Build Your Own Audience While You Still Have a Job
12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
Let's start with the part nobody enjoys saying out loud: the last several years of enterprise technology have been full of layoffs that had nothing to do with performance. Whole sales teams cut because a segment got deprioritized. Territories dissolved in a reorg. Solid reps let go sixty days after a president's club trip, because a board wanted a different number on a slide.
Layoffs across enterprise technology have repeatedly had nothing to do with performance, which makes an owned professional audience a hedge worth building while you don't need it - because it's a slow asset that can't be assembled in the thirty days after a badge stops working.
LinkedIn is the right place to start but isn't sufficient: it never hands you your subscriber list, so a parallel email list on Substack or Mailchimp is what makes the audience genuinely portable. Publishing one issue to both takes about ninety seconds, and every benefit lands in your current job first.
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