by When Farmers Guardian was acquired in 2021, it needed a reboot. Investing time in understanding your customers’ situation compounds growth.
AgriConnect recently told ‘A Media Operator’ that the business is “on course for increased revenue and profit, driven by the digital growth across media advertising, sponsorship and memberships.”
Digital-only subscriber numbers have grown 119% year-on-year. The print audience renews at around 90% annually. EBITDA up 10.9% year-on-year. Revenue shifting from 91% print in 2024 to 85% in 2025, with a 75:25 target now in sight. Events account for 50% of both revenue and profit. In other words, this is a business with a stable base, an accelerating new revenue stream, and improving margins.
Back in 2023, I was called in to help fix a problem. When I started the Substribe discovery sprint, Farmers Guardian had a digital product and some personas in mind. What it didn’t have was a clear picture of who it was for, or what those people needed it to do.
I ran interviews and pricing tests. When I put the existing product descriptions in front of the audience, they couldn’t follow what was being offered. The copy described features. These farmers needed to know whether the product would make them better at running a farm.
I created a new proposition from those conversations. I called it Farm Futures. The team adopted it and Farm Futures is still the premium anchor of the product today.
Farm Futures is a premium membership tier positioned explicitly around profitable farming. Every benefit maps to how a commercially minded farmer uses information. How they want to know about changes affecting the business of farming. Go deep on the topics that matter to farmers adapting for profitability. Exchanging ideas with peers to share knowledge and learn from real case studies. And feel part of something bigger. At events, Farm Futures members get exclusive access at the events they already attend to make commercial decisions.
The pitfall of opinion led product roadmaps
Every B2B information business runs the risk of falling into the trap of making product without connecting it to product value. In the rush for data and moats, it can be tempting to take a “shortcut” of building products without sense checking with customers. But when a product is built around internal assumptions, with copy written for the people who made it, not the people who need to buy it, and a pricing structure that reflects what the business thinks it can charge, rather than what the customer can see value in…
The fix is the same in every case. Go and ask and listen. Find the segment worth building for. Build the proposition around what they say, not what you assume. But don’t think you’ll get the same results if you do it yourself. When you send in people to do the job for you, make sure they have experience in creating selling and renewing information products. Not just research experience, or pricing strategy built away from the customer and your teams who you expect to make the thing work.
Substribe’s Andy Burden runs customer and pricing discovery sprints for B2B information and media businesses – from start to finish.
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