Now that the launch and Patrecon are behind us, the product marketing team andI have started thinking about how we can get the right creators to know about integrations that would be awesome for them. For example, a blueprint project template we can apply to each integration.
Example idea: Look at reward text and find out who is doing this already manually, and create a relevant email campaign with walkthroughs.
Long term, we are thinking about deeper product integration as well.
I thought I’d open this up to the community. What else comes to your mind?
Crazy/silly ideas welcome. This is more brainstorming than analysis phase. Don’t hold back.
(cc @LordHarvie as follow up to our patrecon thread)
Looking at the reward text is definitely a good idea, I think. Perhaps also searching campaign description as well, as sometimes creators put more detailed descriptions of the rewards there.
Rather than an email campaign (or in addition to), it might be more effective to have a pop up ribbon with a simple message at the top of the site, which would display to targeted creators. It’d be noticeable enough to catch the eye of creators, but small enough that it’s not intrusive on the site experience. Emails don’t always catch your eye, (especially if you get a bazillion of them). As an example, even though the app directory was peddled in an email, apparently very few creators knew about it.
As a more general idea, maybe making the existence of the app directory more apparent to creators. Maybe there is a banner that displays when a creator views their own page, or perhaps an icon on the navigation sidebar.
Perhaps there could also be a monthly App Directory newsletter that talks about the latest apps, maybe goes into detailed on that months featured app, small interviews with app creators, etc.
I designed Patronizer so I could embed the web version anywhere via an iframe… so it’d be kinda pretty neat if it were possible to have Patronizer working and available right there in it’s app directory page.
Some sort of “advanced patreon search” tool, where we can search rewards, description, etc, for key words manually, and then contact the creators through Patreon our selves.
Any updates on some of these ways to our apps in front of creators?
Yeah! I wanted to get you a quick answer before the weekend
Having been a third party dev myself - that part of me loves that idea. Being on the patreon side of the table, i know that the culture here (and specific requests I’ve received) generally want to protect our creators from solicitation as we start off. We don’t want creators to feel that because they’re on patreon now we opened them up to being pitched.
That said…
We absolutely want to get you more creator visibility. We should be doing that job for you. That’s how we measure our own team’s success.This week I had a meeting with our head of marketing on investing in this and orienting the organization to help developers and creators around integrations. We are definitely all on the same page on this.
2018 will also see product teams focused on doing this inside the product. They’re thinking long term and thoughtfully, so there won’t be any popups or banners at our product’s scale, but adoption of your work is also how they’re going to measure their own success. The same goes for multiple other teams that are now planning parts of their goals around integrations (high-touch creator-facing teams in particular).
Hope that is somewhat helpful, as much as I can write in a public forum about our internal plans
EDIT: By “no popups or banners” I meant no cross-site just-one-link type things. Our product team has had some sore spots doing that in the past - same with the navigation. Those could totally be what we use, or the design pattern we employ, if it was the thoughtful thing! And to zoom out, we will absolutely work app discovery into the product.
In addition, the marketing team is scoping a few targeted email tests to creators based on their current rewards, to gauge how effective that medium is on developers’ behalf - and hopefully scale that up.
Looking further out, we’ve begun collaborating with our parallel teams in product to plan how to surface integrations directly inside creator onboarding - and on creator pages. Investing in systems that makes this scalable for creators (existing too) and developers is the top priority for those teams in Q1 2018.
