Thank you Mindy that is all VERY exciting! I realise that you don’t want to share timelines but really appreciate seeing these things on the list at the moment! I don’t want you guys to think I’m ungrateful about Patreon, because it is great, but everything is always able to be improved!
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I don’t understand why there isn’t an index of creators. Why is this so hard to do? I don’t understand why I have to know who is on Patreon to find them on Patreon. And I can’t even find them on Patreon if they are “adult” people, ie. many of my horror-writing friends.
Every time this comes up, it’s “not a priority.” My question about this was even addressed quickly in a Hang Time once, but basically they don’t care about indexing or a table of contents or sections where people can cruise to see writers or illustrators or filmmakers, etc.
WHY? So many more people would add to their patronage if they actually knew who is on Patreon! Also, maybe it wouldn’t seem so weird and secretative to those who are trying to understansd it if they could actually see that many people they know in real life are actually on here!
I’ve had a Patreon for many years. I love the idea of it but it’s brutal trying to grow patronage. Also, I don’t care about the merch stuff since I’m in Canada and postage is outrageous for anything. The merch my Patrons get is the…wait for it…merch THAT THEY SPONSOR!!!
A GALLERY would be FANTASTIC! At least we can finally post more than one picture in a post. But wouldn’t it be great if I could post all my stories and books into a gallery and then all the patrons could easily find them? Even I can’t find anything on my own site!
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Searching not just by name or generic titles (“artist/author/etc”) too would be cool, like categories. “Art tutorials” or “video essays” would be neat. You could apply tags to your page, maybe like 3-5? And those tags could be searchable to help narrow things down to what you’d be interested in supporting.
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YES!!!
This is why I basically just use Patreon as a payment handler. All my community interaction is done on my own discourse server. My rewards are facilitated through ConvertKit tags for various levels.
I honestly wouldn’t bother to use Patreon except that it handles the payment well. Even then, I have a chunk of supporters who won’t touch Patreon with a 10 foot pole, so I have deal with them in PayPal individually.
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Echoing this. My patrons haven’t expressed any of this to me ONLY BECAUSE I use OTHER WEBSITES to engage, host, and update them on.
You know something is wrong when you have to use 5 other different sites JUST to make patreon usable for your patrons.
That should be telling. I thought I’d just deal with it and keep up the work but how is patreon making it easy for me when I have to have 5 other sites to make it functional. And that’s also 5 other sites I keep having to direct my patrons to. I HATE sending them on scavenger hunts. It should all be readily available on PATREON as PATRONS to me.
Also I HATE that I can’t read my latest comments! I just want a page dedicated to who comment recently so I can just go down the list and answer it all not scroll through likes, deleted pledges, edit pledges, and THEN a comment… it’s so unnecessary?
Also IDK i haven’t seen anyone complain about our landing page. It was fine just taking them to our actual front page. Fix the problems already there before touching superficial things.
Also-also please, a pinned post that patrons can see so when they join all the info is there.
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They could partner with Graphtreon.com
That site does what a lot of what you’re asking for.
It indexes creators by pledges, earnings, category, whether they’re “Hot” as well as has a pretty nice interface.
Note: No I do not work for graphtreon, but I do support them and am a patron.
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That is an insanely cool index (looked myself up immediately hahaha). Thanks for sharing it.
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Yes yes yes!! Deeply agree with ALL of these asks! And there’s one that I haven’t seen anybody mention yet that drives me crazy, almost as much as the messaging system and search issues… which is the NUMBER of Patrons. Currently for me, it’s nearly TWENTY people off. As in, I have almost 20 more than it says on the page. This is damaging, because when I have a push, it looks to people like I’m losing patrons instead of gaining. It keeps me from being able to celebrate reaching my “goals” that I’ve set, because it doesn’t look like I actually made them. And each time I write about it, someone brushes me off and says “that’s not meant for people to know, just check under your patron relationship section for the actual number”. I’m sorry, not trying to be mean, but that’s utterly stupid. What IS that number there for, if not to let people know??? Seriously what is the purpose of it? It looks to me like the purpose is to let people know, so then, it should be an accurate reflection. I’ve been so frustrated with this, especially lately, as it continues to lower even as I get new patrons. 
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My numbers always get shifty during the first week of the month as Patreon tries to get everyone’s cards that got declined. Then after everything’s accounted for it settles. Could that be what’s happening?
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It’s likely that the discrepancy is caused by the number of declined patrons. If patrons’ payments aren’t going through, then Patreon doesn’t count them as active patrons, and they don’t show up in the number of patrons displayed on the front page. If the patrons fix their payment method and their payments start going through again, then they are counted as active again. Could this be the issue?
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I’d just like to say that it took a ridiculous amount of time to get content filters. I noticed them for the first time today after 5 years of waiting. Insane (that it took so long).
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This sounds less like “we’re trying to make you more money” and more “we’re trying to make more money!”
In the end you devise all these extra stuffs like Lens or Merch… Where, let’s get real, are obtuse, and not everyone’s going to use them. You essentially work on stuff that needlessly divide your creator base more and more, and it seems like you want to work on things that tries to get better percentage cuts out of your creators - as opposed to making creators get more pledges so everyone makes more money.
Instead if you focus on things that literally everyone uses on Patreon, like oh I don’t know, better Patron profiles or any of the things the OP is talking about, it results in better User Experience, which results in better user retention and more usage of the website. It might result in more (or at least more consistent) pledges coming through.
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@cuisine the great thing about Patreon as a business model is that the company doesn’t make money unless creators make money. We have no alternative revenue streams, no ad revenue. Even if you believe Patreon is just trying to make more money, that can only happen (and we can only grow as a business) by helping creators earn more money. It’s in our interest, as well as yours, to build things that we believe will do that. Not every feature is going to help every creator every time, but we are laser focused on building and working on things that we believe, based on hours of research, data, and creator and patron feedback, will deliver the most amount of benefit to the most people.
We recognize that some of the things we’ve focused on building have not improved the core, nuts and bolts, daily use of Patreon, which is a huge focus for us in 2020. We feel that pain. Trust us, we really feel that pain. We want to improve the core experience for all creators and their community of patrons. The anecdote that @haikujaguar shared about a patron needing to use a Gsheet pains us deeply and we know it’s not right.
The good news is we have a lot of exciting work ahead that addresses some of these things! I wanted to share a quick update from my post earlier in this thread that addresses a lot of the issues mentioned by OP and others:
Post Organization for creators & patrons
- Pinned posts
Launched! Gathering feedback here
- Search posts via titles
Extended the scope of this feature to include search of all posts, not just titles! Currently in beta test with 14 creators from the forum
- Welcome notes by tier Launched! Post here
- Featured tag placement on page Launched! Post here
Improving Patron Experience
- My Membership Tab for patrons Launched and still a work in progress based on feedback
Things we’re actively working on:
- Improving the landing page, especially tiers being hidden, design mock ups here
- Annual Plans
- Promo Codes
- International currencies
- Discord improvements
- Merch improvements
Larger items we know need work and are exploring:
- Messaging
- Creator dashboards (these numbers are confusing)
- Gifting
- Revamping your tiers
- Patron entrance survey
I hope this helps provide clarity! Please keep sharing your thoughts as we rely on them every day 
One thing to note: When the team is researching a feature, being able to read a cohesive thread from creators is hugely valuable. It’s a lot easier for me to surface feedback if there is a single forum thread per issue, instead of a mega thread like this one that has a lot of features and requests mixed together. For that reason, and the fact we’ve now launched a lot of the issues first raised, I’m going to close this thread now. Please feel free to DM me directly if there’s anything I’ve not covered here.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Patron Manager design feedback