It's Time.

Caffeine is switching to a paid-subscriber platform. Please come with us 🙏🏻

Okay, we’re going to level with you. We need your support.

From this week, we’ve made Caffeine’s content paid-subscriber-only.

Just $15 a month will keep you at the forefront of what’s happening in our blossoming sector, and keep this good ship sailing.

James, Lauren & Finn

Well, nobody told us media was going to be easy.

But boy has it been tough.

Over the past year we’ve launched Caffeine, grown it to over 8,000 monthly readers (yes you, you beautiful things) and over 2,000 subscribers, published hundreds of articles, newsletters and other content, provided a home for the many podcasts created by our startup community, and given a voice to the many founders who’ve had few local outlets through which to share their story.

We believe it’s important work. We believe that content and community are critical to our startup founders knowing about, learning from, and being able to make the most of each other and the ecosystem that’s there to support them.

We believe that in turn, this will make for a more successful startup community, producing more companies that grow faster, become more valuable, and deliver significant financial returns back to our founders, their teams, their investors and Aotearoa New Zealand.

We know others, probably including you, believe this too.

But we’ve also learned from the hundreds of meetings and pitches we’ve had with potential partners, sponsors, advertisers, or others who could provide financial support, that finding budget to support Caffeine is a long hard battle.

To be clear – those people have all expressed genuine enthusiasm for Caffeine. Most of them love and value what we do, and have been generous in non-financial ways. But helping us where we really need it rarely finds its way across the line.

The change of government has seen the support for startups, technology and innovation decimated, so where there may once have been support from Wellington, that’s no longer the case.

Over this first year, we’ve done everything we can to ensure the people who’ve done the hard work researching, writing our stories, generating our content, maintaining our platform and having those hundreds of meetings and pitches have been paid fairly for that work.

That’s been the result of our team putting their hands deep into their own pockets, with the belief that others would eventually choose to join us.

And today, that’s what we need to ask you to do.

From Monday 4 November, most of Caffeine’s content will only be available to paid subscribers. All of our subscribers, both paid and unpaid, will continue to receive a partial Daily Shot email and be able to access caffeinedaily.co – but only our paid subscribers will be able to read past the headlines and intros, get the full Daily Shot, and access our most valuable content.

And we believe that it is valuable content – if you’re engaged in New Zealand’s startup ecosystem and make a living from it, $15 a month is a pretty reasonable ask in exchange for you staying across all that’s happening and maintaining a professional level of up-to-date-ness.

Only Caffeine provides this – the scraps and straws that other news media throw out from time to time are no way to keep up to date with the insane amount of awesome things going on in our startup community.

We’re also enabling comments and chat to paid subscribers, so that we can connect with each other and each others’ knowledge, in a safe environment, more easily.  

With your support we’ll also be able to provide deeper insight into the startup sector in New Zealand, via both our own surveys and the data of partners – giving paid subscribers a single source of truth of the shape, mood and direction of the ecosystem.

So please, if you’re a free subscriber, hit that ‘Upgrade to Paid’ button and help keep this good thing alive.

Beyond that, if you believe in the value of Caffeine and are in a position to support us, consider the following options:

• If you’re a founder who’s made it all the way and wants to give back to help others achieve what you’ve achieved, consider becoming a founding member. Your annual membership fee of $585 (or any donation above that 👊) will enable us to keep journalists employed, and keep them focused on a genuinely additive yet underserved part of our economy.

• If you lead a startup, VC, ecosystem support business, or business consulting firm, buy a subscription for your whole team. The more they know about the community around them and the more they learn about how startup really works, the more valuable they’ll be to you. Yes there’s a group discount 🥳.
  

• If you’re a corporate (big or little), come on as a sponsoring partner. Be seen as a brand that’s a genuine part of our startup ecosystem. Or own a day – your brand could own Monday’s Daily Shot on Caffeine. You’ll be the one showing up every Monday getting the startup community into the week. Or Tuesday. Or Friday 🎉 !

However you support us, do so knowing that you’re actively contributing to making our incredible startup community even better, and helping lay the foundation for an even brighter future.

Gratefully yours,

Lauren Vosper, CEO, Finn Hogan, Head Journalist and James Hurman, Founder.

PS, we want to thank those few who've been able to support us financially over this past year including Icehouse Ventures, Ministry of Awesome, NZ Growth Capital Partners, Vanta, AWS, and Atlas Digital. Thank you 🙏🏻