Survey Results, Proposed Changes, and the Future! (Patreon)

This is a LONG POST, but filled with very important information about upcoming changes here on Patreon as well as the general direction of my content moving forward. It's worth the read, I swear! I feel that transparency is paramount, especially when it comes to explaining my reasoning to you all, so I hope that you'll take the time to digest this wall of text.

Hello everyone! Let me start off with a big thank you to those who joined us on Discord for the live chat last night, we had a ton of people hanging out and everyone listened to me rant and ramble for nearly two hours about everything I'm going to be discussing here!

Before diving into the survey results I want to talk about why I'm doing all this analysis and what my mindset is. While things are pretty good as they are, I haven't hammered down the schedule and high output that I had hoped to lock in at this point. I often run into hangups that derail my plans, the biggest hangup being me, myself. So when I was looking at the biggest issues to address, like frequency of content and consistency of release, I realized that I needed to take a look at EVERYTHING and refine my whole process from the ground up.

I'll show you exactly what my "vision" was for the way forward. This is what I wrote when I took that hard look at myself and what I felt I needed to accomplish:

Clean up the entire YuuriVoice on Patreon experience. Condense the overview, tiers, and tags. Emphasis on bringing value to the forefront and cutting bloat. Fewer mental hoops to jump through for every user. Make finding relevant content and information as easy as possible.

Add value to the Patreon experience through interaction and acknowledgement. Make it personal, greetings via Bonjoro and a monthly content newsletter via Mailchimp. 

Additional rewards to fill in gaps in tiers, as well as a detailed Special Offers plan. Use special offers to build a catalogue of merchandise and gauge interest. 

Create a clear content roadmap, with a fully detailed schedule and quota. Create a corresponding roadmap for promotional content. Put a system in place for the release and promotion and re-promotion cycle. Simple. Reusable. Plug and go.

Address needs that arise to fulfill quota. Scout and hire artists, writers, freelancers to make the process smooth and achievable. Develop the “conveyor belt” of content.

Renewed hype. Renewed energy. Renewed passion. Eliminate complacency. Achieve more. Work smarter, create better habits, and build the foundation to reach greater heights.

Ultimately, this vision is what guided me through the process of creating the survey and asking what I asked. So let's get into that. 

I went into a big individual breakdown in the voice chat, but I'm just going to give you the big takeaways for the sake of brevity given how long this post already is going to be.

• The least favored reward is the Q&A, which makes a lot of sense to me. I'm thinking I'll roll the Q&A into the Monthly Update, let people leave any questions or topics they might have in the comments of the current month's update to be addressed in the next month's update. This allows me to clean up the tiers a bit and make things clearer.
• In regards to potential new rewards, the bite-sized 30 second commissions were the massive favorite. That's fantastic and I have a pretty good idea how I want to incorporate that in the future.
• Merch stuff and physical items were also well received as potential rewards, and I think what I'll do is have that be part of special offers that I run every few months since having a monthly physical reward would be pretty impossible, but it's clearly a cool thing people would like me to do!
• Enamel pins are the first thing I'll be targeting for that type of thing. Enamel pins were the big winner in voting, with buttons in second place, and my logic is that if you like buttons, chances are fairly high that you'll like pins! 
• The one on one interaction thing was the biggest loser of the bunch, and thank goodness because my anxiety wouldn't allow me to do that type of thing anyway! lol
• The biggest shock was that most people find the content they're looking for here on Patreon fairly easily...which is not at all what I was actually expecting people to say, because Patreon's browsing sucks and I've been telling them this for a good while now. There are changes an improvements coming to the app soon, and browsing is something they're looking to address in general, so that's a positive thing.

On top of the data and feedback I've been collecting from you all, I've been really digging into the business side of Patreon and going over their best practices and data they've collected as well. One very glaring issue that has been made clear to me was that having a $1 tier is actually not a very good idea. A huge chunk of that goes towards fees because processing small payments like that is a bit of a chore on the Patreon end of things. 

However, when I set out on this journey I made a strong point to make the archive available for one dollar. In the changes to tiers I'm going to propose, the $1 tier will be gone...BUT! The $1 tier will be unpublished, not deleted, so anyone who is at the $1 tier right now will retain their access to past and future posts that would fall into that tier. So if you're in that tier, you're not going to lose anything.

Also in my proposed tier changes you'll see that the SFW exclusive is going to move from the $3 tier to the $5 tier. I wanted to make as few changes to the rewards as possible, but this was the one spot in my tiers that I felt I had to make an adjustment. However!!!! I will be leaving the SFW exclusives from past months in the $3 tier rather than bumping them all up to $5, so you're not losing access to anything that has come out and you unlocked during your time at the $3 tier.

I know this might all look confusing so let me just show you what the changes would look like.

• $3 “Welcome to YuuriVoice!” - Audio Archive & Monthly Update
• $5 - “SFW Exclusive Tier” SFW Audio & Voting
• $10 - “NSFW Exclusive Tier” NSFW Audio & Voting
• $20 - “Extra NSFW Exclusive Tier”NSFW Audio #2
• $30 - “Bite Sized Commission Tier” Personalized 30 Second Recording (Limited)
• $50 - “Big Gulp Commission Tier” Personalized 3+ Minute Audio (Limited)

An added benefit of these changes is that now voting will be on the same tier as the audio you're voting on. That was sort of...dumb of me to not have it be like that, so hopefully that clears up some confusion there! You'll also see the 30 second recording coming in as a new reward at the $30 tier. That can be all sorts of things, a greeting, a ring tone, a special message, me moaning tf out of your name...whatever suits you!

Okay. I know this has been a LOT of reading, a lot of information, potentially overwhelming. Hell, I'm overwhelmed just trying to write all of this and probably should have had someone taking notes during the Discord chat because it was a lot less laborious when I spilled the beans there.

To wrap things up I want to let you know that I'm taking steps to address what I feel has been my biggest issue, consistency and frequency of content releases. I'm working on a complete schedule with a goal of releasing EIGHT public audios a month, set release dates for Patreon content, etc. so that you're never left wondering when the next audio is or where I'm at. That's extremely important to me and I'm eager to put this new system in place.

Whew. Deep breaths. Rest your eyes. We made it. I am happy to answer all questions you might have in the comment section, and I'll be giving you all a big heads up before any of these changes are fully implemented. I'm eager to enter a new chapter of the YuuriVoice saga, one with a bit more certainty, consistency, and excitement! You have probably seen that I'm in the process of seeking out writers to handle script work for me, which should open up the door for the content to flow! 

Thank you for reading, and for your continued love and support!