Relatedly, it is not enough for your creator patronization platform to HAVE fully supported pseudonyms. You must make that abundantly specific and clear, and a commitment that you make to your creators, UP FRONT. Ideally, it's part of your elevator pitch.

Patreon falls short of the standard but comes closer than any other payment accepting platform – as far as I know *at all*, of *any* type.

If you want to pull business away from Patreon, you will not do it if your platform, like umpteen zillion other idiot platforms, assumes that the creator is going to use their wallet name, and does not treat that wallet name as confidential information.

Listen, if all we wanted was a subscription platform that exposed our wallet names, we could have been using PayPal subscriptions all this time. What would we need you for?

1) Pseudonym support.

Attention dumbasses: stage names and pen names have been realities of the business of being an artist for over 2,000 years.

Creators are not shoe salesmen.

The most basic functionality of any platform that intends to support *creators* earning money online – the basic, rock-bottom, sine qua non affordance – is people doing business using pseudonyms.

What that ACTUALLY means is the platform has to allow creators (the people who charge money) to be PSEUDONYMOUS (to use their stage name or pen names) in all of their interactions with their patrons (the people paying the money), AND the platform, which is legally required to know the legal identity of the creator and have on file their relevant tax ID numbers (e.g. SSN in the US), needs to keep that legal identity CONFIDENTIAL.

If you're thinking, "but how many works does a creator ship each month?": no, that's the whole point of by-works. It can be ANY number. The creator makes no particular commitment to their patrons as to how many creations they're going to ship. They may ship NO creations in a month, so in that month their patrons are charged nothing. Or they may ship one thing. Or 10 things. Or a 100 things.

(My best month was 10 things.)

You might reasonably be thinking, "migod, what protects patrons from getting socked with an enormous bill because a creator ships many more things then they expected?"

People have trouble believing that this is actually so, but it is. This is the funding model I use.

The by-work funding model is where patrons pledge their support not by the month, but by the instance of whatever it is that the creator makes. If the creator makes stories, it's per story; if the creator makes music videos, it's per music video. The patrons pledge a certain amount of money for each work the creator makes.

Speaking of subscriptions:

2) By-works funding model support.

Patreon had two foundational funding models it supported, and while Patreon has introduced a variety of complexities and alternatives, these remain its core offerings.

One of these is trivial: monthly subscriptions. Like I said, creators can get that from PayPal if they don't care about pseudonyms. Every supposed Patreon substitute is just a monthly subscription service.

But Patreon's much more interesting funding model is not by-month, it's by-work.

This is where things get very hard for outsiders to understand. For emotional reasons.

This is where things get challenging. If you imagine this system, if you try to walk through in your mind how this would work, it will probably occur to you to ask the question, "Okay, but... How does the system know that you shipped something?"

Yeah about that. I log into Patreon, and I basically make a little blog post that says "Look! I made the thing you pledged to pay me for!" with the associated ticky box for "Pay me for this" ticked, and click submit.

That's it.

Patreon and no way, shape, or form attempts to validate that I actually shipped the thing. That is between me and my patrons. And, personally, I'm smart enough not to use Patreon as my delivery mechanism, so delivery of what I am paid for happens through a completely other channel.

Yeah, Patreon has a solution for that too: patrons can set a monthly upper limit for how much they're willing to support a given creator. If the creator exceeds that limit, that's fine, that patron is not charged in excess of that amount.

(Personally, I warn all of my patrons to set that limit, because every once in a while I go off on a productivity tear.)

To my knowledge – and, BOY, would I like to be wrong about this – there is not a single other platform in the world that supports the by-works model that Patreon offers.

To be crystal clear, it entails:

• Patrons pledge to pay $n per work, on an ongoing basis, in advance of the work being done.

• The creator then generates works on an ad hoc basis, not to any set schedule, and each time they do, they check in with the UI to bill their patrons.

• The platform aggregates these bills, and submits them to the patrons' credit cards monthly.

Like I said previously, individual patrons can set their own monthly maximums. But really the only thing that prohibits the creator from doing that is that it will piss off their patrons, and if the patrons don't feel that they're getting their money's worth, they can cancel their patronage. Which they will do.

And that's totally sufficient.

It helps to get over the emotional hump if you realize that it's not actually any different than invoicing somebody through PayPal. If somebody hires you to landscape their yard, and you send them an itemized invoice through PayPal's invoice system, PayPal isn't going to check to make sure that you actually edged the lawn and planted the begonias like agreed.

There will be more on that subsequently (probably item three on this list of Patreon competition sine qua nons).

So you might be wondering, "but that's basically just a 'pay me' button, more or less directly connected to the patrons' credit cards!"

Yes. Precisely. I mean, it doesn't charge them until the end of the month, but yes.

"But what's to keep a creator from just hammering the 'pay me' button?"

Nothing. Nothing at all.

There is an entire little universe of people using Patreon to be funded to do good works in the world. These may be open source contributors. They may be activists. They may be journalists or bloggers. They do not make things that they exchange for money with the people who pledge them on Patreon.

Their patrons do not pay these creators to give things *to them*. Their patrons pay these creators to give things *to the world*: to release code for anyone to use, to engage in activism that changes the world for the better, or to write things that anyone can read.

3) Non quid pro quo patronage

Patreon is not a platform for selling things, even though you can use it that way, and Patreon seems to prefer it be used that way.

But Patreon can also be used to collect support that is not tied to directly providing the person who pays the money with something just for themselves.

Part of the reason this is hard to understand is that people who are not creators (and even some who are) think of what Patreon affords as "selling stuff". Which is incorrect.

There are two problems with the selling stuff paradigm: the selling and the stuff.

First and foremost, Patreon does not require you to sell anything. I mean, you can use it for that. Lots of creators do.

I don't.

I use Patreon for patronage instead. Kind of like it says on the tin.

So this is the next item on the list.

If I put my writing into documents that then I sell on Amazon or Kajabi, then the only people who get to see it are the people who pay me for them.

That is the antithesis of what I want to do. What I want to do is write openly on the internet where anyone can read what I write. Where what I write can be cited by anyone who wants to refer to it in any internet discussion.

The audience of my writing is not my patrons, and it is not just the people who pay me for it. It's the whole world.

And that, quite explicitly, is what my patrons pay me to do.

I'm one of them. The number one reason I signed up for Patreon as my funding platform 9 years ago, was because it was literally the only way of funding my writing that did not entail my SELLING it: my withholding it only for those people who paid me for it.

People get confused here. I'm not talking about my intellectual property rights. I'm not worried somebody is going to steal my copyright in my writing. (I mean it's a legitimate concern but that's not what I'm talking about here.)

I'm talking about the very basic nature of what it means to sell a work of writing, as a book or a magazine or a stand-alone article in a PDF.

(All that said, I also absolutely someday intend to write books that I will sell for money. But that is a very different project.)

Most would-be competitors to Patreon think it's some sort of DRM system. There are definitely people who try to use Patreon that way, and it works about as well as any DRM system does.

We have lots of other "pay us to access this document" platforms, starting with the 800 lb gorilla, Amazon. If you think there is some benefit to wedding a membership system to a document storefront, I think you're probably wrong. I could be convinced otherwise – since I'm not actually in that business, I assume there's a lot I don't know about it – but my guess is having to join a club just for the privilege of buying a PDF introduces friction that reduces revenue. Heaven knows I resent it as a customer.

Patreon's infrastructure for doing all of this is kind of falling apart. In some places they've just taken things down rather than fix bugs.

The really big example of this, I'm not wholly familiar with, because I don't really use it, and I was hearing about it and its problems from other people on the creator forums that then patreon took down.

I'm talking about Patreon's API.

And this brings us to number four:

4) An audience relationship management system, ideally one with an API one can build against

Here's where you can really kick Patreon's ass in the market for alternatives, because Patreon's game has been slipping very badly in this area.

I just invented the term "audience relationship management" system, by analogy to "customer relationship management" system. Like I said patrons are not the same thing as customers. But if you're a creator you do need to keep track of them, and you do need to keep track of their payments, and you do need to be able to communicate with them.

Also you would probably like to be able to tell what's going on with your money: with the amounts pledged, the amounts received, the fees deducted, the credit cards declined, stuff like that. You might also appreciate some analytics.

So for instance, if you (a creator) wanted to run a private discussion forum on the web somewhere just for your patrons, and you're willing to do some programming, you could implement a system whereby your discussion forum software checked in with Patreon.com when someone logged in, comparing their email address with the one on file for patrons, to see whether or not they should be let in in the first place, and if so which forum features they should have access to, based on their tier.

Well, you could.