What we told Odd Lots.
The gap: hay is bought and sold by people making five-figure decisions on rumor. The USDA publishes real auction prices every week — buried in PDFs almost nobody reads. The product is simple: scrape it, validate it, interpret it, ship it.
The data standard is the whole game. Every number we publish traces to a USDA source document, every unit conversion is documented, and every record passes validation before it reaches an inbox. When something fails validation, it doesn't ship. A reader should be able to make a $10,000 purchasing decision on our numbers and not lose money because of how we reported them.
The model: the Tuesday wire is free — that's the audience engine. HayWire Pro is the decision layer on top: a Friday read with The Call, a buy/wait/hold recommendation that's logged and graded in public. Then sponsorships for brands that need to reach hay buyers, and down the road, the pricing feed itself for ag lenders and farm software.
The moat isn't the scraper — anyone can scrape USDA. It's the validation discipline, the on-the-ground relationships like Rock Valley Hay Auction, and the community of producers telling us what auction floors are actually doing. The stuff that doesn't show up in a PDF.