Ungated: Stears Premium Free Reads
July 28th 2020. The day Stears Business paywalled its content. Fifteen months later, we remain unwavering in our commitment to give you premium content five days a week.
Externally, it may look like Stears Premium hasn't changed since we launched it—one story, every weekday, behind a hard paywall.
But internally, the team has transformed. We did not start Stears Premium with a product-led growth model, but that's all we know now. Along the way, we have tweaked, iterated and reassessed our approach to serving high-quality insight. We have learnt to listen to our customers. You have shared your thoughts, feedback and suggestions about what we can do to improve the product. On our end, we have tried our best to build for you.
Today marks one of our more significant product shifts: the launch of the Premium Free Reads. From today, users can create a Premium account for free and read one Premium article every Wednesday. By creating an account, they will access our selection of sample Premium content we have curated for them and all future content that we publish on Wednesdays.
Our long-time readers know Stears Business did not start publishing in July 2020. Before the revenue-generating business was born in 2019, we used a network of voluntary writers to create our insight. We trained these writers to push the limits of storytelling with their analysis, and our readers applauded it.
However, this model changed in 2020 when we started building our full-time team of analysts. That was when Stears Premium was born. Today, our analysts cover Nigeria's key sectors: finance, oil & gas, renewables, banking, technology, fashion, music and more. But, since we launched Premium in 2020, this content has remained paywalled, and thousands of readers pay to read Stears Premium.
As we grow, we have seen newcomers ask us to 'show, not tell' them about our premium content. Without access to a sample, many have had to take the leap of faith when subscribing. Of course, they have been handsomely rewarded with our incisive insight. But, many others have circled the paywall, unsure of whether to pay before seeing the content.
This is why we are improving our product for new readers, by allowing them to benefit before they buy.
As I never fail to emphasise, Stears is in the business of information. We curate, write and build to make our readers more intelligent and informed about the economy around them.
Stears Premium is open to everyone, and we hope that you love our insight as much as we love creating it for you.
Start today by creating an account with Stears Business; I assure you that you will not regret it.
In the meantime, if you have any feedback or questions, please reach out to us at [email protected].