Hello all!
I have been focusing on improving my Youtube over the last several months and I have gotten pretty good results! The next thing I am wanting to work on is improving my Patreon. (Which is my living lol) To do so I have been seeking feedback about tiers and services I can offer.
Currently I make my living from lessons but this has an obvious time ceiling. According to my studies, any successful business needs to have scalability. So I was thinking about $1 and $5 tiers. This also goes along with other Patreons that I have studied. The $1 tier would get access to lecture vods and student lesson vods. The $5 tier would get to attend lectures live, get access to a league, and get game reviews periodically. (Game reviews would be on occasion and not guaranteed due to time constraints.) With enough people signed up I can hire teachers which could help create more jobs for Go players. (One of my long term goals.)
However, when I asked for feedback it seems there is not much interest in a $1 tier. Even the $5 tier is not as good as if I charged $25 and gave weekly game reviews for the leagues. $5 tiers would sound better for access to lectures and potentially a $15 tier to access lecture live. The problem with the league is that it is much harder to scale and I would only be able to hire teachers for $15 an hour instead of $50 an hour. Or I could hire them at $25 an hour and have 1 lecture and 1 hour of reviews. Giving any guaranteed one on one can become very expensive in either time commitment or hiring help once it scales. On the flip side, lectures become even easier to hire more people to give more lectures as more people sign up.
From this feedback, it seems that the Go community would rather pay more for higher quality content than to pay at all, no matter how cheap, for any content when they can get free content elsewhere.
Also, as a side note, many people have informed me that streaming does well and I absolutely agree that it does. However there are some cons to it that make me want to focus more on Youtube videos and lectures over live streaming. While I had some pretty good success live streaming, my wife injured her legs and was unable to walk for a couple months and I had to stop live streaming to take care of her. I had to drive her to work and back, I had to help her get around the house, and wheel chair her anywhere in public including to and from physical therapy. Because this happened we had a significant drop in income in both of our jobs. As such, to me live streaming is too dangerous if I were to get seriously injured, sick, hospitalized, or even if I wanted to go on vacation for a month or two then it could impact my livelihood.
It also got me thinking about how I originally created my work from how job to have the flexibility to be with my family more. Like taking my wife on a surprise date or taking my kid to a sports tournament. I would rather be able to move my schedule around as needed, still putting in the hours of work just at different times each week, than to work on a dedicated schedule and if I don’t work that schedule due to life circumstances than I lose part of my income.
So this is where I’m currently at in my brainstorming. I would appreciate any feedback you can offer! I’m going to continue to work hard for the community to create educational Go content and it is my job to create for you all, so I want to know what you want from content creators. Why would you sign up on Patreon and what would you want out of it? What tiers would you sign up for?
Thank you all for your feedback!