How Welcome to Night Vale's Quips drove 30% of their new members in 30 days

Getting new fans to join your Patreon can feel tricky, especially if you have a robust archive of work with a community invested in every twist and turn. Creators Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor of Welcome to Night Vale found a light-weight way to get more members by posting Quips right on Patreon. Let’s explore how they did it.

Since 2012, absurdist fiction podcast Welcome to Night Vale has released hundreds of episodes, with their own mythology full of small-town conspiracies and deadpan dread. With so many stories over the course of fourteen years, they've built a dedicated community, but, for newer fans just discovering their show, it can be hard to know where to start in such an extensive catalog.

So they started Quipping.

📝 What are Quips, anyway?

They let the show speak for itself

Quips are short, public posts visible to anyone on Patreon, member or not. When Fink and Cranor started to publish Quips, they didn't overhaul their page or record anything new. They wrote eight original Quips in the same dry, uncanny register they'd been perfecting well over a decade, roughly twice a week for four weeks. Each one was a few sentences, self-contained, and unmistakably Welcome to Night Vale.

No setup. No explanation of what the show is. That’s what made it work. Quips are surfaced on Patreon’s home feed to fans who’ve never heard of Welcome to Night Vale, so when someone new stumbles across one, they get a taste of the show in a few sentences.

If you've heard it before, you recognize it instantly. If you haven't, your interest is piqued. And you probably want more. For a show running this long, a single self-contained Quip became one of the easiest entry points they’d offered.

Within the month, their 8 Quips brought in new memberships

In their first month of posting Quips, 30% of their total new member joins came directly from those 8 Quips. And of those new members, 8% converted to paid within the same month.

The reason it worked is simple. Each Quip was a genuine taste of the show: the humor, the rhythm, the total commitment to the bit. The right fans found them, recognized something they wanted more of, and joined for free to get closer. The ones who loved what they found converted to paid.

Takeaways for you to explore

Think about what makes your work yours: the specific quality a longtime fan would recognize in a second. Now find a Quip that sounds like that, without explaining it.

It might be a line from an episode or video script that works out of context. A sketch that didn't make the cut. A recurring bit, a behind-the-scenes moment, a thought that sounds unmistakably like you. Post it without preamble and see who responds. Need inspiration? Check out some of our favorite Quips from creators to get started.

The lift is lower than it might seem. Twice a week for four weeks is a sustainable pace. If you've been creating for a while, the voice is already there to pull from.

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