Special offers for patrons

f you look at any guide to "how to do Patreon", you'll see instructions to make special offers and tiers of membership open to your patrons. That approach doesn't really appeal to me. For one thing, I'm just not a fan of the whole "first class / second class" approach where people who pay more get more access or special privileges. My goal has always been to help as many people as possible enjoy this great hobby by teaching people how to solve the problems that might be getting in the way of their enjoyment. (Hey... that's actually a decent mission statement. Somebody write that down.) I want to make as much information as possible available to as many people as possible, not just people who pay. My reward is, first and foremost, knowing that I am making the world a happier, funner place in some small way, by helping people enjoy this hobby. The money is nice... don't get me wrong.

I do think my content has value, and I appreciate SO MUCH those of you who agree, and who choose to support me financially. I think of your support as you deciding to pay me for something I have already done (helped you or entertained you with my videos) rather than as you buying additional services or content from me. I hope that you think of it that way too, and from conversations I've had with you, I think you do. I hope that most of my patrons feel that they get far more value from my channel than the money they put in. If you ever DON'T feel that way, I encourage you to reduce your subscription amount or cancel your subscription entirely--no hard feelings, really.

But let's be straight for a minute... most people COULD decide to become a Patron, and most people don't, and y'all DID, and that means something too. So I am always trying to think of ways to express my appreciation to you, without violating the values I've discussed so far. And I think I have come up with two of them that you are going to like.

First, I am creating a DRE Patrons Slack board. All Patrons are invited to join this board. If you don't know, Slack is a messaging app for businesses. Basically, it is like a private, invitation-only chat room (people who used IRC back in the day, please commence eye rolling). I am accessible to most anybody on the Internet via many different mediums (email, YouTube comments, FB messenger, etc...) and honestly, it can get a little hard to keep up with who is talking to me where. I hope that the Slack room will give you a place to interact with me more directly. And when the message comes in, I will immediately know it is coming from a Patron, and be able to pay just that little bit more attention if I am able. For example, I almost never do one-off Blackbox Log Analysis any more, because my queue on the RCgroups thread is so long I don't feel it's fair to cut the line. But for a Patron with a quick question, perhaps I would make an exception.

Second, I want to invite those of you who are interested to act as a sort of "inner circle" of testers for me. I sometimes get products that I am not able to test for some reason, or that I simply don't want to do a full test on. For example, I might get a frame, but not have enough other parts to fully build it out. Or I might get a product that simply doesn't appeal to me. In these cases, I would like to offer them to you on the condition that you will use them and give me feedback that I can use to make my review of the product better and more complete.

At least at first, I am going to make the "tester" circle available only to those who Patronize at the $5 level or higher. I realize that by doing this, I am flirting with the "first class / second class" situation that I want to avoid, but I hope that it will be okay. I am not setting this up as a "tier" on my Patreon account. I don't want you to sub at the $5 level because you want free stuff. Honestly, that would be a mistake, because this won't happen very often! But for those of you who have decided to sub at a higher level, I want to find a small additional way of saying thanks to you. I hope that you will think of this as an opportunity for us to work closer together to create more great content that helps others out, and not just as a chance to get Free Stuff.

Please let me know what you think of this in the comments. I'm still new to this whole "Running a Social Media Presence" thing, so I really have no idea if I'm making a big mistake. But as my Patrons, I hope you're the ones that will forgive me a mistake here or there, if I make one.

If you are interested in joining the Slack board, please comment below with your email address. I have to manually send you an invite; I can't just batch add you from your email address on file. Well actually, I could, but I don't want to spam you if you're not interested.

Happy Flying!