Patron Hunt

NOT THE TYPICAL INDIE HACKERS PROJECT
Back in August 2021 I posted here about building PatronHunt.com, a directory for enthusiasts of all kinds to find new independent creators to love.

Patron Hunt is different from most projects here on Indie Hackers. It's not a SaaS. The monetization model won't kick in for months yet. My primary motive is to make a serious contribution to building a bigger economy for independent creators (read: ~not~ influencers). That's not a flip-the-switch kind of project.

BUILDING A MARKETPLACE
When building a marketplace—which is what Patron Hunt essentially is even though there's nothing to purchase—it's usually necessary to first build one side or the other. You need to get to scale with one side in order to attract the other side. I knew I had to build the creator side first. The only way to attract patrons would be to have a massive directory of creators.

18 months later, Patron Hunt is approaching 12,000 creator profiles organized into categories. By the end of the month that number will grow to nearly 18,000. I've hit "send" on 75 weekly newsletters to just under 150 subscribers.

How did we get 12,000 indie creators come to Patron Hunt and take the time and effort to build a profile? We didn't. Patron Hunt created profiles for those creators. The mission of Patron Hunt is to free up indie creators to create. The last thing we want to do is try to force them to invest their precious time in building yet another profile.

LEVERAGING NEW TECHNOLOGIES
So, how did 1.25 people create nearly 18,000 profiles in 20 months? Artificial intelligence and machine learning. My developer and I are leveraging AI to do the kind of work that we'd have contracted out to virtual assistants in the past. It's not perfect yet, but as we continue to train it, it gets better and better. The time and cost savings is enormous.

With a teeny weeny budget, this allows me to focus my time and energy on the stuff that machines can't do.

NOT BUILDING THINGS
I've learned a lot since that August 2021 post. I now know the answers to the questions I was asking:

• No creator has asked to "claim" their profile. Turns out they didn't know what that meant. Also, it felt scammy.
• Patrons don't appear to be interested in having their own profiles. (Of course they aren't! Why would they?)
• As far as I know, no creator has linked to their Patron Hunt profile from their social media bio.

Looking at my initial research, there was no reason to think people would do any of these things! So thank God I didn't invest a bunch of money and effort building those features. It cost nothing to confirm what I shouldn't build.

BACK TO FIRST PRINCIPLES—THE JOB TO BE DONE
I went back to my research and grounded myself in the creator's job to be done and critical outcomes. Creators want to create. They don't want to please social media platform algorithms. They don't want to pitch podcasters to have them on as guests. They don't want to have to build a profile on every platform on the Internet.

Creators want to minimize the time it takes to build a big audience.

Patron Hunt can help them with that—a lot. It's a wholly unique place where the priority is matching creators up with the people who will love them. And creators don't have to lift a finger to get the benefit.

A.I. has helped Patron Hunt build the creator side of our marketplace. And now it will help us help creators do more of what they love, less of what they don't love, and make more money as a result.

Patron Hunt is probably best described as a social network. But it's also like a marketplace, consisting of creators on one side ("merchants") and patrons on the other ("customers"). Of course, there's crossover in those two groups. But I need to get a certain amount of traction on one of those sides in order to make it interesting to the other. I've focused on building the creator side first because I have a strategy that provides me optimal control over my progress, and creators are much easier to find and contact than amorphous patrons.

I use a phased approach to building Patron Hunt. Each phase has to answer a single question with "Yes" before moving to the next. Phase 1's question was, "Will creators amplify and engage with Patron Hunt if I create profiles of them on the site and promote those profiles on social media?"

The answer to Phase 1 has been a solid "Yes." Twitter engagement, in particular, is quite high. Though, I need to accelerate the growth of my followers.

Now I'm in Phase 2. Its original question was, "Once I have enough creator profiles on the site, will people be interested in being 'patrons'?" The answer to that question was, "No." Not yet, at least.

To ask that question I contacted an email list of nearly 50 people who'd signed up to be notified when Patron Profiles were launching. No one responded. One person eventually responded, but she's a friend of mine ;-) And, it turns out, she's more interested in having a creator profile.

When I get a "No" it doesn't necessarily mean I need to keep finding ways to get a "Yes" during the current phase. It can mean that it's too early to ask that question. I took this "No" to be "No, you haven't got enough creators on the site," and as a signal that I need to keep my focus on growing the creator side of the equation.

So my next question was: "Will creators ask to be profiled on the site if I invite them to do so?" As soon as I tweeted an invitation and added that info to Patron Hunt's Twitter and Instagram bios, I got two requests from creators. I'll take that as a "Yes." (Patron Hunt only has 109 Twitter followers, so two responses from one tweet ain't bad.)

Time to move to Phase 3 and a new question. I need to find out if creators are interested in creating and managing their profiles, themselves. Patron Hunt's model depends on creators doing just that. The first question for Phase 3 is then, "Will creators claim their Patron Hunt profiles if invited to do so?" Claiming your profile means you take control of it.

Getting a "Yes" to Phase 3's first question will also help change the perception that Patron Hunt is a curation site, that it's about my judgement of who "deserves" to be profiled.

I've added a CTA on every creator profile that says, "Is this you? Click here to claim your profile." Today I'll notify the two creators who requested profiles that their profiles are published, and a good sign will be if either of those two creators click the CTA. I'll also continue to post on Twitter and IG about the creators who are already on the site to see if they begin to respond to that CTA. Also, I'll start promoting "Claim your profile" as a message on social media.

If I get a clear "Yes," then I'll need to rapidly deploy a solution on the site to allow creators to manage their own profiles as easily as possible, and I'll need to identify what the next question should be for Phase 4.

For Phase 4's question, I'm currently leaning towards, "Will creators link to their Patron Hunt profile from their social media bios if I invite them to do so?" Patron Hunt still needs a lot more creators before it can become a valuable network, and if creators will use their profile as a link from their social media bio, that will potentially create a growth flywheel on the creator side. It would also be a good signal that creators like their Patron Hunt profile, period.

If the answer to Phase 3's first question is "No," I probably need to focus on getting more traction on Twitter and traffic to the site. If I think in traditional terms, a 2-5% conversion rate would be a reasonable expectation from an engaged audience. With 140 creators that would only be 3-7 responses, and that would be if I successfully got the attention of all 140. So not getting at least three could likely indicate I just don't have enough reach yet to accurately measure. In that case, I'll probably ask the question, "Will the current creators on the site link to their Patron Hunt profiles from their social media bios if I invite them to do so?" So, yeah, same question as the one I'll ask if the answer to the Phase 3's first question is, "No!"

If you've gotten this far, you're probably seeing the same thing I'm seeing. These questions could be getting asked in a different order. For example, when I realize that I want to ask the same question regardless of the answer to Phase 3's first question, I do wonder if I should just ask it now (make it Phase 3's first question). Another option is to ask both questions at the same time, since one doesn't rule out the other. It's the work of plotting out this plan that in fact helps me surface these questions and potentially make better decisions about what to do next.

Someone with a very large platform recommended Patron Hunt just about four weeks ago. It was a great week because the newsletter went from a few subscribers to over 100 literally over night.

While getting someone with that big of a platform to recommend the site and the newsletter isn't exactly a repeatable acquisition process, it's a reminder that recommendations by people who influence your target audience are a powerful and free way to get some initial traction.

Since recommendation, the weekly rate of new subscribers has remained higher than before the mention. It's a trickle compared to the week OF the mention, but I wouldn't expect to sustain that rate. What's great is that the momentum has continued and is something that I can take advantage of.

After conducting research interviews with 20 creators on Patreon, I was inspired to launch Patron Hunt. While a lot of startups are focusing on facilitating transactions between creators and their supporters, what I heard from those 20 creators is that they need help building their audience and supporters.

Most creators aren't also marketers, social media experts and the like. They don't want to have to become marketing experts. The platforms , who mostly facilitate financial transactions between creators and their supporters, don't do anything to help creators who aren't actively trying to become "influencers" grow their base of supporters.

How can creators get found by the people who are likely to become supporters and patrons? As a tech veteran, I couldn't help but think about Product Hunt when asking myself this question. And can you believe it? The domain name, PatronHunt.com, was available! Who needs more of a sign than that? ;-)

My dream is that soon everyone with some disposable income will be supporting a handful of creators that they love, on a recurring basis. I'd like to help build the "patron economy" as much as the "creator economy." Here's to our future culture of patronage!