organic, farm-to-table (human-written) newsletter.

Happy Friday, y’all! 👋

We hit 10,000 subscribers this week.

I close every newsletter with the same line:

Thank you for your attention and trust. I do not take it for granted.

And I really do mean it.

I got back from vacation with my family last night (hence the photos of beach scenes throughout today’s piece). And this morning, with sand still in my shoes and the smell of sunscreen on my hat, sat down, genuinely excited to start working. What a gift. To be doing what I love—and have found “pmf” doing it.

When I started writing this newsletter, I wasn’t trying to build “a media company.” I genuinely did not think I could (or wanted to) do this full-time. I was simply trying to learn in public. I wanted a place to document what I was seeing as the old playbook was starting to fail, and a new playbook was emerging (in large part due to the rise of “GenAI”). This newsletter was a place to share the conversations I was having with operators who were heads-down shipping, while the rest of us were still figuring out what the new playbook even was.

Somewhere along the way, it became “a real thing.”

Now, there are over 10,000 weekly readers. Public company CROs and heads of RevOps, founders, and GTM leaders at OpenAI, Cursor, Ramp, Rippling, Anthropic, Vanta, Snowflake, Datadog, Baseten, Navan, Stripe, and many more. Operators who write me after every issue to push back, add context, or share what they’re building.

If you’re reading this: thank you.
(Your) attention is the scarce resource.
And I do not take it for granted.

A few things I’ve learned getting here

Quality beats scale. I’ve said this before, and I mean it: if I have half a million subscribers in three years, I have failed. I am building for a small group of people—by design (“nichemaxxing”). The goal is that the right people find this useful, not that everyone sees it.

Free, forever. I believe information should be free. Including not requiring an email gate on the archives. Trust compounds when you don’t make people jump through hoops to read. It’s also my own PLG motion :) which I deeply believe in.

Organic is slower, but better. Growth has been from word of mouth, LinkedIn posts, and people forwarding issues to a teammate. I have not spent a dollar on paid acquisition, and don’t plan to. Tortoise > hare:

Going full-time was the unlock. I’ve been able to do more interviews, deeper research, stronger live shows, and spend more time interviewing operators who don’t have 12-15 hours to write up what they’re doing. The GTM playbook is changing, and I want to create the place that documents what’s actually working. That was the bet I made. And it seems increasingly valuable in the AI era.

Some stats. I have published 106 articles, viewed over half a million times, and written 172K words (…don’t worry, I’m actively trying to work on making posts shorter… it’s hard!). Over 3M impressions on LinkedIn so far this year.

84% of subscribers are GTM leaders and founders. Below is the split across personas:

If you’re new (or want a refresher)

Here are the top/my favorite articles:

🤖 AI GTM

🛠️ GTM Engineering

🎯 Prospecting

🧰 GTM Tech

📊 Research Reports

Two small asks

1/ Forward this to one or two people who geek out on AI × GTM the way you do. A founder. A RevOps lead. A GTM Engineer on your team. Send them this email, or this link: Best of The Signal. It’s free and ungated.

2/ If you’ve gotten value from The Signal, go check out one of the partners who make it possible for me to spend 100% of my time on this.

Thank you to Clay, our presenting partner.

Bruno, Varun, and the team took a big bet on me and The Signal early on. And I’m very grateful. (The best part is, I was already singing Clay’s praises for over a year while I was consulting, without being paid a dollar, so it has been a no-brainer to partner with them).

And to our supporting partners:

Attention → AI Agents for RevOps.
Clarify → The Autonomous CRM. Sell more, admin less.
Clearskies → The Context Layer for Revenue AI.
Nooks → All your outbound. One AI workspace.
Rox → Revenue Agents for the Global 2000.
Sumble → Buying signals from tech stacks, people data, & active projects.
Terret → The answer-to-action engine for revenue teams.

The Signal literally wouldn’t be where it is today without the support of these companies.

So, do me a favor and request a demo (or sign up for their free product) today if you’ve found value in the content that my caffeine-infused fingers frantically type each week. And let them know The Signal sent you their way; that will help me continue creating valuable content.

What’s next?

I don’t know where this journey will lead me. But I’m loving it for now, and plan to continue down this road until I can see what’s around the next curve. With the same goal as the day I first published in Nov of 2023: to separate the signal from the noise as the new GTM playbook emerges.

I’m grateful you’re here in this little weird little corner of the internet with me.

Thank you for your trust and attention—I truly do not take it for granted.

See you next week,
Brendan 🫡

PS: Photo credit to my wife, Britt.

The Signal

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