Checkin 2: Co-creation of a Patreon (Patreon)

We've gone from 0 to 10 patrons in the past week or so, and crossed a secret milestone in the process: I'm no longer personally paying to keep the servers  for the existing betas running! Sure, they weren't super-expensive, but it's a big vote of confidence nonetheless. Thank you!

New patrons this week include a handful of long-time beta users who are paying for received value, as well as close friends who are supporting me in good faith just because I shared and asked kindly. Another round of thanks to both groups!

Launching a Patreon

Getting this Patreon up and running was a new kind of process to me. I have to say it was surprisingly easy to do, Patreon's backend tools are very nice. But it was also a good bit of work, as I had to:

• choose an avatar and create a cover image
• decide on the tag-line "Loren is creating tabletop game design tools for everyone"
• write the primary content explaining what this all is
• come up with Rewards
• come up with Goals
• write a Thank You message

I'm not sure if I was completely ready for all of this, but the lists I made to clarify my intentions last week (see Checkin 1) certainly helped!

Another thing that helped immensely was sharing it with the early adopter group... early. I bet I'm not alone in saying that I get in my own way quite a bit, and creating this Patreon was no exception. When the initial feedback came in, it was unanimous:

Where is all of the awesome? I want to hear what is great about this project, not the shortcomings!

So I did the sensible thing and rewrote it with that in mind, and I have to say it is approximately 1000% better for it. Thanks again for the community assist! (And I'm still listening if you have more feedback.)

Some things I want to do but haven't yet:

• a video (crowdfunding 101!)
• screenshots of the product
• animated gifs showing how it really works

These will be hugely valuable if I expect newcomers to understand what we're creating and become patrons, it's criminally stupid that I've launched this thing without them. But the video will take a lot of time (plus some professional help), and the screenshots and gifs would be either fake, or out of date very soon, so I made the call to just wait on those items for now.

This Patreon is a work in progress, and I want it to stay that way... maybe forever! Of course, as patrons, you'll get the first look at all of these things as they're created.

It's Still Early...

...and so I'm not blasting this Patreon far and wide just yet. It made me nervous to launch it at all without something to show, but getting the monetization strategy in place first was important for this project. It's never too soon to build engagement, right? That engagement starts with the transparency in these posts.

In this weekend's Unlockable Content, I'm showing off how I'm leveraging Trello to organize these posts based on the work I do each week. I'll also discuss the first steps for the new new beta of Paperize, for which coding has already begun (squeeeee!)

Look for it on Sunday!