YATM ✊ | It's People Who Help Move Your Work

Hi YATMers, I’m Glenn Sturgess and I confess to being a copywriter (while I still can), mostly in technology and B2B circles.

Have you ever known the world to be any wonkier or wankier than right now? As more people turn away from digital enshittification and algorithmically mediated slop, I hope communities like YATM will grow even stronger.

Just being here means you’re already winning.

Continue your streak with two recommendations: must-watch ideas that both had profound effects on me back in the day – Hans Rosling on ending poverty and Sir Ken Robinson on killing creativity.

There’s hope for us humans yet.

Let's make sure we connect today.

Let's do the LinkedIn dance here

Where I work here

Small circles beat big audiences when you start and keep going.

Trust and belief are built faster when you’re not practising in public alone.

Have you noticed how the big names know each other?

The same people comment on each other’s posts. See it once, you see it everywhere. It’s the same guests that do the rounds on podcasts. The same work gets shared by the same few, over and over again.

To the rest of us, it can look like there’s a hidden rulebook. Spaces reserved for people who already have credibility, reach, and a head start.

What it shows is that we trust what’s already trusted.

That’s why recommendations work. Being associated with someone else can change how people read your work before they’ve even considered it properly.

This is what it can look like:

- someone vouching for you when you’re not in the room

- someone sharing your work with context, not just a link

- someone saying, “I’d trust this person”

- someone putting your name forward for a panel, a project, a client, a collaboration

If someone already trusts you, you don’t have to prove yourself from scratch and perhaps your next opportunity arrives faster? If someone already backs you publicly, other people relax around you.

Here’s the shift I’m making in how I think about it.

Don’t Chase The Circle. Build Your Own.

Small circles beat big audiences at the start.

Not because you’re trying to engineer attention, but because you’re trying to build belief, in yourself, in your voice, and in the fact that what you’re making is worth continuing with.

Belief is the first thing to disappear when you’re building in public.

It’s hard to keep putting your ideas out there when you feel like you’re speaking into a vacuum and when you don’t know whether anyone is there on the other side.

That’s why small circles matter. They don’t just help your work travel, but they help you keep going.

We have the Creator Lab programme up and running with Bournemouth & Poole College.

This is with apprentices who are just starting out in their careers and between 18 to 20 years of age. One of our tasks is to share the values they live by (when you don’t have years of experience under your belt, you still have principles).

Once everyone has done the task, each person shares their own story on LinkedIn. Rather than posting and walking away and the risk of feeling awkward if no one engages, the team share their URLs with each other and they back each other up with acknowledgment.

Have a look at the work, to see what I mean (maybe you’d like to join in too). Here is Dexter Dickinson and his value, read here. Zhanna Ahmed moved over to the UK from Ukraine, three years ago and this is what Zhanna stands for, read here.

Instead of that feeling of “I’ve posted… now what?” the silence, the second-guessing, the mild embarrassment if nothing happens, the college team experienced the fact that someone noticed. It makes the next piece of work less daunting and even safer.

For the record, this isn’t about encouraging a pod.

I want to make that distinction as it matters.

A pod is performative engagement designed to game a system.

A circle is deliberate support designed to reduce isolation, increase practice, and build belief.

This isn’t about manipulating reach. It’s about making it less lonely to practise in public. That’s a completely different motivation.

What Small Circles Actually Do

When people know others are there for them, they are more willing to make that next step.

People publish sooner and stop polishing the life out of everything. They learn faster because they publish, receive feedback, and refine in motion.

I see a version of this inside YATM Club through our Sense Check sessions. It is centred around people sharing what they haven’t quite brought to life yet, but would like input and thoughts around what they’d like to progress.

The intention is to help people make modifications, stop what they are doing, or just encouragement to progress.

Two things tend to happen when a circle works.

First, people get clearer. Being witnessed and questioned brings the shape out of the fog. When you’re thinking in your own head, everything sounds plausible. When you say it out loud to people who want you to win, reality is useful.

Second, people start to root for each other.

Identity and relationships become more apparent.

What This Means If You’re Building Something For Others

Your best work doesn’t spread by itself. It travels through people.

The alternative to pandering to algorithms is building pockets of trust, spaces where people are there for the right reasons and prepared to stand beside you. It also saves time, money, and energy.

It means your work and ideas start to travel, where it’s the people around you, who give you the propulsion, not the platform.

You can see this in small ways at our Lunch Clubs. After an event, when someone shares their thoughts and photos on LinkedIn, it’s usually the people who were in the room who join in first, to help reach.

It just feels easier when you’re part of a space where people are with you. Those spaces are findableand better still, they’re buildable.

Let’s Round Up

Being part of a close, connected space is about accelerating what you create by not carrying it alone.

I see it in Creator Lab with young adults learning to step up and be seen and then being amplified by people around them.

The real win early on isn’t attention. It’s repetition with support.

My ambition for Creator Lab and for every space built on encouragement, is to help people keep going long enough to become someone worth paying attention to.

You don’t have to keep chasing an audience.

Start by building a circle that makes you braver.

Share this with someone else 💌

youarethemedia.co.uk/build-a-trusted-community-why-small-circles-win-early/

Time Wasting

A website that generates custom walking routes.

Plan A Walk Today

This Week Around The Web

GROWTH, CREATION & YOUR INDEPENDENCE

Accountability helped me write my book - from Jackie Goddard

👉 People on your side, brings your work to life. It happens.

AI-rbitrage - from Jay Clouse

👉 Shortcuts will come and go, but relationships you build are enduring

THE COMMUNITY YOU CAN BUILD

What audiences want in 2026 - from Scan Club

👉 Communities can create their own stories that get stronger as it grows

I opened a bookshop. It was the best, worst thing I’ve ever done - the FT

👉 The dreams we bring to life are full of challenges

GROWING YOUR NEWSLETTER

Turn Instagram comments into email subscribers - from Kit

👉 How to turn a comment into a new subscriber (video)

How to keep good subscribers (and ditch the bad ones) - Dylan Redekop

👉 I bet you work hard to acquire new subscribers too.

Familiarity

Building stronger relationships isn't about, “How do I get noticed?”

It’s playing a small part in someone else’s week or month and giving people something they can come back to.

Keep to the day you send the newsletter. Hold the mainstay in your work. Show up on a Friday when you said you would.

Treat the moments you create as places people can return to.

That’s how people become familiar and come closer to our work.

'26 Lunch Club starts today...

This year marks 10 years of delivering YATM Lunch Club, it's a lot different today, but it makes me realise that you do it, to find out what it is.

We start in Poole today (Thursday) and then start to connect different homes.

Today we will break the World Record for the most high-fives between two people, standing on one foot, touching their own noses, in 10 seconds. I like this post, above, from Toby Martin, yesterday.

Poole | today, the theme is trust, book here

London | Thursday 12th February and the theme is connection, book here

Bristol | Thursday 26th February and the theme is being you, book here

Mel Barfield has a reveal....

We tested out a live podcast at Creator Day '25 and it worked really well. Live recording, audience in place, plenty of photos.

Mel shared in the Indie Business Club email, the plan for May. We're going to close the whole event with a live show, at FOUNDRY, Poole on Friday 15th May, with extra special guests joining in. I'll let Mel share first.

If you haven't booked yet and you'd like to spread it over February, March and April, just reply and here to help.

Use YATMNewsletter to save £20. Book here.