Patreon Update - One year in.

Hi everyone,

As briefly announced in our Patreon post yesterday, we thought it was time to give a proper update to our patrons on where we are currently standing, and what we want to initiate in the near future. 

It’s now been a year since we launched our Patreon. With the final objective to be able one day to fully sustain the channel through the help of the community, we came to realize quite early in the process that maintaining a Patreon is close to being a full-time activity itself, that came in addition to our content creation and our side jobs. After reaching a peak in September, our community on Patreon has started to decrease since, truth being there were also slower content updates from our end, as client work took more of our bandwidth. Aside from that, we have been receiving some advice such as reviewing our tiers / rewards or adding clear patron goals.

So where are we now? We’re currently finishing up a client project, which without saying too much is game-related and is a “longer” form documentary. But in regards to Archipel, here’s what we have mapped out for our next steps:

• Archipel content: We have multiple projects in the pipe, with one we’ve teased already a few months back - a “renewal” of our toco toco series under a new name, but keeping the concept of Japanese creators and artists introducing the places that inspire them. (As we mentioned in our post from yesterday, our start of 2020 was a bit heavier than we initially thought, but we should start to see things calm down over the next weeks.)
• Patreon Page Renewal: Starting from the base, a rewrite of our description is long overdue; we also want to review the look & feel of the page, either based on visuals from our past content or using original artwork made in collaboration with local illustrators.
• Patreon Tiers: Full disclosure, we have recently received an email from the Patreon team encouraging us to remove our $1 tier - however we are conscious that we have several patrons in that tier so we don’t want to take any hasty decisions, but we plan on reviewing our tier structure.
• Patreon Goals: We have never added any goal so far - but we think it’s time for us to set up some milestones and provide more visibility. 

We are more than ever open to engaging with our community towards the Patreon’s next steps, we’ll try to answer as much as we can to your comments, either on here or on Discord.

On a finishing note, we would like to thank again all our patrons for their support (with a special mention to the patrons who have joined since launch and are still supporting us - it really, really means a lot to us.)!

- the Archipel team