4 ms·

They've been pretty adamant about not chasing after business/enterprise sales and I bet this is a big reason why. Enterprise pays the big bucks but also has wa

They've been pretty adamant about not chasing after business/enterprise sales and I bet this is a big reason why. Enterprise pays the big bucks but also has way higher demands from support, higher expectations about downtime, and all the third party integration requests. It has to integrate with Jira, it has to integrate with Google Calendar, it has to integrate with this niche service that changes their API every month and doesn't care your contract with Dairy Queen relies on this integration working.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gruez 4y ago
Okay but it doesn't seem like patreon needs to, or is even chasing after enterprise sales? At least in the b2c space it doesn't seem like you need a huge engineering team.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  I meant that in response to why Discord can be so successful with 1% of the employees of other chat products. It's because they're not actually similar products. One is for casual chat (with no pretense of security) and one is for business chat. It's not specifically about avoiding enterprise, it's about them recognizing what sort of business decisions are sustainable with small team capabilities. Enterprise chat adds a TON of requirements and harsher penalties for mistakes. In Patreon's case, it's one of those business models that a small team just cannot survive in at scale. Sure, storing some payment data in a database and charging a payment API once a month in a job queue is a weekend project. But then you get your first email about a stolen credit card being used. And one from Disney lawyers about how someone is using their Patreon account to sell Disney intellectual property. And an email from FBI because someone is using it to sell illegal images. And from creators whose account got hacked and all their payments redirected to a new bank account. Or the subscribers who want a refund because they're unhappy. Or the people who realize that if you say your credit card was stolen, you can access the exclusive content from any creator and get a refund the next day.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gruez 4y ago

Okay but it doesn't seem like patreon needs to, or is even chasing after enterprise sales? At least in the b2c space it doesn't seem like you need a huge engineering team.

squeaky-clean 4y ago
I meant that in response to why Discord can be so successful with 1% of the employees of other chat products. It's because they're not actually similar products. One is for casual chat (with no pretense of security) and one is for business chat. It's not specifically about avoiding enterprise, it's about them recognizing what sort of business decisions are sustainable with small team capabilities. Enterprise chat adds a TON of requirements and harsher penalties for mistakes. In Patreon's case, it's one of those business models that a small team just cannot survive in at scale. Sure, storing some payment data in a database and charging a payment API once a month in a job queue is a weekend project. But then you get your first email about a stolen credit card being used. And one from Disney lawyers about how someone is using their Patreon account to sell Disney intellectual property. And an email from FBI because someone is using it to sell illegal images. And from creators whose account got hacked and all their payments redirected to a new bank account. Or the subscribers who want a refund because they're unhappy. Or the people who realize that if you say your credit card was stolen, you can access the exclusive content from any creator and get a refund the next day.