🚜 Know anyone with a forest?
This blog was distributed to our first 200+ backers via email.
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Kia ora 👋
We are aware we have not had an update for over a month!
As the legendary Naval Ravikant (@naval) says “I want to play long-term games with long-term people.”
We believe RNZ is an expression of this in it’s full embodiment so we thank you for your patience and nudges over the past weeks, checking in on the app and links on our website!! Much appreciated.
TLDR;
Know anyone who owns a small forest block? We would love an introduction to battle-test a few more hypothesis (skip to #6 to learn why)
Tree or four notes for this update 🌳
1. The current app balance has just ticked over $30,000NZD in weekly contributions 👏👏
This is a huge milestone and we are excited to see this collective pool grow so that when the right time comes to put our money where our hearts (or trees) are we will be in a great collective position to do so!
2. Incase you missed it unfortunately RNZ was unsuccessful in its application to the Westpac NZ Government Innovation Fund.
This was for approximately $150,000 NZD funding to accelerate our progress. Applications were via submitting a “Lean Canvas” - you can read the full Regenerate NZ Lean Canvas we submitted here.
As we continue to evolve our knowledge, business model and iterate, all of these opportunities to “think in ink” or write it down only continue to focus our industry knowledge and enable us to battle test our greatest assumptions and methods.
3. Jonny took some time off visiting family in Malaysia & Alex has moved to Melbourne for a new role.
Jonny, recently a father took the opportunity now that borders are re-opened to connect with his wife’s family in Malaysia. Getting to witness the effects of Palm Oil plantations first hand and deforestation over there, Jonny concluded that although New Zealand’s Pine Trees have their downsides, he would way rather have Pine Trees vs. Palm plantations any day! This was also a time off the tools for him and “just what the doctor ordered” as a chance to reflect on where we are at and where to from here.
Alex has recently taken a role as Head of Operations at a Melbourne Engineering Tech Startup called ClearCalcs. They have an innovative cloud based software for Structural Engineers globally. The platform reduces building costs through material optimisation and the time it takes to calculate the strength of building structures in line with building standards. What does this mean for RNZ you may say? Well thanks to remote tools and ease of communication across the ditch, not much at all. As we are working on this as a long term project with 10 year + horizon, slow is smooth, smooth is fast!
4. We circulated a “Pitch deck” to test Wholesale investor interest the past few months.
In the investment landscape there are two sides. Retail and Wholesale. We are confident we have a strong understanding in the Retail side (that’s you!) with regards to interest and positioning. We identified the Wholesale side of the market as a knowledge gap and therefore tested this further to support the focus of our trajectory.
Our core learnings on feedback from “the upper end of town” was;
“It is difficult to differentiate this from a traditional Forestry investment from a large fund portfolio perspective.”
“You need to be clear if you are becoming Tesla or a Charity, get really clear on this as doing both mediocre won’t get you far.”
“If you can’t prove right now that you can get a return from “the third way” then traditional investors will discount this and not look at it favourably, most of “us” are traditional and only take “safe bets on things we know”.
All of these are great nudges for us to improve our communication, battle test our vision and increase our understanding of one side of the investment market. And we also believe (especially on the last point) that maybe we just need to continue to connect and speak with those who see and believe in our vision.
5. The missing piece of the puzzle? 🧩🌲
Identify your greatest business risk, and run full steam ahead at that…..
As we have been evolving RNZ over the past 12 months - yes it has been possibly 12 months since Jonny and I started having weekly catchups… We have been continually identifying our greatest risks, looking at our hypothesis and running at these full steam ahead.
Our first identified risk was, a) do everyday New Zealanders care about this? and by now having $30k in the wallet and 220+ people on this email list we believe we have disproved this.
As mentioned above (#4), we recently ran at the wholesale investor landscape to battle test our ideas.
So where does that leave us?
Retail investors ✅
Wholesale investors ✅
Industry experts ✅
Forest experts ✅
Small block Forest owners ☑️ (we think we are 50% here)
The basis of our Small Block owner research has been from first hand experience (Jonny’s family plot) and from Forestry industry experts such as Adrian Loo.
We have learnt from experience and through previous interviews that Small Block owners face a big decision when their trees come to maturity. Do they
a) Cut and replant
b) Cut and sell or
c) Sell the block
We want to triple down on this aspect of “Customer discovery” and really battle test some lasting hypothesis here;
Would a small block owner be interested in a short-mid term option for retail investors to progressively buy out their blocks?
Would a small block owner be interested in a fixed price acquisition of their block post harvest?
These are all on the premise of 1,000,000 hectares requiring harvest in the next 8 years and a decision making time becoming increasingly relevant for them.
6. Our ask from this weeks update is do you know anyone with a small block forest?
If so we would love any introductions via email, happy to jump on a phone call or meet up in person. We have a list of small block owners that we will be connecting with in the next 2 months however we also know how powerful networks of networks are!
Our goal at RNZ is to continually challenge the norm and so we want to talk to these owners and test these hypotheses even further so we are crystal clear in our direction before putting our money where our trees are.
As always, any questions, calls for help or things we should know, please do not hesitate to reply directly to these emails, we love hearing from you!
Best,
Jonny & Alex
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This blog was distributed to our first 200+ backers via email.
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