Stephen DeStefano
patreon
So look, kids….
🕑 Added 2025-04-23 17:23:41 +0000 UTCI’m still building this here digital tin cup, so I may just as well get your help now before I finalize it and do something stupid. I’ve already gotten some help from dear friends with conflicting advice (all good and caring, of course), and I’ve done a bit of research here on P, trying to glean how other creators set their tiers and prices. So let’s get down to brass tacks and talk money. Let’s don’t beat around the shrubbery, yes?
Some creators are all like, “gimme a buck, we’re good”, and others are like “here are all these lesser tiers, but if you gimme a C note, we’ll shoot the works!”.
I’m thinking a handful of initial tiers, nothing over ten bucks, and obviously you get exclusive yatatta yatatta for all of them. Then I’m thinking of going slightly higher for professional help, a chunk higher still for mentoring (I’ll talk about that in a minute) and higher yet again for hardcore mentoring.
Now times being what they are, it’s rough out there, I get it (would anyone be on Patreon if they weren’t). But in terms of higher prices for mentoring—-see, the way I’m looking at it is, let’s don’t have you pay 30Gs PLUS a year for art school. Infamously, I did not go to art school. I was snot nosed and had fantastic mentoring. I was snot nosed and have been a mentor, to some of the most extraordinary talent in the animation business (maybe I’ll get testimonials from a couple few of them). Art school—which I have taught at, believe me—always confused me, because there’s lots of money being thrown around, and everyone’s looking at their grade point average, but most students I’ve encountered thought secondarily about the work. THE WORK. It’s always all about the work. Art is a thing to make, not a thing to grade. So, you come to me with an idea of what you want, what you want to do, what you want to make, and I’ll help you with it. And you don’t have to go into debt.
Now how’s all that sound? It’s academic now of course because you’re not seeing numbers yet, but I’m just trying to get feel for interest here.
Outside of the mentor stuff, I’ll be posting new strips, new drawings, old drawings from my thousand and four years in the animation biz, images from my long-gestated graphic novel (the sequel to LUCKY IN LOVE), and installments of my new graphic novel, which you’ll hear more about very soon.
I’ll move ahead cautiously—-I realized I may not get much response to this post, but tell me your thoughts about tiers, pricing, etc. And if I don’t hear much response to this post I’ll just shoot ahead, groping, but that’s usually how I learn anyhow. I’m good at it.
Huh. Now that I think about it this post reads a bit like that TV ad from the 70s where a dude offers you excellent knives, then asks how much you’d pay for them, then informs you to WAIT, THERE’S STILL MORE.
So, yeah, wait, there’ll be more
PS. Wait, was it a commercial for knives or a commercial for classical music records? Now I’m forgetting, dammit. Help a guy out here, will you?
Comments
phil
Finally got around to joining your Patreon cousin Stephen. Everything you’re sharing is well worth the price of admission. Your mentorship was (and still is) invaluable to me. I think you could offer a “drawover tier” and a separate “let’s zoom once a month tier” to individuals looking for feedback / mentoring
Stephen DeStefano
Yay!
Gabe
Would jump at chance to be a part of this!
