The State of the Valley: Patreon Edition (Patreon)

Greetings, patrons!

Elliott here, speaking from our fort here in Sherman Oaks, California. Would you like to know how the business side of things is going with The Valleyfolk? Well, strap in, because we’re gonna put on our Big Bird pants and get into the seeds. 

First of all, if you haven’t heard already from other creators on Patreon: AAaAAaaAAhHHHH!!!!!!!! 

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s what’s going on: Patreon evidently made a move that had a pretty negative side effect. Basically, many of your payments were registering as fraud due to Patreon changing their system to be more international. This caused a large drop-off in our patrons and six times the normal amount of declined payments. Bad. We went from around 4500 patrons (our sweet spot) to less than 4300. Also bad. So to be honest, this is all a bit discouraging, but we also already had a plan in motion, which we’ll talk about in a hot second. . . 

BUT FIRST!

How freaking good is Your Show?! Over the past month, we’ve released multiple twenty-minute episodes, two of which were made the week of. We’re all very happy with the quality of the product, as well as its reception. Now that we know we can still put out a pretty impressive amount of content, it’s on to our next goal: YouTube domination. For this reason, we will be posting Out Yonder (or Here’s A Thing, etc.) on Tuesdays, and Your World Today will be uploaded every Thursday, so you can stay up to date on the news from the perspective of four very different people, if that’s what you’re into. With this schedule, more people can see the wonderful characters and insane moments of heliarity. Get it? Helium? Hilarity? There’s something there. . . .

Your Show will still be sourced from you, and it’ll still incorporate various types of sketches and one-off segments, but we wanted those other segments to have a life of their own. This means that, moving forward, there will be no reposted content (hi, we’re The Valleyfolk, and we’re listening). Fresh ingredients. Fresh pizza. Papa Johns. 

This month, we are taking some time and putting more content in the can. This will up the overall quality of every video, something that you’ll notice very soon. Our goal is to reach that still-untapped audience that doesn’t even know we’re doing this. Also, we'll be doing weekly directors commentary streams on Twitch, where we'll watch the content with you guys and make fun of ourselves and our stupid antics. Fun, right? Yes, we are excited.

Oh, and speaking of quality, back to you: we’ve read every exit survey and every message from you, and we’re excited to announce that we are revamping this Patreon. 

New look.

New tiers.

And most of all: improved fulfillment.

We are also creating an exclusive piece of merchandise for our $100-tier patrons that will be shipped to you once we finalize the design, and we will be rolling out massive discounts and sales for various other tiers. We also realize that podcasts aren’t for some people, which means that we’ll be posting more exclusive content (like bloopers, one-off sketches, experimental shows, etc) on this platform. 

Now more than ever, we are very thankful for you all. Despite these past couple days being fairly stressful, we are still filming and creating hilarious stuff (for example, we just filmed a video called Brain Freeze Races. I beat Steve. It hurt.) We’re in good spirits and the machine is well-oiled, so stay tuned for a month of wondrous surprises. 

God bless America, and all the other places.

-elliott