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Superpath Q2 2026 Quarterly Update and AMA · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
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• 0:12
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• 0:53
  That's less time managing tools, more time creating content people actually wanna watch. Learn more at wistia.com/superpath. That's wistia.com/superpath. Welcome. Alex here.
• 1:05
  This is our second quarterly State of Superpath, so that means I am jumping on here solo to talk about what's happening in the community, where we are headed, and to take questions that Superpath Pro members submitted.
• 1:20
  So we'll get into wins, experiments, stuff that worked and didn't work, and all of your questions.
• 1:26
  I'm gonna start with the numbers and kind of a quick reflection on the past quarter, and then we will jump into the AMA segment. Okay.
• 1:35
  By the numbers, it's been just over six months since I took over Superpath, and it really feels like time has flown there.
• 1:42
  As of this recording, we're at 320 Pro members, and the broader Superpath community, our audience is 12,500. If you have been paying close attention, that actually sounds like it's a lot fewer people in the audience.
• 1:57
  That's a little bit by design. We moved our newsletter over to Beehiiv a few months ago, and had the chance to clean up the list.
• 2:03
  Over six years of this newsletter, we have obviously pulled in a lot of junk and duplicate emails, so we gave people an opportunity to open emails if they hadn't been lately, but then removed everybody else that hadn't opened in three months.
• 2:19
  Now, we have an awesome active list that I think is more reflective of the actual number of folks in our audience, with an open rate of 50%, which is awesome.
• 2:28
  While we're on the subject of the newsletter, this has been so awesome lately. Eric has done just... He's such a good writer.
• 2:34
  [chuckles] A fun fact is that when people reply to the newsletter, it actually goes to the team inbox, and I forward them all to Eric.
• 2:42
  And the number of emails we get these days that are just like, "This is the most amazing subject line I've ever seen," it's incredible. Eric's doing an awesome job there. All right, moving on to the quarter.
• 2:52
  So first up is the Member Hub. This is the thing I'm most excited about shipping this past quarter. We launched it a couple months ago as a one-stop shop for everything in Pro that lives outside of Slack.
• 3:04
  Slack's great for conversation, but it's a hard place to host anything else, event recordings, courses, subscription management, and there were a bunch of different places you had to go to find things in the community.
• 3:14
  So the Member Hub is the answer to, "I need this thing. It's not in Slack. Where do I go for that?"
• 3:20
  So it's got all of those things like quick links, but also directory and a kind of profile for who all's in the group, how to navigate Slack, all that stuff is in there. It's just the base of what we're building here.
• 3:33
  So much more yet to come. If you're in Pro and haven't checked it out, make sure that you do. Touching base on onboarding, last quarter I said we were overhauling onboarding. We've shipped a lot there, kinda quietly.
• 3:44
  New members that land in the community have a much clearer path now. The Member Hub is a big part of that. It helps you kind of navigate and see what all is going on at once.
• 3:52
  There's still a lot we're working on in that space, but it's a project that we keep moving ahead on. Change My Mind. So we brought a new event concept in this past quarter.
• 4:01
  Rachel Beacha joined us to host an event called Change My Mind. The concept is to take two or three hot takes, put them on the table, and have a nuanced conversation a- about them.
• 4:12
  And the format has been really, really good so far. I'm gonna get into this a little bit more later in the AMA, so I'll keep that short here.
• 4:20
  Challenges are another area that we are continuing to iterate on and figure out the ones that stick that, and that don't, so kind of just a reminder as we had these awesome LinkedIn challenges that people participated in, where you post on LinkedIn every day and hype everybody up.
• 4:35
  We have been exploring other things beyond LinkedIn to work on, so this quarter we did Write For Yourself, we did an AI workflow sprint, and a cold outreach sprint.
• 4:46
  Big props to AK Young, who has stepped in to kind of run the challenges each month. We're learning which kinds land still.
• 4:53
  A couple lessons that we have so far is that time is a constraint, so if we're asking you to do, to commit to a challenge that might take 10 hours, like, that's probably not gonna land as well as something that's, like, very easy to accomplish.
• 5:06
  If we do something too niche that's probably not a priority for you, our interest drops off a little bit. I think it's very cool that we create these small group accountability groups.
• 5:14
  I don't think it needs to be, like, the whole community participates in the challenge, but still exploring, like, the buckets of things that work well and don't there. In real life events.
• 5:23
  I've been talking about doing in-person events for a long time, and this past quarter we finally did our first six of them. So we had happy hours in Salt Lake City, Denver, Seattle, London, and Lisbon.
• 5:35
  The big secret here is a lot of these were cities I was already traveling to, so I used those trips as a testing ground. I've loved doing these, and there's clearly real demand.
• 5:44
  Meeting you, so many of you in person, has been one of the best parts of this quarter, and just, like- Truly, some of you traveled over two hours to show up, which blew me away.
• 5:55
  That said, I'm still rethinking the format here.
• 5:58
  E- each event has been a lot of planning, promotion, and logistics for a small group, and the ROI is tough to justify on both the time and money front, especially if I were to, like, fly somewhere specifically where we only have a handful of pro members.
• 6:12
  One of the hardest parts is finding the right venue and not knowing if, like, six people are gonna show up or 15.
• 6:17
  In almost every city we went to, there was somebody I was really excited to meet who couldn't make it that night.
• 6:22
  And so it's just, like, one of those things that's like, oh, you know, I'm gonna spend some money to go travel to this city where we just have a few people, and it's just like you gotta pick a night, and not everybody can make it that night.
• 6:31
  So I'm not gonna commit to another big tour here, but I'm excited about potentially doing a member-led model 'cause it means we can show up in any city, and not just the ones I can fly to. We tested that out in May.
• 6:43
  Vlada hosted an awesome meetup in Warsaw. She's the only pro member there, but put together a group of eight content marketers from around the city. If you wanna host something in your city, please reach out to me.
• 6:53
  I'm thinking potentially about a repeatable New York event, since it's our biggest metro and I'm here and I can run it without a lot of setup and find, like, one event space that works over and over.
• 7:02
  That might be in the works for this fall. If you are traveling to New York, I'd love to meet up also. Like, I think there's opportunities to do one-on-one things as well.
• 7:11
  Mo just came through New York a few weeks ago, and we had a great time. So if you're ever in New York or hear that I'm headed to your city, please let me know. I'd love to connect one-on-one.
• 7:19
  Before I move on to what's next, I wanna read something a member sent me a few weeks ago because it says what I'm going for better than what I can.
• 7:29
  So here's what they wrote: "Social Hour is such a good time spent, and I'm mad my work calendar is starting to prevent me from attending future ones.
• 7:37
  AI Show & Tell and Change My Mind have been intellectually stimulating, and the caliber of conversations across the various channels in this Slack is hardest to describe, but I frequently feel enlightened, inspired, and smarter from them."
• 7:50
  Reading this when this was sent made my week, obviously. That's the goal right there in one message.
• 7:55
  It's exactly what I mean when I talk about building something that respects your time and actually makes you better at your job.
• 8:01
  And the part about the work calendar is something that we are working on, just being better about getting recordings and recaps up really fast so that you can get value from the events even if you can't make it live.
• 8:12
  All right. On to what's next. First up, podcast reset. I said last quarter that podcast updates were coming. They are still coming, and they are much more imminent, actually, just in the next few weeks.
• 8:25
  We did test a few new things last quarter. So Rachel came on for a series based on her blog, The Art of Content, interviewing people who write about content marketing.
• 8:35
  We did four or five of those, but also partway through the quarter, I realized it would be better to do...
• 8:41
  I think I had this concept of doing, like, a bunch of different series within the podcast, and then realized it would be a little bit operationally difficult to pull that off and just still it didn't give the podcast, like, a full identity on its own.
• 8:57
  So I pivoted a little bit to a new concept that we are going to be working on in the next few weeks. I think our first one's probably gonna be in mid-July.
• 9:07
  As a community, we aren't limited in the way that maybe your company is, where it's like, "Oh, we gotta bring on customers and hype them up." Like, we can really get creative with what we wanna do.
• 9:17
  So in our reset, instead of a single interview, we will have a group of our content friends. So like, you know, all the usual characters, Eric and Chloe. Rachel's gonna be on there. Jimmy's gonna join when he can.
• 9:27
  We'll have a few other folks, but picture, like, a four to five-person discussion. A lot more dynamic and a lot more voices from the community. So there is an operational piece too.
• 9:37
  We're getting to a more repeatable process, recording on the same day, tightening the workflow.
• 9:42
  It's not gonna feel like a giant relaunch on the outside, but under the hood though, it's a really big step for us, and you'll see a more consistent format there. All right. Less launching and more iterating.
• 9:53
  One thing I'm committing to next quarter is launching fewer things. The first six months were a lot of experimentation and a lot of new launches, and now we've got a really good set of programs.
• 10:04
  And I wanna focus on making them better instead of adding a whole lot more.
• 10:08
  My goal is to look back three months from now and say, "That thing is twice as good as it was before," whether that's the podcast, the Member Hub, the events, all of it.
• 10:16
  Member Hub in particular I think is gonna look completely different three months from now. Events will get better cadence and a lot more polish, I think, if I'm looking back three months from now. All right.
• 10:25
  On to the questions. "How has your perspective on content marketing evolved since you took over? Is there hope for the field, or are we all just quietly avoiding the uncertainty?" I'm optimistic about content marketing.
• 10:38
  I think I've consistently said that. Obviously, there are a lot of things changing.
• 10:43
  I would say specifically to this question, I don't think a lot has changed about the direction we're headed, at least in the last six months, that wasn't already in motion a year or two ago.
• 10:53
  I think a lot of the things that are coming, we've seen coming for a little bit now. So I don't think my read on it has changed dramatically. There are a few different paths opening up for content marketers.
• 11:03
  Like, I think the role is going to look very different. Two things that I find really interesting. One is that I think AEO is shaping up to be a little bit of a different discipline than SEO.
• 11:13
  So we've got a lot of AEO, SEO jobs popping up, but old school SEO, which is the background of a lot of you, find keywords, write a bunch of blog posts to cover them, do some link building.
• 11:24
  More than half the job was actually writing, and I think with AEO, that's a little bit different.
• 11:29
  It's a little more technical, not in the engineering sense, but in the fact that there's more moving pieces, and the answer is usually not just write more to solve, uh, AEO.
• 11:40
  So I think that's very interesting that if you're moving into AEO, that seems like a move away from writing being the core of the job.
• 11:48
  Another thing that kinda stands out to me that I'm seeing is that- I think this community, myself included, still, this is one of my hotter takes, still undervalues multimedia.
• 11:58
  So I think video especially, I think it's becoming a lot more of an expected skill, and it's something I'm trying to get more comfortable with myself as I sit here looking at myself on a video recording this podcast and trying to decide if we should do video podcasts.
• 12:12
  We'll be digging into this on a future episode, but I would say in general, that is a direction I find very interesting and one I want to bring into the fold of Superpath a little bit more. All right.
• 12:23
  What are the ultimate wins you want from Superpath to help members achieve?
• 12:28
  I always come back to our three pillars on this kind of question, kind of created each one as a jobs to be done statement with a win behind each of them. So one is find your pillar.
• 12:37
  When you feel like no one at work understands what you do, I wanna be around people so I can feel like I belong somewhere professionally. The second pillar is stay ahead.
• 12:47
  When the job is changing and I'm not sure what's working anymore, I wanna learn from people figuring it out in real time, so I can stay relevant without falling behind. And three is grow together.
• 12:56
  When I'm trying to move forward in my career but feel stuck doing it alone, I want people in my corner so I can actually make progress. And that last one looks a little bit different depending on who you are.
• 13:06
  If you're a freelance, the win might be more clients or a LinkedIn pod that amplifies your work. If you're in-house and things aren't going well, it might be landing your next role.
• 13:17
  But everything that we do in the community should tie back to one of these three pillars, and if it doesn't, then we probably shouldn't be doing it. All right. What's your long-term vision for the directory?
• 13:29
  Obviously, I've talked already about the member hub as something I'm really excited about. The directory is really a core piece of that.
• 13:36
  So backstory on this, I've kept my own internal directory of members for all six months I've been leading Superpath, and when you become a pro member, after your trial and once you make your first payment, we go in and actually populate your profile with everything that we can find that's public about you so that you don't have to build it yourself.
• 13:54
  It's just there, and it's, like, built in the system, so we know who you are and what your skills are, and we can start to use that. And a few months ago, we launched our member-facing version of the directory.
• 14:05
  First and foremost, it's a place for members to find each other. So picture an in-house member who wants to hire a freelancer.
• 14:12
  Maybe they posted jobs and gigs today, but in the future they might wanna reach out to a few people specifically.
• 14:18
  The directory makes that possible and links to your actual contributions, your podcast appearances, blog posts, AI show-and-tell appearances, so people can actually see the work you're doing and what you're talking about.
• 14:28
  Longer term, I'd love an external version. We're already seeing people sign up for a pro trial purely to hire people, so they post a gig, find someone, and leave before the trial ends.
• 14:41
  Right now, that's fine, and they are okay to have in the community, but that tells me there's a actual demand on the hiring side, and I wanna think about a more thoughtful way to bring those folks in. Okay.
• 14:53
  Here's a fun one. If I had an unlimited budget, what would I be building for Superpath?
• 15:00
  I would probably just use that budget to hire a hundred of you to build up the media business into, like, a really big publication covering the content marketing world with the community still operating underneath that.
• 15:14
  I really love the idea of Superpath being a client or employer for members, particularly when somebody's between jobs and we can bring them in for the interim. We're doing a, a little bit of this right now.
• 15:24
  It's been fun to be able to bring on a few community members to help out with the podcast and media, but with an unlimited budget, I think I'd be thinking a lot bigger about what we could do there.
• 15:36
  How do you get people to actually participate, and how do I decide to... what to test? Participation, I think, starts with cadence.
• 15:45
  I want you to know what to expect, like, what happens weekly, what happens monthly, what happens quarterly, and once a year. And I think that's why you know what's coming and can plan better around it.
• 15:54
  We've landed in a really good spot with one-on-ones every month and challenges too, and about a event per week between the Superpath Social, AI Show&Tell, monthly AMA, and Change My Mind.
• 16:06
  That's four events a month, which feels really right. The biggest participation challenge is time zones and calendars. I think I've talked about that before. Some people just can't make the calendar slots.
• 16:16
  So a big focus this year or the back half of this year is getting recordings and recaps out really fast so that you still can benefit from the events even if you can't make it live.
• 16:26
  On the testing front, I'd say the hardest part is prioritizing. I've got ten million ideas. Figuring out the right one for the moment is the biggest challenge.
• 16:35
  So when we do try something, I put it out there and up front. That's just kind of like, "This is an experiment.
• 16:41
  We're gonna see if it works, or if it doesn't, we will, you know, ditch it and try something else," 'cause again, we have a million different ideas out there.
• 16:48
  And I think the key thing there is we wanna see if there's something magical that is worth iterating on. Change My Mind is the perfect example. I brought Rachel in, and I said, "Hey, I wanna do a fourth event per month.
• 17:00
  I think we need one more event." I called it New Event, and I said, "Let's get really experimental with this. Let's try some new concepts." And the first new concept was Change My Mind.
• 17:10
  So the idea was that this quarter we're gonna have three different concepts that we tried out, and then we would reflect on that after three months and see which one made the most sense.
• 17:19
  But after the first Change My Mind, we kinda ditched that plan and said, "There's something here. Something felt really good about what we were providing here." It was, like, a really nice balance.
• 17:29
  It was kind of like the high level conversation versus the AI Show&Tell being very tactical.
• 17:34
  It just felt like it fit there and that there was enough to build on, and so we decided to not try out new concepts and to just focus on Change My Mind. What's the best way to give me feedback, good or bad?
• 17:48
  Any channel works. My email, the team email, Slack DM I'm looking for it everywhere.
• 17:54
  The richest feedback I usually get is in the one-on-one conversations I have with y'all, because I can actually understand where you're coming from and, like, ask follow-up questions and get what is behind your feedback.
• 18:05
  The other place I'd like to point you to is the Building Superpath channel in Slack, which we launched a couple months ago. That's kind of a space for, you know, I ship things there.
• 18:15
  Think of it as kind of shipping beta versions on things to try to get feedback. And so, perfect example there is that the directory, I shared that there a week before I shared it with everybody else.
• 18:26
  There were a few things about the UI that were kind of confusing in the directory, and people gave me feedback there. It was great. I was able to make a few tweaks before I shipped it to everybody else.
• 18:36
  That sort of stuff is really, really impactful. So if you wanna get really involved in feedback, Building Superpath, the Slack channel, is worth checking out.
• 18:45
  "There seem to be fewer jobs and gigs in the channel than two years ago. Is that because companies have to pay to advertise now?" So short answer there is actually no. If anything, there's fewer paid job promotions now.
• 18:58
  I pulled most of that off.
• 18:59
  We're rebuilding the job board, and I think Eric shared a little bit about this, but thinking about how job filling works today, which I think looks very different than the way it looked two to three years ago, and how we might play a role in that in the future.
• 19:14
  On the volume question, I can't speak specifically to two years ago, but, I mean, it was a very different community back then.
• 19:20
  We had a lot of free members, and so there was just, like, a lot going on and maybe more posts, but also, like, a lot more noise. It has been quiet, I think, the past month or so.
• 19:31
  I chalk that up to it's a very quiet time of year in the summer, not a lot of hiring going on. But I was actually... In my mind, there was a lot in the spring. We had pretty active jobs and gigs channel.
• 19:43
  I still think there's more things we could do, and again, that's kind of... Not committing to anything right now.
• 19:47
  Obviously, I didn't talk about job board stuff in the intro here, but I do think there's more stuff that you will see in the next few months around supporting jobs and gigs and seeing how we can get better flow into that channel.
• 20:01
  All right, I had one more question sneak in that did not make my notes document. It came in just about an hour ago, so I'm gonna try to answer it live. "I'm actually curious about the transition from free to paid.
• 20:14
  I know Jimmy was running things then, but I've been talking to another community about possibly going paid. I think they should.
• 20:20
  I guess my question is, how has the business changed since going paid only, and is there anything you think we're missing by not having a free tier?"
• 20:30
  I think talking to most of you, everybody was really happy with the move to fully paid. The big thing is that we can just focus on providing a really, really good product. We can invest in the community a lot more.
• 20:43
  I know in talking to Jimmy, just the way you're able to spend time, he was doing a whole lot of spam management, dealing with bad actors in the space.
• 20:52
  Like, that took up a huge chunk of time in the free community, which took away from building out the community product.
• 20:58
  So I'd say paid just allows us to better invest in the community, and then what I've heard from you all is that it's just a nice vetting mechanism, I think. You know, we get people come in.
• 21:10
  We get people still trying to do spam. I think we have the free trial, which allows you to get around that, but you do have to put down a credit card, and it really is so much vetting in its own.
• 21:22
  It's like it opts in the people that are really dedicated to it. So that move has been very positive, I think, across the board for everyone. Are we missing something with free?
• 21:31
  I don't think a generic free thing, but kind of back to the thread that I was pulling on before, I do think there's some opportunity to engage with people trying to use our community to hire folks, and allowing them a space to come in and post their jobs to the Superpath community or use the directory in some way.
• 21:53
  Trying to figure out what that might look like, but if we do anything that's, like, free or a lower tier, it would be something there. I think that'd be the big thing. All right, so that's the AMA for this quarter.
• 22:04
  Thanks again for the questions. Keep them coming, and keep the feedback coming too. The whole thing gets better when you tell me what's working and what's not. That is our State of Superpath for this quarter.
• 22:14
  On the podcast specifically, keep an eye out over the next few weeks. The new format, I'm really excited about this new format. It's landing soon.
• 22:21
  I just did yesterday our first script for the new format, and I'm really, really excited about it. It's gonna be more voices, real conversations, and I think just, like, a different energy in the audio form.
• 22:33
  If you're listening and you're not in Superpath Pro yet, obviously come check out what it's about. There's a free trial, superpath.co.
• 22:39
  The best way to kinda understand it is to just be in there a few weeks, jump into Slack, come to a social hour, sit in on a Change My Mind, and that's kinda where the magic happens.
• 22:49
  So before I go, I wanna give a few thank yous for the quarter. Thank you to Rachel Beacha for joining the content team this quarter, experimenting with the podcast, and running Change My Mind.
• 23:00
  Thank you as always to the whole Superpath team, Eric, Jimmy, and Chloe. AK Young for some help on the operations side of the business and for stepping in to lead challenges this quarter.
• 23:10
  And thank you to our space hosts this past quarter, Brenda, Tanaz, Lisa, Michelle, along with our ongoing hosts of Ronnie, Carol, and Anna.
• 23:17
  You've been a huge part of what makes this work, and I know I didn't talk about spaces too much, but that's 'cause it's something that we really kind of got into a rhythm this past quarter. So no news on that front.
• 23:29
  One very last big thank you to Anton. Anton has been the host of AI Show & Tell for the better part of this last year, and he has done such a fantastic job with it.
• 23:40
  AI Show & Tell has really been a program that I think is a model for the kinds of programs and events that we want to be running in Superpath, something that's vulnerable, authentic, really in touch with the changing landscape of what we're being asked to do as content marketers.
• 23:57
  And he has found some awesome people to be a part of that, and will actually be transitioning off next month as the host. We will be continuing to do AI Show & Tell.
• 24:10
  Eric will be leading it in the future, but I wanted to give a special thank you to Anton for all the work he has put into that. So that's it for our Superpath Q2 update.
• 24:23
  Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you soon. [outro music]