We're Removing The Paywall
What one year of publishing Frontier Fintech has shown us from a commercial perspective and why we're excited about the clarity we're getting.
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We’re removing the Frontier Fintech paywall so everyone can access our content. From next Monday’s edition, Frontier Fintech will be accessible to everyone. After careful consideration, this is the right move for our community and for the long-term health of the business.
Over the last year, about 90% of our revenue has come from sponsorships and advisory, while subscriptions contributed less than 10%, even as we surpassed 100 paid subscribers. Sponsorships (especially Pan-African B2B partners) and bespoke advisory are growing faster than subscriptions.
A paywall also slows audience growth. From our analytics, roughly 1 in 10 people who click “Subscribe” end up actually subscribing - they drop off once they see the different paid options. That significantly throttles growth and therefore the reach of both the media and advisory business. We think that removing the paywall is good for business because it means more subscribers and therefore more advertising revenue. Additionally, each new subscriber is a potential advisory client meaning that removing the paywall helps us cast our net wider.
I’ve been grappling with this decision for sometime and ultimately I think it’s the right one. I always argue in the newsletter that reality is the undefeated world champion. Nonetheless sometimes we fail to heed our own advice. After a few months of having the paywall, it became clear to me that it may simply not work. At the core of it, even some of my most hardcore readers just didn’t subscribe. It wasn’t about the quality of the content or anything, but it's simply not a model that works in the continent. In Africa, we’re not yet at the point where such information or context moves the needle for a large subset of the target audience. For something like Lenny’s newsletter, the extra content can help a product manager become 5% better at their job. For someone who’s earning over US$ 150k per year, US$200 per year for a 5% improvement is a valuable exchange. We’re just not yet there as a continent. Keeping it for the sake of it, just doesn’t make sense.
What makes sense is leaning in to what is working. On one hand, I’ve had some decent success with Newsletter sponsorships. What works is companies particularly in the B2B Fintech space seeking to either educate the market on what they’re doing or growing some awareness. The big barrier to really scaling this revenue line across all platforms is to grow my reach and that’s not easy when there’s a barrier to people subscribing.
On top of this, I’ve also seen some success on the advisory side. At the core of this is a growing asset. I read and write about Fintech all the time. On top of that, through the podcast, I not only speak to some of the most interesting people in the industry, I also get to learn from them. This occurs in two ways; the first is through the immense research that goes into each episode, the second is the actual conversations. In short, Frontier Fintech is a Fintech learning machine that will only compound with time. What this means is that we’re well placed to provide bespoke and high level advisory services to the Pan-African Fintech industry. This can be through;
Market scans and mapping;
Product deep dives - particularly for teams who want to understand where their offering lies within the market;
Co-authoring reports;
Company or industry due diligence for investor teams;
Ongoing fractional support for teams that are building in the space;
Research services;
Strategy support.
Of course amongst a host of other things. The beauty of this within the broader Frontier Fintech context is that we get better with every article, GPS or podcast. It’s a machine that improves itself. Of course, one would say that AI may slow down this growth. However, from my experience, AI is a force multiplier for us. My work so far with AI has shown that the higher-level context that we have is actually the core value driver. I see myself building a lean, productive and world-class advisory business - supported by a swarm of AI researchers doing the grunt-work.
We’re excited about what’s next. Some of our recent advisory work includes:
Mapping the African crypto ecosystem for a leading global VC
Mapping the digital banking ecosystem in Africa for a leading African bank
A market deep-dive for a leading B2B fintech
Market and company due diligence for an emerging late-stage VC
If you think we can be of value, reach out to me on samora@frontierfintech.io.
We’re also thankful to advertising partners like Paymentology, Oradian, Moment, Skaleet, Triage, Little Cab, 10x Banking and others.
This advisory work aligns with our deep-research focus, and we’ll keep building on it. For the media business, we not only provide what I believe is the best Fintech audience in Africa, we also provide context and a narrative arc, a capability that we think is unique to us.
For my paid subscribers, thank you again for believing in Frontier Fintech. I’m committed to creating even more evergreen, high-quality content for you and the broader ecosystem. For all my subscribers, I look forward to finally opening up our vault.