How to move from one mental breakdown (or depression) and a desire to stop everything, launching a company valued at more than four billion dollars today? This is the experience of Jack Conte, successful entrepreneur and ex-musician, founder of the artist site Patreon. Focus on his inspiring story!
Biography and career of Jack Conte
Jack Conte was born on July 12, 1984 in the United States. He began a career as singer-songwriter. With his wife, Nataly Dawn, also passionate about music, they launched their music group Pomplamoose in 2008. The duo displays their content mainly online via their YouTube channel and still tours. The two artists constitute a community that supports them considerably.
The singer also became known to the general public during his vocal dubbing of the “teenager” from the video game The Sims 2, but also thanks to his Youtube video Yeah Yeah Yeah, which has recorded more than a million views in November 2017. The majority of his solo sounds have been released on YouTube.
A trying musical career for Jack Conte
The musical group Pomplamoose was doing quite well and earned Jack Conte and his wife about $400,000 a year. They even called on employees to manage their schedule, until the day Jack Conte suffered a nervous breakdown. He actually spent three months producing a very complex music video for the song “Pedals”. He then found himself exhausted and drowned his sorrow in solitude. He explains to CNBC Make it : “I sat in a puddle and started crying like a baby. It was truly pitiful. »
Cherry on the cake? The video generated very little revenue despite millions of views. Jack Conte then thought about the best way to generate more money for content creators and allow them to see their work rewarded at its fair value.
The birth of a revolutionary concept: Patreon, a startup valued at 4 billion
After this episode strewn with doubts and questioning, Jack Conte reconnects with his former roommate, Sam Yam. The two embarked on the idea of creating a platform allowing content creators to earn money by creating value for communities ready to support them financially through a subscription.
This project responded to the problem encountered by Jack Conte. As Sam Yam details at JDN: “The remuneration model for creators, traditionally based on advertising, was not working. Jack was a musician who had tens, if not hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube. But he was paid barely a few hundred dollars for his activity. The advertising model is actually valid when you have a massive audience, which is far from being the case for the majority of creators. »
The Patreon platform was then born and became one of the most popular on the internet. After just one year of activity, it had allowed its users to earn a million dollars. Today, that rapid growth puts the company at a crossroads, as it eyes an IPO and is valued at $4 billion.
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What is Patreon and how does the platform work?
Patreon is an online membership platform. The concept is simple: content creators (musicians, videographers, editors, etc.) run subscription services for their communities. The company has raised $400 million since its creation in 2013 and is today valued at $4 billion after a fundraising in April 2021. Today, co-founders, Jack Conte and Sam Yam, are are wondering about the possibility of taking their company public.
The particularity of Patreon is that everyone can become a creator and develop an engaged audience around common interests or topics. Video or podcast creators are generally those who are most successful on the platform thanks to the connections they build with their audience. The company is one of the few winners from the coronavirus crisis. “No longer able to provide concerts or performances, some artists have turned to Patreon to diversify their income. We now have eight million monthly active users. Since our creation in 2013, more than three billion dollars have been paid to creators,” explains Sam Yam.
The main objective of the co-founders of Patreon is to help creators in their development by providing them with more sophisticated tools, such as the possibility of uploading videos or podcasts in native format, directly to the platform. They also want to continue their international development by translating Patreon into more languages.
