LK Weekly: A better deal for patrons (Patreon)

After the launch of our Open Beta last week, it was time to dig into the hard stuff - designing a process for migrating off of Patreon and onto a new billing system. We'll be honest: this is stressful. Our patrons are the lifeblood of LegendKeeper. Without your support during this critical time, we can't bring LegendKeeper to the level we want it to be.

Braden and Adam got together on Monday and took a hard look at our Patron Price Guarantee. It was okay, offering a discount to patrons who were actively supporting the project. But it was complicated. It had several clauses around when and how and at what tier you supported LegendKeeper. The core idea was this: How can we thank our patrons for getting us to this point? But the offer as it was would exclude and confuse many patrons–Patrons we seriously appreciate.

So we've reimagined and radically simplified the deal:

Anyone who pledged to LegendKeeper on Patreon before Jan.17, 2022, can claim a lifetime discounted price of $5/month or $54/year.

You can read the new guarantee and FAQ here.

As we said at the top - this is hard. So we are sweetening the pot and encouraging y'all to help us do this quickly. If you claim the deal within 2 weeks of the feature shipping, we will send you an exclusive puzzle encounter as a thank you.

As of now, we are aiming to deploy this on Monday (though that could change after we do QA). It will appear as a simple flow on your account settings page. You don't need to take any action yet. Rest assured we will broadcast loud and clear when the time comes.

Behind the scenes: designing the billing flow

Braden has completed work on an ETL (Extract - Transform - Load) that will make LegendKeeper fully aware of every patron's history. There were some interesting edge cases, such as people switching their email addresses over the years. We almost got stuck on annual plans, but because Patreon forces every charge to the first of the month Braden was able to make the ETL have a much lower maintenance burden.

Adam did the wireframes for the actual billing UI you are going to see. Here is a picture of the design from Figma. As usual, he wrote way too many words but don't worry - Justin is finessing this. By the time you see the final thing, it should be simple and way less wordy.

Automating operations and communications

Our team is small (3 people, only 2 of them full time). There is always too much work to do. Thankfully, robots can help us 🤖.

Adam has been working on systematizing some of our operations (bug reports, data reporting, etc.) and moving communications (sending emails, announcements, etc.) onto some new platforms.

The most delightful discovery this week was the power of Zapier. It took only a few minutes to start setting up automated Slack messages for critical events.

We are very close to a workflow that will allow us to write announcements on our blog and then automatically stream them out to the correct subscribers across multiple platforms. Here's a screenshot of the workflow (still a WIP).

In the coming weeks, we will ship a new notifications section in LegendKeeper. This will be the way you decide how you want to hear from us in the future where Patreon is no longer our main communication platform.

Here's a basic wireframe of what's to come:

How to reach us

We launched a new support request system. You can file bugs or ask for the team's help by filling out the quick form at https://lk.quest/support

We are still accepting feature requests on our Nolt board. We have removed many of the tags and features that were no longer accurately reflecting how we work. You can learn about how we prioritize work on our features page.

LegendKeeper integrations

We can't say much about this yet, but we are still following some threads that began at our PAX U trip.

Adam and Justin started work on some wireframes focused around integrating other popular RPG apps with LegendKeeper.

Let us know in Discord - what integrations do you want to see?

More to come 🤫

TEAM LK