Grace Woods, VP Global Head of Marketing at Patreon, joined me on the Modern Startup Marketing podcast.

Prior to Patreon, Grace held executive roles at Flexport, Kloudless (Series A startup), and Salesforce (for 5 years).

Patreon was founded in 2013, has over 200 people, and is based out of San Francisco, CA. They've raised Series E ($258.3M total).

Patreon is a creator-founded membership platform that helps creators change the way their art is valued through a direct relationship with their fans. Thousands of video makers, podcasters, musicians, writers, game developers, and other creators are making a salary on Patreon. Creators offer their fans a monthly membership.

So I’ve been part of DGMG’s Patreon ($10/mo.) for months. $10 seems like nothing, but when you have thousands of fans, that’s amazing recurring revenue.

Here's what we hit on:

How Grace made her way over to Patreon and the personal significance of working there;

First days and weeks at Patreon, what she focused on and then COVID hit and brought various challenges;

Marketing is 40 people across Creative, Brand, Demand Gen, Product Marketing, Web Engineering, Marketing Operations, Customer Marketing and Events. How Grace gets the pulse on everything;

What it means to set the bar on content (when your customers are content creators themselves);

Patreon's very successful creator ambassador program that fuels their content engine;

Frequent content is not as important as authentic, valuable content;

Grace offers up tips on how to approach virtual events;

Top Patreon creators (including While She Sleeps with a link to their PR video);

Some super creative marketing ideas from Grace's creative and social team (including visually celebrating creativity plus spreading the word about what we offer);

How Grace continues to stay creative;

The idea of having a "village of advisors" to help solve different problems;

New ideas have to run through the customer obsession litmus test;

Grace's story on failures and learnings going forward (HINT: listen to your customer vs. push your own message);

How to approach website redesign in a balanced way;

How to balance both brand + demand to drive growth;

Grace's marketing pet peeve;

Grace's mantra to "do what you suck at" and how that relates to marketing.

You can find Grace on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/gracewoods

Find out more about Patreon: www.patreon.com

Link to While She Sleeps creative PR video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5mKa0r8Fjk

For more content, subscribe to Modern Startup Marketing on Apple or Spotify (or wherever you like to listen).

You can find Anna on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/annafurmanov or visit this website: www.furmanovmarketing.com

Thanks for listening!

Ein paar Schmus Geschichten- laxoblabla #16