Patreon:<p>You have too many employees. You are trying to do too much. You are not a tech company. Your business model should be that you facilitate transactions between multiple parties. To do this, you take a small cut, on top of the transaction fees the banks take that you pass on.<p>Stop being greedy.
<i>The company is also on track to pay out $500 million to content creators in 2019... 90 percent of funds are paid directly to content creators. Patreon takes 5 percent, and the remaining 5 percent covers transaction fees.</i><p>By my rough maths, that suggests Patreon runs on $25-$28 Million a year. I'd love to know what is costing them so much to be unsustainable (Customer support? Fraud department?)
It seems odd that they would have profitability issues since they are just a wrapper around PayPal. They should be pocketing the 6-7% after PayPal’s cut and the payout to creators for 90%.<p>I thought that this was one of those 4-hour-work week businesses where it was just the founder registering domain names and planning marketing.<p>It also seems odd that creators don’t just use PayPal directly and ask for scheduled transactions.
Maybe I'm missing something here but just taking a cut of the transaction I would think would make profitability pretty easy with some discipline...
I had such a good laugh that CNBC called them a crowdfunding site after I got admonished by Patreon for thinking they were a crowdfunding site. Internally, they've convinced themselves they're a membership site and they can't figure out why they have a messaging problem...
Sure it is. Scale back.<p>Or, face competition.<p>And generous? Who is doing the work?<p>Notice the focus on all the money paid to content creators?<p>They need it.<p>So much always going to the top is not generally sustainable. Unrest is all over the place.<p>If we can't figure out how to pay working people enough to actually make it, this whole thing is going south.<p>Not just Patreon.<p>Frankly, Patreon was one of the ones I felt better about. Now I don't and will immediately find ways to contribute to content creators I support directly.<p>And doing that is just not that much work.