On Jan 7, 2017 the most creative corners of the Internet exploded in a fiery ball of F%# YES, confirming yet again that “2016 was the best year, in the history of humans, to be a creative person.”
If you’re a creator, chances are you watched this unfold yourself. You likely follow a creator or two: your favorite webcomic, writer, musician, youtuber, podcaster, visual artist… or, you at least follow a passionate fan of said creators.
So, if you’re creative and plugged in, you already know what I’m referring to, because the sonic wave reached an estimated 10 million people on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
In one weekend.
So (for the rest of us), what exactly were these creators sharing?
It all began with an email. Well, actually three emails.
These are milestone emails, and they were sent to tens upon tens of thousands of financially active Patreon creators. They recapped their 2016 in numbers, pictures, and in an incredibly individual way.
What our creators probably don’t realize is: Behind those three emails stand four months of growth engineering, data science, creative work, and infrastructure innovation. These emails were the product of a core team of the sharpest minds in Silicon Valley, mostly women, bringing their experience from meteoric companies including Airbnb, Secret, Wix, and Google.
….aaaaaaand a lot of fun:
…..powered by a lot of Turkish coffee:
“Let’s Make It Shareable as F#$&@”
We wanted creators to see their own amazing stats, but we didn’t just want to send the “our company did well” or “look at this” variety of year in review emails. We wanted to make these facts as shareable as possible. We wanted creators around the world to know that:
[Patreon] creators are doubling their incomes, annually, and they are establishing ongoing, reliable salaries, which not only fuel their creative endeavors, but legitimize their efforts as respectable, value-generating operations that contribute to society and enrich humanity.
Serve It on a Silver Platter
We didn’t want creators to just tell their communities. We wanted them to show their communities. And for that, it was important that we help creators share beautiful images.
Our creators are pros. They are creators who know how to screenshot. They know how to make an image. But you know what? We were going to do it for them.
Online creators don’t need social media and sharing explained. They’ve been building their audience for years. And even so, for this highly sophisticated audience, it was critical for us to make it as easy as possible:
- We’d generate perfectly 2:1 social media size images,
- We’d put their brand in the headers and footers,
- We’d give them direct social buttons right there in the email that shared them with one click.
But wait, that means generating 100% custom images. For every single creator. And, we realized, that’s not easy. Or something we could subscribe to, buy, or borrow:
…not the answers I had hoped for.
Joshua ♥ Hull heard about our challenge, and created Gutenberg, an internal service for printing dynamic images from HTML templates — tens of thousands at a time. He also did it in a few days. So um, thank you, Josh for saving the day. Again.
Confident that our image generation scheme was feasible, and with Gutenberg in hand, it was time to design the emails.
Create Total Optionality
Milestones are tricky. Not every creator wants to share every stat about their lives and business. Imagine if we bundled five stats in one big blob of an infographic — one “meh” number could discourage a creator from sharing all of them.
With Darby Thomas leading the charge, and Taryn Arnold on copy, we went with one-stat-per-image information architecture. The benefits were simple to see:
- Creators could pick and choose only the stats they were most proud of
- Creators might choose multiple tweets/shares — more visibility!
- Lots of design and wording love for each statistic — emphasize each win
We Said F* It on Timing
You might be asking yourself how did you pick the exact times and dates to send the emails? Wasn’t it critical to optimize?
We said f* it. Why?
- There’s so much of a chain reaction here — we don’t really control time of day of social media sharing
- Like so many questions in product growth, there’s seemingly a blog post out there to back up any opinion, any time of day on any platform.
- It might improve, but not by a lot. 80–20! No fussing over the details. If you think about it, it really didn’t matter what hour “Gangnam Style” was first posted.
- We had to send them out slowly over a 12-hour period anyways for infrastructure reasons. So… it wouldn’t matter.
In short, it wasn’t that important when exactly we shipped. It was more important that we shipped.
There’s Data, and There’s Happy Data
As cold, rigorous, and straightforward as data can be, the moment you try to display it visually, data science becomes the very, very flexible data art.
Normally, that has evil connotations. Misleading graphs, poorly labeled axes, and other dark tools of manipulation are often used to trick even the most critical of thinkers. However, the flexibility of presenting data can also be used for good — to make people feel encouraged, to emphasize the glass as half-full, and, if only once a year, to focus exclusively on the wins.
For this project, we weren’t building a business dashboard; we were building a celebration.
Throughout the project, the team made a series of decisions to make sure that creators would receive the happiest accurate stats available and present them in the most optimistic way.
- When pointing out how many patrons were paying “$X or more”, we programmed the script to selectively choose dollar amounts that constituted over 50%
- When displaying # of new patrons this year, we counted new patrons who pledged at least once, even if they had since churned (celebrating the number of people who thought a creator was awesome enough to pull out their credit card anytime this year)
- Choosing to showing a graph of patronage as cumulative (always getting higher) rather than the rate of change that month.
- Setting minimum thresholds on all statistics (and creators) to ensure no one got a “sad email.”
- Adding a
+symbol in front of a number. To make it feel more like growth ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
These small editorial details may seem superficial, but they make just as much of a difference as the numbers themselves.
When it comes to celebrating, no win is too small — and creators are extremely good at being proud and grateful of their achievements. They are optimists, and for one weekend a year, we wanted to give them nothing but the happiest data.
The ‘Wrong’ Voice Is More Shareable
Unlike most products, when writing copy we had to consider two different voices.
First is the voice of Patreon to creators. This is everything in the email outside the shareable cards.
Second is the voice of creators to their fans — the actual content they’ll share with their fans.
The voice between Patreon and creators is something we think a lot about, and can fill a whole different story. But how do we write when we have to speak for creators?
One option was to make it first-person. “I did this.” “I achieve that.” “My patrons are this.” That seems natural and logical, but there’s a downside. Our creators do not see themselves as shameless marketers. They don’t necessarily want to brag (the way, say, I’m bragging about Patreon in this post). They very consciously and gratefully share their success with their fan base. A first-person voice would have caused many creators to reconsider sharing.
Instead, we went with the second person — we intentionally phrased the cards from Patreon’s point of view.
- “Your 21 patrons generated…”
- “You’re more active than 95%…”
- “You made 62 posts…”
You might call this the Patreon-sent-me-this voice. That way, when creators shared the cards, it would feel like they’re sharing something that might not be meant to be shared — privately addressed to them — and thus more humble and intimate.
When choosing our share-card voice, we intentionally chose the awkward, slightly illogical option, to make it more shareable
Surprise People With Information They Can’t Normally Find
Our second email took things to the next level, where we highlighted the (yet) invisible network effect to creators:
All We Have to Do Now Is Hit Send, Right?
There’s no end to the times I will learn the lesson “the last 5% of a project takes 95% of the time.” Until I internalize that, we fortunately have the legendary jason byttow on our team.
I’ll spare you 95% of the details, but I will re-iterate how each email got built.
Getting the emails out took five days of 24-hour monitoring, last minute fixes, 47 uses of the phrase “SHIP IT!”, and two emojis including:
So much of the last-minute craziness could have been solved with better advanced thinking, spec’ing, and thinking through edge cases. In other words, my fault. The technical team, under Jason’s lead, gets double credit for making this happen — once for the execution, and twice for doing so despite my lack of foresight.
They led the charge in creating impromptu production scripts, slack integrations, “resumability” (thank the lord), and advanced monitoring at every stage of the email and sharing lifecycle, from delivering and clicking to downstream ROI.
What We Counted
Each email went out to tens of thousands of creators (and there were three emails). Open and click rates were reasonably high…
…but what was most impressive was the level of sharing and exposure these cards got. Using reach estimation tools, our campaign reached about 10 million timelines on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
What We Can’t Count
If there’s one thing we know about Patreon’s viral growth model it’s that creators are the center of it. Creators bring their patrons — sure. But more importantly to us, they serve as living proof to other creators that today it is possible to make a legitimate living making things — and not just for enormous audiences.
When a creator uses Patreon, they put it in their content. They share it with their followings. Their success is visible. We know that almost all reticence creators feel about our platform vanishes when they see a creator they admire successfully and proudly running a creative business and getting paid to create.
In that light, these emails are not about how many timelines or fans we’ve reached. They’re not about name recognition for Patreon. We’re actually shooting for a very targeted, important audience: other creators.
When it comes to reaching creators, we know this: creators in every type of art form strong communities. They support each other. They learn from each other. They follow each other. And so we can think of no better way to share our message with creators, than through their own community, through their own peers and mentors.
So, maybe coming close to 1,000 tweets does not sound like, say, TV numbers. But as far as the online creator community goes, we consider this Super Bowl impact.
And that’s who we built this for.
If you liked this, please click the ♥ so other people can read about it on Medium. Not because I, you know, refresh every five minutes to see how many ♥’s I have. Nope.
