How we doubled our Patronage in two months

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Hello Everybody!

This is my first post in the community, glad to meet you all. I’d like to share our experience on how we managed to double our Patreon in two months.

We are animators, and sadly, a bit caught in the fanart venue, though we are slowly stepping into original work. Many artists know this situation.

However, we had been creating tools to speed our works for years, and as an experiment, we decided to give great focus to them in Patreon as rewards.

Trying to promote a tool online proved to be a nightmare, but in Patreon, because of the pledge barrier, people started to value them more, and were more willing to give them a chance. Psychologically, when people had access to some of them for free, they immediately discarded them because they even didn’t want to take the work to install the actions.But in Patreon the psychology changed, and they started seeing them as a gift, and a fun thing to tr, specially, when we show GIFS showing how they work in one click.

At first, it felt transactional, but it encouraged us to make something that normally would not take off online, and being supported for it, which is the tool making. So it acted exactly as Patreon is supposed to, allowing us to do what we enjoy, as we provide value through it.

If you are an artist, or an animator, focusing a part of the rewards on this could be effective for you as well. Explaining your settings, giving a portion of your brushes or taking the time to disect a PSD and explain it in a PDF file.

The Trick is to be able to show the results of what you give in one single splash view, for us is a GIF, for you, it can be anything.

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Very cool! Thank you for sharing. Was this the only change you made that directly impacted your patronage? How did you promote it to your fans?

Would love to know more about what you think made this so successful.

Tal

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It was the most important change, yes, but not the only one. We read a lot about how to conduct a business and understand and audience.

We figured, to our surprise, that our audience was segmented almost at perfect 50% split. We started giving songs and High Res copies of our art as rewards as well, and that alone attracted 50 new Patrons, yet they go to the lowest tier levels. Rewarding the non artist was as important as giving unique value to the artists.

Whenever we receive a comment from any of our patrons we listen very closely to what they are saying. “you focus a lot on artist rewards” was a huge red flag, we conducted small scale tests, which caused a reaction, and then amplified them. We count on another 30% growth this month.

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