Employee count seems to be the major problem. The current Patreon site doesn't seem to justify more than 50, and I still feel I'm being generous; I really want to say 20. A couple of web people, contract out any design work you need, some sales staff, a few support people, definitely some business people and support people to deal with chargebacks and the credit card company, and I'm having trouble finding how they have 5 times that many.

I feel I need to expand that because that's going to read to a lot of people as "Patreon shouldn't need more than 20 or 50 people." But it actually makes sense to me that Patreon could have 250 people. There's plenty of ways for VC-fueled growth to indeed take over this market and become the household name as VC-style growth intends to do. The problem is that what I see from them doesn't seem to justify that. The complaints that people are posting in other comments have been like that for years. Discoverability of artists is awful. Obvious places to list patron-only media are missing, let alone any sort of hosting. Community features are very perfunctory. Their outreach seems to be stalled out; the top of the patron chart seems to gas out weirdly, where I think there ought to many dozens of people making $10K/month by now by the way the economics of this should work. Patreon today hardly seems any different than it was three or four years ago. As a startup with a couple hundred people, I'd expect to see it moving fast and breaking things and rolling out new features every couple of months, if not weeks, not being so stagnant.

I mean, I've worked for a "startup" [1] that had ~200 employees. It had several products, each of which pushed significant updates around once every two months, sales staff, support staff, physical manufacturing staff... it moved fast and sometimes broke things. In any six month period you could take any of the products it had and there were clear changes and improvements, probably a new model, probably starting up a new product since then. Totally different business, my experience is not entirely applicable of course, but Patreon from the outside feels like a business that is already running a bare bones staff as it treads water while the business winds down, not an exciting startup getting things done. Where's the features? Where's the improvements? I don't just mean techical, either, I mean business improvements too (better deals for the users over time, better business partnerships for the aforementioned content hosting, etc.) Why is it still possible to effectively set up a feature-parity competitor to Patreon in a few months with just a few people? Shouldn't they have both technical and business features that make that harder by now? Where's the output of all those people's work? I dunno. I don't expect to be able to see all of it anyhow... but I don't see much at all.

If that ~200 person startup had suddenly been switched to working on Patreon, in a year we'd have a good forum (even if we had to write it from scratch), we'd have some sort of custom content hosting, we'd have listened to our customers and built what they wanted more... & I'm judging it against what we could have done 15 years ago at the time. Today a decent prototype of some of what I'm talking about is 10 minutes with CloudFormation or equivalent, and then you can tune from there (since you may not be able to afford to directly ship that).

[1]: I can understand if you don't want to call that a startup any more.