On Starting Something New

I first tried to start a Patreon account back in February of 2021 and my plan then was to upload longer build videos, tutorial content, and the like. But Patreon didn’t allow video hosting back then (that I could find, anyway), so my only option was to upload to YouTube, and embed the file into the Patreon page. And of course, hosting externally meant that the content was no longer hidden behind the Patreon paywall. It is possible to upload videos to YouTube without making them public - they won’t be suggested to people browsing - but anyone can watch them if they have the URL. It wasn’t a perfect solution. Someone could just copy the link to their friends, and then anyone could watch it. So after spending a few hours faffing about with that, I gave up.

I don’t think it’s true that this is the only reason I abandoned my Patreon plans. And it was silly to get worked up over the idea that someone would care enough about my content to try and distribute it for free. Besides, content theft is just an everyday fact of my life now. Most of the time, I’m unaware of it. I only find out when other people see it and send me links. And most of the time, I can’t do anything about it anyway. Occasionally I’ll file takedown requests, but by then the content has already been seen by thousands or millions of people. It’s already generated ad revenue for the thieves, and all the paperwork just causes me stress. These days I prefer to live in blissful ignorance. So having a few people watch my stuff for free wasn’t really a big deal.

No, the real reason I abandoned Patreon was fear.

I’ve seen so many creators listing dozens and dozens, sometimes hundreds of patrons, in the credits on their YouTube videos. I wanted that support, and moreso, I wanted that financial security.

Most of my work comes with a high price tag, but when you factor in materials and tool costs, all the extra work needed to film and edit content, to photograph everything, to manage the website, to pay for the website and the mailing lists…. I’m barely making enough money to scrape by, working huge overtime at less than the minimum wage. 2024 is the first year I’ve had to support myself solely through my artwork, and it’s been one of the most consistently stressful periods of my life.

If I could have a couple hundred patrons tossing me a few pounds every month, that would go a loooong way to relieving some of that stress, and allow me to focus on making what I want to make, and maybe rediscover the joy in my work. 

But I’ve only discovered many of these creators after they’ve already become popular. They are only suggested to me, and I only see them, because they already have a big audience. I haven’t followed along with their 10 or 15 year history as they build their YouTube accounts up from nothing.

It seemed like such a monumental task at the time, to create enough content to attract new patrons, and to have to advertise the existence of the content. Like many artists, I‘m uncomfortable with selling myself. And not just once, but over and over, every week, maybe even with every social media post, with no definite end in sight. And after all of that, it might not work. I might just be putting in all that extra effort for nothing. That was a very scary prospect.
I wanted the end result, without the work, and without the risk.

At the moment, I have a decent following on Instagram and Tiktok. But once upon a time, those accounts were new. Those accounts were tiny and unknown, and I had no idea what I was doing or how to grow them. So I just started making things, and taking pictures, and writing posts, and I would advertise on reddit, or host giveaways, or send crafts to larger accounts to try and get extra publicity. And by gum, that was slow. But I was in full-time employment and making plenty of money, so I didn’t need it to be big or fast, I just needed to do the work. And I did all the work in my evenings and on weekends. It took me seven years to get to where I am now, and in that time I transitioned from full time software dev to part time artist, and then eventually quit my sensible, well-paid job.

Now, I’m full-time self-employed, and I’m just about surviving. If I want to grow a new platform and find a new kind of financial stability, I guess I just have to put the work in, in the evenings, and on weekends, and hope it doesn’t take me another seven years.

If that future does come to pass, where I’m sitting on a fat Patreon empire, most of my patrons will find me well into my journey. Most of them will never read these first posts.
So for now, it’s just a quiet little place for me to air some thoughts on self-employed life, and share them with a tiny handful of people. And that’s not scary at all; that actually sounds quite pleasant.