By Sheila Dang
(Reuters) – Patreon, a company known for helping content creators sell memberships to fans, has acquired a tech recruiting firm as it readies a hiring push to accelerate the launch of new features and double the total revenue its creators are earning each month, Patreon executives told Reuters.
The company, which was founded in 2013, helped pioneer the growth of the so-called creator economy, enabling videographers, podcasters and other creative people to earn money directly from their audiences. Since then, major companies including Alphabet’s YouTube and Twitter have followed, introducing their own features to let creators sell subscriptions.
The acquisition of Clear Talent, a New York-based tech recruiting firm, will add 40 employees to Patreon and represent a quadrupling of Patreon’s current recruiting team, said Tiffany Stevenson, the company’s chief people officer.
Clear Talent Chief Executive Rockman Ha will become Patreon’s head of talent acquisition.
As social media influencers and other creators are using a growing number of apps to earn money, Patreon is working to transform itself into a platform that can help users manage their business in one place, said Julian Gutman, Patreon’s chief product officer.
“We’re in a growth phase,” he said. “We need to build a much bigger team than we have right now.”
The hiring push will be focused on growing the engineering and product teams with the goal of expanding beyond content memberships to include other money-making features for creators such as ecommerce sales.
Other plans include allowing users to customize the look of their Patreon page and increasing the community interaction among a creator’s fan base on Patreon.
By investing in talent and accelerating product launches, some of which are expected to roll out later this year, Patreon hopes to double the total amount earned by its creators each month to $200 million, Gutman said.
The company also hopes to expand from almost 300 employees to 500 “pretty quickly,” he added.
(Reporting by Sheila Dang; Editing by Mark Potter)
