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Comment by patrickyeon | Hacker News Reader

> In March, Patreon wrote in a blog post, “Not only are patrons not leaving the platform, we’ve even seen many of them upgrade their tiers to support their favorite creators during this challenging time.” Additionally, the average income for creators was 60% higher in March than in previous months, according to the company.

> Around that same time, however, Patreon said it saw patrons exiting the platform more than usual due to financial hardships. Still, Patreon said churn rates were stable.

These two paragraphs are one right after the other. How do you reconcile the two? How is it not at least a question posed to their spokesperson of which is the case?

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Coincidentally, your username is patreon with icky in the middle!

The key to reconciling is seeing that "due to financial hardships" is a dependent clause. When patrons leave, they are asked to give a reason why. The % of those leaving who give "financial hardships" as a reason, is increasing. However, as also noted, the total churn rate (people leaving for any reason) is stable.

They're not saying that more people are leaving than usual. They are saying that of the people leaving, more are offering financial hardship as a reason for leaving, than usual.

A corollary would be that the % of people leaving for reasons other than financial hardship has decreased.

Mmmm yeah I would believe that. I guess it could've been better written with something like "even so, some users are leaving and the ones doing so due to financial hardships..."

Thanks

> How do you reconcile the two?

This sounds like a riddle / koan.

Business analysts pulled these metrics from a data warehouse and the semantics don't line up.

I've worked on growth and data science teams, and there ought to be a book "How to lie with data science" as a successor to "How to lie with statistics".

There's been situations where I've seen the same metric queried in two different ways with contradictory results. The slight of hand here is that the query is query, and unless the metric is defined as the query, the metric is not the query.

I remember Nassim Taleb proposing that books are fractals and can't be summarized / compressed.

Nitpick: the expression is 'sleight of hand'

"In March alone, we onboarded 50,000 new creators to the platform of which the average income was 60% higher than previous months."

It seems like the "60% higher than previous months" figure applies to the new creators rather than all creators. I could easily imagine that income for new creators is very low on average and a 60% bump wouldn't mean much.

I'm totally guessing but I think there's simply a missing "most" in the first sentence:

> Not only are most patrons not leaving the platform, we’ve even seen many of them upgrade their tiers to support their favorite creators during this challenging time.”

Because as the second paragraph reminds us, there's always some churn. I think what they mean is, the churn rate went up a bit, but it's not increasing (though how they can tell from only one month is intersting).

And btw, it wouldn't surprise me if churn goes up, a lot of $1 tier supporrtes withdraw support to save money, but a bunch of higher level supporters increase their donation by a higher amount. E.g. if you're well off enough to support a creator at $10, you're less likely to need to leave given the current situation, and if you do incresae your pledge, then you won't increase it by $1 - you'll probably increase by $5-$10 at a minimum. So the average income could still go up even as churns are going up.

This is guesswork.

Facts: They raised a $60m D in July 2019.

Guesses: Patreon loses money (ie, they're a startup). This may be due to solely due to international, the use of the round D, or not.

Either way, they -- much like the startup I run -- are immediately planning how to go 24-36 months without any additional investor cash. Because your investors will still expect you to meet growth targets to get that next round regardless of covid.

Speaking for myself only, we've taken to heart the cut once, cut fast mantra that every company that came through 2008 says is the right thing to do. And we've figured out how the company will go for more than two years without additional cash, or be able to tolerate 20q2 being a sales disaster. Those both require immediately cutting burn.

Although that makes sense as to why they may cut, none of that addresses the two statements the grandparent quoted, though.

They wrote in a blog post in March that patrons are not leaving the platform, and then at the same time they apparently reported that they were in fact leaving.

Which is it?

In March most of the world went from "everything's fine here, situation normal" to shooting out the radio and diving head first into a trash compactor. That might have affected a few things.

What does shooting out the radio mean?

It's a reference to a scene from Star Wars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FSV8w1UoZA

I kind of assumed people were aware of events since 26 March. For instance, on 26 March, 3.3m weekly unemployment reports was by far the largest ever reported.

I also suspect some of that type of reporting may lag, and if a ceo or finance team orders it to be shown daily, may be surprised at what a week or two of reporting lag does in the time of the aforementioned events.

The people leaving due to financial hardships weren't making much money so they pulled the average income down. After they were gone, average income of the remaining creators was 60% higher.

Or something like that perhaps.

Maybe the point is that they are not reconcilable and the writer wants you to think what Patreon wrote in the blog post was a lie, hence the however in between "Around that same time" and the patrons exiting the platform.

Way more people are leaving than are upgrading.

People are also being removed because they are not woke enough for Patreon.

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