Today Grown In is making some changes to our news, reporting and subscription offerings. Before we get to the what, let me explain the why.
When we first launched, Grown In was structured as a free, twice-a-week newsletter, a mix of straight reporting and analysis, with all of our reporting encased in the email. Then, about a year ago we changed our offering so that we were reporting more straight news, but readers had to pay to access the reporting. We also cut out most of our analysis in the process.
A few things happened during this time:
- A few, dedicated souls signed up for our paid reporting;
- Readers kept telling us that they missed our deeper analysis;
- We realized that many times, we were reporting on topics already covered elsewhere;
- We started losing readers of our free email; and
- Most of our readers remained unaware of our other major offering, Grown In Learning, a service to train cannabis employees in multiple states.
Most importantly, we discovered that we were not only not serving what readers really wanted, we also weren’t doing a good job of telling people about the other half of our business.
A bit more on that second point: Yes, Grown In has a large and significant business of regulatory compliance training. We’re licensed in Illinois, Massachusetts, Colorado, and soon Maryland. Thousands of cannabis workers have gone through our training, and we’ve never lost a client – so far everyone has reupped with Grown In Learning. You can learn more our Illinois offerings here.
You can imagine that we want everyone to know what you now know. And we’ve done a insufficient job of that – on top of not getting things right with our news product!
So, starting today we’re doing some things differently. First, we are lifting the paywall on all of our regular reporting and future reporting will be entirely encapsulated in our emails, the way you like it. Second, we’re slimming down to just three reports a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Our new reporting will be a deeper dive than in the past, with more analysis.
Third, every month, we’re going to produce In Depth Reports on a topic or market. We’re kicking that off today with a refreshed edition of our State Fact Sheets, an overview of laws, regulations, and players in CT, DE, IL, MA, MD, ME, MI, MO, NH, OH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, and VT. (Purchase one here.) Next up, at the end of this month we’ll release an In Depth Report on New Jersey. This will include key facts, data, insights from operators, and more.
We’ll be selling those In Depth Reports on an a la carte basis, but also providing them – along with all past reports – for free to our paid annual subscribers (Watch for an email later today). That includes two other popular reports, our Public Company Executive Salary Report, and our Public Company Organization Charts.
While we’re providing past and future In Depth Reports to our annual subscribers, we’re also ending our monthly subscription offering. To ease the pain, we’re providing refunds to monthly subscribers for the months of July and August, since we didn’t report much during that period. Future regular reporting will be free anyway, and we expect the In Depth Reports to be much more valuable than a monthly report would be worth. And yeah, we’re raising our annual subscription rate from $149 to $499. Those of you already with an annual subscription will be grandfathered in, but then when you renew in 2023, you’ll be subject to the new price.
Finally, we’re doing one MORE new thing: We’re launching curated local events, starting with two meetings between Illinois cultivators, dispensaries and infusers in Chicago on September 15 and in Springfield on September 20. If you own one of those three types of licenses, click here to learn more and join us.
So, in short:
- Fewer newsletters that are more in depth and free.
- We’ve lifted the paywall on all past news reporting.
- We’ll be producing monthly In Depth Reports, starting with updated State Fact Sheets. available to non-subscribers for $99.99 today.
- No more monthly subscriptions. We’re giving you last month’s fee back.
- Annual subscriptions get access to all past and future reports, now available for $499.
- Existing annual subscribers get access to reports and don’t have to pay the new subscription price until they renew next year.
Any questions? Please drop me an email at mike@grownin.com. We greatly appreciate your readership and support. More than anything, it’s made this job fun.
Keep reading for our first full, newsletter report…
Sincerely,
Mike Fourcher
Editor
