This has been a monumental year for the Mycopreneur platform, which we’ll be celebrating the 4th anniversary of on January 26, 2025. The most impactful thing to happen in my life occurred this week, when I became a father all of 72 hours ago. So without further adieu, please enjoy the final newsletter of 2024.

2024 Wrapped

Mycopreneur was featured in numerous international press outlets in 2024; here are some of the major features.

5 Innovative Mushroom Entrepreneurial Ventures That Caught My Attention in 2024

Culture Shrooms

Culture Shrooms has become the de facto mushroom community hub in several California cities. Their flagship store in the heart of Long Beach hosts regular mushroom events and festivals, including their recently launched Culture Nights which feature mushroom based haute cuisine, bespoke mushroom infused cocktails and curated speakers. Their Northern California location in Arcata town center has also generated a lot of buzz this year, recently hosting the Humboldt County Fungi Fest among regular programming.

This mycomaterials company based in Maine has pioneered fully biodegradable mushroom mycelium buoys as an alternative to plastic based buoys that have corrosive environmental impacts as they degrade over time. Founder Sue Van Hook discovered the buoyancy of mycomaterials while working as the mycologist for Ecovative Design for a decade, and has since launched several mushroom based solutions to help bolster sustainability initiatives in oceanic and estuary based industries.

Eti Farms Global

The #1 mushroom farm in Lagos, Nigeria has sold over 100,000 packs of mushrooms and caught the attention of the international mushroom entrepreneurial community. The business is actively showcasing the success of an independent mycopreneurial venture to scale in a densely populated region of Sub-Saharan Africa, where regenerative food and industry solutions based around mushroom entrepreneurism can help to fast track sustainable design initiatives.

Studio Cartier

This design firm based in The Netherlands helped design prototype ‘Mushroom Houses For Gaza’ that were showcased at Dubai Design Week this year.

Open Fung

This mushroom research and innovation accelerator is an artist and scientist led organization that fosters deep engagement with fungi through applied research and the arts. The collective has inaugurated their research in collaboration with Stanford University’s Department of Bioengineering and The Drew Endy lab, and is spearheaded by MycoWorks Co-Founder Phil Ross. I had the privilege of interviewing Phil Ross about the project over the summer for Mycopreneur Podcast.

2024 Mushroom Events

Highlights from the mushroom conference and festival circuit this year included SXSW in Austin in March, Semantrix Sessions in Sayulita, Mexico and Discovery Sessions San Francisco in April, All Things Fungi Festival in West Sussex, England and the 12th Annual International Medicinal Mushrooms Conference in Bari, Italy in September, the Oklahoma Mushroom Festival in Oklahoma City in October, and the Colorado Psychedelic Conference in Denver in November.

Mycopreneur Podcast has reached listeners in 117 countries as of the latest episode - including mushroom entrepreneurs and the myco curious listening in from such places as Syria 🇸🇾, Madagascar 🇲🇬, Maldives 🇲🇻, and Ivory Coast 🇨🇮 among many others.

The bulk of the audience tuned in from North America, UK, Western Europe, and Australia.

Predictions for 2025:

1. More mushroom and psychedelic media platforms will be focusing on newsletters - and beehiiv will be their #1 choice.

Social media and traditional search have been ruthless to independent media, especially in regards to psychedelic and mushroom platforms; a lot of AI censors seem to have a hard time differentiating between functional and psychedelic mushrooms. We’ve seen a number of platforms start to prioritize their newsletter channels above and beyond social media and their websites, as the opportunity to ‘own your audience’ is paramount in the era of seemingly random and oftentimes arbitrary deplatforming from social media. 

The beehiiv newsletter platform, which the Mycopreneur Newsletter here is hosted on, has established itself as a forward thinking and innovative host for psychedelic content creators. ‘Psychedelics’ are even a category of newsletter that you can designate when selecting your niche(s).

2. Functional mushrooms will continue their ascent into the mainstream

With brands like PepsiCo and Nestle beginning to incorporate functional mushrooms into their product lines, and with mainstream platforms like Fox News declaring functional mushrooms one of the major health and wellness trends for 2025, the continued proliferation of functional mushrooms like Reishi, Lion’s Mane, Cordyceps, Turkey Tail, Chaga will carry into 2025 and beyond. More content creators and journalists will emerge in the mushroom space, and more public education initiatives will be undertaken to communicate the benefits of mushrooms - as well as to dispel some of the unscrupulous practices such as mislabeling and corner cutting for cost saving measures. Remember, if you’re considering beginning a mushroom supplement routine, and i very much recommend you do start one, then make sure the product you’re getting is made with fruiting bodies (you know…the mushroom part of the mushroom - and not ‘myceliated grain’ or anything other than ‘fruiting bodies’.)

3. Brands that build communities will win

This is an antidote to the proliferation of’ faceless’ brands that cut corners, create defective products, and engage in unscrupulous business practices that require anonymity to thrive. Above and beyond simple What’s App Groups, Signal threads, and Discord Servers, people crave real and authentic community. 

This has been the cornerstone of the Mycopreneur Incubator; no matter who comes through, we reliably have a core group of invested and accomplished mushroom entrepreneurs who actively show up to build community together. This type of ‘set and setting’ is where long-term working relationships and partnerships are seeded.

4. A more tempered and nuanced framing of psychedelics in the will emerge

With the launch of the War On Drugs in 1971, psychedelics got caught in the prohibitionist dragnet and scheduled atop the Controlled Substances Act. This designation states that they have ‘no known medical value’. By 2019, a multibillion dollar industry sprouted up around a renewed interest in psychedelics thanks to the rebooting of clinical investigation and research applications around them, with the ‘Shroom Boom’ being a major driver. Hundreds of clinical studies into the potential benefits of psilocybin have been undertaken, though very few of these studies actually use mushrooms, opting instead for the more clinically controllable synthetic psilocybin molecule. The hype around psychedelics reached a fever pitch around 2023, and the pendulum is starting to swing back towards the middle of the road with a more tempered recognition that psychedelics may possess tremendous potential benefits, but there are also definite risks that require due diligence and personal responsibility in order for their value to be fully realized and risks properly mitigated.

5. The psychedelic movement will go global

The ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’ is a highly westernized conceptualization of a global phenomenon; there are many parts of the world that are left out of this conversation by and large, as the majority of the activity underpinning the psychedelic industry / movement / renaissance / what have you is localized in the Global North. We’re starting to hear perspectives from places like Sub-Saharan Africa, where recent ‘newsly discovered’ psilocybe species and traditional healing practices have made global headlines in Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and South Africa, and from other Caribbean island nations looking to capitalize upon the boom in mushroom tourism that Jamaica’s legal industry has attracted (I’m looking at you St. Vincent and the Grenadines), and even the notoriously draconian prohibitionist countries of China, Singapore, and United Arab Emirates either actively conducting clinical trials into psilocybin and ketamine or making investments into research around psychedelic medicines. Plus, the Global Psychedelic Week coming November of 2025 will help drive this globalization of psychedelics in unforeseen ways.

Outlook for 2025

Mycopreneur will be celebrating it’s 4th anniversary as a platform on January 26, 2025. My aim for 2025 is to keep the rudder steady and pick up momentum based on wisdom and experience accrued over the last 4 years of building this platform.

As someone on Reddit or somewhere probably once said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

With that being said, would anyone be interested in sponsoring this newsletter?

I’m actively seeking collaborative support to help improve and streamline the Mycopreneur Newsletter and to further build upon the influence, credibility, and consistency for this particular vertical of the Mycopreneur platform. I’m open to collaboration, design help, feedback, and fiscal sponsorship to ensure this is a bankable media property.

Consider that the Mycopreneur Platform is actively comprised of a weekly podcast, of which 52 episodes were published this year, an in-person incubator, which we hosted 30 sessions of this year, daily social media satirical and journalistic content, which accrued over 5 million + organic views with zero boosted or sponsored posts this year, and frequent guest articles for numerous well-positioned platforms as indicated above. Beyond this, I’m functioning as somewhat of a PR agency, having landed partners and clients numerous media mentions this year across the various platforms that contact me for a story, a quote, or a tip.

There are three sponsorship opportunities for this newsletter for the first quarter of 2025 that are priced as follows (sponsorship package names are subject to change).

Macrodose (Title Sponsorship): $700 / month

Museum Dose: $350 / month

Microdose: $100 / newsletter

Consider that I’m running all of the above mentioned verticals of the platform as a solopreneur, and that being able to commission collaborators, contributors, and to fund travel opportunities to conferences and events, etc. will all factor into the growth of this newsletter as well as the sponsors / brands who help underwrite it.

Please contact me if you’re interested in applying for sponsorship, and would like to further discuss and/or co-design the accompanying features of each sponsorship tier.

Finally THANK YOU to the Mycopreneur premium sponsors that have helped sustain this platform for 2024 - It’s an honor to collaborate with two of the most prolific functional mushroom companies in the industry, above and beyond the many one off projects and partnerships with numerous other reputable brands throughout the 2024 calendar year. I take mushroom supplements from both of these brands on a daily basis, and it is immediately obvious to me that getting into a routine with these fruiting body extract supplements has been foundational to my ability to stay healthy, energized, and motivated to do what I do. Please consider checking them out and getting rolling with a functional mushroom supplement routine for yourself, or recommending them to a friend.

Real Mushrooms

Mycroboost

Thank you for reading the Mycopreneur Newsletter!

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Thank you all for an amazing 2024, and I’m all ears for suggestions on how to improve this newsletter experience moving forward into 2025.

Cheers!

Dennis Walker