This presentation was from the middle of 2019. We did planning 2x per year and this presentation was part of the H2 2019 planning cycle.

The entire company was coming off a huge all-hands initiative of completely restructuring our pricing. All of the teams were then contemplating what was next.

In addition, going public was on the horizon for us. So we started to get much more rigorous about the future, started benchmarking ourselves against other companies, and were getting more mature as a company.

I felt there was a large opportunity for the growth team, but it required a much larger investment and expansion of the team. So I felt we needed to put something together that was more comprehensive. There were a few things I was trying to accomplish with this presentation:

Clearly define the mission of the growth team.

Tell a story around the vision for the growth team that got people excited about the possibilities.

Tell the story from a customer-centric point of view.

Frame the story in the metrics that the company cared about.

Provide an ROI analysis that supports the vision.

Given the size of investment I was making a case for, I felt that just like a company, the growth team needed a clear mission statement along with the vision.

Our mission as a growth org was very creator centric - helping bring more creators onto the platform and help them realize their full potential. That mission aligned with both the creator and the business.

Here I was trying to provide a quick overview of how we were thinking about the strategy for the growth team. This strategy comes to life in the vision slides that follow.

Here I wanted to provide a quick overview of how we were going to deliver on the strategy, and start to preview some of my asks around team investment.

At the top is the Creator journey - Find, Convince, Build, etc. I wanted to show how the teams would align to the different parts of the journey.

The find and convince stages would be our logged-out Website team coupled with an investment in Growth and Performance Marketing. We’d call that group Creator Acquisition. Their role is to generate qualified leads and creator signups.

The current Creator Acquisition team focused on the onboarding and launch experience, gets re-branded to Creator Activation. Their role is to ensure that creators build powerful, engaging memberships and launch them with great excitement. They’d take the qualified leads and creator signups and help propel them to success.

Creator Revenue comes in post-launch to help creators continue to grow through the various expansion levers of pledge value acquisition.

And finally, driving the blended Membership Solutions margin and maximizing Gross Profit is a small investment in Monetization.

In addition to previewing the ask, I wanted to preview the impact for each of these teams, which you see in the black boxes. It is important to frame the impact in a metric that the executive team cares about. For us that was TMV which stood for Total Membership Volume. It was like the GMV metric marketplaces use.

At this point in the presentation, we had to tell a story about what it means to be a successful creator on Patreon.

The goal was to get the room hyped and excited about what could be before hitting them with what it would take to get there. Everyone on the team was a very visual thinker, so creating screen mockups were key compared to just having words on the page. In general, I think pictures tell a story way better when it comes to a product vision.

At each step of the lifecycle, it was important to provide some evidence for the ideas that we were about to show. We did that through customer quotes.

Creators had lots of questions, and that was our opportunity - provide an experience that answered those questions in a clear and compelling way.

At the time the dominant way we grew was word-of-mouth from one creator to another. But I knew we couldn't continue to rely exclusively on word-of-mouth over the long term. We needed to create more channels and productize lead generation."

Part of the vision was that we'd collect a lot of info about your potential as a creator on Patreon and what your fans wanted so that we could recommend a plan to make that choice easy.

Like a lot of products, a key friction point was the number of decisions you needed to make upfront when you have a blank canvas. So a key part of the vision was offering guidance and quick starts with templates and structured benefits to reduce the amount of work it was for a creator to offer and deliver things.

Once a creator builds their membership, a key friction point was promotion. This was an important part of the journey where we could impact their long-term trajectory and success.

The early part of the deck was getting people excited about the possibilities. But now comes how we make it happen and what is needed in resources.

After a 20-slide story, I'm connecting this next section back to the preview I started with.

This was a proposal for what each team would own, some of the types of work they would/could do, and how their success would be measured.

We defined missions for each one of the sub-teams, not just the growth team overall.

For each team we showed the investment case by forecasting the impact. I've removed the exact amounts from this slide but you can see how we thought about it for each team.

The key for each of these was that in the short term, there would be a meaningful increase in investment, but over a 3-year period would return a lot more.

We used 3-year time horizons because we were starting to forecast our business growth over that time horizon -- also, as with most investments in a compounding business the return comes in future time periods.

One of my biggest recommendations is to work with a partner in Finance to help come up with these numbers. You need to expect that your assumptions are going to be questioned, so it is good to have finance already on board with the assumptions that you are making.

This is where I got the most pushback and questions from the team. It ended up being the biggest number in terms of impact and cost. Additionally, it was an area of the product where we had done the least work and so had the least hard evidence to back up all of the assumptions.

That ends up being a common challenge. Your biggest areas of upside are the ones you have the least cycles on which means they are the hardest to justify investments in with hard evidence.

If I could go back and do this all over again, I'd keep in mind what decisions the room has already made.

People had already made up their minds on some of these investment areas before I got into the room. So I probably would have taken those into account and narrowed in on fewer things that complemented the decisions that were already made.

Since I hadn't done that, part of the presentation was viewed as a bit of a kitchen sink approach to building.

Over time, even though my team didn't do all these ideas many of the ideas were absorbed and executed by other parts of the org. Ultimately that is a win because if Patreon wins, then I win.

After presenting a lot of details, it is always good to provide a summary in one view of:

Adam Fishman

As a part of Patreon's H2 2019 planning cycle, I shared this presentation as the team was coming off a big price restructuring initiative, considering upcoming investments, and looking towards going public.

As a part of Patreon's H2 2019 planning cycle, Adam shared this presentation as the team was coming off a big price restructuring initiative, considering upcoming investments, and looking towards going public.

Growth team strategy & vision at Patreon

Vision & strategy presentation

Mission statement

Our strategy

Creator journey

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