>> I started Patreon because I had just
finished a music video that I spent $10,000 on.
I spent three months of my life making this video.
I knew if I posted on YouTube,
I'd have about a million views because
that's what my videos were usually getting at the time,
and I knew I'd make about $150 from the ad revenue on it.
I had just maxed out two credit cards.
I drained my savings account to make this music video,
and I thought there's no way
that this is the right model.
The global system that we've built
to convert media and music,
and videos into a paycheck
for the people who make the media and the music,
and the videos is a totally broken system, it sucks.
[LAUGHTER] Yeah, Patreon was a way
to fix the way the artists were paid.
It came from this concept of patronage,
how basically every piece of great art we've
ever known has been funded.
Then it's evolved into this full-fledged membership system
that's essentially like KQED does,
or what NPR does or SFMOMA
or Lincoln Center or SF Jazz and other organizations.
It's a way for a creator to have
a membership for their creativity,
for people that are coming out with lots
of things and have great ideas and want
a platform to launch new ideas
and have a vision and execute on that.
It's become this wonderful system that's allowed
creative people to have an expected regular,
reliable paycheck and income they
can lean on for the rest
of their creativity and projects.
I'm approaching all of this
from the perspective of a creator.
I never dreamed, I never even had
any idea that I'd be running a tech company.
For the last 10 years, I've been
a creator and a YouTuber, and a musician.
I make music videos I put them online.
My band Pomplamoose is me and my wife Nataly,
and we've been making videos for 10 years.
Last year, Pomplamoose released 50 videos,
and also a year before that,
I started another band with my friend Ryan.
We have a funk band called Scary Pockets,
and Scary Pockets also releases a video a week.
As a creator, I released 100 music videos last year,
which is wild and I use the product myself.
I have two Patreon pages and yeah,
Pomplamoose is making about
9,000 bucks a month on Patreon and
Scary Pockets is making another
3,500 bucks a month from Patreon,
and that helps us pay for our musicians and
our video editors and our mixing engineers,
and mastering engineers, and producers and
lighting folks and the full team, admin, everything.
It all gets paid for with our membership income,
which is awesome because it means that we can
focus on the creative part and being
musicians and being artists
and hire a team to do the rest.
Yeah, my background is as a creator.
I've been making a living,
actually the first few years of
Patreon I wasn't even taking a salary of CEO.
I was making my living as a creator using the product.
When thinking about like, hey,
if I launch on Patreon,
Patreon is going to send me a bunch of patrons.
There're two things to note that are important there.
The first is, from our perspective,
speaking strategically as a company,
we don't consider ourselves to be like a marketplace.
We're not mitigating the relationship
between fans and creators.
We're not, for instance, Facebook,
they have a feed and Facebook's engineers are building
algorithms to figure out what stuff
should we put in which people's feeds,
and they're building personalization algorithms
and content consumption tools, and things like that.
Patreon doesn't do any of that.
We're not in the game of helping a fan find
stuff to like and listen to and
watch and enjoy. That's not our strategy.
Our strategy is to build business tools for
creators to run their memberships.
If you launch on Patreon,
Patreon is not just going to send you a ton
of traffic that might like your page.
That's not what the function or purpose of our site does.
However, what we have found is that
when a creator does launch on Patreon,
about 40 percent of
their patrons that join
their membership already have Patreon accounts.
In other words, because Patreon has
so many people now who are
paying creators every month for their work,
there's just going to be
an overlap, and for those people,
it's going to be way easier to sign up
for your membership because they already have an account,
they already have a login,
they don't have to go through that sign-up flow.
They can one click and add a membership
and they already have their credit card
info on the site and everything.
It's just very easy.
All that to say, that strategic relationship is super
important for Patreon because I'll give you
an example of how it manifests
to the benefit of creators.
When you make a post on Facebook,
I think if you're a person with fans on Facebook,
you'll notice maybe 1-3 percent
of your audience might see that post,
and then Facebook will give
you a little pop-up that says, "Hey,
you can reach another five percent of
your fans by paying 100 bucks" or whatever it is,
that feels terrible to
me [LAUGHTER] as a creator, I'm like,
"I've spent years building my audience
on Facebook and now you're charging
me to reach the people that have
said they want to hear from me, like WTF."
It actually feels terrible to me as
a creative person who's trying to build an audience.
On Patreon, when you have a member,
when a person becomes a member of your Patreon page,
Patreon delivers 100 percent of
your posts to 100 percent of your fans,
100 percent of the time.
No exceptions ever.
These are your fans,
not our fans, and we're not trying to make
money by delivering more posts to more of your fans.
That's not our business model
like it's Facebook's business model.
That's a really strategic,
important thing for a Patreon that I
think makes the platform more creator
first. Of course, I'm biased saying this,
but the way we've envisioned and
designed the platform is not
to send a bunch of
traffic to people and have them pay for it.
The way we've designed and built
the platform is to give creators the tools
they need to build and reach and grow
their audience as
a professional business service platform,
and there's a big distinction there in the strategy.