Happenings
SFTW and AgTech Alchemy is holding a joint live webinar “Rethinking Funding Models for AgTech Innovation” featuring Connie Bowen, GP at Farmhand Ventures, and Steve Sprieser, investor in life sciences including agriculture.
I plan to pick their brains on alternative funding models other than the VC model for AgTech. The webinar is on September 9th at 10 AM Pacific. You can register for the webinar here.
Reducing friction to get to the market of ideas
Last year in October, I launched a paid version of the newsletter. Starting from tomorrow, I am dropping the paid subscription and all future content will be free for all subscribers going forward. I want to thank everyone who has supported me on this journey.
From a business model perspective, I have realized the best way to create the most value and the most impact is to share my thoughts with the largest possible audience with the least amount of friction. I can participate in and capture some of the value creation and hopefully get a share of the pie by growing the pie.
For you, the reader, the content is not going to change dramatically. SFTW will still use food, agriculture, and technology as its primary lens to look at the world. You will still continue to get analysis about the technology trends in food and agriculture, with some additional perspectives thrown in.
The paid subscription was an experiment. It has done reasonably well, if I compare it to conversion rates of other newsletters, many of which are in low single digits. (I am not counting corporate subscription numbers, which is a great model to boost paid subscriptions).
The reason to start the paid subscription was to find out if people value the content and the analysis. I believe I have been able to answer the question to my satisfaction based on the higher than median conversion rate to paid compared to other newsletters. This data is hard to get by. I have collected real data from at least 10-15 other newsletters over the last 10 months, many of which are non-ag focused newsletters.
The paid subscription requires one to put something out every week, which can be a challenge in terms of quality (at least for me). A free version of the newsletter gives me more flexibility in terms of when and how I publish new content.
A free version provides me with more flexibility in terms of experimenting with different types of content and formats, which I am very keen to try out. It allows me to go where my interests take me, while still respecting the reader, if they want to join me on that journey.
Given how we access information is changing, (for example, I use LLMs a lot for research now) how people will discover you and how your ideas will have impact is also changing.
I want my thoughts and ideas to be easily accessible to LLMs so that current and future participants in the market of ideas can find them easily. It will give me the creative freedom to do other things like host a webinar, or give talks or help a university improve their tech transfer program, without feeling the pressure or guilt of shortchanging my newsletter subscribers.
Just to be clear, I am not against the paid subscription model. I just feel a free model is a better fit for what I am trying to do.
SFTW will continue with its regular programming and will be back in your Inbox next week.
I once again want to thank you all for your continued support and I hope you will stay with me in the next evolution of SFTW.
Rhishi
If you had signed up for a paid annual subscription, and would like a refund, I totally understand. Just reply to this email, and we can work on a refund together.
For anyone who has a monthly subscription, your credit card will not be charged going forward beyond the current monthly subscription period for you.