41–50 of 277 posts
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Why unfortunately? This all seems like ultimately a good thing, although it may be unfortunate for some individuals in the short term.
It's a good thing that millions of people have lost their jobs at what were otherwise well functioning businesses because of a global pandemic that also, by the way, is going to end up killing hundreds of thousands of people? Uh huh.
This is interesting given that, like the article suggests, patron contributions were still growing last month. Seems like they either wanted an excuse to "right-size" and this is a great opportunity, or they're expecting a significant hit to patron contributions on the back of mass unemployment, which would make the rest of the year rather painful.
> This decision was not made lightly and consisted of several other factors beyond the financial ones. Prior to the pandemic, we had completed an in-depth performance review cycle and deployed a new company strategy – both exercises highlighted the need for different skill sets moving forward.
It was this combination of economic uncertainty, performance reviews and a shift in strategy that prompted us to make this change.
I don't really understand why Patreon needs so many employees. We're talking about almost 300 people to just supervise a fully automated process. The tech has already been built almost a decade ago and hasn't changed much, so it can't require that much engineering work. It's also an easy problem (take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out) and they ironed out any potential issues over the years.…
When you have a lot of users (especially when they rely on you to get money from you!) even 0.1% of them asking questions and having difficulties is a huge work generator!
It's not "oh it's easy to write a for loop". It's "my for loop now has 20 non-orthogonal options, and a user is saying we emptied their bank account and now we gotta make sure if we did". Also a content host, a CMS, and reporting software for taxes and the like.
I mean I bet you could get away with 100 people or something for this but there's _so much_ that can go wrong and would require lots of intervention.
I don't really understand why Patreon needs so many employees. We're talking about almost 300 people to just supervise a fully automated process. The tech has already been built almost a decade ago and hasn't changed much, so it can't require that much engineering work. It's also an easy problem (take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out) and they ironed out any potential issues over the years.…
* Product is successful * Hire lots of people because that's what successful companies do * Product development slows way down, because you hired too fast (Mythical Man Month stuff kicks in, where adding more people to a team can slow development down, if not done carefully and thoughtfully) * Notice that development is slow, so you hire even more people to try and speed it up At least that's been my experience at 3…
Given the purging of creators for arbitrary and political reasons, I can't say I feel sympathy for this company's collapse. Ideally it'd go out of business entirely. Creators should be cutting out the middleman anyway.
I don't really understand pateron when I have a donate button..but I imagine people who use pateron are doing better.. Gamification?
I don't really understand why Patreon needs so many employees. We're talking about almost 300 people to just supervise a fully automated process. The tech has already been built almost a decade ago and hasn't changed much, so it can't require that much engineering work. It's also an easy problem (take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out) and they ironed out any potential issues over the years.…
* Product is successful * Hire lots of people because that's what successful companies do * Product development slows way down, because you hired too fast (Mythical Man Month stuff kicks in, where adding more people to a team can slow development down, if not done carefully and thoughtfully) * Notice that development is slow, so you hire even more people to try and speed it up At least that's been my experience at 3…
- Value of a 1% improvement at $100/week revenue: $104 of developer time.
- Value of a 1% improvement at $1M/week revenue: $1,040,000 of developer time.
This is interesting given that, like the article suggests, patron contributions were still growing last month. Seems like they either wanted an excuse to "right-size" and this is a great opportunity, or they're expecting a significant hit to patron contributions on the back of mass unemployment, which would make the rest of the year rather painful.
I ain't seeing it. I saw significantly more patron contributions. I guess maybe there's a danger I am just that awesome? ;P the general sense I get is people tend to rally around their creators, and I would imagine that happens across the board, and not just in special cases.
Not sure if they're all just spooked or if they've seen hits already.
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Thank you, I had no idea that's why these links haven't been loading. Just switched back to google's resolver (8.8.8.8).
Yeah, you can find more information on this standoff here: https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680 There's some HN posts about it as well.
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Patron seems like a classic long tail situation. The fall off to 100th place is only 1/7th the number of subscribers and 1000th place ~1/37th the number of subscribers as first place. Patreon’s fees range from 5-12% so they could easily be making more make more money from the 10,000 to 100,000 creators than they do the top 10,000. Further, people can hide earnings which makes estimates of their finances difficult.
Something like 350 of the top 1000 creators have their financials public. There are several in that list that likely bring in less than $100 per month for Patreon. That tail has to be pretty long and flat to justify 230 employees and any hope of the type of growth that many investors demand.
Also, they have three different fees. The 5% to 12% fees are on top of the CC fees and money transfer fees. https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360027674431
Ex: Someone with 500 subscribers at 3$ per month after CC fees on the middle 8% tier is 120$ per month to Patreon.