Jack Conte

“I actually think it's easier to break through now. I think it's harder to stick. But I think it's easier to break. And what I've seen is, you know, the internet has really shifted away from the follower model. And it's shifted into an interest-based model that…”

“About two-thirds of our payments volume is not going to the, like, you know, super top-of-market creatorists, like the super rich and famous creators. It's going to what we call, I don't like the term, but, like, some people call it, like, the creative middle …”

“When I was starting Patreon, the number of people who told me that's a bad idea, it's not gonna work, was like, everyone. I don't think a single person said, that's a good idea, you should go do that.”

“I found the right strategy for finding product market fit is actually no strategy at all. It's speed of iteration. Like your intuition is actually going to be right in some areas and wrong in some areas. And what matters most is getting through the mistakes so…”

“There comes a point where you have pretty good judgment, you've seen a bunch of things before, and rather than cross-indexing a bunch of different disparate opinions, if I could go back in time, I'd tell myself, figure out what you want to do, what kind of com…”

“We did about 400,000 dollars in a year off of mp-three sales, basically. And it was, I think that that year in particular, I think, was 2010.”

“The economics of that failed to evolve with the distribution technology. So like the distribution happened first, and the economic systems to support that didn't keep up. And so we were in this horrible phase where essentially artists are working for free.”

“Yeah, it's in this email. We agree to become fifty-fifty partners in Patreon.”

“We made an Excel spreadsheet with those folks, and I found their contact info, and reached out to all 40 of them, and all 40 of them said no.”

“Within the first couple weeks, I passed 5000 dollars a month. And then soon after that, it was, yeah, it was even more. And at the time, I was making maybe two videos a month. So, you know, suddenly, like very suddenly, within two months, I went from draining …”

“Some of the people who watched my video were creators themselves, and when they landed on my Patreon page, and they saw this random middle-of-the-road YouTuber making six figures, they had that same mind-blow moment that I had had two years before when Lauren …”

“That first round ended up being 2.1 million at a six million valuation, so it was, you know, about a third.”

“In 20, yeah, twenty-fourteen, we raised the fifteen million dollar round.”

“The thing that caused the debate was a website called eight Chan that launched on Patreon. Guy Raz: Yeah. Jack Conte: And they were using Patreon to fund the development of the site.”

“He built these Jack Conte: Very massive content policy and trust and safety and enforcement systems, and he worked with us for a period of two months to draft the first version of what became Patreon's content policy, which was, turned out to be about 40 page…”

“I've heard people say, you can't define porn, you just kind of know it when you see it. I beg to differ. You can define porn.”

“We weren't going to you know, we weren't going to change our minds to keep two or three creators as painful as that was.”

“So no, Patreon's not profitable. It's tracking toward profitability. We're burning money every month, but actually the business is, like, very healthy.”

“On the internet, there are literally millions of people who will like your stuff if your ratio is one in a thousand. You can get millions of fans and make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.”