Anna Novak Advisory memo Decision Call · USD 220
Is the positioning wrong, or is the audience wrong?
60 minute call, 5 November. Reviewed and signed off by Anna Novak on 7 November.
You asked whether to rewrite the homepage. Having read the call notes back, the homepage is not your problem: it describes the product accurately to people who are not buying it. The question underneath is which of your two audiences you are actually for, and you have been avoiding it for a year.
Loamfield sells to both independent farms and agricultural co-operatives, and the site speaks to both. Your best 11 customers are all co-operatives, your support load is 80 percent independents, and your pricing suits neither. Picking co-operatives would be the obvious move on the evidence. It would also mean telling about 60 customers you are no longer for them, which is a founder decision and not a positioning one.
The question
What was asked, and what was reviewed
As you put it on the call: "Three people have told me the homepage does not explain what we do. Should I rewrite it?"
| Reviewed | Source |
|---|---|
| Homepage, pricing page and two product pages | Live site, 4 November |
| Customer list with revenue and tenure | Supplied, anonymised |
| Support ticket volume by customer | Supplied, 12 months |
| Six sales call recordings | Supplied, three won and three lost |
| Your own description of the product on the call | Transcript |
| Three competitor sites | Public |
The split
Two audiences, and what each one actually does
| Co-operatives | Independent farms | |
|---|---|---|
| Share of customers | ~15 percent | ~85 percent |
| Share of revenue | 62 percent | 38 percent |
| Average revenue per customer | 9x the other | Low |
| Share of support tickets | 20 percent | 80 percent |
| Churn in 12 months | One, to an acquisition | Steady |
| Sales cycle | Long, 4 to 7 months | Days |
| Who decides | A committee, with a budget cycle | The farmer, on a phone |
| What they ask about on calls | Integration, reporting, member access | Price, and whether it works offline |
The two columns want different products. Co-operatives ask about member reporting, which you have built. Independents ask about offline use, which you have not and which they need because of connectivity, not preference.
Options
Three honest routes
Pick co-operatives
Rewrite for the committee buyer, price for the seat count, stop building offline. Revenue concentration improves, support load falls, the sales cycle gets longer and slower and you have to survive that. And you tell 60 independents that renewal in 2028 will not be for them.
Pick independents
Volume business, fast cycle, self serve, and you would need to build offline properly and cut support cost per customer by a lot. It is a different company from the one you have, and your 11 best customers leave.
Keep both, deliberately
Viable only if you separate them: two pages, two prices, two onboarding paths, and an honest internal decision that independents are a self serve product with no human support. The version that fails is the one you have now, which is both audiences sharing one page, one price and one support queue.
Uncertain
What I do not know
| Unresolved | Why it matters | How to settle it |
|---|---|---|
| Whether independents are profitable at all | 80 percent of support on 38 percent of revenue suggests not, but I have no cost data | Your accountant, one afternoon |
| Whether the co-op market is big enough | Concentration is good until it is a ceiling | Count the addressable co-operatives. It is a finite, countable list |
| What you want | Genuinely the deciding factor and not something I can assess | Yours |
Next
What to do before you touch the site
- Get the cost-to-serve number for independents from your accountant. One afternoon of work and it may make the decision for you.
- Count the co-operatives in your market. If the answer is under 200 you have a ceiling you need to see before choosing.
- Decide which audience Loamfield is for. Write it in one sentence and keep it somewhere you will see it.
- Only then rewrite the page, and rewrite it for one of them.
- If the answer is both, separate them properly. Two pages, two prices, two support models, decided rather than inherited.