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Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

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Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#81

Post by tempsy »

tehwebguy wrote: post #75
treelovinhippie wrote: post #65

Patreon shouldn't have any more than half a dozen employees. But alas, they joined the VC exit cult.

This always gets said, have you ever looked at all the documentation and helpful materials they’ve put out? If they just wanted to be a payment processing platform they would just be a payment processing platform. Instead it’s guidance and education to help content creators create more and learn more.

Documentation doesn’t take 300 employees either.

Pretty sure onlyfans is basically run by one guy out of London and maybe a handful of contractor support staff for essentially the same business.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#82

Post by NamTaf »

x0x0 wrote: post #68
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 rou…

Although that makes sense as to why they may cut, none of that addresses the two statements the grandparent quoted, though.

They wrote in a blog post in March that patrons are not leaving the platform, and then at the same time they apparently reported that they were in fact leaving.

Which is it?

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#83

Post by zerm778 »

Patreon became successful mostly because of the girls charging money for their nudes. Then they've started to ban these girls because they wanted a clean platform. Guess what, these girls have now moved to onlyfans and they won't come back. Patreon has lost the money bringing members thinking that failed musicians/youtubers would bring them the big bucks.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#84

Post by tempsy »

FWIW I’m pretty sure OnlyFans is run by one guy out of London. Maybe has a handful of contracted employees for engineering and support. Basically the same business. Not sure what the payment volume comparison is but must be hundreds of millions a year, at least.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#85

Post by baron_harkonnen »

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 don't know why X needs N people

This statement can be made about almost any company in the US right now. There is some serious systemic risk in the surreal number of people working whose jobs do not matter at all.

Even for productive software engineers, think back on how many projects in your career really shipped, how many of those then made any money, and then how many of those companies are still thriving. For me nearly all of the work in my career has amounted to surprisingly little and I have always been on the front lines of creating products in my roles.

So why are there so many people at every company that don't really create value? What does it mean when an economy depends on those people being employeed, well paid and consuming goods?

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#87

Post by miguelmota »

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 was at a consumer facing startup where about 70% of employees were in-house customer support representatives, so even though a product may appear simple, it can have a lot of non-programmer employees.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#88

Post by doctor_eval »

Friends and I were discussing this last night on jitsi. We think that instead of throwing employees to the wolves at a time when getting a job is going to be difficult, many employees would accept equivalent pay cuts to help weather the storm.

In fact I know one company that did just this, with 100 employees. The staff chose a 10% indefinite pay cut over 10% reduction in head count.

Sacking people at this time is awful, and any company who has cash in the bank has options other than bankrupting some of their employees.

I don’t care if Patreon had planned this before Covid-19. There are alternatives. These are dark times and companies who sack their employees as a first resort are part of the problem.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#89

Post by taneq »

NamTaf wrote: post #82
x0x0 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rou…

Although that makes sense as to why they may cut, none of that addresses the two statements the grandparent quoted, though. They wrote in a blog post in March that patrons are not leaving the platform, and then at the same time they apparently reported that they were in fact leaving. Which is it?

In March most of the world went from "everything's fine here, situation normal" to shooting out the radio and diving head first into a trash compactor. That might have affected a few things.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#90

Post by tempsy »

sk5t wrote: post #80
rtpg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really representative. If you sort by publically available earnings, you can see 100 Patreons pulling in $10k/month, another 100 making $5k/month, then another making $3/month. the rest are private. Assuming this is a representative distribution of the top 1000 (and I bet it's actually higher!): - $10k/month * 300 + $5k/month * 300 + $3k/month * 400 - ~$285k/month for Patron just from the official cut On t…

Honestly, $600k/month for 300 knowledge workers is horrible revenue if growth and margin aren't on the right track. This is more like a "20-30 pretty decent consultants in a second-tier American city" number.

I think they make more than that. A TC article last year projected $50M in 2019. It also said they were not profitable.

Even then that doesn’t exactly cover salary and benefits for 300 employees in SF, let alone everything else.

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