The Octopus Day, three years of Patreon, and prospects of future

Hello guys!

The yearly day of contemplation on the past and future is here, for those who are interested in behind the scene stuff.

Today is day of numbers - it is my 33th birthday, my Patreon is 3 years old and i have left full-time job to fully dedicate myself to sculpting 4 months and 4 days ago.

So, where am I now and how good or bad it is?

Speaking from pure numbers - not good. Since December number of Patrons has dropped and does not recover. Current income from Patreon and MMF allows me to pay the necessary bills, but we are not talking about "thriving" nowadays.

Over the last year(s), my extremely naïve plan of "do the good job and be fine" has met the reality of increasing competition as more sculptors enter the market, increasing prices in the countries where most of my supporters are (leading them to expenses cuttings) and, i suppose, me being born in "wrong" country politics-wise (and being stupid enough to publicly admit it).

What am i going to do?

First - i'm expanding to Cults3D to have more possible customers. They do work with Payoneer, it helps. At the same time I've cleared my Gumroad page since they only work with PayPal and Stripe, who don't operate in Kyrgyzstan.

Second - i will implement loyalty rewards and make an open post about that later. It will be a couple models every three months (i.e. 3-6-9-12 months etc) for those, who has been subscribed for enough months (i also think it will be fair to make it retroactive, so those who supported me for a long time but had to stop recently will also have their slice of pie).
The only things i can say that they will always be within Patreon's scope (so no anime stuff, fantasy stuff, sci-fi stuff etc). Mostly they will be either additions to existing sets (such as US army crew for .50) or just some loners that don't exactly fit anywhere else.

Third - i will either try to finally make non-Patreon campaigns, and/or take some commissions (if i find someone willing to, lol). My idea with terrain proved to be a little bit more complicated than i've initially assumed, so i will postpone it and push some other ideas forward

Fourth - in order to do all that, i will strictly limit the timeframe for Patreon. Content-wise it will mean less "two types of torso available" things (as Octopods having multiple variants ate helluva lot of time) and overall limitations in new complex stuff like weapons per month.

Is that bad? Yes and i don't like it. However the way of "invest more time in Patreon and it will pay off" didn't work, so i guess i will have to look for other solutions.

What is contingency plan?

Obviously - if things go south, i will have to return to full-time job. And that's it.

Cheers and see ya in a couple of days in new release posts!