Patreon aims to be the intersection of "media, community, and business" for the creator economy. I led the media and community pillars, scaling from individual contributor to managing two teams of designers.

I focused on two of the company's most critical barriers to growth: retaining top creators and broadening our consumer audience. My teams revamped core experiences like post creation, creator pages, and podcasting tools, and added new use cases like livestreams, newsletters, and social functionality.

The home for podcasters

Podcasters are Patreon's top earning vertical, but in 2024 we were losing them to specialized platforms. In trying to serve all creators, we had neglected podcasters' specific needs.

I led our response, straddling product strategy and design. I became a voice of the podcaster user, advocating for our product with at-risk customers while channeling their feedback into product design.

We began by fixing a foundational problem: Patreon treated all episodes as a single feed. Successful podcasters often run multiple shows, but our system mixed their episodes together on creator pages and in podcast apps, preventing them from bringing their full catalogs to Patreon and driving them to other platforms. I rearchitected our podcasting system to support multiple shows, removing a major barrier to retention.

With that foundation in place, we saw an opportunity to position Patreon as the central hub for podcasters—managing both paid and free episodes in one place. Most podcasters were only using Patreon for paid content, forcing fans to jump between platforms to access their full catalog. I designed two solutions:

• Public feed: Enabled creators to publish free episodes from Patreon to directories like Apple Podcasts and Spotify, with migration tools and guided setup simplifying a lot of nuanced technical complexity
• Podcast syncing: Allowed creators to display episodes from external hosts on Patreon while maintaining their existing setup.

As podcasters increasingly became the company priority, I transitioned to leading a design team and shaping product strategy in this area. We continued improving our podcast tools, developed complementary features like newsletters and livestreams, redesigned creator pages to showcase everything, and partnered with marketing to package everything as a compelling, integrated offering.

Together, these product improvements transformed our relationship with top podcasters, turning former critics into advocates and enabling high-profile partnerships with creators like Joe Budden and Chapo Trap House.

A front porch for casual fans

Historically, Patreon served only the most dedicated fans. The app offered no content for new users—fans only arrived after creators directed them to paid subscriptions, and even then engaged infrequently. We saw an opportunity to help creators grow by creating a space for casual fans who wanted to connect but weren't yet ready to pay.

Building on our ambition to be the home for podcasters’ work, I envisioned Patreon also becoming the home for their community. Podcasting has plenty of community activity, but it’s scattered across different platforms with no central hub.

After rounds of divergent concepting and user research, I arrived at Highlights—short podcast clips paired with discussion prompts. Podcasts are long, and the most interesting moments are often hidden and overlooked. Highlights met two goals: they created a space for members to discuss those moments, and they gave non-members a window into what Patreon offers.

We piloted Highlights with a group of creators. While some clips drove strong engagement, we also saw limitations: the format was time-intensive for creators, didn’t fit all content, and often went unnoticed by fans. Recognizing a larger opportunity, we took these lessons into our next initiative… which I'll share more about here once it launches soon. :)