Justin Rhodes / Abundance Plusdiscussed

Caroline opened this as a broader category question rather than a single pitch: homesteading is a crowded vertical (Ballerina Farm being the obvious giant), and the team debated how to identify the actual winner rather than just another entrant. Eddie is getting introduced to Justin Rhodes, who has over 1M YouTube subscribers teaching homesteaders and aspiring homesteaders, and separately built Abundance Plus, a subscription streaming platform/network (his own and other creators' homesteading shows) with roughly 4,000 paying members — a real community/marketplace layer on top of content. Eddie doesn't have fully formed views yet, but the raw membership number alone signaled real commercial depth. Megan reframed the category: homesteading is the mirror image of the "New York City influencer girl" lifestyle-documentation genre — a lifestyle choice being documented, not a true scarcity niche — and she's skeptical about winners beyond a couple of outliers like Ballerina Farm who manage to cross over to broader (urban/coastal) audiences. Her read: look for someone who, like Ballerina Farm, transcends the core homesteading audience rather than just serving it. Eddie separately floated the idea of a "Paige Lorenz of homesteading" archetype (a stylish, crossover-appeal figure) as more interesting than the 45-year-old, self-described "crunchy" homesteader he's about to separately meet with.