A few thoughts after reading the posts here. There seems to be a concensus about having a Premium community that captures the 'most active' Strawaman users. I would think it's very important to maintain the balance of what gives Strawman it's value/outperformane and the value it creates for others.

Some of the contributors would be giving more than they are ganing and the last thing you would want is to lose any of those contributors because they did not want to pay for premium. This would instantly impact the performance and content. 

Also I assume there are a lot of Strawman readers who don't contribute much at all but gain a lot of value from following and collecting ideas. (in my mind there is your paying memeber) even though they are not big contributors they may be happy to pay for the value they are receiving being a reader.

For example: Assuming you are targeting circa 600 premium members (20000 x 3%) You could have the top 100 ranked contributors automatically become premium members and then 500 spots for anyone else wanting to pay for pemium. This would ensure you maintain ALL the best contributors and make it as attractive as possible to ALL potential paying subscribers. 

It also incentivises some people to work on their picks and posts to try and get into the top contributor bracket. As you grow you accept new free premium members and more subsribers. 

Anyway, Andrew seems a sharp and fair guy, so I am sure he is weighing all this stuff up and will come up with that works for all users.

It will be interesting to see how Strawman Premium pans out :)

Andrew is 100% right, it is for those who want to take investing seriously. From the email I read, it would not be for people:

• who do not actively participate 
• who are not willing to do hardwork 
• who put others down because of your success (Andrew says it's a club so everyone should support each other) 

I put forth my interest as for me Strawman Premium would provide: 

• Better validation/critque of the thesis. Faster detection of loop holes in my understanding.  
• Better insights from investors who are better than me or have personal experience investing into that company. 
• CEO interviews, you don't get a lot of access to things like that. Usually it's for professional investors. 
• Good incentive structure to keep premium members engaged with the reward scheme.    

In saying that, I hope the free version should still be useful for investors so that those members are not completly left out. The content we have created soo far is frankly better than what is out there in other platforms.The current incentive structure is based on generating and sharing your ideas that increase your portfolio return.   

Even though the strawman index does not take tax into consideration. We have done quite well as a community. Outperforming a lot of benchmarks for long period of time.  

This is very welcome news. I'm an absolute novice when it comes to investing but this site has a wealth of information which has helped me to realise my novice investing goals.

I'm highly motivated to achieve and this announcement has given me a kick up the ass to start contributing to the site. Im a regular and highly active user but my contribution is severely lacking.

I'm sure there's a correlation between this announcement and the activity levels of some of the more experienced/professional investors increasing their activity on the site. Perhaps I'm making connections where they don't exist, but if the premium content is where people like this will be sharing ideas, that's exciting to me.

Over the past year and a bit (granted it has been a good year), purely from following ideas and information from this site I have made a hefty 5 figure return in my RL portfolio. Other than ShareSight, I don't subscribe to any other financial websites. 

Thank you Andrew for creating this community. I'm all in.

With regards to the difference between free and premium, is the thought to like, have the ASX 100 or 200 available for viewing access for free members, but then have the posts on smaller companies only available to premium members? Something like that could work reasonably as the research on companies that it's harder to get an edge on, but which most people are interested in, would be available, leaving the microcap space for premium users. 

As a side idea, if you are wanting to increase the amount of research on the forum, you could have a way of obtaining premium without paying, or with paying less - something of a valued contributor thing, though how to moderate that would be difficult. It's amazing what people are willing to spend in terms of time compared to money. This would have a cost in terms of money, but might increase the value of the product.