Interest check
Prior to starting my Patreon, I made an interest check to see if I had an audience that would subscribe to the page and what kind of content they would like to see. As I’m considering adding more tiers, I went back to review the responses.
From this, I figured that my audience were willing to spend the least amount on subscriptions, there was an overall demand for fan content over original content, and that there was more interest in videos than I had expected.
With that information onhand, I added two extra tiers to my page.
With this, I spent the month prior to the launch of the page to create at least a piece of content for every tier. As my internship wouldn’t begin until the 27th, I had plenty of time to work on everything.
Comic update
My comic ‘My Neighbor’s Secret’ is about a man who received a strange curse that would turn him into a cat every time his heart rate spiked, and his neighbor who was wondering where the guy who lived next door had gone, before running into a stray cat.
I posted the comic on Twitter where it received a fair bit of engagement and anticipation for updates, so I thought it could be a good idea to grant a week’s early access to new chapters. On top of updating on my Patreon first, I’d post a snippet of the chapter publicly to garner more interest in reading the full chapter.
This was by far the most popular piece that had gotten the most people to subscribe to the Patreon.
Speedpaint/video
As it turned out, fan content was the easiest way to get engagement online. A short animation I had made inspired by the discography of one of my favorite artists, j-hope, received a lot of attention online with a handful of people asking me technical questions about the programs I used.
I thought it would be a good idea to film a video explaining my process in detail for subscribers of my highest tier, where I would typically upload a speedpaint with no commentary.
What I had in mind for the video was to not come across as a seasoned professional revealing industry secrets to beginners, but rather a classmate who watched a tutorial on YouTube outside of class and found a cool new tool that they wanted to tell you about, and maybe talked about the concert last week.
As I was worried that some people may prefer just watching a speedpaint with no commentary, I released another version with just that.
Surprisingly, the commentary video received more engagement than the speedpaint, which slightly contributed to my ego and gave me more insight on what kind of content people enjoy.
By adding more tiers to my page, my subscriber count doubled compared to what I had before with one tier. This was great news, but I did have concerns surrounding the demand and obligation to create and release something every month and to set a deadline. I hoped that through this experience, I’d be able to manage my time well working on this on top of my internship, and perhaps find ways to work faster and grow my audience.
Getting ‘scammed’
Money hadn’t been a huge priority for me when I first started my Patreon. As there had only been one $1 tier, I made an average of around $7-$15 a month. I had a handful of people subscribe and delete their subscription during the few days of September, and though I had expected a huge increase, I was alerted by a friend that it so happened that I forgot to set my page so that patrons are charged the moment they subscribe instead of being charged at the end of the month, meaning that anyone could subscribe, look at all the content, then delete their subscription without being charged. With this, there was $29.50 in payouts, which was remarkable in the fact that it doubled, though could’ve been far more if I had known to change my settings from the start.