Editor’s note: The Fix is running the “What’s your media job” series where we profile different job positions in and around the news industry. For this edition we spoke with Laura Goldfarb, Patreon’s Senior Creator Manager.

Laura Goldfarb’s career took a new turn a few years ago, when she wound down her boutique PR agency and took the role of a Senior Creator Manager at Patreon. Her current job is interesting itself – she’s part of the team that supports the platform’s most high-profile creators – but her previous career is no less fascinating.

Goldfarb started podcasting when the term barely existed and founded a PR agency for musicians at the age of 22. While running what was most of the time a one-woman company on the US West Coast, she remained a podcaster and a freelance music journalist. In 2020 she switched industries and later moved back to New York.

In an interview with The Fix, Goldfarb explained how Patreon takes care of its most important users, shared tips for individual creators, and reflected on her career path to offer advice for people interested in media and tech.

How Patreon supports its creators – and how to achieve success on the platform

Patreon is a platform that allows content creators like musicians or bloggers earn money from their fans. Patrons pay a monthly fee and get benefits like exclusive content or access to the community in exchange.

The business model is straightforward – Patreon takes a cut of the creator’s earnings. Goldfarb says this approach creates a “symbiotic relationship where a creator’s success is Patreon’s success and Patreon’s success is a creator’s success”.

At its peak in 2021 the company was valued at $4 billion (though valuation has dropped since then amidst the broader tech economy downturn). The platform hosts 250,000 creators supported by over 8 million people.

Laura Goldfarb is part of the five-people-strong Creator Management team, which offers dedicated support to the platform’s most prominent and highest-earning creators. Goldfarb personally handles about 50 creator teams. She acts as a point of contact for these creators, advising them on questions like platform onboarding and revenue opportunities, collecting and soliciting product feedback, and working on any requests creators might have for the platform.

*Laura Goldfarb, courtesy of Laura Goldfarb*

For example, Goldfarb supports The Kyiv Independent, Ukraine’s most prominent English-language outlet that has close to 10,000 patrons on the platform; popular podcast Gaslit Nation that covers “rising autocracy around the world” with almost 4,000 paid supporters; as well as multiple artist teams, comedians, and climate change awareness projects.

Goldfarb says that there are two broad motives for people to pay Patreon creators. On one end of the spectrum, the reason is “altruistic” – fans want the product to exist, they believe in its cause and are ready to spend money to support it. Other subscriptions are benefit-driven; people pay money and get something tangible in return.

“What I’ve seen with media and education creators is that the audience tends to, at least in the very beginning, skew to the altruistic side”, Goldfarb says. While this is good for retention, she advises media creators to also consider what specific benefits they can offer to patrons. She recommends directly connecting with the audience to understand their preferences and needs.

From Goldfarb’s experience, two types of benefits work particularly well for media creators in addition to the more common ones like exclusive, bonus content and early access. The first is creating opportunities for community and connection, such as via Zoom hangouts or group chats. The second is acknowledging and recognising paid members, for instance, through shout-outs, social media mentions, or involving them in content creation. (By contrast, physical goods are sometimes overrated and not always worth the effort put into their production and distribution).

From music publicist to Patreon creator manager

Laura Goldfarb spent close to 15 years working at the intersection of music and media. She started podcasting while studying in college in the mid-2000s, hosting and producing her own jamband music-based podcast. Around that time, she also started doing work as a freelance music journalist, contributing to various American outlets.

Goldfarb’s main job for much of this time was working as a music publicist. At the age of 22, she founded her own small PR agency that worked with independent artists. The job involved publicity tasks like getting press coverage for her clients’ albums and tours, including by pitching major national outlets like Rolling Stone or NPR.

Most of the time the agency was a one-woman show. Goldfarb says that she employed a couple of people at the peak and was handling most work herself – from the core tasks of preparing pitches and writing press releases, to client acquisition, to business administration work like taxes. The company worked with up to five clients at a time; the last major client was singer Milck, who rose to prominence after a video of her performance at the anti-Trump Women’s March in 2017 went viral.

Interestingly, Goldfarb continued to do side work as a freelance music journalist. Although the combination of PR and journalism might seem unusual, she believes it was a useful synergy. “My experience of being a journalist helped me have a sense of how best to pitch to a journalist as a publicist… I pitched to the media the way that I wanted to be pitched to, and that was definitely an advantage”, Goldfarb says. She has also been a painter and sound healing artist.

Goldfarb says she decided to put her agency on hiatus because she achieved the goals she set for herself at the beginning and felt burned out after being a sole proprietor for over ten years. In 2020 she applied for a job at Patreon, which she recounts “felt like a really beautiful intersection of the work that I had been doing – working with artists and creatives, understanding their language and how to best support them”. Goldfarb reflects that artists and creators “have always been ‘my people’, my community, and I want to do whatever I can to support their success”.

Advice for people exploring a career in media and tech:

Reflecting on her career so far, Laura Goldfarb thinks it’s important for young people to resist the pressure to figure out their life path immediately at the age of 17 or 18 – and to try out different things. Her unique, diverse experiences made her an interesting candidate for her current role at Patreon and, more broadly, often created virtuous circles allowing one type of work to feed into another.

Specifically for people working in media and interested in a role in a tech or product company, Goldfarb advises to make use of:

LinkedIn – “look up people who are at the companies or in the roles you’re interested in, and ask them for a conversation to learn more about what their day-to-day is currently like, and how it’s changed since they’ve been in it”, Goldfarb says.
Industry conferences such as SXSW, Podcast Movement, The Podcast Show, VidCon are “a great way to learn or validate trends”.
Companies’ websites – “look up how a company talks about themselves, and if you have access to try out their product, give it a go!”, Goldfarb advises.
For Patreon specifically, she recommends becoming a patron of a few creators, as well as setting up a mock creator page. Another good resource is the company’s Creator Hub, which will help “understand the mindset of [Patreon’s] creators/users”.

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From music publicist to Patreon creator manager – interview with Laura Goldfarb