Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web

[Music] this concept turned out to be one of the most important things about the internet the Subscribe button allowed people who liked my stuff to sign up to see more of it in the future and as a Creator it gave me a channel of distribution to ensure that my future work was sent to those people it was a framework for the distribution of creativity and communication it made my dreams come true as an artist the follow is a piece of Internet architecture that felt closer to Magic than anything I had ever experienced in my life

hi everybody hello hello I've been thinking a lot about the whole Arc of the internet uh and how it's evolved over the last couple decades and then how I think it's going to evolve and patreon's place uh in all of that and that's what I want to share with you today um so uh I started making music and videos and putting them on the internet right after I finished College in 2007 I made a ton of movies in school I also made animations as a kid so making stuff wasn't particularly new to me but I

had just spent at the time when I finished College 6 months and thousands of hours on a new record called nightmares and Daydreams I was living at my dad's house at the time working out of my old childhood bedroom and I was trying to figure out how to reach people with this new record that I had worked so hard on like even the cover that guy on the cover is an actual clay guy that I made out of sculpy and then I did a photo shoot with him and I got a great shot but then

I had to use the lasso tool in Photoshop to cut them out and this was before the magnetic lasso tool so I had to do that [ __ ] by hand and that took way too long but none of that mattered because by sheer luck I happened to finish school right when this budding technology called the internet was going through a massive shift it was just starting to move from what people called Web 1 to Web 2.0 web 1 was essentially a readon version of the internet in retrospect people call this '90s version of the

web the static web it was like AOL where you could browse web pages and read the news but there was no easy way for people to upload and share and then in the early 2000s a slew of new companies like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter came onto the scene and YouTube's motto was Broadcast Yourself the whole idea of web 2 was that for the first time as a creative person you could easily participate on the internet you could post and tweet and upload instead of just being a passenger and I thought that was [ __

] awesome honestly I still think it's [ __ ] awesome it's so easy to forget how magical this is how special this is but this moment in history marked a shift for Humanity and for artists and creators especially because for the first time on the internet you could do more than just consume you could create you could reach other people and it was in that moment right here in 2007 when I happen to graduate college and finished my record nightmares and Daydreams and I was trying to reach people with it and at the time my

best bet was dming bands on MySpace and asking if I could open for them at local bars up and down the West Coast I sent cold Outreach to music venues to get booked and then I got in my car because I couldn't afford to rent a van and I drove up and down the West Coast United States and I played the dankest local bars and I sang my guts out and I sweat and I sang and I sweat and I sang and I ate tacos out of the back of my car while my friends were

all getting promoted and high-paying jobs as investment bankers and I did that for years tour after tour and I'm using the word tour lightly here like there weren't people at my shows like like nobody came I had no fans on a good night there were a couple stragglers who wanted in off the street but I was playing empty bars it was so hard to reach people so you can imagine how excited I was when a friend sent me a video of a guy named David Choy singing with a guitar in front of his webcam on

a new website called YouTube and this video had like 300,000 views or something like that I couldn't believe it David was reaching people this phase of the internet had the potential to solve a fundamental problem for me as an artist I felt like I had to jump in and I did I immediately started uploading videos to YouTube back then no one else was showing the atome recording process so I just filmed myself playing instruments and then I layered them in the video with split screen so people could see all the musical elements coming together to

form a song and it's funny CU in 2024 this idea seems to totally obvious but nobody was doing that back then it wasn't a fancy recording studio with millions of dollars equipment it was a bedroom with an Mbox audio interface and a cheap version of a laptop recording software called Protools Le and an old Sony handic Cam that I lugged around with me everywhere that shot on high eight tapes and a bed comforter hung on the wall to dampen the sound and broken symbols that a fan sent me in the mail for free but I

was making real music I was screaming my [ __ ] guts out and playing accordion and doing collabs with friends and it started working people started watching my videos and listening my music I was reaching people my videos started getting thousands of views it wasn't millions of people at first but it was so much better than playing empty bars so I kept doing it and by 2009 I had made 43 YouTube videos of my songs and I was feeling amazing because For the First Time Of My Life I was actually reaching people with my work

but the real beauty of this new website called YouTube the most amazing thing about it was that it had a subscribe button I only realized how truly special this idea was in retrospect but in my opinion this concept turned out to be one of the most important things about this new era of the internet what people called Web 2.0 the Subscribe button was foundational it changed YouTube from being a tool to reach people to being a way to reach them and then build a following around my work the subscri subscribe button allowed people who liked

my stuff to sign up to see more of it in the future and as a Creator it gave me a channel of distribution to ensure that my future work was sent to those people so it turned out that web 2 solved more than just reach more than just Discovery it represented the birth of the follower the follow is not some handy feature of a social network the follow is foundational architecture for human creativity and organization the idea of a creator an artist or a community of fans around them who want to see their future work

this concept the follow it's profound whether it's the following that I was building as a musician or a podcasting Duo who talks about what it's like to be single moms in a community of single mothers who finally feel seen and understood or a Science Education Creator and students who didn't previously have access to high quality education the follow was a system of organization for the entire internet it was a framework for the distribution of creativity and communication now not just reach but a step past it ongoing communication connection a sustained relationship community and I learned

just how magical the concept of following could be when I did my first collab with my girlfriend Natalie we put up a video on my YouTube channel in 2008 that was a song we created together and it was different than my music it was way less screamy and insane but it was more active and fleshed out than her music so we decided to create a new separate channel for our collabs and we call this new YouTube channel pomus the first pomus video was actually posted on my channel and I had about 7,000 subscribers at the

time and my subscribers loved this new video and at the end of it we posted a little link to the new pomp channel to tell people about it and almost instantly the new pomp new channel got 3,000 subscribers that's what a following is people see your new [ __ ] literally they follow you wherever you go on the internet so Natalie and I started making more videos and more videos and within a year we got 18 ,000 subscribers and then in one video we announced that we were playing a show and we showed up to

the show in San Francisco and there were 40 people there and oh my God guys I cannot tell you what it's like to have 40 people at your show after years of playing empty BS [ __ ] magic it was amazing it was so great uh another time Natalie and I were filming a vlog and my sister happened to walk in like behind us she's a soap maker she was holding a bar of grapefruit scented soap pomp means grapefruit in French and she said hey guys look I have pomu soap if you'd like a bar

Natalie and I just saw that and decided to keep it in the video and our F like oh my God pomu soap and so we made another video and we said okay now you can order pomu soap and we got hundreds of orders wrapped in toilet paper no it's not toilet Pap another time when thumb drives were starting to get huge we thought why do CDs let's put all of our music on a thumb drive and we we loaded up the thumb drives we put up a video we said hey if you want to buy

a thumb drive drive you can buy a thumb drive now and we ended up selling hundreds and hundreds of thumb drives we decided to sign every one of them it was kind of crazy we had to like figure out the packaging we had no idea how to package that many thumb drives my family ended up helping out dad's like taking pictures and stuff you know like it was like really fun it was amazing um another time we decided to put our album on iTunes our first pomp moose album back in like 2008 and we didn't

have artwork so we asked our fans like hey do you want to make the artwork for a Pomp and we got hundreds of submissions for the cover of the new pal moose album from our fans and they were freaking talented this is the one that actually won Natalie and I just love this one so this is actually this is the artwork for our first album it was made by one of our fans another time we booked a show at a laundr mat um that's a sentence I just said uh we we booked a show at

a laundromat the idea was like it was a laundromat where there was a cafe and a laundromat you could go order food do your laundry eat by the time you're done eating take your laundry home and uh we booked the show like if you crammed people in there it held like 60 people in this laundry and then we uploaded this video and this was the first video that we ever uploaded that went viral and it got like half a million views overnight and we showed up to our show at the laundromat and there were 200

people crammed inside the laundromat and then 150 or 200 people outside like spilling in the street cars were swerving around them and like there was no stage like it's a laundromat so literally I'm playing music and there's a person like I'm like looking at a person's eyes while I'm playing pomu songs like it was mayem I don't have any pictures of the night but this is what it felt like like it was just like insane and this was the first time I was like oh my God this is going to work having a following is

amazing this is going to work we're going to be able to be full-time musicians another time we posted another video and at the end of the video we told our fans hey we're uploading a song to iTunes we decided not to ever sign or kind of enter the the music industry we did everything ourselves we negotiated our own contract with iTunes directly WE Post our songs directly to iTunes so we kept almost all the revenue associated with that and when we posted this album we sold 30,000 songs that month and we got $22,000 deposited directly

into our bank account it was more money than i' had ever seen in one place ever in my life I was losing my mind it was so incredible um then then po started playing shows and we started touring and you know hundreds of people started showing up and then thousands of people started showing up this is my wife crowds surfing and she's said [ __ ] badass that's what I mean when I say that the Subscribe button is not a silly feature the concept of the follow changed my life it made my dreams come true

as an artist it took me from playing empty bars to living out my fantasy as a musician the follow is a piece of Internet architecture that felt closer to Magic than anything I had ever experienced in my life and right around the moment that pompus was starting to work right through all of this there is this genius named Kevin Kelly he wrote an essay called a thousand true fans and his premise was simple it was that in the age of the internet you don't need millions of fans to be successful if you can just find

a, people who are willing to buy a 100 bucks of stuff from you per year that's $100,000 per year which is a pretty freaking great business as a creative person you just need a thousand true fans who really connect with you and believe in you and this is different than just reaching people it's even deeper than followers this is super fans true fans real fans call it whatever you want the idea is that there's this group of people that is your core if reach means people see it and follower means people want to see more

then true fans are the people who go to the show and buy the merch and download the record and pay for the course and get the live stream tickets and all the things and this idea really resonated with me we had fans showing up to pmu shows with tattoos of the Band custom t-shirts posters drawings artwork icing of my face on a cookie I ate my face we had a fan who made a oil painting and me screaming my [ __ ] guts out I used this link release software called e junkie and and I

cobbled together like a little MP3 store for myself on the internet and I would sell original music and I was selling 500 bucks a month of my original songs on my own website fans were showing up to buy things to be there one time we asked our pom fans to come film a music video with us on a Saturday like show up to Dolores Park in San Francisco just show up and be in this music video and 50 people showed up they even learned this dance and we shot this dance and the dance is in

this ppose video another time we would actually always use this software called stage it which was like a ticketed live stream software so we could play our songs people could buy tickets and show up live on the internet and Natalie and I would just sit at home and play these songs for 45 minutes and people would buy tickets and leave tips during the concert and we would routinely make like three grand in 45 minutes playing our songs it's like these are true fans another time Natalie raised over $100,000 for her record from just 2,000 people

other time we made a pom album and we went online on YouTube we put up this video and we said hey everybody we have a new pom album it's not for sale you can't buy it you can't get the new pom album the only way to get the new pom album is if you donate a book to the Richmond School District send us the receipt for that book and we will send you the P Moves album for free and the Richmond School District ended up having to rent a shipping container to keep up with the

packages it's like 11,000 books that got sent to the rich school it's like $140,000 worth of books it was amazing it felt incredible to see that many people show up for this that's true fans real fans super fans call it whatever you want but this was the concept that was rattling around in my head when I started patreon 11 years ago this is actually the first sketch of patreon I called up my co-founder and he turned this into what is now patreon and the idea was very simple it's like a membership platform where fans could

sign up for a subscription payment to the crater and the creater could run a membership and get paid for their work I'm not going to tell the patreon founding story I've told it a million times but the company is now over 400 people 11 years in we have over 250,000 craters who have made over 3 and A5 billion dollar on the platform which I think of as proof If We Ever Needed it that the true fans are there and the true fans are ready in the background while patreon was being formed building over the last

decade the whole internet was again starting to [Music] shift and if you think of the '90s as web 1 the 2000s as web 2 right around the 2010s there was a new change happening Facebook started experimenting with a new thing called ranking and I realize most everybody here knows about this but what ranking did was essentially it took the feed which you can think of as a list of posts from creators that I follow and it analyzed each and every post for how how engaging it was and if it wasn't engaging enough Facebook would then

take that post and push it down in the feed in other words they started ranking or ordering posts according to what was best for their business this was actually great for Facebook it was the right business decision for them and their company and their revenue model but what it meant for creators was that for the first time since Web 2.0 my followers might not necessarily see my post and this idea of a subscription started to break down if the person doesn't receive the things it's not really a direct true connection between a Creator and their

fans it's not really a subscription the channel of distribution is broken and it creates another problem too around creative freedom CU now suddenly my post has to be better than the other posts according to a set of criteria that I don't know or have control of or even agree with so instead of thinking what do I want to make what lights me up what is the output that I want to create as an artist what will my fans love instead of thinking those questions now in the back of my mind I'm thinking what will the

ranking algorithm favor and that subconsciously or consciously changes my creative output to achieve Facebook's goals not my goals as a Creator and if it were just Facebook doing this fine creators would just leave and post somewhere else but it worked really well it was great for Facebook's business and people started spending even more time on the platform so the other platforms had to compete and YouTube launched the cosmic Panda redesign centering the entire company around watch time and Twitter and Instagram followed with rank feeds in 2016 and we only sought in retrospect but now I

think of the 2010s as the decade of ranking the decade when the original promise of the Creator Le Community the true follow was broken for the first time I want to just do a quick aside here because I know there's this big debate in the world about you know chronological feeds versus algorithmic feeds and I don't want to make it sound like I'm a zealot uh on on either of the two polarized sides that's actually not the the takeaway here it's not how I think of it I actually see problems with chronological Feats because as

a crater if if if it's chronological then you have to keep posting to stay on top so I don't think that's necessarily the best way to build strong relationships either the the problem that I have is if if you're going to change that if you're going to adjust the way you you create a feed what is the purpose behind that what is the intention behind that are you trying to create a place where you can build strength of relationship with your community where your fandom gets energized over time where people are guaranteed that subscription where

you get a direct connection with your community and your true fans is that it or is it maximizing attention is it maximizing watch time those are two very different goals and very different ways of organizing your entire product as a technology company this one helps me as a Creator and this one hurts me as a Creator it hurts my community it hurts my business it hurts my creative output I wish that it stopped there but around the turn of the decade a new company came onto the scene called Tik Tok and Tik Tok had a

much deeper impact in the ecosystem I think anyone foresaw at the time it wasn't just short form vertical first video that wasn't it that's a red herring I think it was much more fundamental than that Tik Tok said we want to make the most engaging feed possible this whole idea of a list of your subscriptions forget about that in fact forget about the whole concept of subscriptions Tik Tok started from the ground up with something totally different called for you where each of these posts are chosen for me by Tik Tok instead of me choosing

what's in my feed and this completely abandoned the concept of the follow but it worked Tik Tok hadit a bil users by 2021 and traffic on the internet started flowing away from the Legacy social companies and toward Tik Tok so just like with Facebook and ranking the other platforms had to compete YouTube launch shorts Instagram launch reels and Twitter launched a you feed as well and within a couple of years this whole system of organization for the internet the Creator Le Community started to fade into the [Music] past I have really felt this personally as

a Creator in the last four years especially my fans don't see as much of my stuff anymore it's harder to sell tickets to a show it's harder to reach people with my new work it's harder to build community it's harder to build a business it's harder to energize my fans What's Happening Here is we are in the middle of another shift and this is a big one if the '90s was web 1 and the 2000s was web two and the 2010s was ranking I'm worried that the 2020s could become the death of the follower I

um got an email from a crater about a year and a half ago and I got this email my heart just sank in my stomach hey Jack I'm writing this letter to you hat and hands due to changes at Facebook overnight the traffic to my links in my pages dropped by 80% as such it looks like I'll have to sell my home I'm dusting off my resume and looking for jobs social media management I'm seeing more and more of things like this and it's not just happening to creators it's happening to anyone who posts stuff

on the internet it's happening to Media companies Vice and BuzzFeed and rooster teeth's announcements this is a really hard change to navigate for anyone who's posting stuff online and trying to build community and business for the creators in the room I think it's really important to remember that and and to understand that if you're not connecting as much as you want to with your audience right now that does not necessarily mean there's something wrong with you a lot of us as creators have this tendency to be like H what can I do better and that's

a good impulse honestly it's like growth mindset how is how can how am I contributing to this what can I do better and again that I think most of the time that's really good but there is also something happening in the background right now it's it's a macro thing that's happening on the web that makes our jobs as creators really hard right now there a lot of smart people at big companies that are well-funded big media companies trying to figure this out too and they're having trouble with it too so as creators just know that

doesn't necessarily mean there's something wrong with you here I believe that this problem is the single most important problem that faces creative people today the weakening of Creator Le communities of our distribution channels to our fans this is the hardest most challenging and most painful issue threatening the present and the future of creativity on the internet I actually I don't think that this is going to happen I think the follow is too important to die I think it's too valuable to ignore I think it's too useful and awesome for Creative people for Publishers for media

companies and I think the next wave of Internet and Media technology companies are going to Surge on this problem and try to solve it and it's actually already started and the incumbent social platforms they're not going to be able to fight it because their revenue relies on maximizing attention to drive their businesses they're being forced up towards Discovery towards reach personalization algorithmic curation these are the levers that drive attention and therefore they drive their strategies that's why there's a hole already opening up and why we're starting to see a whole new set of companies emerge

that look fundamentally different from the Legacy social landscape Discord and kajabi and fourth wall and gumroad moment which patreon acquired last year the courses platforms events companies some people are calling this subset of companies the creater economy I don't even think of it like that it's a fundamental SHO sh in approach and the Hallmark strategy of the drivers of these businesses is to focus on deeper connections as opposed to just more connections the true fan the real fan call it whatever you want it's the 5% of fans that drive 90% of the community and business

this is a direct fan business this is an ads business this is about depth of connection this is about maximizing attention this is about deeper fans this is about more fans and what binds this new way of emerging companies is that their strategic focus is down here the next decade of creative and media technology companies will focus on building direct to Fan connections and Community strength as creators we'll still need the social platforms we'll still need those companies up here for discovery for reach we need that but those companies will be one component of the

many tools that we have as creative people to help us run our communities and businesses that's where the world is going I'm sure of it and personally right now I feel a sense of responsibility through this I remember what it feels like to be a crater on the outside of these platforms watching the internet move in a direction that I don't agree with and that I don't like and that I don't think is good for my community or my business I remember what that feels like I remember feeling anxiety I remember feeling fear I remember

being scared of where that was going and what it meant for me and now through whatever Crazy Life Path I have been on as an artist I'm I'm now finding myself as a CEO of one of these [ __ ] tech companies and um I feel this sense of I want to help build the type of internet that I want as a Creator that's what I want to do so I really don't want this talk to feel like a patreon ad actually I I really hope it doesn't but um but I do want to give

you a a sense of how I'm thinking about this problem given this seat that I'm in and how patreon is now thinking about this problem and what we think our place is in it and what we want to do about it and the headline is this it's been 20 or 30 years and the current version of how art and Community exists on the internet today [Music] I don't think is the right version how community and art exists on the web I don't think it's the right way and I want to I want patreon to contribute

to building a better version of how art and Community could exist on the internet we've oriented the whole company uh around this problem we started as a membership platform 11 years ago subscription payments but we have built a lot ESP in the last 3 years in an effort to take a more holistic approach to solving this we built video Community podcasting better posting a New Media Player Commerce free membership which is essentially like a follow gated on an email and live and while this might look like a lot it's actually just three things media community

and business and we're now thinking of patreon no longer as a membership platform but as this whole thing the media community and business foundation for the next decade of professional creativity on the internet organized around the concept of the true follow in an effort to build a better way that art can exist on the web that's the theory that's what the company is setting out to solve now in practice what that looks like is a a new set of products and tools that we built into patreon this is our first foray into Community essentially this

allows fans to connect with each other and build energized fandoms and creators to hop in there and talk with fans and it's a place for True fandom why do we build this what's the strategy and the idea behind this here's why as a Creator on the internet today I can get subscribers and I can get views and I can if I can send my fans to Instagram or Tik Tok and they can be there but what I've noticed is those communities degrade over time I I they they they don't get energized over time they get

deenergized it gets harder and harder to reach those people I make a post I reach two% of my audience I reach 1% of my audience I lose touch with those people and there's no way for me to find find those real fans those true fans the small portion of my fans that drive everything for me as a Creator the way we're building this and what I want as a Creator is a place where I can send my fans and that phandom gets energy over time that Phantom gets closer that phandom gets more vibrant more connected

over time more enthusiastic over time that's what I want as a Creator that's the space that I want to have as a creative person creators deserve a place like that that is important it's important for the future of creativity okay another thing that we built is Commerce Commerce allows creators to sell a digital thing an episode a bonus episode a download a a course anything that you can sell online why do we build Commerce creators send lots of people to their patreon millions of people to their patreon pages every month what we found is a

lot of those people are true fans they're like the really intense interested excited fans but not all of those fans are ready to pay with a subscription payment in fact a lot of them don't want to pay a subscription payment and and why why don't they want to pay with sub well they either they have subscription fatigue which is a real thing or they're not in the right financial situation or they don't want to commit to a payment every month but they're still true fans and rather than having those true fanss leave the Creator we

want to give creators a way to start forming connections with those fans to build businesses with those fans and so we built Commerce as a way for the fan the true fans that aren't yet ready for a subscription payment they can now participate in the Creator's business and Community through this Commerce product and and meanwhile the creater can can build an awesome business along the way too the logic is very similar for free membership why do we build free membership what is free membership by the way it's a thing of this as like a follow

gated on your email so it's kind of like an email capture it allows a fan to follow your page without paying in exchange for giving them your email and it's the same logic is Commerce creators are sending their true fans Millions um every every month to their patreon pages and we wanted to give creators a way to reach that portion of their fans that they go to the shows they have the merch they have the Hat they're true fans but for whatever reason they don't want to buy one of the things you have digitally and

they don't want to uh pay a subscription and this allows creators to continue forming relationships with those fans and what's super exciting about this is we have found that about 40 to 50% of these fans actually say that they intend to pay the crater in the next few months they High intention to be a part of the creaters community and business and this gives creators a way to start building Community with those folks okay we also uh acquired um a live experiences platform called moment and I don't even want to call it ticketed live streaming

because it's not it's so much more beautiful than that Argent and the team did such an incredible job building this place for creators to sell tickets to these live experiences and they can debut their work a standup special a movie that they've made um a special episode that they know is going to be a total Banger whatever it is that allows creators to sell tickets to that experience and then um have Community with those fans while they're all watching it together all that to say the way we're thinking about this next phase is that we're

not just a membership company anymore we're a true Fan Company we're a Creator company we're we're building a better way for art and Community to exist on the internet because I want patreon to build and internet where creators have true creative freedom control of their businesses and their careers and I want it to feel like fire to be part of a Creator's Community I know what it feels like to be part of an energized Community I remember it and I have that same conviction now that I did back in 2013 when I started patreon I

know that it is possible to build an internet where Phantoms Thrive and where professional creativity is possible for anyone I believe this in my bones it is not a choice it's not optimism it's just deep down what I actually know to be available to humanity if that is the path that we choose that's what patreon is doing it's how we're thinking about this future and our and patreon's place in it but for the creators in the audience creators don't have to wait over the last decade I've talked to thousands of creative people I've had my

own creative projects I've learned a lot and I want to share just a few thoughts about navigating the the shifts in the internet and how we can all prepare ourselves and our communities for for those shifts we and we and we don't even need to wait for any of the any of the tech platforms to catch up the first invest in those true fans invest in the depth of connection not just new it's not all about new views new subscribers watch time up and to the right it's about depth it's about quality of interaction it's

about finding that small portion of your fans that are your engine that are your core and then figuring out how to reach them by the way sometimes when I talk about this creators think well does that mean like DMs like should I be talking to individual fans no not necessarily that's not actually what I mean I mean finding those people and building real connections with them in whatever capacity you have and my team will probably kill me for saying this but I'm not it's not even using patreon there's like a bunch of ways that you

can do this right like you can do it via email lists you can get a Discord you you could get a patron if you want I'm a little biased but I think you could you could find um some other place where you can build build that Community with your true fans the point is find those people and invest in that community that is the engine that will drive your business slingshot your business through these shifts in the internet okay the second thing make beautiful things there is so much tension especially right now to make for

the algorithm and I've seen the diagrams I've seen the charts I've even drawn them in my answer you know make for the algorithm make for yourself and then make the things that help you build a business and you sort of this a v diagram the little center part and that's the sweet I've seen all that and I get that but the gravity everywhere we look as creators today the gravity is just pushing us it's just pushing us toward making for other reasons than why we set out to make things in the first place it's so

important to remember to make beautiful things to make things that light you up and to make things that you care about there's a wonderful metaphor that I love um it's a business metaphor but it it makes sense for creaters too I think it's a metaphor of the the business of the hot dog stand under the Eiffel Tower or the local restaurant and the hot dog sand on the Apple Tower gets thousands of new customers coming through their hot dog sand every day right cuz just tourists just coming through and they know they're going to get

lots and lots of new customers know those people come back but it doesn't matter cuz they're just always getting new customers every day cuz the Eiffel Tower and they just make hot dogs and sell them and some portion of those customers buy their hot dogs actually don't even have to be very good hot dogs right they just like sell hot dogs they know they're going to keep making money and that business works like it works it's an okay business there's another business which is the local restaurant business where the people there just focus on making

great food and having great service and they actually are not in a place that gets a lot of foot traffic so they don't get lots of new customers but everybody in like a five mile radius eats there twice a month and they just get lots of repeat customers cuz they've built trust and they've built depth of connection with those people and people know that restaurant and love it know they're going to have a great time when they're there that is a great business you don't have to get lots of new and billions and acquisition and

you don't that's not the only type of business you can build as a Creator there's this wonderful group of creators oh my god I've fallen in love with them anybody heard of the YouTube New Wave it's this group of creators they make these wonderful 30 45 minute long form films mini documentaries about their lives and their struggles coming into the world and quitting college and they're beautiful it's incredible they're patient they're slow the films are long but oh my God the depth of the message in these films is incredible and they're building such a strong

Community around their work people just love what they have to say and can't can't wait to see the next one that's a real business that's a real Community it's different than what we're incentivized to do everywhere on the internet but that that works okay know what you want the hardest lesson I have learned as a creative person and as an operator and CEO is to know and trust what I want and to be true to that over time that's easier said than done don't let somebody else tell you what you want because then you'll end

up with what they want instead of what you want think a good example of that is as creators we open up our our dashboards and we see these metrics on what success is this is a dashboard that someone else built for us and it tells us what we want and the weird thing is after a couple years We Begin we like start to believe that like our minds get reprogrammed and we believe this is what I want this is success and we chase that if you went back in time and you asked elitz Gerald or

David Bowie or Prince what do you want what's your goal as an artist what matters to you do you think Bowie would have said my goal as an artist is to maximize the amount of human hours spent consuming my work I do know what Bowie wanted I'm not going to pretend to but I can tell you what I want as an artist I can tell you what matters to me as a creative person and what I know will matter to me 10 years ago now and 10 years from now I want to say something that

matters to somebody I want to say something that only I can say because of whatever experience I've had and my lived experience something that is uniquely pointed to me I want to say that I want to figure out how to say that I want to find that core of human truth in my experience and communicate it eloquently and clearly and have it be true and feel true and have someone else see that and have that person think yes that feels true and it feels true to them and then I want that person to feel connected

to me even though we've never met before in our lives but I set a thing that res resonated with them and made them feel a little bit less alone cuz they felt like there was another person who had that same experience I want to make things that are Timeless I want to make things that feel true now I want to make things that feel true in 50 years I want to make things that still feel true 500 years after I'm dead I want to figure out how to use my short years on this planet to

find that kind of Truth and say it that's what I want as an artist and that's a very different goal than what watch time that may not be what you want as an artist and that's okay but the point is to know what you want what matters to you what are you trying to achieve as a creative person we have this tendency to look outside for those answers I do it too this advice is honestly more for me than it is for anybody else in this room we want there to be a Yoda we want

there to be a leader or a manager or a voice of authority that can tell us what we want cuz it's a scary thing to ask but that does not exist what we want comes intrinsically not extrinsically it comes from in here that's where we find it so as we navigate this next phase of the internet as creative people as we go through these ups and downs of the web in its ever evolving state do not forget what matters to you as an artist do not forget what fills you with pride to make do not

forget your purpose for making things in the first place don't forget why you wake up in the morning and devote your time and energy to your craft don't forget what gives you a sense of meaning as a creative person and lastly don't forget to scream your [ __ ] guts out thank you everybody appreciate your hand thank you than thank you thanks