Creative funding platform Patreon is looking for a front-end developer to shape UX
This story was produced by Job Portraits, which highlights job openings at Bay Area startups. Patreon commissioned this portrait to highlight its front-end developer role. For the interviews below, the Job Portraits team spoke with cofounders Jack Conte and Sam Yam, as well as with front-end developer Jimmy Lee, at their office near Folsom and 9th in San Francisco.
What is Patreon and how are you making the world a better place?
Jack: Patreon is a way for creators to make a living doing what they do best, which is putting out beautiful, clever, funny, poignant things on the internet that millions of people love. For too long it’s been about page views and the size of your audience and advertising revenue. Unfortunately, those things don’t do a good job of helping creators make money. There are a lot of companies right now that are about finding listeners or readers or viewers. They’re consumer-first organizations. Patreon is a creator-first organization.
Talk a little bit about how it started, because I assume it came from you guys being creators yourselves?
Jack: It started in January of 2013. I’m a musician and I have a small, dedicated fan-base online. Generally my videos get about half a million views, and at the time, those videos would only make about $100, which just didn’t make sense to me. So I called up Sam, because he’s the man, and I gave him a very fuzzy, super-high level overview of the idea, like: “What if I asked my fans to give me a buck every time I released a new music video?” In three months Sam built this fully fleshed-out, amazing, thorough, beautiful product, and we launched it as Patreon. When I did my next video, after two weeks the product brought me $4,000 instead of $100.
We’re specifically focusing on the front-end developer role here. Why are you hiring for it right now?
Sam: We’re creating a great experience for both creators and patrons, and the part that touches people most is the front end portion. The team is 16 total, and the core engineering team is only six people. Everything single thing this person produces will be really visible.
Jack: They’re going to be building entire portions of the site. We just recently brought on Jimmy, who’s our lead on the front end. I think in a lot of other companies, especially larger ones, you’d be focused on a particular component or feature, or part of a larger push, but here you’re going to be pushing out entire assets, a whole page, the whole experience. Like, for example, the onboarding process for new creators.
Right now we’re at the point where we are hiring our founding team. We’re looking for people who are going to build teams. We’re not looking for leaders, we’re looking for people who make other people leaders.
The things that drive engineers can often be different from the things that drive creative people. Are you looking for engineers who are also creative types?
Sam: Certainly we have engineers who are also creators, like Marcos, who does a lot of sculpture. Me personally, I do a lot of music things that I care about, and Kathy, who is a designer, she does all kinds of illustrations.
It’s also important for us to foster a healthy culture that encourages all kinds of creativity. For example, Jimmy built out this whole framework on the front end called Oceans. We want to open source it so we can show the rest of the front-end community all the cool stuff we’re doing.
Cool. What do you think would be the biggest obstacles for this role over the next few months?
Jack: You mean, what are the tough parts? Patreon is an early-stage company. I think it’s a little bit of a double-edged sword, because it means that we’re still figuring everything out.
This isn’t a place to sit back and get told what to do. It’s a place for people to be excited about challenges. Even things about the business and internal operations, and how engineers communicate with the rest of the team, how product communicates with engineers, all that stuff is being figured out. You could consider that an obstacle, but we hope it’s exciting to people and they realize the opportunity to have a big footprint within the organization.
What’s the hardest question a candidate has asked you in an interview?
Jack: Wow, that’s an interesting question. Well, one candidate we had asked how we think about the spectrum of users, the distinction between creators and patrons. That’s really challenging to think about. It’s the kind of thing that surfaces in all the things that we build, and it feels like an engineering question I guess, but it also manifests everywhere in the site. That was a really cool question. It made me feel like they were really thinking about high-level, long-term vision for the company.
How do you deal with disagreements here?
Jack: I can give an example. When Tim, a PM here, joined us he asked that I be a part of a meeting with him and Sam to make sure we aligned on this particular issue. I said great.
Then the time came for the meeting, and I think I was in the middle of a phone call or something and I forgot about it. Tim wrote me an email right after and said, “Jack, I’m really disappointed you weren’t a part of this meeting. You told me you were going to be there and you weren’t there. I just wanted to give you that feedback.”
I profusely thanked him for coming to me, and not only that, I’ve told that story to every employee at the company. I encourage everybody to do things like that when they feel like they’re not able to do their job for whatever reason. I think that helps encourage folks to get into the mentality that disagreements are not just welcome, they’re necessary to build a healthy, progressive culture.
One last question. This is a young company. People are taking a certain amount of risk coming in. Do you want to say anything about where you are financially?
Jack: Thirteen months ago we were processing about $24,000 a month. The last time we processed, it was a little over $1.1 million, so we’ve had amazing growth in the last year.
Sam: At the same time, there’s so much more that we want to do. In terms of burn, we have forever in some ways. We just raised $15 million, and we have more than that in the bank.
Jack: We have 100 months of runway right now, which is actually a bad sign. I guess we can say the bottleneck right now is not money. That’s why we’re hiring.
When did you join Patreon and why?
Jimmy: I joined Patreon two or three months ago. I’m the only front end guy here. Before Patreon, I kind of made my life about the craft. I believe the future is all about immersive digital experiences. I think that we’re in a renaissance when it comes to building cool UX and artistic experiences. With that being my background, I saw Patreon as this bastion for creators. I thought, “This product deserves a better experience,” and I wanted to be a part of that.
Tell me a little bit about your average day. What are you working on right now?
Jimmy: I wake up really early, I pound some coffee, and I just run right in. We’re working on a really cool front-end framework, and we’re also building a lot of cool new features. After standup at 11, the rest of the day involves just moving things forward, checking in with the team, and iterating on code.
Who do you talk to on a regular basis? Who do you interact with?
Jimmy: I talk a lot with the engineers on the team. I think we have a very open and transparent group, so there’s a strong sense of collaboration. If someone’s working on something, I kind of just peer over. If I’m working on something, they peer over. We provide a lot of constructive feedback. Our designer is so in love with creating visual experiences too, and, you know, when two people have a lot of passion for one thing, it’s just really easy to get into an engaging conversation. You get lost in your work. That’s the environment that I really enjoy, and it just kind of happens every day.
What’s the most challenging thing about this job and how have you dealt with that?
Jimmy: The challenge is that you start with a product that defines the business in the beginning, right? It gets made quickly and proves a concept for what people need, and Patreon definitely did that. The biggest challenge now is taking that and putting craft to it. Now we have to make something that doesn’t just work for one demographic, but for as many users as possible.
I think that’s a challenge a lot of people have when they work on products. They think about themselves and their friends, but we have to think beyond that. Things that we might like, our creators might not, so we have to balance those needs. I think building experiences for people is really hard, because you have to think beyond yourself. It’s a very empathetic thing. You need to honor as many people as possible. Sometimes we do make mistakes, and that’s okay, because we’re trying our hardest, and we know that we’re the forerunners in this business. We have to try our hardest because no one else is doing it.
Is that different from other places you’ve worked?
Jimmy: Absolutely. The people you’re with here, they’re going to fight for the same ideals as you, and that moves you so much. It’s like, I’m with these people. We’re in the trenches. I think if you’re a professional and you have that kind of environment, you’re really lucky.
If you were this person coming in to interview, what should they know?
Jimmy: I don’t think it’s about how good you are necessarily. I think talent is something that you gain from making mistakes, and you’re just more prepared for them than other people. It’s really about where your head’s at. Do you like making things for other people? Do you care about this space? Do you care about people who produce art, who produce music, who write? Does this actually matter to you? If you’ve got that, then you’ll solve any problem.
Interested in joining the Patreon team? See details for this and other open positions on their careers page or contact Head of People Ops/HR Amanda Smock, amanda@patreon.com.
