Well, It's About That Time (Patreon)

Hi everyone. Things may be changing here, probably for the better. Possibly for the worse, but I doubt that.

I doubt it because of the enormous support I've received from all of you, and my audience in general, over the last few years. When I started this I did not expect to have more than a few dozen views a month, and a couple comments total, that both say "cool." Where I am is not where I expected to be, to put it mildly, and I'm reaching an inflection point where I'm asking myself if I shouldn't make this what I'm all about.

You might not know this, but I still work a day job. I hate it, but I've been there for over a decade because it's the devil I know, and because I frankly never had to put in that much effort.

But that's been changing. The job has become far more stressful, the product much worse, and I dread going to work every morning, to the point where I can't make myself go to bed until at least 2AM because I'm trying to claw back some of the life this godforsaken place is stealing from me.

That, in turn, has made my videos crappier. You might not see it - I do my best to smooth over the effects, but this job is killing me.

There are weeks when I can't even look at a script, even once I'm totally off the clock. I end up squeezing scriptwriting, review and editing into the little chunks of time when I can finally relax, which ends up being after midnight - so I'm staying up until 4 in the morning and waking up at 10 the next day, late for work and totally zombified.

This is not sustainable. I've known for well over a year that I needed out of this place, but I've been too anxious to pull the trigger.

Here's the thing though: My Patreon income exceeded my day job months ago. I've been trying to ignore that - only using patron money for Content, almost never for personal needs, because I wanted to make my channel as good as it could be. But I don't think that's really doing any good anymore. I've plateaued, in several senses.

My subscriber and patron numbers aren't going up all that much. They do when I do my best work, but I've been struggling to achieve that quality for a long time.

And, while I've been trying to spend the Patreon income specifically on material for videos... it's honestly just piling up and getting ignored. I HAVE tons of stuff to cover already, and I'm not covering it. My studio is PACKED. I have literally hundreds of items that deserve footage, but I'm too tired and busy to think about anything except what's right in front of me.

In addition, I support three other people, including my girlfriend, with both my time and money. I have to shop (and pay) for groceries, clothes, etc. and if anyone needs to go anywhere out of the house, I have to figure out how to notch time out of my 40-hour-a-week-plus-on-call work schedule to drive them.

I am beat. I am tired, stressed, constantly busy, and I keep asking myself: what's next? When does this end? I'm sitting on a surprisingly popular youtube channel, but three years into it I'm staring at an indefinite future of days that look just like this. What did I put in all this effort for?

So, enough beating around the bush: I'm planning to quit my day job on Friday, assuming I don't chicken out, and do this full-time.

This is going to knock about $5,000 off my monthly income, and I'm pretty sure I can handle that... but it's gonna be close. I'm going to use my last paycheck to zero out some credit cards, then cancel some subscriptions I don't use, and having totaled up all my remaining expenses as best I can, I think I'm going to just barely scrape by with my current earnings - but I think I *will* scrape by, and that's good enough.

There will be changes for me. Initially, I'm going to have almost no money for new materials or equipment. I don't think this'll be a problem in the short term though - I have good cameras, I can still afford rent on the studio, and like I said, I have tons of stuff to make videos about already.

So, the dream is like this:

With the stress of my day job gone, I start chewing through the stuff that I already have on hand. I finish scripts that have sat for years untouched. I cover subjects that require more thought than I've been able to manage.

This results in an improvement in the quality and frequency of my output. No more month+ hiatuses. I actually start FINISHING series instead of losing the steam to keep going in favor of new business (sorry, SCSI Tower Part 2 - you'll get your day in court, I promise.)

This effort produces more subscribers, more patrons, more ad revenue. This becomes a sustainable business, for at least some time, that buys my groceries and my beer - and when I *do* run out of material, it leaves enough left over that I can still pick up new things to show you on eBay.

And honestly...  that all sounds workable. I need my patron income to increase to achieve it but I think it will, if I really put my back into the work. I think I can do it, I think I should, and I think I'm way past the point where most youtubers make this leap. If it's ever going to be time, this is the time. 

But, to put a point on it: I will now be relying on you to keep me afloat.

Ad revenue is fickle; if I release a dud and adsense drops $500 that month, I gotta be ready for it, that's just the hell of youtube. Patreon, on the other hand, has been extremely consistent - I've made more, almost every month, for over 24 months. It has never dipped appreciably, so I feel this is as reliable as any job, except I get raises more often than any job I've had.

I've always known it could drop precipitously - everyone could just decide to cancel their pledges next week and I'd be screwed. But it's been like that for over a year, since I decided to sign an office lease that I can only afford with this income. I've been treating this as a reliable paycheck for 18 months; I think I can keep going.

Things could go wrong, I could end up in a pickle. Maybe, possibly, I might have to take a sponsorship here or there - but I will sleep in the gutter before I start hocking online betting or alternative breakfast cereals that are apparently disgusting - and frankly I don't even get offers that legit; all the sponsorships I get are for outright scams. I might accept, like, PCBway, someone who actually makes a verifiably solid product, but I don't think this is likely to ever happen.

I am also not, to be clear, making any new promises. I am not a man of promises, I don't have it in me. I'm a mess, and my only goal here is to have more time and energy to focus on fighting it.

I am NOT going to promise weekly or biweekly videos, or any increase in patron-exclusive content, nothing like that. This will continue to be a "I make what I make" and "when it's done" kind of thing - I just hope I'll make more, and it'll be done more quickly. I think both are likely.

You've seen me do weekly videos before though, and I can do that again. I wasn't doing it out of necessity, I was just at a very low stress level at the time, and doing what I wanted to do. I'd like to do it again, when it makes sense. It made sense with the Quick Start series, in fact, but I only made it through two episodes before the day job caught up and sucker-punched me.

The next episode, in fact, will be a pretty dull one that I planned to shoot after the Phoenix Hyperspace story. I had to move up a much more boring episode in the schedule, despite having a script written and ready to shoot, because I realized I just didn't have the energy to make it happen.

I hate this! I had a plan, and I wanted to stick to the plan, and I knew I could do it, and I knew that we all wanted it, but it's clearly not possible under these conditions. I intend to change the conditions.

I'm not demanding that anyone up their pledge amount or make any promises - none of you showed up here thinking you were signing up to cover my food and health insurance, and it would be wrong to put that pressure on you. I know a lot of folks are shaving off a few bucks they can barely afford to give me every month - you have no obligations to me. If all of this doesn't work out, I will graciously accept it, call this "a good run," and go get a job like everyone else has to.

But if you can offer more, it would make it a lot easier to tell my boss "actually man, no, I'm good," on Friday, and make it a lot easier to give assurances to the people I support in my household that I am not making a huge mistake.

Also (whew, this stings, even though I know I'm about to enter a much stiffer era in my life of Asking For Money): if you know anyone who likes my stuff but isn't a patron, consider suggesting they sign up if they want to ensure that I keep gracing their Youtube recs.

Thank you all once again for the tremendous faith you've shown in me. The last couple years have been unbelievable, and I wouldn't trade this experience for anything.