Hey Simrell, thank you for reaching out to share your concerns around this issue. Your feedback is absolutely valuable and we are listening, always. This forum has been an invaluable source of information and inspiration for almost every team at Patreon. The community team reviews and responds to it daily, shares out threads in the company Slack channel, and use it as our main source for providing regular feedback in meetings focused on closing the gap between the people who use Patreon and those who build it.
We took the time to go through each item on your list and it looks like several of them are specifically related to changes we made to the creator landing page a few months back. We know this was a big change and while it may have seemed sudden, or even unnecessary, we want to assure you that we took every precaution to be as communicative as possible about these changes and why they were made. We recently posted about some of the new updates and the positive results from that work. With the changes we made to your landing page, on average 20% more fans are choosing to become patrons, which means less work for you to convert your fans into patrons. Since making these changes, we’ve continued to monitor average pledge size and have found no decrease in the pledge amount creators are receiving from patrons. Improvements to the welcome experience for new patrons, including more prominent featured tags and search for posts, has led to an 8% drop in patrons cancelling their pledges to creators .
Sadly, as much as we would truly love to, we’ll never be able to build all the things our creators want. That hurts. We have to make difficult decisions about what to prioritize along the way, which is no easy feat when we recognize there are multiple areas that creators are incredibly passionate about and areas that do need improvements. We absolutely see that and are excited to finally be tackling some of those major pain points (like messaging and patron data, which we’re working on improving over the next couple of quarters) as well as new feature requests, like annual memberships and more currency choices. The feedback provided in this forum has been instrumental in ensuring that work in these major areas get prioritized this year.
When possible, we do love to create more opportunities for direct creator participation and feedback around something we’re actively working on. We have hosted beta testing for the post search bar and run 10 consecutive weeks of being able to provide design feedback as part of our Open Studios. We read every comment and incorporate that feedback into our decision-making process for building and releasing new features and improvements. I think a great example of this was when we launched image galleries, which was a much requested feature itself. We were able to go from getting feedback from the community to launching the feature in 3 months , and even featured a creator from the forum (with permission) as part of the promotion. I’d love to be able to run more of these in the future when the feature and timing allows; often our user research team does a lot of work behind the scenes to gather feedback from creators and patrons before something becomes live.
Thank you for all the time you have spent sharing your thoughts and feedback in here, it has made a difference even if it doesn’t feel like it right now. I hope you’ll see the impact of it later this year when some of these features and improvements start rolling out for all creators to benefit from.
Best,
Brian