Happy New Year 2020!! (Patreon)

Hey everyone! HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

What did we accomplish for ThreatWire this year? It turns out, there were a LOT of updates and upgrades. Here's where your contributions went and how that money is used:

First and foremost, Patreon contributions continue to fund my time for researching, writing, and producing the show every week. It also continually supports the reoccuring bills such as internet, electricity, and memberships such as Adobe Premiere Pro (my editing suite), and Podbean (what I use to upload the RSS). And my editor is amazing and deserves tons of credit for her hard work as well! She makes the show look good each week.

I collaborated with Daily Tech News Show to bring you weekly security headlines in audio format, created a smaller RSS video file to be more inclusive, and I ran a pledge campaign for Women in Security and Privacy (WISP).

Over the springtime, the show moved into my home studio where I had to delegate some of the funds to a new lens, new lights, and a new backdrop. That was a pretty big change and required a lot of reconfiguration, so I'm glad that I had your support through that stressful time!

In July, the $1 tier was retired and more benefits were added to the $2 tier that took it's place. 

During DEF CON I spoke with some other members of the hacker community and started collaborating with Mr. Twinkle Twink to create the ThreatWire Totem for SAOs board. This was time consuming but he was so helpful through the creation process, and this board was introduced as one of the Olympus Fire annual rewards. Also during DEF CON, I purchased SAOs to go with the boards. I'll be working with more manufacturers in the future to create more cool techy gifts for y'all!

I hired Len Peralta to do an art piece just for patrons, which shipped in packages in December. These will continue to ship as annual rewards for some perk levels next year. I also invested in creating stickers as a part of the rewards this year.

In December, I put a bunch of time, and lots of cash for postage, into shipping out all of those rewards (if you haven't received your annual reward yet and you've been a patron for more than a year, give it a few weeks to arrive, especially if you're overseas).

And as a surprise gift, I sent out Christmas cards! All in all, this was a year of change - going full time as a creator in a home studio has been tough. I'm so used to working in studios at production companies who have tons of cash flow and buy big expensive fancy studio gear. I had to learn a lot about producing content professionally in a much smaller, compact environment. I'm very lucky to have such a supportive group of friends here in Patreon. In other words, THANK YOU.

I have SO MUCH to tell you about, but those announcements will have to wait. 2020 is going to be a big, exciting year. I've got awesome ideas for new perks. I'm already starting to brainstorm ideas for rewards to introduce this year. And I've got some new goals as well!

Onwards and upwards!

-Shannon