🌱 Regenerative agriculture is sprouting new opportunities

Happy Trends Tuesday!

Today we’ve got:

• 1 trend alert

• 1 piece of operator wisdom

• 1 startup you should know about

• 4 tabs we have open

Let's get to it.

🚨 TREND ALERT

Regenerative agriculture is a type of farming focused on replenishing the land, decreasing chemical usage, and sequestering carbon from the air into the soil.

We first covered it in January of 2020; since then, search volume has continued to grow, along with investment and startups in the space.

A key factor driving this trend is the carbon market. Regenerative farms can sell credits for the carbon they sequester. This incentivizes farmers, who are often looking to pad thin margins, and is attractive to companies trying to offset their carbon footprints.

Farmers need help in a few key areas, though:

• Marketplaces: Startups have come forward to create marketplaces where farmers can receive and sell carbon credits. However, adoption is still low, which smells like opportunity. And of course, fraud is always a concern. So, find a way to verify the source/scarcity of carbon credits (blockchain, maybe?) and you have waiting customers.
  
  
• Measuring: Farmers also need tools to measure the carbon they’re sequestering. Startups tackling this so far include YardStick and Perennial. Still, more scalable solutions are needed.
  
  
• Distribution: Regenerative farms are often smaller, and have a harder time getting their products on shelves. Brands are popping up to aggregate meats from small ranches and pack, ship, and shelve them in bigger grocery stores. This type of business aims to reduce emissions by keeping food local — so competition is geographically bounded. There will likely be opportunities to create similar businesses across many geographies.

🎤 PERFECT PITCH DECK TEMPLATES

🧠 OPERATOR WISDOM

Polina Marinova Pompliano has come to master the art of profiling well-known figures in business and life.

Polina started her newsletter, The Profile, in February 2017 as a way to share her favorite profiles with her family and friends.

She left her job as a journalist for Fortune magazine in 2020 to commit all her time to The Profile, and has since been able to grow it to 100k subscribers. More than replacing her previous salary.

Here are her revenue streams:

1. Premium subscriptions. Polina writes a free newsletter that goes out every Sunday, showcasing her favorite pieces of the week. But she also has a premium option which includes podcasts and video recommendations, and deep dives on a specific person that Polina has profiled. She estimates that this accounts for around 85% of the revenue from the business.
   
   
2. Sponsorships. Polina used to run more sponsors in her newsletter, but there aren’t many these days. She has mentioned in interviews that she only runs sponsors if she uses the product and/or trusts the company.
   
   
3. Licensing deals. A lucrative revenue stream that is often ignored. Polina has deals with a few platforms where they publish her content, give attribution, and pay a fee. As a side note, she also has deals with other media outlets that don’t pay, but are able to publish due to their size and distribution.

🔥 STARTUP YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT

Have you gone for a dip in the ocean this summer and surfaced looking like a seaweed Medusa?

That’s because there are millions of tons of seaweed in our oceans, leading to a whole bunch of smelly problems.

The answer?

According to the climate tech startup Seaweed Generation: autonomous seaweed-sinking robots.

Read more on The Hustle blog about how the startup is using them to clear the waters and tackle climate change. 

OPEN TABS

❓ Your next move: Is becoming an entrepreneur right for you?

🤖 AI HR: Predictions on how AI might change skills-based hiring. 

🎧 Podcast: How serial founder Sam Parr researches and validates million-dollar business ideas.

👊 Founder power: How one entrepreneur went from underestimated to a $360m exit.

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