Patreon Reflections

It’s been about 2 months into this Patreon experiment and I wanted to reflect on all of your significant impact on my life, as well as thank you.

I’ve always toyed with the idea of doing a Patreon model, as the failures of a strictly “ad-based” revenue model are obvious, but I never acted upon it. 

I had two fears around it: I didn’t know if people would support, and I didn’t know what I could offer if people did.

As 2022 wrapped to a close however, I had started noticing a few trends in my life that were making my fears seem smaller by comparison.

1. I had started to get burnt out on “daily” content.

There’s a pressure on Youtube to ALWAYS be producing, and never thinking ahead. Many of the creators I used to love, I’ve since learned behind the scenes are completely burnt out, empty shells of themselves. I was not immune to these pressures, and have, at various times also felt burnt out with the demand for “what’s next”.

2. My high effort content was always being pushed aside.

This was the thing that really pushed me over the edge. I noticed my high effort investigations, which were my main focus, were demanding more and more time, and I struggled to give them the attention they deserved.

In the month of October, when I was really ramping up my Cryptozoo investigation, I found myself constantly second-guessing whether all the time and attention on a single investigation, was “worth it”, given how many smaller videos I could’ve made in the meantime.

My solution at the time, to help myself justify the decision, was finally re-launch the defunct Patreon page I had, and give people the option to sign on to helping support these longer-form investigations. Fears be damned, ultimately if people didn't support, I wouldn't be any worse off, I could just continue with the status quo. 

So after a couple months of planning, we announced the launch along-side the Cryptozoo investigation, as a testament to what we can achieve with more time and effort on production and WOW, the reaction and support was more than I expected.

Just in the first couple months you all have totally changed the way we can prioritize content. Internally we’re able to be a different type of Youtube channel because of your support, and make decisions that are best for us not just today, but for the next few years of content. 

We've started music albums, we've created new characters, launched new scenes, finished a "sting" operation, and we're just in the first 2 months!

A bonus side-benefit I wasn't expecting as well, this much smaller community inside of Patreon is also fun to interact with. There's a certain scale on Youtube you get to where the idea of community gets lost to big numbers.  You just cannot realistically interact with a million people, but a few hundred is a different story.

So I suppose to wrap this up, I feel a tremendous amount of gratitude for your support. I truly cannot thank you enough for believing in Coffeezilla, you're quite literally enabling us to be a better version of what we are.

-Stephen