All roads lead to rome..?

Heyo, I haven't done one of these in a while. Wanted to write down some thoughts and proposing some future changes to the patreon.

As of right now, this patreon just makes a little under $40 a month. It saw a huge boost in december after it used to barely be $15/mo. For a "hobby" or "for fun" thing that's perfectly fine, but in the past month I've started thinking about doing this seriously, with the dream being self-employment and the closest to being independent as I could possibly be. 

The simplest explanation as to why I would like a "job" that I can never explain to my parents is that I have some lifelong mental and physical issues that make home life hard and run the risk of making work life even harder. To give you the least compromising answer I can give, I have some really bad arm tremors that can vary from slight jittering to not even being able to hold a cup full of water without spilling half the contents, an issue further exacerbated due to dyspraxia. That obviously leaves anything where I handle anything fragile or dangerous out of the question and it really sucks!

Right now, I'm not actually employed. If you're a longtime follower you probably know at the very least I'm a student doing studies. I again can't divulge specifics but the field I'm aspiring to work in is becoming more and more unlikely to achieve; truth is, I'm competent at it but I don't think competent would cut it because it's such a competitive field. That and the fact I would have to retire if I moved back in with my family leaves me with two choices with some fairly unrealistic time windows (and I mean unrealistic, we've got until just a little before september)

1) hope I get in that field first, fall back to a crappy retail or office job as a last-ditch option

2) hope I can get enough support from you guys to do this independently 

I may as well have both of those choices running concurrently for the time being, so I added a bunch of new goals on the patreon. They're a lot of money, but bare in mind I'm not a US resident so the prices are a little inflated to compensate for conversion. At about $2200 a month though I should have more than enough to live decently. Please also keep in mind this is just a very rough estimate and it could be I need less or more of that goal depending on which place I can find.

If I aim to achieve #2 there's probably a few changes that need to be made.

First and foremost, I am considering retiring the free 4K downloads. This has been something I've been doing literally since day one on Tumblr. I thought it'd be nice to just give people the way my stuff was always meant to be viewed for free but there's a few issues that have cropped up;

• the number of people who actually bother to click the mega.nz links to get the 4K image is very sparse, I did a check on some of my most recent images and the average, even on posts that have had hundreds of likes, is around 40 people. I don't even know how many of them went through with downloading it. It could be far less.
• it meant that the free/paid parity included a watermark I intentionally kept visible and that is more than a little underwhelming. Is this really how I intend everyone to see it?

If I were to retire it, here's how we would go forward:

• All images up to that point will still be on mega at 4K for free
• Any image after retiring the free downloads will be released at 1080p on twitter/pixiv/621/etc with a watermark and with a delay
• $1 "SFW" tier is retired and becomes a tip jar.
• Anyone who gives $5 will get the 4K image with no watermark with a delay. I'm a little unsure about that price. Maybe I'll make it more or less.
• Early access may become reserved for people who give $10 a month instead, again at 4K with no watermark
• Legacy patrons qualify for the $10 tier but I will not open up new slots.

Exceptions will apply for commissions (unless the commission gives me their blessing) and for any renders that feature models by Wattchewwant.

The second proposed big change is animations. I've sworn off against ever doing these for the sake of maintaining image quality and a total lack of animation experience, but I think it's the big push I need to make to have this SFM thing be a viable financial path. The plan will be that I just start off doing short and simple shitpost animations, something where if it sucks it can just easily be shrugged off and we can move on, and then eventually do more NSFW affairs as I get more and more confident in my skills, from short loops to hopefully full length sequences.

Let me know what you guys think about those changes!