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That's not really representative. If you sort by publically available earnings, you can see 100 Patreons pulling in $10k/month, another 100 making $5k/month, th
by rtpg 6y ago
That's not really representative. If you sort by publically available earnings, you can see 100 Patreons pulling in $10k/month, another 100 making $5k/month, then another making $3/month. the rest are private.
Assuming this is a representative distribution of the top 1000 (and I bet it's actually higher!):
- $10k/month * 300 + $5k/month * 300 + $3k/month * 400
- ~$285k/month for Patron just from the official cut
On top of this, Patreon probably has revenue sharing with the card processors for a small percentage of the fees (let's say even 0.1%), which adds a couple k.
Now people in the high-paying pro plans that get you the 5% rate (the lower end is 12% platform fees!) will pay $300/month.
that alone doubles their revenue, adding $300k/month _for just these first thousand patrons_.
So you're already at $600k/month in MRR. Hell of a lot more than a lot of "serious venture scale" B2B CRMs that are trying to be the next Salesforce or whatever but utterly failing at providing the value add needed to make big billings.
You might not need 300 people for it. And yeah it would be a lot better to make a lot of money. But they're being pretty successful at getting money here. And this is just assuming that they only have 1000 patrons (which is just false)
- flashman 6y agoPatreon makes more sense as a medium-sized business than an epic-scale corporation. Unfortunately reliable recurring revenue is a tough pill for "To The Moon!" investors to swallow.
- sk5t 6y agoHonestly, $600k/month for 300 knowledge workers is horrible revenue if growth and margin aren't on the right track. This is more like a "20-30 pretty decent consultants in a second-tier American city" number.
- tempsy 6y agoI think they make more than that. A TC article last year projected $50M in 2019. It also said they were not profitable. Even then that doesn’t exactly cover salary and benefits for 300 employees in SF, let alone everything else.
- rtpg 6y agoWait, how does $50M not cover 300 employees? Is fully loaded cost of employees (I imagine most of those 300 are _not_ super high level engineers, but things like CS and admin) in SF really above $160k/employee?
- tempsy 6y agoSalary + benefits + bonus + stock. Health insurance is expensive. Don’t think many realize how much it costs employers. Then obviously rent is the other big expense. And cloud computing.
- rtpg 6y agoYeah I don't disagree that it's not nearly enough for 300 workers. I just think that they totally have a legitimate business model to make Real Money. And my whole calculus was based on just the first thousand patrons, but I think there's a very long tail here.