Patreon Welcomes The Renegade Coder

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to monetize the site. Honestly, I’m at a bit of a crossroads financially, and I want to try to reach financial independence. I don’t want to have to depend on any single source of income outside of what I create myself. That’s why I’ve been so focused on building up the store, but it’s required quite the investment of time. As a result, I’ve decided to pursue other options for the time being. That’s why I’m starting to experiment with a platform known as Patreon.

Table of Contents

Inspiration

If you had a chance to see the old site, you know that I tried playing around with Google Adsense and the Amazon Affiliate program. I didn’t really care for either of those methods as they both required heavy traffic and they both cluttered up the site.

When I created The Renegade Coder, I started to appreciate how clean the site looked, so I never really went back. Eventually I decided I wanted to launch a store.

Unfortunately, that idea has sort of taken a backseat. I plan to get back to it at some point, but articles are my main priority at the moment. Sadly, articles by themselves don’t really make me any money. In fact, they hardly attract anyone to the site. That’s no fault of the content. I just do a bad job at marketing.

A Mechanical Engineer

Now luckily for me, I have a friend who is excellent at marketing. It’s funny because I’ve never really mentioned him on this site. I actually worked with him pretty closely on the previous site, and we even promoted each others content.

My friend’s name is Robert Maldonado, but he goes by the SolidWorksNerd. Or at least he did. It seems these days, he goes by VirtualFlatCAD. I imagine that has something to do with copyright issues, but I digress.

The reason I bring him up is because I got to thinking about his YouTube channel. He sort of treats it like a hobby, and I think he can transform it into a serious side hustle.

Side Hustle School

Ultimately, I would like to do the same with The Renegade Coder. That’s why I listen to Side Hustle School almost everyday (note the article headings).

Lately, however, I’ve been queuing them up and binge listening to them on long drives—like a move to Georgia. During my most recent drive, my man, Chris Guillebeau, reminded me of a platform that I thought would be a perfect fit for Robert’s content. It’s called Patreon. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s an income generation platform for content creators. It basically allows people like Robert to build up a list of patrons who support their content with donations.

Initially, I was thinking that this would be a great idea for Robert. He’s constantly looking for new pieces of nerd culture to tackle on his channel. I thought maybe he could crowdsource some ideas for videos through Patreon. These ideas could then be voted on once a month by his core group of patrons. A business model like this would offer potential patrons an incentive to subscribe to his content. At least, that’s how imagined it.

Action

It wasn’t until I arrived back in Erie that I thought maybe Patreon could work for me, so I decided to launch my own Patreon page. It looks sort of like this at the moment:

It’s obviously still in its infancy, but I’m a huge proponent of just getting something out there. I expect this profile to grow and develop as I get feedback. If you want to take a look, here’s my Patreon page. 

I think this will be a great opportunity for me moving forward. If nothing else, it should improve my marketing a bit.