Patreon

“It's a little over 200,000, yeah, who are getting paid.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“We couldn't, for example we couldn't process all the payments at that time yet. I hadn't hooked any of that up. We could accept your credit card. And so that would get saved, you know, very securely by the way, because we were working at Stripe, but we hadn't …”

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

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“Not only creators, you know, launching on the platform, you know, triple digit growth month over month and podcasting and music and things like that, but also patrons, like, Stepping up and really doing their part.”

“If you don't have an audience actually Patreon doesn't work so well for you at all, and so I think it's totally fair to, like, point that out, and I actually think it's important to be honest about that. Like, we want to be honest with that. If somebody expect…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“Building a community as a founder is different than building community as a creator. There are similarities, but I think it would be a mistake to assume it's one for one”

“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…”

“I feel like if you're kind of averaging yourself Off to appeal to as many people as possible. You kind of appeal to nobody. And what we see with creators on Patreon is the ones who are just almost like entirely unfiltered, who just empty their minds into a mic…”

“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…”

“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.”

“Yeah, Patreon, I think, is a hugely important company because it changed the culture. It showed not only that people will be willing to pay for content online, they'll be willing to pay for the artist or creator who they most love or trust.”

“We were in the position to own all of them, and, you know, we decided that we had to think too much about unit economics and profitability, and I think that's a shame.”