This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Thanks for tuning in today, this is Chris Guillebeau, your host of Side Hustle School, a daily podcast, a short daily podcast, I should say. It is all about actionable ideas to make extra money without quitting your job. Now, we have talked a couple times about Patreon. Patreon is a platform that allows artists of all kinds, or really anyone doing any kind of fundraising to enable financial support from patrons or backers. So, you know, this can be a good thing for musicians who want to stay away from labels, or for somebody writing a book, and delivering the chapters over time, just to name a couple of examples.
Patreon is probably independent, but they're also pretty big, like they have a good amount of scale now. Now, our caller is looking for something like Patreon, but different. That's the best way they describe it. They're going to explain more, so that they like the idea of Patreon, but they're looking for some alternatives. Are there such alternatives out there? If you want to
get backing financial support from fans, friends, readers, supporters, sponsors, patrons, if you will, what might be a way to do that? Okay, so they're going to tell you more in just a moment. I want to say thank you to our sponsor, and I also want to say thank you to you, our listener. So, thanks, and stay tuned. Hi Chris, this is Carrie. Thanks for all you do. I'm an independent
musician, and like the idea of being independent with my fundraising as well. In fact, that's part of the problem. I don't like the words "fundraising" or "sponsorship," so I'm looking for something that feels more organic and natural. You've covered Patreon a few times. Do you know of any good alternatives? Patreon takes a lot of fees and doesn't seem like the best platform for me.
I don't know if there's anything else out there, but I figured you might have an idea. Thank you, and have a great day over there. Hey Carrie, thanks so much for calling in. I'm excited to know about your music, and definitely hope that you can get some fundraising going. I should just say right off the bat here that I am a little biased because I think Patreon is ideal for someone like Carrie.
The thing is, if you Google "alternatives to Patreon," you will find a bunch of options, and I'm sure some of them are fine, but most of them I've never heard of, and I'm fairly knowledgeable about this world, or at least fairly involved in it. Patreon really is the market leader of long-term sustainable income for independent artists, and they're not like a terrible big corporation either. Kickstarter and Indiegogo and other platforms are great for one-off projects, but for ongoing support, that really is what Patreon is about. Now, that's not a pitch or a shell for them. It probably sounds like one, but I really just am a fan. That said,
if you're determined, there are those other platforms, and you could also just DIY it completely. So that's the one alternative I thought of that could work in some cases. It just means that you then bill each supporter each month. You gather commitments, pledges, then you bill those supporters each month, or however often they commit to. You could do that through PayPal, Stripe, any other number of services.
So it is possible, and probably some people are doing that. I just think it's going to be a lot of work, first of all, and then if you don't mind the work, it's also not necessarily ideal for your supporters because they're used to something turnkey where they just click a button on Patreon, and then it's all sorted out. So you have to create that environment if you don't want to use the existing one. So in conclusion, why not go the easy route if you can? If there's some reason why you can't, of course, then that DIY option is available. All right, listeners,
if you have a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions, let me know what you're up to. We'll continue to feature them each week with a new episode every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
