Help Patreon fans discover you
🧭 This post is part of our Growing your Patreon collection. If you haven't taken the Growth Pathfinder quiz yet, consider starting with How should you grow? to discover your best growth opportunities and build a personalized path through this collection.
When you think about growing on Patreon, do you think about bringing fans in from somewhere else?
YouTube. Instagram. TikTok. A newsletter. A podcast.
Those pathways absolutely are an option. But they're not the only option.
With over 100 million free members and 25 million paying members, Patreon already has communities of fans gathered around the kinds of work they love. Fans are discovering podcasts, joining conversations, exploring artwork, watching videos, and finding new creators on Patreon every day. In fact, over 60% of people who sign up for a creator's Patreon come from the Patreon fan network.
Your discovery quest is about helping those people discover that you've been here all along.
The most powerful path: Participate like both a creator and a fan
The creators who get discovered by new fans on Patreon aren't only creating. They're participating.
Follow creators you genuinely enjoy. Leave thoughtful comments. Join chat conversations. Show up as a fan as well as a creator. When creators participate in the communities they care about, Patreon becomes a more vibrant place for everyone.
Every comment, Quip, public post, and interaction gives fans another chance to discover you. A real person who's just as excited about being part of the community as the fan who's seeing their work for the first time.
That's often where discovery begins. With connection.
⚡ Pro Tip: Curious about Quips, collaboration posts, and getting discovered in the home feed? Go get discovered! walks you through all of it.
Leave trail markers people can follow
Participating in the community as both a creator and a fan? Check! ✅
Next up: give fans opportunities to discover your work. This is where public posts, Quips, and public media collections come in.
Think of public media on Patreon as trail markers. Small signs that help curious people discover what you're creating and decide whether they want to explore further.
Video reaction creators WhatchaGot2Say has made Quips a core part of how new people find them. After creating long-form Patreon videos, they clip out the most interesting moments and share them as Quips. Short previews that create curiosity and give people a reason to click through and learn more.
What's especially clever is that they're not creating a separate discovery strategy. They're using the work they're already making and presenting it in a format that helps new people find it.
Painting creator Watchpaintdry_minis took a similar approach, repurposing existing work from his Instagram archive and turning it into Quips. By consistently sharing visual, educational moments that sparked curiosity, Quips ended up driving more than one-third of his monthly revenue in just 30 days.
No extra creative project. No second version of themselves. Just thoughtful ways to help more people find what they were already creating.
⚡ Pro Tip: Want an easy way to stay consistently visible? Keep a running Discovery Idea Log. Spend a few seconds capturing ideas when they happen, and you'll build a backlog of Quips, creator to creator recommendations, and collaborations you can draw from whenever you're ready to post.
Collaborations create shortcuts
Every good quest has a shortcut hidden somewhere on the map. On Patreon, collaboration posts can be one of them.
When you create a collaboration post with creators whose work overlaps naturally with yours, that post appears to each of your communities, making it possible for members to discover someone new through a creator they already trust.
Sometimes, finding a creator to collaborate with happens in the most unexpected ways.
Linguistics podcast Lingthusiasm posted a Quip that inspired comic artist Erika Moen to immediately picture as an illustration. So, Erika drew it. One comment led to another and suddenly a collaboration was born between an unlikely pair.
A shared interest turned into a conversation. A conversation turned into a collaboration post. And that collaboration introduced both creators to new audiences while creating something fun spontaneously.
Erika has shared that Patreon discovery reminds her of the welcoming early days of the internet, when finding interesting people and unexpected creative connections felt a little more natural.
Hear more about this collaboration in each of their own words: Erika Moen’s story and Lingthusiasm’s story.
Make your page worth exploring
The discovery quest keeps going once someone finds you. Imagine someone clicks through from a Quip, a collaboration post, or a creator to creator recommendation. Can they quickly understand who you are, what you create, and why they might want to stick around?
A welcoming page helps curious visitors find a place to start exploring.
Public posts and previews can help new visitors get a feel for your work before they join. Public media collections can help organize your best examples and make it easier for people to explore. Think of it as creating a helpful "Start Here" sign. Which, conveniently, is something Patreon creators actually do all the time.
Turns out the urge to leave helpful directions for future visitors is pretty universal. Because the easier it is for someone to understand your world, the easier it is for them to imagine becoming part of it.
Discovery is really community-building
At first glance, discovery can sound like a checklist:
Post this.
Optimize that.
Figure out the algorithm.
But the more you engage on Patreon, the more you may start to notice something different. Discovery often grows from participation, visibility, relationships, and community.
You show up.
You share your work.
You support creators you genuinely enjoy.
You leave opportunities for people to discover what you're making.
And over time, more people find their way to you.
If that sounds a lot more fun than chasing algorithms around the internet, that's because it usually is.
🧭 Your next steps
Patreon has communities of fans gathered around the kinds of work they love. Discovery is about helping those fans find their way to you.
Try these steps on your discovery quest:
Share one or two public posts or Quips this week.
Make sure your Patreon presence gives new fans enough context to understand your work and want to explore further.
Spend time in the Patreon community as a fan. Follow creators you enjoy, leave comments, and join conversations.
Build or update a collection with public posts.
Check your page views in your Insights tab regularly to see what’s driving new fans to discover your work.
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Comments (31)
Omg I’m burnt out only by watching the video 😹✨
Quips' impressions are sometimes literally 4 or 5...why should I make any effort at all if they're not being put before people? Also, I try to look at other people's to maybe interact but navigation is awkward on this whole site.
That kind of low reach isn't the intended outcome for a discovery-focused feature, and we've heard similar feedback from smaller creators consistently over the past couple months. Jack recently shared more on this, including changes underway to help with discovery for creators of any size. You can read more about this in our most recent post: https://www.patreon.com/jackconte/posts/new-patreon-167204499
I don't really see any movement that is native to Patreon and I have tripled my activity on Patreon. It's mostly people from my nightly audience who are coming here to check out what I have listed.
Not cater to an algorithm!? Build and foster community!? What Internet am I on right now? 👍👍❤️❤️
Can your liked ones follow free tier
Hey Heather, we want to make sure we're understanding your question correctly. Are you asking who is allowed to join the free membership option on your Patreon page?
Thank you for sharing these helpful tips! I’m new to Patreon and just getting started here, so I’m looking for ways to grow my audience and connect with more people.I create simple and useful English lessons to help people speak with more confidence. If you’re also learning English, come say hi — let’s learn together!
I love patreon but I already requested more than 5 time to be suitable for all audiences, and already cleaned a lot, but you don’t tell me what’s the real issue, always got the same email reply. 😢
Hey Laytar, this is something our Trust and Safety team needs to review. It would be best to follow up with them directly.
The problem is. The General Social Media public has no idea what Patreon is. I have 5210 Facebook followers. 4812 Followers on Tiktok and 7300 followers on Snapchat. Ipost CTA posts regularly. Asking my followers to Join my Patreon. Not having the effect I would have expected considering the amount of followers I have.
I'm not entirely sure how everything works behind the scenes or how to actually attract people to my work. That said, I think two things have worked really well (because I've been getting more members than usual and can only attribute it to these things): 1. I make quips about silly/random things. It's not often I quip about what I actually do unless it's... A. Something a lot of people would grow curious about. (Like asking what kind of pet would suit my main character, or asking what others would like to read next with a sneak peek at a list of my future story ideas.) B. An update for my existing readers. And I use GIFs, I suppose. Hopefully people find me more silly than annoying lol, so maybe that plays a part too. 2. I have an entire collection available for free (my first book). So people come in, see the welcome collection, check out the first book because it's just free to do so, and voila - people who are into the kinds of stories I want to write will want to subscribe and continue to book two. Probably. Maybe? Lol 3. Oh, bonus that no doubt has a significant part to play: my subscription is kept really cheap xD Access to everything I do costs $3, and will always cost $3. Of course I have greater subscription tiers, but they don't offer anything else. It's just an option for people who want to support more. I don't want to compete for people's wallets, I just want to try to make a living while doing what I love. Everyone has monthly fees already, and many of them already struggle to afford them all. So... yeah. I suppose this is more a philosophy than a business practice, but still. That's all I can think of. Apologies for dumping my own bit here, but I saw some negativity and pessimism and wanted to help alleviate it if I could. ❤️
If you want to grow on a modern platform, the current formula is soul-crushing. BUT Jack and his team at Patreon are aware of this and are actively trying to fix it now.☺️ At the moment, most SNS and community platforms are like: Create your own work, Post It on our platform, write a quick caption (Quip/Tweet/Reel/Short, etc)... and then spend the REST OF YOUR DAY and free time feeding our algorithm. You grind for views, chasing an invisible threshold of "enough" engagement, draining your time and life just to make a machine happy until it finally decides to show your content to a few select people based on how much "work" (engagement) you have done and how many people you yourself have connected with and convinced to view your page/content. That’s not creative freedom. That’s THE MATRIX - a machine designed to harvest your creative energy, drain you, and feed off of your soul.🤣 Creators are completely exhausted from begging an algorithm for access to the very communities they built. That is exactly why they are fleeing to private Discord servers and personal newsletters. They want direct, unfiltered access to people who have actively decided they care. The Machine vs. The Community Don't get me wrong: algorithms and AI aren't entirely evil. They are useful tools for security, organization, and basic sorting. But a machine should not be making decisions, blocking visibility, or burying content just because it isn't instantly viral or based on arbitrary numbers. Shareholders and investors are currently targeting the wrong metrics and betting on the wrong numbers in order to try to squeeze more money out of creators via the machine by attempting to force participation in the grind. That`s why they may be "gaining more people on the platform" but are still losing money and therefore have to try to create "more engagement" somehow. They are running on a poisoned fuel system. Engagement should be voluntary, not a mandatory toll for discovery. They are trying to "trap and contain" the creative sparks of people on the platform once they arrive here while forcing them into a repetitive loop within their own ecosystems... What they should be doing instead is creating a platform that will Set These Sparks FREE on the platform and provide them with enough oxygen, fuel, and energy to explode and grow! (That`s actually where the REAL money is...) When people have a genuine CHOICE, and when they know their time and effort actually MATTER, the organic results are vastly superior, and the energy/money naturally starts to run free-flow because everyone wants to buy into and become part of a positive and electric energy system where they feel empowered. And that`s that`s different between the internet of my day and what I`m seeing/eperienceing today... The old-school internet didn’t run on mandatory engagement loops. It ran on pure Creativity, Innovation, Community, and HOPE. We (Gen X - 1970s ~ 1980s) BUILT the current Framework I am old enough to remember the golden era of MySpace, early Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and BlackPlanet. I know these platforms intimately because my generation - Gen X - actually built them and fueled their growth. From the 90s to the early 2000s, these platforms exploded long before algorithms took over in 2008–2009. They thrived because they were strictly community-driven: • True Autonomy: People searched for exactly what they wanted and engaged with what they genuinely liked. • Human-Driven Rankings: The community—not an equation—decided what blew up. • Zero Shadow-Banning: Small pages weren't hidden. If you got bored of the popular page, you could scroll to the bottom or click a "New/Fresh" tab. I used to do that all the time. I became a loyal fan of tiny, undiscovered creators and watched them blow up organically. And many of these creators/platforms are still around today and basically survived strictly because of that organic community engagement prior to 2008. We know organic discovery works because we already did it successfully for decades. Breaking the Stagnant Loop Algorithms haven't pushed us forward; they have choked our collective consciousness and creativity. Instead of creating, artists are trapped in a perpetual "survival loop" of just trying to get seen. Patreon is uniquely positioned to break this loop. But to do that, a platform has to give creators the environment to innovate and feel hope - not keep them trapped in an endless, desperate survival grind of engagement and seeking discovery. Right now, most tech platforms are running the Matrix’s "soul entrapment/extraction software." We need an upgrade to "creator empowerment software." Engagement naturally skyrockets when creators are fulfilled, happy, and free. This will be vital for humanity's continued physical survival and autonomy in the near future... Why the Creative Spark Dried Up Humanity desperately needs that concentrated, unfiltered creative spark back. Think about the explosive innovation we saw from the 1970s to the early 2000s: • The cultural touchstones: Star Wars, Alien, The Terminator, Back to the Future, G.I. Joe, Transformers. • The tech revolutions: The Apple II, Atari, Nintendo, Sega, CDs, smartphones, the early internet, and the foundations of Google and Amazon. Every single one of these milestones was built by humans who had the mental bandwidth to hope and innovate for the future. They weren't trapped in a desperate, daily survival loop. There is a reason modern entertainment companies keep recycling and failing to revive these exact franchises - they are trying to replicate a creative spark that the algorithm has choked out - much like Patreon and other SNS sites are doing now by trying to force creators to create the same "loosh" content repeatedly instead of allowing completely new ideas and innovations to be discovered. Technology and AI are tools for us to use. Our creativity & discovery should never be governed or RULED by them. That is the fatal flaw of the modern internet, and it's why human innovation has hit a wall. But Patreon (and a few other platforms) now have the power to change that. So let's return to what works and see what happens. ☺️
I use this comments to get more visible than with Quips. Join my Patreon for free to read free fiction and articles and follow the development of my dungeon crawler: Lathmar: The Fallen Depths Lathmar: The Fallen Depths is a dark fantasy Dungeon Roleplaying Game focused on exploration, dangerous multi-dungeon delves, and a near-roguelite sense of risk and discovery. https://lathmar.de/
Hey there, we strive to keep our community here on Patreon for Creators a safe and productive space for conversation. We ask that comments contribute to the discussion and stay relevant to the post, rather than posting repetitive or off-topic self promotion comments across posts. Thanks for helping us keep discussions meaningful and in line with Patreon’s Community Guidelines.
Amazingly superb and fantastic advice. I'm gonna try this! Be a fan and at the same time a creator! Though I would also love if patreon can geared towards authors too. Most insights and campaigns are on artists- drawing, painting and videos. It was said that patreon is good for authors, what I'm seeing is different. The engagement on author's page is too low, very very low to be precise. Maybe one or two likes. Please help we authors to do something about it, thank you.
Imagine a situation: a young, talented author, such as Stephen King, registers on Patreon while still completely unknown at the beginning of his creative career and starts writing here. He writes for a year, but nobody reads him. He is told to interact with others so that people will notice him. Otherwise, he will remain an unknown writer. It is a sad story. It is sad because talented people are told, "Make your own way. We are not interested in your talent."
No matter what I write on Quip, nobody sees it. Nobody reads my Quip notes because nobody knows who I am. If these notes were shown to people who had never heard of you and were not subscribed to you, the growth would be impressive. I hope the Patreon administrators will pay attention to this. Show Quip notes to at least 1,000 people so that someone will actually see them — help talented creators grow!
This right here. Same for me. I even asked a question a few days ago about art and have yet to see a view on that post.
Solid advice. ✨
Thank you for the post I would try some tips! ❤️🐾 My project is a single animation (frame by frame) and comic project (as my own passion) together with my work and illness. So is hard to post every day or week but I do my best. Perhaps you have a few tips? Wish you a great sunday!
Hey Mr. Rize, thanks for sharing about your projects! Frame-by-frame animation and comics both take real time and care, especially alongside everything else you're managing. There's no need to post daily or weekly. Quality and consistency over time matter more than frequency. One idea that might help: instead of creating something brand new each time, you could repurpose pieces of your existing animation frames or comic panels into quick Quips. Watchpaintdry_minis does something similar, turning existing work into short previews. His story on how that approach paid off is worth a read: https://www.patreon.com/PatreonforCreators/posts/how-minis-drove-153930351 Keeping a running idea log (even just a note on your phone) can help too. Save a quick sketch or frame whenever inspiration strikes, so you'll have a small backlog ready whenever you have the energy to post, no need to do it all in real time. Wishing you well with both projects!
Show up as a fan as well as a creator. ❤️😎
Hey everyone! I am a new creator here but been writing for hurting people for years. Any tips to let people know about my posts?
Hey Judy, welcome to Patreon! Since you're just getting started, here are a couple of resources that should help. This support article on getting traffic to your page walks through sharing your Patreon link across your social bios and newsletters, along with a few other tactics for cross-promotion: support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/8641994390413-How-to-get-traffic-to-your-Creator-page And our post on using Patreon's engagement tools covers ways to use posts, Quips, and other features to connect with your community and grow, once people find their way to your page: patreon.com/PatreonforCreators/posts/using-patreons-155060118 Both should give you a good starting point as you build things out. So glad you're here!
Interacting hasn't done any good...nobody seems to be seeing my posts. At most, they get one or two "views" and no engagement. As a writer, I don't have much content I can share for free without losing content that should (as I understand it) be generating revenue. Patreon keeps saying it's great for authors, but it appears to be geared toward podcasts (video and audio) and graphic artists of various types. No real thought seems to have gone into helping authors get a foothold.
I'm a artist and singer and I feel this way too . My patreon is kinda dead lots of free members but not to many paidMaybe i need to post more quips or be more consistent idk but it's hard to keep up w posting everywhere and also creating too lol.
Ok I’m here interacting, let the subs roll pour into my account! 😝 seriously though it’s good advice. I’m fighting some intimidation
Putting yourself out there can feel intimidating, but every interaction is a chance to build a stronger connection with your community. You've got this!
I generally like the direction patreon is going but you made a big flaw that will eventually cause patreon to fail. In the end everything is going to come down to who can stop the scroll. To really create the experience you are trying to create you have to get away from the scroll.
This is a nice explanation/ round-up of how to engage with new Special Folks! We've had a bit of a chaotic, quantum change Life transformation - and shift in our Patreon focus! - so being reminded of the anchors we need to ground our Vision: this is super helpful at this time.... Thank you to all involved - really like the point about our page having to make sense when folks land there - hehe - working on it!! :-P