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Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

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Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#61

Post by warent »

egypturnash wrote: post #39
0xy wrote: post #31

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 have had “donate” buttons on my work and I have had Patreon and I have gotten several orders of magnitude more money out of Patreon than any other method. Patreon has more than earned their 5% cut of what my fans are willing to give me for drawing weird comics that make no attempt to fit into what corporations are interested in marketing.

For me it somehow feels like my donations are being received in a more meaningful way via Patreon than anywhere else, even if the creator has no rewards set up. Like, a "Donate" button on a creator's website just feels like sending my money into a black hole. But sending it in Patreon makes me feel like a real supporter.

It's completely irrational but there it is. And I suspect a lot of people feel the same way too for some reason.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#62

Post by crazygringo »

rtpg wrote: post #44
Nextgrid wrote: post #9

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.…

I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations. 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 accou…

Exactly this.

A lot of people don't seem to realize, when you're dealing with communities -- especially communities that involve money flying around -- there's tons of work in managing it.

You've got employees trying to grow the community in different areas (genres?) and different geographies, reaching out to people, giving advice to get them on board. You've got employees giving support. You've got employees looking for irregularities and fraud among all the finances.

Sales, marketing and operation are huge parts of businesses that many engineers don't often think about.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#63

Post by at_a_remove »

0xy wrote: post #31

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.

Yes, I will simply not donate if my only option is Patreon. I want a dumb pipe between myself and the person or organization who receives the money. I do not want the pipe making any decisions about who gets to use it.

The idea that I am going to have to navigate the ever-changing political sensibilities of different organizations is starting to bother me, and I am seeing in it more and more places.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#64

Post by patrickyeon »

> In March, Patreon wrote in a blog post, “Not only are patrons not leaving the platform, we’ve even seen many of them upgrade their tiers to support their favorite creators during this challenging time.” Additionally, the average income for creators was 60% higher in March than in previous months, according to the company.

> Around that same time, however, Patreon said it saw patrons exiting the platform more than usual due to financial hardships. Still, Patreon said churn rates were stable.

These two paragraphs are one right after the other. How do you reconcile the two? How is it not at least a question posed to their spokesperson of which is the case?

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#66

Post by TylerE »

rtpg wrote: post #44
Nextgrid wrote: post #9

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.…

I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations. 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 accou…

If 0.1% of your customers cause 80% of your effort maybe rethink that retention?

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#67

Post by quickthrower2 »

patrickyeon wrote: post #64

> In March, Patreon wrote in a blog post, “Not only are patrons not leaving the platform, we’ve even seen many of them upgrade their tiers to support their favorite creators during this challenging time.” Additionally, the average income for creators was 60% higher in March than in previous months, according to the company. > Around that same time, however, Patreon said it saw patrons exiting the platform more than u…

Coincidentally, your username is patreon with icky in the middle!

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#68

Post by x0x0 »

patrickyeon wrote: post #64

> In March, Patreon wrote in a blog post, “Not only are patrons not leaving the platform, we’ve even seen many of them upgrade their tiers to support their favorite creators during this challenging time.” Additionally, the average income for creators was 60% higher in March than in previous months, according to the company. > Around that same time, however, Patreon said it saw patrons exiting the platform more than u…

This is guesswork.

Facts: They raised a $60m D in July 2019.

Guesses: Patreon loses money (ie, they're a startup). This may be due to solely due to international, the use of the round D, or not.

Either way, they -- much like the startup I run -- are immediately planning how to go 24-36 months without any additional investor cash. Because your investors will still expect you to meet growth targets to get that next round regardless of covid.

Speaking for myself only, we've taken to heart the cut once, cut fast mantra that every company that came through 2008 says is the right thing to do. And we've figured out how the company will go for more than two years without additional cash, or be able to tolerate 20q2 being a sales disaster. Those both require immediately cutting burn.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#69

Post by dankerr »

icelancer wrote: post #7
Nextgrid wrote: post #6

Non-shit link: http://archive.is/zsdOS

Really wish archive.is and Cloudflare could get over their problems, since I use cloudflare's DNS resolver, none of these links work. Oh well.

It works for me and I'm using Cloudflare DNS. 1.1.1.1/help confirms this and I just loaded the archive.is link.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#70

Post by sk5t »

TylerE wrote: post #66
rtpg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations. 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 accou…

If 0.1% of your customers cause 80% of your effort maybe rethink that retention?

Depending on the business, this can be like poking out your eyes to save money on eyeglasses.
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