No more Patreon for me…

Going on with it would mean that from now on, I would need to put some serious time into it, creating a bunch of new material. I have plenty of ideas, but if I create this for only ten people, then why bother? That set me to think: why did this not work? I can think of a bunch of reasons:

  1. It wasn’t as good, fun or original as I thought it was. I tried to come up with angles to the topics that you don’t often see in the other online material, but who knows that this is what people would sign up for?
  2. The audience I was trying to reach was too much of a niche. I aimed at people who already knew some data science, but still were surprised by some of the topics I presented.
  3. I didn’t do enough marketing or advertisement. In the first weeks I spammed a bunch of platforms with it, and basically all of my membership came from that. After that, I sometimes posted teasers every here and there, but when this doesn’t seem fruitful, I get demotivated quickly. (If someone knows how to do this properly, I’d be all ears!)

When I asked my members what they would want to see treated in the episodes, I got requests for two types of things, that I wasn’t going to deliver:

  1. Examples from real life. I have done these things in the wild, but obviously can’t get too specific about use cases, and certainly can’t share the data I have worked with in the past. These are typically sensitive…
  2. Data engineering. Building a model is easy, deploying it isn’t, right? That’s probably right (although I think there is much to gain still in the sciency part, rather than engineering part of data science), but I just don’t enjoy the engineering part that much, so in an experiment for fun, I am not going to treat stuff I don’t like. Stubborn me.

Either way, the journey ends here. The site will go down, the Twitter account will be deleted and I don’t need to worry about finishing content on time anymore. It was fun, I learned more than my members did and at some point in the future I’ll just post all the stuff that I created out in the open on Github. The money my patrons were charged (or what is left of it) will go to open source projects. On to the next adventure!