YouSaid · the spoken record

Jack Conte

lines on the record: 84
first: 2021-01-11
most recent: 2021-01-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, the beautiful thing about the internet is that suppose you're a total weirdo. Like suppose you make stuff that like in your life, in your town, nobody in your town likes your music. Nobody likes it. Like only one in a thousand people like what you have to make. Great on the internet there are literally millions of people who will like your stuff if your ratio is one in a thousand. You can get millions of fans and make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Like that is, I love that about the internet. I think that's such a special weird, wonderful time in the development of humanity to be connected like that.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh god, I mean, we would never judge the quality of somebody's art and have that be an input into a decision whether to include them in Patreon. Like that, we would, of course, never, ever do anything like that.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. You know, I've done a thousand things in my life. Nine, you know, 1999 of them haven't worked. Patreon was one that happened to work. Was I smarter or did I make better decisions of Patreon? Like, no. I mean, it just was like, there's a lot of happenstance and circumstance. you know when i killed ourselves to you know do it of course but”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the level of launches on Patreon are what you could expect in a situation like that. Not only creators launching on the platform, triple-digit growth month over month in podcasting and music and things like that. But also patrons like stepping up and really doing their part. I think a lot of people are looking for a way to help right now. And patrons are too. And there's like a really easy way that they can.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, yes, it's been... Wild to see. I mean, the pandemic has been such a brutal thing in the world, and it is so weird to think about, you know, it is true that it has benefited Patreon. And that dichotomy is very strange for me. I think I'm trying to think about it is like, I'm glad something like Patreon exists to catch creative people right now in a moment like this. So, for example, AEG Live Nation both canceled global touring operations. So very suddenly there are these creators who are looking forward at a year or two of touring and hundreds of thousands or millions or tens of millions of dollars of touring revenue that evaporated. Over the period of a week.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this new plan, the three crater plans that we rolled out have amazing adoption. Creators are opting into those more feature-rich products. And so it actually has changed the business. So like we're going to keep adding features to those. So, I mean, we're going to keep building out the product and building more things. But I think very clearly, yes, this worked. This allows us to scale and be healthy and be a long-term meaningful company.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sam, are we talking about profitability? Yeah, so no, Patreon's not profitable. It's tracking toward profitability. We're burning money every month. But actually, the business is very healthy. The financials are very healthy.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's the opposite of fun. But we learned so much about our community and product development and communication and how to talk to our creators. And so the next time we rolled out something like that, we literally talk to over a thousand creators first, which we did not do that time. We did A-B tests. And like we got the data, the data showed that actually it was a great thing. But that's different than talking to a person and hearing them react to it and hearing their feelings about it. You can't just disassociate that from the product experience.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were yeah so that you were very kind about it. Thank you describing the backlash about patrons paying fees. That was the worst product rollout in the history of the company and it was, I mean, backlash doesn't begin to describe how it felt from the inside. I mean, there was a tweet at me every two to three seconds for probably 72 hours. You know, equating me to the devil. I mean, it was very”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm not sure that criticism is as much as just as a statement. Perhaps it was meant as criticism, but Patreon, I think, is solving a very specific, clear problem. One of the problems it's not solving is... You know, the thing is, there are now tens and tens of thousands of craters who are making a lot of money on the platform and building media companies and leasing office space and hiring teams. And now there are craters making millions of dollars a year on Patreon. But we're not going to solve the product market fit problem for folks.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think more folks should do that, especially like emerging tech companies. I wish more folks did that. So look, it's a bummer and I wish Sam was raising money on Patreon. His pitch was. Awesome and straight from the heart and right on. But sometimes, you know, you have values-based disagreements like that, and that's what happens.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I talked with Sam many times. You know, he's such an incredible thinker. I respect him so much. And, you know, I was very clear about our logic and why we have to have a content policy. And I think these things are complicated if you're not inside a company. I think, look, things have over the last few years, it's become very, very clear, I think, to people why companies need to have a content policy. But at the time, his reasoning was the First Amendment should do it. That should be the policy. And yeah, I mean, we disagreed. And we weren't going to change our minds to keep two or three creators as painful as that was. But again, I am really proud of our content policy.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The end state of this project working with this outside person that helped us write the first version of it was this content policy, which was a rules-based framework that gets to a level of specificity that I think most people are probably unaware of. Like, for example, people say, you know, I've heard people say you can't define porn, you just kind of know it when you see it. I beg to differ. You can define porn. We have spent quite a lot of time defining porn in way more detail than probably anyone wants to hear about or go into. And then do that across everything. Weapons manufacturing, hate speech. What is harassment? You know, the output of this content policy was rigorous definition around what we meant by each of those things and as many edge cases as we could think of. That's how much detail you want to go into”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are two reasons the first was Sam and I, this was one of the first moments where we had fundamental disagreements about the business. It was challenging our relationship in a way that we hadn't dealt with before. Is that fair, Sam? Like we.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Conversations about what we okay with supporting and what are we not? And then content policy is like anything else at a company. It's a living breathing thing that you iterate on and it changes over time. But that first version and the creation of that first version was a very difficult two months.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And still does. And we got connected through those investors to a fellow who had wishes to remain anonymous even to this day. He built these very massive content policy and trust and safety and enforcement systems. And he worked with us for a period of two months to draft the first version of what became Patreon's content policy, which turned out to be about 40 pages, was the first version of it. And to tell you the truth, that was one of the most horrific two months of my life was, well, because the internet can be a dark place. And there are really horrific things out there. And in that two months, we had to explore all of those cases, real in the world on Patreon, and we had to have some very deep philosophical”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, the investors are super helpful here. Besides just the money, they connected us to people who had worked on these types of problems before. Reddit had dealt with stuff like this. Facebook had to deal with stuff like this.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there was Sexualized depictions of minors and things that we, just from a values perspective, it felt like that we should, there should be something in place to stop this from happening.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing that caused the debate. Was a website called Han that launched on Patreon. And they were using Patreon to fund the development of the site.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I needed it to be my full time focus, which was a really, really painful tough thing because not only was this for me, not only did this decision affect me, but my wife, you know, we were partners in crime on this rock band that was kicking ass and getting millions of views and touring around the United States for big rooms. And like we were living the dream as creators. And not only was I abandoning my career, I was abandoning her by choosing to focus on Patreon. And the moment where I basically stopped working on Pompeo's and took a salary as CEO, that was a tough moment because I felt I was one of those kids in my 20s who's like, I am not going to be an artist in my 20s and grow up to be a business person in my 30s. Not the kind of person that I am. I'm going to stay an artist in my life. And then I found myself running a business.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, first of all, it was a slow process. I think the desire to not take salary really came from a place of wanting to be a creator and wanting to continue to make art and videos and music. And a couple years into the company, it became very clear that”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not a lot, yeah, which is again, because we had that business model with a really low percentage, which came from this idea of not wanting to be another wedge between creators and their fans, right? So we wanted to have a low rake. And so, yeah, even when the company was processing 100,000 bucks, that's only five grand for the company”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go to office in Noe Valley. Yeah, it was a two bedroom apartment, and we moved in together. And at that point, we hired Tyler Palmer, who was the first employee, and he hired a couple folks, Cole and Tony, who started building out basically like the artist relations and the marketing and the operations, customer service side of the business.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it was really important. I don't think Patreon, not I don't think Patreon would not have gotten close to where it is today without that. I mean, even from that first day, Patreon started growing a lot. And we needed to hire people to answer emails and help build features and scale the company. And we would not have been able to afford that without raising money.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time, I think at that round, the company was valued at $6 million. And so we ended up raising that first round ended up being $2.1 million at a $6 million valuation. So it was about a third.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No spreadsheets, no math. There was, yeah, there was none of that. I mean, again, it's just very different than it is now. Now it's a, you know, now we have, you know, FPNA and finance teams and we're forecasting out multiple years. But that's, yeah, back then, no, we didn't have any of that. We didn't think about any of that. We were just.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had that same mind blow moment that I had had two years before when Lauren launched her Kickstarter, and they saw a new revenue model for professional creativity. And then those folks launched on Patreon, and then they did the same thing. They went onto YouTube and they went onto their podcasts and they went onto, you know, they wrote on their websites. And then that cycle just repeated. And that's actually responsible for most of Patreon's growth is that viral product cycle.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we launched, and this is how Patreon ended up growing, when we launched, I went onto my YouTube channel. I told all my fans about Patreon, and I said, hey, go to this website. And of course, creators follow creators. So some of the people who watched my video were creators themselves. And when they landed on my Patreon page and they saw this random middle of the road YouTube making six figures.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was not strategic. There wasn't a five-year plan, there wasn't a strategy deck. It was just solving a problem. And so I don't know that I had a clear vision about how the next year was going to go. I knew that we needed to build this thing. I knew that it was going to be a way that artists could make money. I did think it could scale and help a lot of folks. I didn't know how much work that was going to be.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within the first couple weeks I passed five thousand dollars a month. And then soon after that, it was, yeah, it was even more. And at the time I was making maybe two videos a month. So, you know, suddenly, like very suddenly, within two months, I went from draining my savings account to making over $100,000 a year for my solo career.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at $1, you got access to my patron-only stream. You got first dibs on concert tickets. At $3, you got access to my patron-only stream, first dibs on concert tickets, and video tutorials about audio production. I would just make these little extra tutorials and give folks access to them. And then $10 was a Google Hangout once a month with me and all $10 patrons. And then the $100 was the Skype sessions.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I had four tiers. $1,500 ten dollars, and then the night before I thought, screw it, I'm gonna put up $100 tier. No one's gonna buy it, but I'll just do that where you can kind of do a one-on-one Skype session with me and I'll hang out with you. And a bunch of people signed up for the $100 tier. A bunch of people signed up for the five and the $10 tier. The average payment per patron was around seven bucks, which that really blew my mind. I was thinking maybe people will give me a dollar for YouTube videos. But the fact that on average people would give me seven bucks, yeah, I couldn't believe that.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I at the end of the pedals video where I told people about the idea. And I said, hey, I'm building this new thing. And I don't think it's just going to help me. I think it could help a lot of people. And check it out and let me know what you think. And if you're up for it, join me on this journey here.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was surprised, but I wasn't I didn't think it mattered. I thought, like, well, let's do it anyway. And people will come around. They'll come around to this. So I wasn't like bummed about it. I just thought, okay, let's do it ourselves. Let's launch with me. And my roommate also wanted to launch Lauren O'Connell was one of the first three creators on Patreon. And Natalie wanted to launch too. So the three of us, yeah, my girlfriend at the time. So we launched with just the three of us on day one of Patreon.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Folks who I thought like, hey, you're in the same boat that I'm in right now. And let's do this. I think this could be valuable to you. And so, yeah, we made an Excel spreadsheet with those folks and I found their contact info and reached out to all 40 of them and all 40 of them said no”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in other words, we were going to, not Pomuse, it was going to be my personal YouTube channel, which was where I was uploading all that electronic stuff. And so the plan was like, I'll put up a YouTube video on my YouTube channel, send my fans over to Patreon, and that's kind of how I'll start. We also, you know, I did want to launch with a bunch of other artists, as Sam mentioned. We made a list of like 40 or so creatives that you knew to call up”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's basically like, hey, we put our friendship first here. Yeah. I thought it was kind of a nice thing. And then Sam writes back all caps. Awesome. I agree to all of this. Okay, let's go.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I wrote this long email at the end. I said, I know I said this before, but I just want to stress how important it is that we communicate with each other about all aspects of the business and our relationship as long as we're not hiding anything from each other, as long as we're telling each other something's wrong. We are greatly reducing the chance of hurting our friendship. I want you to feel 100% okay with talking to me about the company finances, your interests in the company, your ideas, your feelings, anything you like. This will lead to a strong partnership.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm staring at the email right now that I sent Sam on March 10th. I just pulled it up. March 10th, 2013. And it's just kind of like a summary of our agreement. And I think that's kind of what I thought it was going to be. Like here's what I'm saying. I'll just read one sentence of this. You agree to be, so we're talking about the agreement. Here's what I'm agreeing to. Here's what you're agreeing to. And one of the lines is like, you agree to be co founder and CTO of Patreon. You agree to build and maintain the site as it is laid out in the wireframes.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I wanted Sam to build it. I was in hardcore pitch mode because other people had told me no or just didn't seem interested. Yeah. Yeah, I wanted Sam to do it. And he had just, he was right about to launch this new project and he had gotten a TechCrunch article and he was about to come out. So he said, like, hey, I can't meet till Thursday because I'm launching this. Wow.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But wait, but Sam was like, Jack, nobody cares about your idea. He was like, we don't need to do an NDA. Nobody cares. Ideas are trash. Ideas are worthless. Like, we don't need to do that. And I was like, okay. He's saying.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I called him up, and I was like, so, Sam, I've got this idea, and I'm really excited about it, but I don't want to tell you, like, do we need to sign an NDA or something? Because you thought...”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it was the worst. It sucked. Yeah, there's no way I could have done that by myself. And so That's when I started calling various people to see if they could build this for me.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I took out 14 pieces of printer paper from my printer, actually probably more than that, because I didn't know it would be 14 pages. But it ended up being about 14 pages. And essentially it was a recurring payment between a fan and a creator. And yeah, there was a whole, you know, there's like a content feed and like a, you know, login page and a homepage and the whole thing. I am a terrible designer. And so looking back.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And so I sketched out Website so that my fans can do this. And then, you know, of course, I was also looking at all these other YouTubers going through the same thing and podcasters and news and everybody, anybody who makes stuff and puts it online was going through the same thing. I was like, oh, this should just be a thing like Kickstarter where anybody can set it up for themselves. And so yeah, I sketched out”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I sat down at my kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon, and what I was thinking about was like, I like Kickstarter, but I want to be paid every month because I need income, because I make stuff every month that's valuable to other people. And at the same time, you know, I was seeing other websites start to accept, you know, like membership organizations, not necessarily websites, but like membership organizations like SF Moma or, you know, KQED would do these pledge drives. And it happened. It wasn't, you had the option in many of those cases to set up a monthly payment. And so I was like, great. Like, I just want essentially that system.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And I actually got like sick. I got like nauseated thinking about all of this work and energy and time. The robots, the set, the credit cards, the draining of the savings account Of that adding up and thinking, I'm gonna put this thing out and I'm gonna get paid $100. And I was angry, but I was also like, I couldn't believe that that was, that we were all just, that humans were just okay with this, that like, this is the system that we've designed for artists. It's like, yeah, you put up your thing that you spend your life on, and then you get paid $100 in ad revenue, and then you put up your next thing. And I remember like thinking about What the hell was going on where all these people who make things and put them online, the economics of that failed to evolve with the distribution technology. So like the distribution happened first and the economic systems to support that didn't keep up. And so we were in this horrible...”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2013 that I kind of it almost felt like waking up after a dream and and you know watching my savings account go down basically to zero and then maxing out a couple credit cards and then feeling like I was almost like coming out of a dream or something yeah I felt like I was waking up and I was like suddenly very terrified about like what was on the other side and the thought that I had in my mind was I'm going to upload this video to YouTube. It's going to get a million views. And I knew that that video would bring in maybe, you know, 100 bucks.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the part of me that decided to not think about that. And it was terrifying. It was. I remember being. Pretty scared about that. And I also thought, like, look, if I start being logical about this, I'm never going to make something that's great. It wasn't until about February.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was considering it, the problem with that was I didn't want to kind of, you know, the sort of the Kickstarter conceit was like, I'm going to do this big one thing and I need a bunch of money to pay for it. And that's not, I didn't want to do that. And I didn't want to really force fit it like that.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT