Jack Conte
Co-founder and CEO, Patreon · 2 appearances on the record.
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founderexecutiveentertainer@jackconte ↗LinkedIn ↗jackcontemusic.com ↗Wikipedia ↗YouTube ↗Instagram ↗
Jack Conte co-founded Patreon in 2013 alongside Sam Yam to provide creators with a subscription-based platform to earn reliable, recurring income directly from fans. As an artist and multi-instrumentalist, he is widely known for his viral music videos, the indie-pop duo Pomplamoose, and the funk collective Scary Pockets.
29statements → 15claims → 5claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 4.03/5average certainty → 1.69/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
5 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 9 not checkable as stated how the 15 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
15 assertions · 12 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 15 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 9 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Jack argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Jack Conte on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Jack Conte said on How I Built This that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Jack Conte: 8chan launched on Patreon to crowdfund the site's initial development
“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.”
Conte: Patreon refused to alter content policies to retain high-profile creators
“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.”
Jack Conte: Breaking through online is easier today, but retention is harder
“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…”
Jack Conte: Two-thirds of Patreon payment volume goes to middle-class creators
“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 …”
Conte: Product-market fit comes from iteration speed, not strategy
“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…”
Conte: Creator monetization economics failed to keep up with distribution technology
“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.”
Conte: Patreon's growth was primarily driven by a creator viral cycle
“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 …”
Jack Conte: Online platforms absolutely can define pornography with rigorous explicit rules
“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.”
Jack Conte: Patreon does not work without an existing audience
“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…”
Jack Conte: Building a community as a founder differs from a creator
“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”
Conte: Unfiltered creators build the most loyal followings on Patreon
“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…”
Conte: Bottoms-up employee adoption creates pressure on enterprise buyers
“As a CEO or as a head of engineering or a CTO, if you notice all your teammates are using Figma for their designs and they're asking to switch to Figma, there's bottoms up pressure for the management team or the buyer of the product to then use your product an…”
Jack Conte: Founders must shift from consensus to internal conviction
“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…”
Conte: Patreon is not profitable and burning cash every month
“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.”
Conte: Extreme niche creators can reach millions and earn big online
“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.”
Jack Conte: Everyone said Patreon was a bad idea when he started
“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.”
Jack Conte: YouTuber Bo Miles Is Selling Out 1,400-Seat Australian Theaters
“Bo Miles, who's an amazing filmmaker on YouTube is going all over Australia where he lives and renting theaters and selling out 1400 person theaters and screening his YouTube videos and doing Q&As with his fans.”
Conte: YouTube drives creator discovery via search traffic for familiar songs
“That's kind of when I learned that YouTube is a search engine, and so people are searching for songs that they know. And if they then see a cool band who is singing that song, but maybe in a completely different way, with a completely different sound, and they…”
Conte: Pomplamoose made $22,000 in one month from 30,000 iTunes downloads
“We released a record, and, you know, at the end of the month, we logged into our bank account, and, like, we had sold 30,000 songs, and because we hadn't signed with a label, we owned all our own masters, and therefore we owned all the royalties, so we logged …”
Pomplamoose Earned Around $400K in 2010 Peak Direct Digital Sales
“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.”
Natalie Dawn Raised $104,000 on Kickstarter for Solo Album
“And that, she ended up raising a 104,000 dollars.”
Conte: Patreon co-founders agreed to a 50-50 equity split
“Yeah, it's in this email. We agree to become fifty-fifty partners in Patreon.”
Conte: All 40 creators rejected Patreon's initial launch invitation
“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.”
Jack Conte earned over $100K annualized within two months of Patreon's launch
“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 …”
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Advice Line with Jack Conte of Patreon | Jan 16, 2025 | 19m |
| Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam | Jan 11, 2021 | 39m |