The Workflow that survived two time zones and one goodbye
How The Workflow went from a Thailand panic attack to 2,450+ subscribers (and what comes next).
Welcome back to The Workflow, the newsletter that uses AI for the grunt work and the heart for everything else.
You probably didn’t expect this issue. I didn’t expect to write it either.
I’m breaking the usual bi-weekly cadence to share a story, and an announcement worth your attention.
The idea that survived a panic attack
Let’s travel back to April 2025.
I’m spending three weeks in Thailand on my own, trying to find some clarity, when a major storm breaks out, and I become fully convinced it is going to flood my bungalow and kill me.
I was shaking.
Not exactly the best moment to hop on my first real call with Diandra Escobar, someone I’d been following on LinkedIn for a while, commenting back and forth, never properly spoken to.
We stayed beyond the hour. It turned out to be the best thing I could do in that moment, because without knowing it, she stopped me from going down a spiral of googling past flood history in Thailand and saying my last prayer.
Between the storm anxiety and the feeling of being stuck at my job, I told her I had this idea for a newsletter that had been living rent-free in my head for a year.
I wanted to understand what was happening to marketing and GTM as AI entered the chat, past the daily hot takes, feature announcements, and the endless hype that was killing me.
I wanted to discover how people were using AI tools in practice, how their processes and roles had changed, and to counter the misleading advice spreading on social media.
I also wanted a reason to spend less time doom-scrolling on LinkedIn and more time talking to people who were building interesting things with AI.
But I knew I couldn’t do it alone.
Diandra told me she was running a LinkedIn ghostwriting agency she had been building under the radar for months, heads-down in client work. She recognised every frustration I had with the AI hype wave, and also regretted not taking email seriously earlier.
The vision clicked.
We clicked even more.
And suddenly, The Workflow became a concept with a timeline and a purpose. It finally moved out of my head and onto a Google Doc.
“Let’s fu****g do it.”
How the Workflow was born
What followed was a lot of iteration that nobody ever saw.
Diandra created the visual identity, which gave legs to the big idea behind The Workflow: that the human behind the tech is always the real driver of any outcome.
I drafted the first newsletter MVP.
We created a kanban board to keep the content ops on track. Week after week, we adjusted: tightened the format, improved the visuals, started lining up people from our network who were doing remarkable work, and figured out how to promote the newsletter without making it feel like promotion.
We discovered each other’s strengths by building it together.
In August, we created The Workflow’s Substack account and announced it on LinkedIn. 500 souls gave us their email before the first issue went live in October.
What most people don’t realize is that a good newsletter runs exactly like a product. It requires product development, R&D, sales, and constant promotion, most of which is invisible to anyone reading it.
Sixteen issues later, over 2,450 people trust us with their inbox. Every time I refresh the subscriber count, someone new has found their way to us.
⚠️ PSSSSSSSS: Want to be featured on The Workflow or know somebody we should absolutely interview?
101 different time zones
Not even a month after the first issue went live, we got to hang out at the Semrush conference in Amsterdam. If you have spent enough time online, you know how this goes: you end up talking to some people more than people you see in real life, and in some cases, you get a cold shower once you meet them in person.
Not in this case. Diandra’s live version was even better than the one I got to see through a screen, and also much taller.
Since then, we’ve been running the whole thing across time zones, Zurich to Colombia, except Diandra switches continents roughly every other month, so we were almost always in different time zones regardless. Coordinating interviews, having calls at unreasonable hours, and making decisions asynchronously.
We overcame every hurdle because we always came back to the same principles: strong respect for each other and the focus on maintaining our friendship intact. Every win had a better taste when shared, and the hard moments never turned too sour.
Including the hardest one. A few weeks back, she told me she had decided to step back from The Workflow to focus on her other projects.
The sadness was there for both, but the gratitude was much stronger.
Finding a real friend on the internet is harder than building any workflow we have ever documented.
The next chapter of The Workflow
So now, I feel like I am standing in an empty flat that I get to furnish and arrange for myself. Very scary and quite exciting at the same time.
I want to do so many things!
I want to write more AI playbooks and find the people doing exceptional work with AI who are not posting templates on LinkedIn, the way it has been with Joni, Mina or Clay.
I want to collaborate more with writers from Substack to reach new audiences and open the door to recurring contributors. A few people have already asked.
And in August, I am starting a new chapter alongside it. I’ll be dedicating most of my time to finding out where AI and editorial quality can meet: how to build AI-native content workflows without losing your voice, your soul, and your standards in the process.
All of it will feed directly into future issues. I cannot wait to share the news with you.
⚠️ Fair warning:
I am European. Do not expect much before the end of August. There are laws against unnecessary brain cell activity during a summer like this one.
It does not matter how many more people I interview. The thesis I had back in April 2025 has been validated over and over. If you think AI can replace marketing, it just means you never understood what marketing was in the first place.
What AI does is expose the gap between people who had a solid GTM strategy and the ones who just wrote about it on LinkedIn.
As long as The Workflow exists, it will help you stay on the right side of that gap.
Thank you for trusting me as your editor and anti-AI hype officer going forward.
Sara Stella ✌🏼