Writing is Reflecting
I’ve been writing this newsletter (and working on offshoots like the audio and video editions) for 5 years now! With that anniversary coming up, I thought I would note down and share a state of the business. It’s amazing to look back on compounding growth in aggregate, reflect on fortuitous paths that emerged, and aim for the untapped potential that remains. After this reflection exercise, I’m most thankful to all the folks who have followed, encouraged, and subsidized the journey.
As always, I’d also love to hear from readers on what they’d like to see me do more / less of - please chime in via comments👇. And if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing / upgrading.
Executive Summary
Run the Business (RTB) is a knowledge portal for B2B company leaders that educates its audience about building teams, shipping products, and repeating outcomes. The moniker has been established over the last 5 years with growing brand awareness amongst both PM and GTM operators in the B2B space. RTB is a creator business, centered around a Substack newsletter with active monetization streams through paywalled videos (Substack), discussion forums (Slack), sponsored posts (LinkedIn), cohort-based courses (Maven), live events (Luma), advisory engagements, and leadership coaching. It’s led by solopreneur Ibrahim Bashir, who leverages ~ 25 years of product development experience combined with a knack for sharp writing, a talent for community building, and a lifetime of storytelling to engage subscribers.
About Ibrahim
Ibrahim Bashir has been building and shipping software since the early 2000s, and has worked on everything from desktop applications to mobile devices to web services. He was most recently an executive at Amplitude, where he served as the VP of product. Before that, he scaled emerging products at Box, service infrastructure at Twitter, and the Kindle business at Amazon. And in past lives, he studied computer science, taught algorithms courses, wrote radiology software, built e- commerce platforms, and served as a technology consultant.
A consistent thread across Ibrahim’s career has been a desire to document and disseminate learnings for his community of peers. As a new-grad engineer, he led university recruiting and new hire onboarding for his company. As a consultant at Deloitte, he served as the editor of his practice newsletter. At Amazon, he led an internal education series around “war stories” from product launches, a concept which eventually turned into a feature article for the First Round Review.
During his Amazon tenure, which was Ibrahim’s first structured product management experience, he had a chance to work with and learn from a group of builders who would become industry leaders within the next decade. But he also chafed at a culture of secrecy, where best practices and strategic frameworks were not open sourced or externally discussed per company policy.
Creator Journey
When Ibrahim joined Twitter, his mindset shifted from someone who was sharing knowledge internally with just his co-workers to becoming an industry thought leader with 10x the reach. The ethos of Twitter around public discourse coupled with Ibrahim’s pent-up desire to educate a broader audience led to a period of experimentation as a creator. He wrote for an alumni magazine, keynoted a conference, and launched a blog.
As not only an avid content creator but also a consumer, Ibrahim saw the emergence of a new breed of entrepreneurs who were making a go of it solo. One aspirational example was Ben Thompson of Stratechery fame, an early pioneer of paid newsletters. But Ibrahim also noticed that to execute such a career transition you had to stitch together your own tech stack (Ben famously mentioned using “37 different tools” to manage everything from drafts to payments) and also leave your day job (to give creation and distribution the necessary time and attention). With that not being a viable path, Ibrahim bided his time and continued to compile content (with everyone who knew him knowing that he was waiting for the right platform to publish a lot of his thinking).
In the interim, Ibrahim switched from building DTC products to the B2B space, and found other outlets to share ideas and collaborate publicly, including podcasts, webinars, and panels. He also observed that the product development community in the SaaS space was under-served, with influencers and content focused on consumer product trends. In 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, with everyone spending more time indoors, reading went up and newsletters boomed. Someone shared a Substack article with Ibrahim, and he immediately recognized that platform as the solution to the “37 different tools” problem. RTB launched on Substack in April 2020, and Ibrahim has been consistently building a community around it ever since.
Milestones & Metrics
With RTB now approaching its 5 year anniversary, there are meaningful milestones and performance metrics to gauge impact. Ibrahim has published over 200 posts, collaborated with over 50 other product influencers, and launched multiple spin-offs (a snack-sized podcast titled “5 Minute Fridays” and a paywalled video interview series with industry experts called “60 Minute Stories”). With 10K subscribers on Substack, a follower base has been established for RTB. Lifetime views of posts are now in the millions on Substack, with an order of magnitude more unmeasured eyeballs across LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and Instagram being exposed to Ibrahim’s content.
There are also more subjective signals of impact that have emerged. SEO for RTB is very strong, with certain terms Ibrahim has coined and popularized entering the lexicon, such as “product market flex”, “skip step SaaS”, “manufacturing champions”, and “the mindset ladder”. And there have even been instances of other “thought leaders” plagiarizing RTB content, including tweeting passages without attribution and sharing visuals as their own (the latter of which led to Ibrahim watermarking all visuals); while annoying, it’s validating.
Monetization Signals
But even more important than attempted plagiarism and vanity metrics are the monetization signals that RTB has seen and capitalized on. Over the last 5 years, Ibrahim has successfully layered a services business around the newsletter, establishing a flywheel. And the most encouraging part is that he’s serving a segment of the market (PM and GTM executives) that have significant budget to spend on learning and development (L&D).
In 2021, he was selected for an invitation-only program by ScholarSite (later Sphere) to design a curriculum and build a course based on the learnings being shared on RTB; “Scaling B2B Products” officially launched in 2022, runs multiple cohorts a year (now on Maven), and has generated six figure revenue. In 2022 Ibrahim started charging speaker fees for conference keynotes and fireside chats, making appearances for established PM communities like La Product Conference and ProdPad. This speaking blitz, combined with a slew of podcast appearances, established a new pipeline of newsletter subscribers.
In 2023, offers started coming in to do tailored coaching and custom workshops, tapping into enterprise L&D budgets. And in 2024, monetization became the focus, with RTB adding paid newsletter plans, launching a paywalled video series, and establishing brand partnerships for sponsored posts. One of the more successful events Ibrahim spoke at in 2024 was ProductCon in New York, where his keynote not only got the highest engagement live but the YouTube video of which has also become an evergreen content asset. This initial success with YouTube is now a focus for 2025, with plans to launch an RTB channel soon.
Scaling Rationale
At the end of 2024, Ibrahim made a decision to treat scaling RTB as his professional priority, which is why he left his operating role as a product executive and has gone all-in on the creator economy. And while there are other product influencers and thought leaders creating content and offering services, Ibrahim has consistently gotten feedback that his domain expertise, executive experience, and storytelling flair make his writing and workshops unique.
Without the workload of a day job, the primary unlock for Ibrahim has been time to create without constraints. The volume and velocity of just the newsletter content is a full-time role, not to mention coordinating guests, nurturing collaborations, vetting partnerships, managing social, producing visuals, editing videos, etc. Ibrahim has offloaded some of the work to an intern volunteer, but to get the quality and consistency of content needed to scale RTB, a small team of contractors is likely required. If Ibrahim continues on RTB full-time, the roadmap for growing it from a solopreneur service to a knowledge destination is clear, albeit sequenced across horizons.
Future Plans
In the immediate term, it would be launching the YouTube channel successfully and professionally to serve as a platform for structured monetization; additionally, RTB needs other growth vectors for new subscriber pipeline other than Substack referrals and LinkedIn followers, and YouTube has the best potential given how quickly the RTB video edition on Substack has taken off. Also, in the near term, more engagement is required to nurture and monetize the existing subscriber base across Substack chat and Slack channels, likely through a dedicated community moderator.
Further out, the corpus of content already created can be leveraged in new ways across different channels; with a talented design partner and the right creative tools, the essays and visuals that are the backbone of RTB can be formatted to fit other mediums like Reddit, Instagram, etc. RTB has also been popping up on LinkedIn as a searched-for term, so establishing and maintaining brand pages on all the major platforms will be necessary. All of this requires either a person or software to manage across social channels. With a seasoned marketer on board, RTB can not only get into a better cadence of virtual events, but also start expanding into in-person experiences; using Ibrahim as a “draw” for community events has already been validated by a handful SaaS companies and their field marketing teams.
And in the long-term experimental bets bucket, there are product ideas galore, including requests from the RTB community. Being a writer at heart, Ibrahim has outlined a book series based on the different topical buckets RTB delves into. One avid supporter is currently building a chatbot to do live Q&A based on the archive of concepts embedded in RTB. There is the potential for RTB-branded templates for tools like Notion and Miro, which can be new growth vectors into established builder communities. At its core, RTB serves as a companion for product builders and distributors who want to tap into the collective wisdom of seasoned operators; today that is accessed through a knowledge portal, eventually it will evolve into a SaaS application, and ultimately and most likely it morphs into an AI agent.
Next Steps
RTB at this stage has activated its core growth engine and is expanding organically as a brand. But with a more concerted strategy and focused execution, it could scale more efficiently and stitch in new flywheels.
Wouldn’t you like to partner and join the community? After all, it’s more fun to Run the Business together...
further reading / references
I’ve written previously about how Writing is Thinking, Creating, Connecting, Compounding, Manifesting, Iterating, and Building
you can see more of me in action speaking here, and if you want to work with me, drop me a note
childish drawing / interpretation
