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Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

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Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#91

Post by jacobsenscott »

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.…

Nothing is fully automated. At their scale even if a small fraction of their users need manual intervention that's a lot of work. I'm sure they didn't freeze their feature set 10 years ago - they have a feature backlog for sure. On top of that they appear to have an ios, android, and web app. At their scale they need an infrastructure team just to keep the plumbing working. Their administrative back end is at least as complex as their user facing front end, and probably is also constantly generating feature requests. We are easily up to 30 engineers and more support people. That means accounting, HR, managers, payroll. The beast grows.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#92

Post by dpcan »

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…

Way more people are leaving than are upgrading.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#93

Post by s17n »

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…

Yeah it still sounds like a pretty easy problem (I work at a super operationally heavy company and at time my workload has been 90% ops 10% eng). If the 300 count includes all the support agents then I maybe I can see it but the common Silicon Valley practice would be for none of those people to actually be employees of the company.

On the other hand my company has zero marketing, which obviously won't be the case for Patreon - I have no idea what headcount levels are involved there - at Google marketing had a ton of people like running promotions and campaigns but again the entire bottom layer was TVC's...

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#94

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

Maybe the point is that they are not reconcilable and the writer wants you to think what Patreon wrote in the blog post was a lie, hence the however in between "Around that same time" and the patrons exiting the platform.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#95

Post by dpcan »

mdorazio wrote: post #17

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 am more inclined to believe that a lot of people are dumping their donations right now. Listen to a few podcasts that rely on it, and it will be clear.

I know that my patreon subscriptions are unfortunately the first to go of all my expenses right now. I only do them to inspire certain creators to keep going, but in some cases I don’t even listen to them or use their stuff anymore, I just liked donating so they could do what they love. But when things get tight, I have to survive first.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#96

Post by alephnan »

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…

> How do you reconcile the two?

This sounds like a riddle / koan.

Business analysts pulled these metrics from a data warehouse and the semantics don't line up.

I've worked on growth and data science teams, and there ought to be a book "How to lie with data science" as a successor to "How to lie with statistics".

There's been situations where I've seen the same metric queried in two different ways with contradictory results. The slight of hand here is that the query is query, and unless the metric is defined as the query, the metric is not the query.

I remember Nassim Taleb proposing that books are fractals and can't be summarized / compressed.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#97

Post by orblivion »

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'm with you on the political thing, but the middleman is great for reducing friction. I personally do not like to think about X number of expenses, which means X receipts in the email, X credit card numbers to update, etc. Patreon was one expense. What I would give to have one organization handles every charity I might donate to (and then have them hide my mailing address from them).

At very least it would be nice to have a piece of local software that acts as a "middleman" by integrating with (let's say) Stripe or Bitcoin, and I set up subscriptions that way.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#98

Post by SpelingBeeChamp »

eganist wrote: post #19
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.…

Some of the services Patreon offers bring them dangerously close to being regulated as a lender, or even a bank. Wouldn't surprise me if some number of their staff are retained to meet any such compliance needs.

Such as?

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#99

Post by dajohnson89 »

taneq wrote: post #89
NamTaf wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does shooting out the radio mean?

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#100

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

tempsy wrote: post #84

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.

They’ve made ~100M over the last 4 years according to Wikipedia (quoted as saying they’ve paid out $400M since they started in 2016 and they keep 20% of payments).

Still an insanely good number for a 1(ish) person operation.

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