The responses to the entailapps Twitter pitch remind me of a rule I've learned from watching focus groups: When users complain about a problem, they're often wrong about how to fix it. They're often even wrong about how to describe it. But they're always right that it exists.

I'm very aware that this rule applies to me as well. But I'm going to try to describe what's wrong and how to fix it anyway.

People are complaining that the pitch 'seems corporate.' What does that mean? Why is that a problem?

Most cons are corporate. Many sites are corporate. Even some artists self-incorporate. Lots of wonderful, appreciated furry things are corporate. Being corporate almost certainly isn't the problem.

So what do people mean by _seeming_ corporate? What about the wording of the pitch is setting people off?

People are looking for alternatives to existing sites like FA. But I don't think that most of the concerns are philosophical. They're often very pragmatic and specific. UX issues. ToS issues. Sharing and commenting issues. Poor support of certain kinds of art.

Retail's current pitch and website is all about 'Here's a bunch of positive buzzwords describing what we're doing' and a dash of 'Here's why we're great, happy people.' It's the sort of thing that a corporation _that's already well known and understood_ would do. 'You already know us. You already know what we offer. You've probably already more or less decided whether you like us or not. We just want you to think about us again.'

If you're new and nobody knows you, all of that sounds shallow and inauthentic.

Retail needs to give us a very specific taste of 'Here's why you, the consumer, should _care_ about what we're doing and how good we are. Here's what we'll specifically do for you.'

Patreon is changing their fee structure in a way that substantially increases fees, especially for patrons supporting large numbers of creators. Creators and patrons are crying out in droves. Patreon doesn't seem to care. Why are they doing this?

Patreon has hit a very dangerous point in the life of a company, where the math of company metrics starts to smack you around.

When investors look at growth companies, their focus isn’t about the current value of most metrics. They care about rate of change. They want to see sustained, high-percentage growth.

Suppose that the metric you've been pitching to investors is "monthly active creators".
When you only have, say, 2000 creators, adding 500 more is a 25% improvement -- a good-looking result.
When you have 50000 creators (https://www.patreon.com/about), adding 500 more is a 1% improvement. That looks like nothing.
You need 12500 more creators to get that same 25% improvement that investors are used to seeing. That's really hard.

To make matters worse, when you have 50000 creators, everyone else – Kickstarter (Drip), Gumroad, etc. -- says "Hey, that's a market worth pursuing." Competition makes large-scale growth even harder. And your competitors are smaller, so now they’re the ones who can produce big percentage rates of growth relatively easily.

If this is indeed the problem, then at this point, Patreon can do one of three things.
* They can say “Hey, we’re no longer a growth company. We’re a mature service company. Deal with it.” But then investors will value them as a mature company rather than a growth company. That valuation will be quite a bit lower.
* They can do increasingly hard, increasingly expensive things to try to keep their current metrics growing at high-percentage rates.
* They can say "Hey, investors, that old metric doesn't match the current state of our business -- here's a new metric you should care about, and look how that's growing!"

Judging from this investor-focused article, it looks like Patreon may be going with the third option here. "Hey, investors, what you should care about is the creators making a life-changing amount of money!" That's a much smaller number -- and they can choose how small it is by arbitrarily defining the "life-changing" amount. It's easier to produce impressive-looking percentage increases in that number.

And when someone points out that the old metrics are stagnant or even dropping, Patreon can say "That's okay, that's no longer the focus of our business, and we're streamlining to produce better results in our core market."

It may or may not be a successful pitch, but it may very well look better than the other options.

And it's almost certainly not good for many creators or patrons; but hey, that's their problem, right?

  omnikitsune has done some wonderful story writing for me.

I suppose I should recommend that you commission stories from this talented vulpine author. However, that would leave the aforementioned author with less time to write stories for me. So, er, forget you saw this.

Just q quick endorsement of  PalanteanWriter : I positively loved the story I purchased. Extremely easy to work with; supplied great original ideas, but was more than willing and able to take suggestions and incorporate my ideas into the mix as well. Wonderful use of language and imagery. Very much worth the money.

The esteemed  JonasBelford has reopened commissions after a hiatus. If you want a great TF story written to spec, please go to his journal page for the details!

I've been ordering quite a few commissions lately, and a few of them are already done and great. Here's the queue:

 KelvinTheLion : Coyote-fox-cheating comic; paid; DONE -- http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5992868/ and http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5992885/
 AkiWeirdo : Coyote-fox-cheating; paid
 lawlzy : Cel-shaded coyote-fox-cheating; paid
 AkiWeirdo : Reference sheet; paid
 Tincrash : Digital color; coyote-fox-cheating; paid; DONE -- http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5862822
 Red-Dog : Ref sheet; sketched, coloring
 Andren : Cel-shaded; coyote-fox-cheating; paid
 rabbi-tom : Color; coyote;fox;cheating; paid; DONE -- http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5818987
 JonasBelford : Transformation story; paid; DONE -- http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5797710/
 Red-Dog : Painting; werewolf and fire mage; deposit paid; sketching
 Ifus : Color; coyote-fox-cheating; DONE -- http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5994162/
 WOlfyu : Sketch; pleased coyote; paid; DONE -- http://i857.photobucket.com/albums/.....ckahaotaSM.jpg
 Tigris : Color sketch; devious coyote; paid; DONE -- http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5516878
 Tigris : Color sketch; happy fox; paid; DONE -- http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5450155

If you've ever enjoyed anything I've ever written, read this: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5797710/

I really wanted the aforementioned  feathertail to write something for me, but I couldn't come up with a become-your-fursona idea, for reasons mentioned in my previous self-indulgent journal entry. So I said "If I just give you some money, will you write something I'll like", and Feathertail said "That would work", and an awesome story was the result.

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3119171/

 feathertail has some really great transformation stories revolving around the theme of "becoming your fursona". A few of them are here on FA; there's a larger collection at the aptly-named http://www.becomeyourfursona.com .

Feathertail does commissions, and they're wonderful (and probably underpriced), which, oddly enough, leaves me a little bit sad -- like someone who finds out about a simply wonderful fish restaurant, but who's allergic to fish.

WARNING: SELF-INDULGENT TRIPE FOLLOWS

Because in order to commission a "become your fursona" story, it really helps to have a fursona. And I don't have one... at least, not anymore.

The people who have actually read my writing (all four of you, and let me stop and apologize to you again) are probably laughing at this, considering that pretty much everything I write about is canine-related, and considering that I have a fox-coyote-thing as my avatar. But "fursona" means something more than "favorite animal". There's all sorts of different opinions on what it does mean, but at a minimum, I think it requires a sense of identity... of "This animal represents what I really am", or at a bare minimum, "This animal represents aspects of what I want to really be". And somewhere along the line in the last few years, I've lost that. When I think about Wolf or Fox or Coyote in that sort of context these days, it's like thinking about my best friend in the first grade, the one who moved away at the end of the year. There's still a sense of emotional attachment, but I just know that if I ever actually met him again, we probably wouldn't even have much of anything in common.

 automata does some wonderful transformation stories. The "RRQI" series is a great take on good old-fashioned Infocom interactive fiction, done collaboratively with other site denizens; I still deeply regret not having time to do a second story.

I'm not sure why, but I've actually started writing again, at least a little. So for those of you who just started watching me because I made a funny comment somewhere, please be advised that you may start seeing one or two Actual Stories before too long, and my insurance won't cover any pain or suffering that my poor writing may inflict upon you.

By the way, my previous journal entry plugged a wonderful transformation story that someone wrote for me as a commission. Sadly, the author has left the site, for reasons I can understand; so I deleted that link. But the story -- "Genetech: The Seeds of Doom" -- is still on the net at http://kschnee.deviantart.com/art/G.....Doom-122434754 . You'll want to read "Genetech: Employment Survey" first so that you'll understand the setting; it's at http://kschnee.deviantart.com/art/G.....rvey-121799349 .