Hi all,
Here’s a photo for you, this goes back to 7/9 when the Reno was coming back from the Great Western Steam Up.
Sorry this is long, there’s a lot to talk about, housekeeping-wise. The long and short of it:
— New Discussion Group on savethereno.discourse.group
— Discussion About Growing This Patreon Group
— Going on Hiatus For a Month, No Monthly Charge For September
New Discussion Community on Discord
We were trying out something called Discourse but initial feedback is negative.
Join this Discord group instead, it’s just free right now so there’s no big uploads allowed: https://discord.gg/YtDCn6Bh
Figuring Out Tiers Now that Live Streams are Public
We have a little problem. We created this Patreon on the idea that people would come to see content that wasn’t available anywhere else. We see now, we have a chicken and egg problem — to get people here we need good public content on YouTube, and to keep people here we need good private content.
We’ve put up some really good content, we think, but so far we’ve failed to grow this Patreon significantly. The livestream was so much fun to produce, and we look forward to the next one. But we still don’t have people flocking here.
For some background, we’ve run Facebook and YouTube ads that have been seen by many thousands of people. The ads performed well, a lot of people came to the seethereno.com site. Unfortunately, it hasn’t converted into people signing up here. If anyone has suggestions on how to make seethereno.com convert better, I’m all ears.
Also, as we’ve announced, the next live stream will be public. This leaves me trying to figure out what do do for the VIP Tier to incentivize the higher subscription level.
So we’re punting for a month.
Hiatus and No Charge for September
While we figure out the above questions, we’re going on hiatus for a month. Therefore you won’t be charged for September. This hiatus won’t affect your account’s continuity, when we turn payments back on, we’ll consider everyone who stays on as continuous members since their start date.
The reason for going on hiatus is three-fold:
- First, as the guy who runs this Patreon page, I just started the final semester of a MS-CS degree and I just don’t have the spare time I had a month ago. This one class, Graduate Algorithms, is really taking a lot of time!
- Second, I talked to Tom and he’s focused on other things this month, like keeping two steam locomotives going until the end of the season. He told me when he gets the Reno tender back together, he wants to do a live stream. I don’t know when that will be. There just won’t be a lot of updates this month, and we want you to feel like you’re getting your money’s worth.
- Third, there’s the questions above about how to properly incentivize a VIP Tier if we’re going to make live streams public.
Thanks for putting up with such a long post, have a great day or night!