25 - Rediscovering Intimacy In A Remote World With Grace Woods, VP Global Head of Marketing at Patreon

Episode description

Grace Woods, VP Global Head of Marketing at Patreon, joined me on the Modern Startup Marketing podcast.

Prior to Patreon, Grace held executive roles at Flexport, Kloudless (Series A startup), and Salesforce (for 5 years).

Patreon was founded in 2013, has over 200 people, and is based out of San Francisco, CA. They've raised Series E ($258.3M total).

Patreon is a creator-founded membership platform that helps creators change the way their art is valued through a direct relationship with their fans. Thousands of video makers, podcasters, musicians, writers, game developers, and other creators are making a salary on Patreon. Creators offer their fans a monthly membership.

So I’ve been part of DGMG’s Patreon ($10/mo.) for months. $10 seems like nothing, but when you have thousands of fans, that’s amazing recurring revenue.

Here's what we hit on:

How Grace made her way over to Patreon and the personal significance of working there;

First days and weeks at Patreon, what she focused on and then COVID hit and brought various challenges;

Marketing is 40 people across Creative, Brand, Demand Gen, Product Marketing, Web Engineering, Marketing Operations, Customer Marketing and Events. How Grace gets the pulse on everything;

What it means to set the bar on content (when your customers are content creators themselves);

Patreon's very successful creator ambassador program that fuels their content engine;

Frequent content is not as important as authentic, valuable content;

Grace offers up tips on how to approach virtual events;

Top Patreon creators (including While She Sleeps with a link to their PR video);

Some super creative marketing ideas from Grace's creative and social team (including visually celebrating creativity plus spreading the word about what we offer);

How Grace continues to stay creative;

The idea of having a "village of advisors" to help solve different problems;

New ideas have to run through the customer obsession litmus test;

Grace's story on failures and learnings going forward (HINT: listen to your customer vs. push your own message);

How to approach website redesign in a balanced way;

How to balance both brand + demand to drive growth;

Grace's marketing pet peeve;

Grace's mantra to "do what you suck at" and how that relates to marketing.

You can find Grace on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/gracewoods

Find out more about Patreon: www.patreon.com

Link to While She Sleeps creative PR video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5mKa0r8Fjk

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You can find Anna on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/annafurmanov or visit this website: www.furmanovmarketing.com

Thanks for listening!