Tiers, etc. (Patreon)

So, it's been a year since my channel and Patreon really started taking off. I'm reevaluating how I use Patreon, so it's one of These Posts as I try to figure out how to steer this vehicle.

In short: I'm going to switch my tiers up as follows for new subscribers but everyone reading this will get grandfathered in (Reddit says so anyway):

$2 is just the "thanks for the support" tier.
$5 gets you early access and Discord.
$10 gets you patron-exclusive videos of whatever type I make.
$20+ gets you in the credits.
That's it, much simpler offering, and higher top tier because everyone tells me I'm undercharging.

There's a poll down there, just because I'd like to know if those numbers sound absurd. Let me know if you would have walked away or picked a lower tier if you saw those when you signed up. Any other changes mentioned in this post are happening anyway though.

As I've said, I have no idea what I'm doing and am desperately trying to make this make sense to myself as much as anyone else. Thank you for your patience and understanding. Here's a bunch of details you can read if you like, although they boil down to, "I always hated how I set this up and I don't think anyone else liked it either."

Basically: It's hard to come up with bonus content, much harder than I thought. I really wanted (and still want) to offer exclusive material to patrons, but the first thing I've made that I felt was really worth it was the email video last week. You all seemed to enjoy that one, and I've had some suggestions about other patron videos that sound like good ideas, and which I'd never want to do publicly. So that kind of thing makes sense to me, but a lot of other stuff I intended to do doesn't.

I'd originally made the $5 tier pretty much because I had this idea of posting pics of stuff I've recently acquired that won't make it into a video in the near future. Trouble is, that's basically emailing you a tweet. None of the other creators I'm pledged to do it, and it feels weird to receive an email for "hey here's some pictures" and then have to reply through Patreon's crappy comment system.

Meanwhile, I made a twitter (@crdudeyoutube), which I think is a great way to establish a larger persona, but almost every time I go "oh I should post this on twitter," I think "oh but wouldn't it be depriving the paying customers," a hurdle that I simply created for myself.

I was doing patron only mail-call videos, and those made sense when I was getting unknown viewer mail, but that hasn't happened for a while, I just get ebay packages now and I can't make a video about every individual one. Besides that, right from day one multiple people told me "you should really just post those publicly, they do numbers on other peoples channels."

I also used to be worried about either getting scooped, or spoiling my Big Reveals if I posted stuff on Twitter, but in short, I'm less worried these days. With a growing audience, only a small number of people will ever see my tweets anyway (look at Tech Connections' twitter follow count vs channel sub count.)

Besides, at this point it's really Discord where I'm discussing the up and coming stuff, and it's only $2 to access that right now, something I should have adjusted for this exact reason (although, again, I won't kick out any existing members.) In short, I've realized it's just not very natural to post random stills of stuff on here, so I should stop pretending I'm going to do that and just post them on other mediums.

Of course, then it wouldn't be exclusive, but - and here's the crux of it - does anyone care? Every time I ask about this stuff, people say they just want to support me and the tiers are mostly meaningless, but the fact is, this is the only place where I allow people to give me money and then promise them something, and I need to feel like I'm delivering, even if that means promising less for the same amount. I'd rather be honest than stack up a bunch of benefits that don't really exist, especially if it's just me making more work for myself.

I've needed to rework my tiers for ages anyway, partly because my ambitions have grown (it literally costs more to do what I'm doing now), but also because I'm just not making the kind of extra stuff I thought I would be. It turns out this is all incredibly hard. So the above adjustments are just to flatten things out, offer less nonsense that's more practical elsewhere, and bump up prices to support what I'm doing better.