How Zoe Hong gets her community to 'kick off their shoes & stay awhile'

Hey hey party people! I’m Zoe Hong, a fashion designer and university instructor who turned her love of teaching into an independent teaching career via YouTube and Patreon. My Patreon offers university level fashion courses paced for adults living full lives with jobs and families.

You’ve prepared and created your content, organized your tiers, marketed your Patreon, and finally, your followers have invested in you and your work by subscribing! How do you make sure you continue to create an environment that makes people want to kick off their shoes and stay a while?

Below are four categories of ideas for you to explore.

Create connection and conversation with your members. 

Monthly Zoom meetups work well for me. During these meetups, there is definitely a Q&A session focused on me doing a lot of talking but as our community grows, more and more members are participating! We discuss all things fashion, from the fun and frivolous (Met Gala fits) to the serious and goal-oriented (ethical business practices). 

To increase participation, I use methods that have worked for me both in university and on Patreon. I start by lobbing easy questions to specific people to coax them off mute. I ask students to share their projects, their favorite bit of fashion news, their opinion on the latest Prada show. When people share their projects, I become head cheerleader, and only critique when they ask for it. The zoom meetups are a chill space for building friendships—I’m more critical when students submit homework assignments.

Another fun option is to create topic-specific chats, which creates space for deeper discussions. One creator I know holds a book club in their chat, while another has a chat devoted to roleplay/cosplay. Each chat channel can also made available to a specific tier, which can add value to higher tiers and make them even more appealing.

Give members something to look forward to.

Think about how you can build your content into a series, whether that means songs in an album, a story series sprinkled with some cliffhangers, or updates to a larger project.

The biggest difference between my YouTube content and Patreon lessons is Patreon allows me to build on previous lessons and keep my classes organized via the Collections feature. Creating sequential content keeps people excited to see what’s next! 

Another option is to keep your members apprised of upcoming content, both in the next few weeks and further in the future. Monthly posts announcing the month’s drops, lessons, videos, meetup dates get people amped up. I like to announce the next class I’m teaching far in advance and drop it in conversations often. They might have little interest in the technical flats class I’m teaching now, but they will be back for the marker renderings class that will start soon. 

Something I do that combines the above two categories is having a theme for each zoom meetup. Last month we covered the Spring/Summer 2025 shows. The month before that, we discussed house codes and their role in a brand’s DNA. I announce the topic a few weeks in advance so members have time to peruse the shows or make a list of questions. Free members will also see those announcements and join the meetup tier to participate.

Bring members into your creation process.

Polls help me a lot! I want to create the classes that really help my students and if it means slowing down or speeding up my pacing, repeating some lessons, throwing in a few designer case studies, or addressing related questions, I’m happy to do it.

I also welcome my students to submit lesson requests. This is a double feature, in that I’m giving members what they want, but also I get ideas on what kind of content to create! (I know we have all had a moment or three where we run out of ideas and need a nudge.)

The lesson requests are public, so people get an idea of what’s coming, and members wait patiently for their turn. Bonus: free members will join one of my paid tiers when I start a new class topic they want to learn!

Keep an experimentation mindset and be open to feedback.

Don’t worry, I’m not attacking your creative process! But it can be a huge help to talk to mentors, fellow creators, and your fans about what can help them engage with your work more. One creator told me how her members loved her work but complained that they could never find anything when they wanted to refer back to something specific. We bounced some ideas around on how to organize her content better through the Collections feature, titling, and hashtags.

Think about the above categories, make notes on what methods could work for you, and try them out!