
Patreon lays off 13% of workforce - abakker
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/21/patreon-lays-off-13-of-workforce/
======
asiachick
I have no idea about the financials of Patreon but their site leaves so much
room for improvement. It's actually pretty awful.

There are lots of independent artists running Pateron accounts with 200-5000
patrons. Fans sign up to support them but also to get access to their library
of content.

Patreon provides a piss-poor UX for getting to this content. There is no list
of content. There just "here's the stream of posts by the artist". The stream
is JavaScript driven so if you want to go 100 posts back you have to page
through multiple pages of posts. If you want to do it again tomorrow, or if
the site crashes which it does, you have to start over at post 1 and page
through again.

It's telling that so many artists use google drive, dropbox, mediafire, or
mega to distribute their works. This seems like money Pateron is leaving on
the table if they'd provide for a similar service at similar prices. They do
provide a way to upload media but the UX is awful compared to Mega which has
arguably the superior UX of those 5 options.

Worse, because these artists are using these separate services there is no way
to limit who accesses them. In other words a bad user can share the links with
others where as if they did this through patreon you'd have to log in to
access the media. Of course bad users can still share the media they
downloaded in other ways.

Further, and I don't know if this has been fixed, but I know what one time
they only billed once month so bad users would sign up in the middle of the
month, download everything, then cancel their patronage and avoid having to
pay at all.

I can certainly imagine a service that's significantly better Patreon for this
use case.

Let me also add discoverabilty is horrible. Maybe this is mostly on the
artists but the #1 way I find one is off of patreon. Compare to say youtube
where the #1 way I find anyone is on youtube itself.

~~~
cirno
> In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they
> did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course
> bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways.

They do. There's a popular website I won't name (----.-----) that has users
provide their Patreon logins, and it goes and auto-scrapes all post content
from people that login supports and mirrors it for free. Almost every artist
with more than 100 subscribers is illegally shared there. It's really quite
sleazy when you consider most of the artists let you see their entire catalog
for a $1 or even $5 tier. Cheating someone out of thousands of hours of labor
for $1 is particularly low.

I know it's the internet and you can't really stop piracy, but I'd like to see
Patreon being proactive against a service that hurts both itself and its
creators like that.

~~~
andy_ppp
Yes, water marking downloads with account details and charging for this sort
of thing would help put a stop to it...

~~~
jermaustin1
A PDF I bought on sellfy actually did this. It stuck my email address in the
footer of every page.

That email was tied to a transaction in paypal, making it highly traceable
back to myself. In 30 seconds, one could easily remove that from the PDF in
Acrobat, but that doesn't mean there aren't other hidden watermarks in the
file.

------
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?

~~~
hammock
The key to reconciling is seeing that "due to financial hardships" is a
dependent clause. When patrons leave, they are asked to give a reason why. The
% of those leaving who give "financial hardships" as a reason, is increasing.
However, as also noted, the total churn rate (people leaving for any reason)
is stable.

They're not saying that more people are leaving than usual. They are saying
that of the people leaving, more are offering financial hardship as a reason
for leaving, than usual.

A corollary would be that the % of people leaving for reasons other than
financial hardship has decreased.

~~~
patrickyeon
Mmmm yeah I would believe that. I guess it could've been better written with
something like "even so, some users are leaving and the ones doing so due to
financial hardships..."

Thanks

------
chipotle_coyote
Patreon's problem, I think, is that they've taken enough VC money to be at a
kind of "half-unicorn" status -- and there's no possible way for them to
return on that investment unless they start wooing megastars to their
platform. The majority of creators are always going to be way back in the long
tail, but the folks at the top of the curve need to be bringing in a lot.
Like, _a lot._ A million a month or more.

And I can't help but suspect that this realization necessitates changing, if
not the business model, the business _strategy._ Patreon in 2017 is fine with
Chapo Trap House and Amanda Palmer as the top moneymakers; Patreon in 2020
needs the next Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga. (Better yet, the current Taylor
Swift and Lady Gaga.) That doesn't mean they have to actively drive out the
podcasters and comics nerds and furries, but it probably means they have to
put all their resources into going after whales.

~~~
dannyw
A middleware that can be described as Wordpress with access control and Stripe
integration, but worse in terms of performance and UX; somehow takes on $165
million in funding [1] and describes their business model as "not sustainable"
[2].

Patreon is a low touch SaaS platform that charges up to 12% PLUS payment
processing fees. They do not provide any meaningful level of discoverability:
you must build your audience yourself.

I wonder how the business would be doing if it disregarded that "raise money
and spend money at all costs" model, that Softbank exaggerated? What if it had
a WhatsApp-size of team: ~20 employees using sensible and well-architected
tech stacks (not chasing the latest shiny thing just cuz its hip or cool)? I'm
sure they'd be outrageously profitable.

[1]: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/16/patreon-
raises-60m-series-...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/16/patreon-
raises-60m-series-d-targets-international-growth-and-more-customization/)

[2]: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-
patre...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patreon-
announces-it-will-pay-out-half-a-billion-dollars-to-content-creators-
in-2019.html)

~~~
hef19898
There seem to be a lot of businesses out there, that should be cash positive.
Yet, the VC funded ones (also the ones you read about), aren't. No idea why,
maybe easy access to VC money, and VCs themselves, cause them toneglect cash
flow?

I also saw this effect with Chinese manufaturersofsolar modules, whatever
amount of cash they need, they get from Chinese banks. In their day to day
operations, cash flow doesn't really play an important role, as long as they
are marginally profitable at the end of the year.

~~~
jerf
Employee count seems to be the major problem. The current Patreon site doesn't
seem to justify more than 50, and I still feel I'm being generous; I really
want to say 20. A couple of web people, contract out any design work you need,
some sales staff, a few support people, definitely some business people and
support people to deal with chargebacks and the credit card company, and I'm
having trouble finding how they have 5 times that many.

I feel I need to expand that because that's going to read to a lot of people
as "Patreon shouldn't need more than 20 or 50 people." But it actually makes
sense to me that Patreon could have 250 people. There's plenty of ways for VC-
fueled growth to indeed take over this market and become the household name as
VC-style growth intends to do. The problem is that _what I see from them_
doesn't seem to justify that. The complaints that people are posting in other
comments have been like that for _years_. Discoverability of artists is awful.
Obvious places to list patron-only media are missing, let alone any sort of
hosting. Community features are very perfunctory. Their outreach seems to be
stalled out; the top of the patron chart seems to gas out weirdly, where I
think there ought to many dozens of people making $10K/month by now by the way
the economics of this should work. Patreon today hardly seems any different
than it was three or four years ago. As a startup with a couple hundred
people, I'd expect to see it moving fast and breaking things and rolling out
new features every couple of months, if not weeks, not being so stagnant.

I mean, I've worked for a "startup" [1] that had ~200 employees. It had
several products, each of which pushed significant updates around once every
two months, sales staff, support staff, physical manufacturing staff... it
moved fast and sometimes broke things. In any six month period you could take
any of the products it had and there were clear changes and improvements,
probably a new model, probably starting up a new product since then. Totally
different business, my experience is not entirely applicable of course, but
Patreon from the outside feels like a business that is already running a bare
bones staff as it treads water while the business winds down, not an exciting
startup getting things done. Where's the features? Where's the improvements? I
don't just mean techical, either, I mean business improvements too (better
deals for the users over time, better business partnerships for the
aforementioned content hosting, etc.) Why is it still possible to effectively
set up a feature-parity competitor to Patreon in a few months with just a few
people? Shouldn't they have both technical and business features that make
that harder by now? Where's the output of all those people's work? I dunno. I
don't expect to be able to see all of it anyhow... but I don't see much at
all.

If that ~200 person startup had suddenly been switched to working on Patreon,
in a year we'd have a good forum (even if we had to write it from scratch),
we'd have some sort of custom content hosting, we'd have listened to our
customers and built what they wanted more... & I'm judging it against what we
could have done 15 years ago at the time. Today a decent prototype of some of
what I'm talking about is 10 minutes with CloudFormation or equivalent, and
then you can tune from there (since you may not be able to afford to directly
ship that).

[1]: I can understand if you don't want to call that a startup any more.

~~~
hef19898
From my total outside perspective to both, development and patreon, it is that
there is more to platform business than just reach and number of users. I mean
without users, it is pointless. But without value for the users, it is kind
pointless as well. Or not pointless, but falling short of the potential.

EDIT: 200 people, depending on the business, is still in start-up teritory if
the company is not decades old.

------
mdorazio
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.

~~~
Applejinx
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.

~~~
kevinmchugh
The patreon podcasts I listen to have all said they're sorry to see people go
but know money will be tight for many, and that if we can stand remote
recordings, they'll be making just as much content as before.

Not sure if they're all just spooked or if they've seen hits already.

------
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.

~~~
Kiro
In Europe most companies are doing this instead of laying off right now. It's
a conventional practice that saved a lot of companies during the 2008 crisis
and in many countries it's subsidized by the government.

~~~
ac29
If its subsidized by the government, how is it a paycut? Similar programs in
the US exist, for example states paying a 50% unemployment payment for
employees who have their hours cut by 50%. Its a win-win - companies
effectively pay nothing to keep their employees at a full time salary for
reduced hours, and the government avoids needing to pay out full unemployment
benefits to laid off employees.

Edit: see this for an example of the program in California:
[https://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Work_Sharing_Program.htm](https://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Work_Sharing_Program.htm)

~~~
Kiro
Can only speak for Sweden but you do need to take a paycut as well. In Swedish
but you can see the table here: [https://tillvaxtverket.se/om-
tillvaxtverket/information-och-...](https://tillvaxtverket.se/om-
tillvaxtverket/information-och-stod-kring-coronakrisen/korttidsarbete.html)

For the 60% bracket the company reduces your working hours by 60% and you get
a paycut of 7.5%. The government covers the difference, effectively reducing
the cost for the company by 53%.

------
Nextgrid
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.

For what it's worth I've stopped using Patreon when they included some
Facebook tracking (among others) on the membership management page that when
blocked will crash the entire front-end and make the entire page unusable.

~~~
rtpg
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 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.

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

~~~
rtpg
These customers are usually top billing and are just indicators of going
upmarket. They’re also probably hitting problems loads of your users are
hitting and simply dropping out of the funnel from.

“Fire your users” is a thing, but at one point you gotta actually have things
work

------
tempsy
This company never made sense to me from a “venture scale” perspective. It’s
big, sure, but are the financials really ever going to be strong enough to go
public? I guess I don’t see it.

Also annoying to basically admit that layoffs were basically avoidable given
the “strong cash position” but made anyway to give the company a little more
runway. Doesn’t look too great.

~~~
slg
>This company never made sense to me from a “venture scale” perspective. It’s
big, sure, but are the financials really ever going to be strong enough to go
public? I guess I don’t see it.

It looks like the company's biggest creator brings roughly $5k a month for
Patreon and only one other creator has their financials public and brings in
even 40% of that [1]. There is certainly money to be made in that business,
but I just don't see how they scale revenue in any large way without pissing
off either patrons or creators.

[1] - [https://graphtreon.com/patreon-
creators](https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators)

~~~
rtpg
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 top of this, Patreon probably has revenue sharing with the card processors
for a small percentage of the fees (let's say even 0.1%), which adds a couple
k.

Now people in the high-paying pro plans that get you the 5% rate (the lower
end is 12% platform fees!) will pay $300/month.

that alone doubles their revenue, adding $300k/month _for just these first
thousand patrons_.

So you're already at $600k/month in MRR. Hell of a lot more than a lot of
"serious venture scale" B2B CRMs that are trying to be the next Salesforce or
whatever but utterly failing at providing the value add needed to make big
billings.

You might not need 300 people for it. And yeah it would be a lot better to
make a lot of money. But they're being pretty successful at getting money
here. And this is just assuming that they only have 1000 patrons (which is
just false)

~~~
sk5t
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.

~~~
tempsy
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.

~~~
rtpg
Wait, how does $50M not cover 300 employees? Is fully loaded cost of employees
(I imagine most of those 300 are _not_ super high level engineers, but things
like CS and admin) in SF really above $160k/employee?

~~~
tempsy
Salary + benefits + bonus + stock.

Health insurance is expensive. Don’t think many realize how much it costs
employers.

Then obviously rent is the other big expense. And cloud computing.

------
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.

~~~
aembleton
There is more than one person working at OnlyFans [1]. Many of these are
customers of OnlyFans, but there are others like a Social Media Manager,
Recruitment, Marketing etc.

1\.
[https://www.linkedin.com/company/onlyfans/people/](https://www.linkedin.com/company/onlyfans/people/)

------
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.

~~~
fareesh
They also banned Carl Benjamin, leading to a mass exodus. They justified this
by citing his use of a racial slur in a YouTube video, although the word was
not used in the context of a racial slur.

In the USA there is some kind of Voldemort status given to this word where you
cannot even use it out of context - it reminds me of that Jehovah sketch in
Monty Python where that parody has now manifested itself into a reality that
seemingly changes the course of companies.

~~~
lalaland1125
For context, here is a censored version of the transcript that caused Carl
Benjamin to get banned:

"I just can’t be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It’s
really annoying. Like, I — . You’re acting like a bunch of n-----s, just so
you know. You act like white n-----s. Exactly how you describe black people
acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right. I’m really, I’m
just not in the mood to deal with this kind of disrespect.”

“Look, you carry on, but don’t expect me to then have a debate with one of
your f--gots.…Like why would I bother?…Maybe you’re just acting like a n----r,
mate? Have you considered that? Do you think white people act like this? White
people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys
can’t even act like white people, it’s really amazing to me."

Seems quite ban-worthy to me, but of course each individual can judge for
themselves. Do note that the whole section has a sorta racist slant best
exemplified in the contrast between "white people are meant to be polite and
respectful to one another" and supposed "black people" behavior.

~~~
vorpalhex
Patreon and other platforms that engage in this kind of moral policing are
always going to have an issue in that they must continually get more strict.
As a platform, you can't easily defend to your profit source picking an
arbitrary line between one offensive behavior (racism) and another (eugenics).
At first that seems fine - nobody is going to defend racism or eugenics.

But remember that Patreon has a diverse user base and some of those users will
be very offended by things that don't offend you or I such as drinking, same
sex relationships or transgender rights. If Patreon (as a profit seeking
entity) sees financial risk, it's always going to engage in the most
aggressive enforcement of any potentially profit affecting content. This is
happening with Youtube now with the crackdown on firearms content, legitimate
coronavirus talk and swaths of political content on both sides of the aisle.

At some point we need a way to have platforms that allow any legal content,
even when that content is really reprehensible. I don't know if that solution
is legal or just an incentive problem, but the mainstream-ification of all
internet content at some point needs to be halted before free speech is
genuinely quite harmed.

~~~
freeone3000
Any platform that wants to can host all legal content. Nobody's preventing
them, as an outside force - people are complaining, but the complaints have no
force, other than people don't want to be there. Platforms with explicitly
free-speech agendas (see: 4chan, voat, gab.ai, hatreon) have reputations as
absolute cesspools of hatred and bigotry, and people who don't want to deal
with that choose on their own not to go there.

~~~
vorpalhex
I'm not saying platforms should be forced to host all legal content. Well
moderated communities (HN as an example) have a lot of value.

The issue is that right now those platforms can't really exist. Even if the
platforms themselves had an incentive structure to do so, credit card
processors would cut them off or heavily punish them in fees and rates.

Let's say you wanted to legally sell NSFW content. Perfectly legal, nothing
morally objectionable. Well, you can't host it on several server providers
immediately because their TOS/AUP restrict it. Some providers may allow it
with significant restrictions.

Once you find a place to host, you still need to accept money. Paypal, Amazon,
Google Pay, et al are right out. You can't use Stripe last I checked. You may
be able to use Authorize.net or another middleman but you'll have to post a
bond and pay a much higher rate. They may still cut you off.

And that's all for perfectly legal non-morally questionable content! That's
for porn which 80%+ of the population indulges in.

> Nobody's preventing them, as an outside force

Except practically yes, they are.

~~~
freeone3000
You can't have it both ways. If some site can choose not to host some content,
then so can some server provider, some DNS provider, some colocation operator,
some payment processor, and so on. It's the same deal.

And the above platforms DO exist, people CAN use them, and by God there's no
shortage of porn on the internet.

(ccbill for NSFW billing, btw)

------
imjustsaying
>This decision was not made lightly and consisted of several other factors
beyond the financial ones

>Still, it’s peculiar timing for Patreon, given the company touted an increase
in new memberships during the first three weeks of March.

Peculiar indeed. So what is a factor not yet mentioned?

69 days ago, I was net downvoted after pointing out specifically what trouble
was coming for Patreon.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22316071](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22316071)

>>I wonder if consumers could use forced arbitration in the same way.

>They can. Patreon is about to be hit really hard for playing thought
policeman.

Now we are here.

------
gldev
seeing news like this really brings me down, no matter what i hate when
employees take the hit and i sure hope they can find another job sooner rather
than later.

------
mikorym
I think there should be a music service that works exactly like Spotify /
Apple Music / Google Music but with these differences:

1\. No free tier

2\. Your views determine which artists get your money.

AFAIK all of the above mentioned services pool views and give your money to
the artists with the most _overall_ views. If I listen exclusively to Scatman
John's _Scatman 's World_ then I would have expected his estate to get all my
money minus maybe 5% admin fees.

~~~
anandoza
What's the difference? Maybe I misunderstood but isn't pooling the views and
then giving money weighted by views the same thing?

~~~
syllospri
Slightly different. Example if the service only has 2 users:

I listen to artist A's song 1 time, you listen to artist B's song 9 times. We
listen to no other songs for the month.

With pooling, A gets 10% of the money, B get's 10% of the money.

With their suggestion, they each get 50%

------
flashman
But I thought Patreon never took more than a 12% cut...

~~~
winslow
Sign of the times

------
tobyhinloopen
Somehow I thought Patreon was just a small service built by like 4 people...

~~~
zhte415
I thought similar. Four developers/full-stack, but then a customer support
function that'd roughly 0.X scale with users, then marketing - could double-
hat that, then certainly a legal/compliance team after some scale, also
finance which probably doesn't need to scale linearly but should be a couple
of people at least and no double-hatting on these at their size. So, thinking
a bit, perhaps more than four.

------
rorygibson
I'm slightly surprised by Patreon's pricing, given they're not a discovery
platform - it's really just subscription payments and some simple CRM stuff...

It's pretty easy to make a simple facility for accepting subscription
payments.

You can do this with any website, plus a tool like Trolley [1] - of which I'm
the creator, btw - with no technical knowledge. The fee structure (2% for
Trolley, plus your Stripe fee of ~2%) comes out less than Patreon, and you're
not inside a walled garden.

Use the webhooks to link to it a CRM of your choice - probably on a free plan
- and you're golden (yeah ok, maybe this bit isn't entirely non technical)

I should probably write a blog post about this, tbh :)

[1] - [https://trolley.link](https://trolley.link)

------
0xy
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.

~~~
hateMyIdeas
I don't really understand pateron when I have a donate button..but I imagine
people who use pateron are doing better..

Gamification?

~~~
lmm
Single place, consistent UI, my credit card details are already there. I can
change my card / address for everything in one go. It removes a lot of
friction.

------
panpanna
What alternatives to patron exists today?

What happened to those French guys patron alternative for open source
projects? Libre-something was is name...

~~~
sp332
How about Gumroad?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733)

~~~
Kye
Gumroad is working on something that can potentially replace Patreon, but as
it is Gumroad's different features lack the integration that makes Patreon
what it is.

------
0zwan
It seems they still hiring:
[https://boards.greenhouse.io/patreon](https://boards.greenhouse.io/patreon)

How is it possible?

~~~
asperous
Two possible reasons:

\- They may have interviewed for those roles internally but not found a fit

Or,

\- Those job lists are "continual" in other words fake so they can increase
their applicant pool and possibly use it in the future (or they haven't taken
them down)

------
billpg
One of my pet peeves.

If you sign up with Patreon to get perks, you're not really a patron any more.
You're a customer.

------
dependenttypes
This was not unexpected at all. They ended up shooting their own legs by
harassing lewd artists off the site.

------
readhn
unfortunately this is just the beginning

~~~
paxys
Not the beginning. There has been a steady stream of layoffs happening for a
couple months now.

~~~
readhn
2months is nothing. dark times ahead unfortunately.

------
tsukurimashou
I'm dead

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

~~~
tehwebguy
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.

~~~
tempsy
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.

