The Wrongness Playbook, part 1, w/Patreon's Jack Conte
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2022
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Summary
Building a business means making mistakes. Lots of them. But how you’re wrong isn’t always obvious. Jack Conte has learned this lesson as a working musician — and while scaling Patreon into a company worth $4b. In Part One of a two-part series, you’ll hear how Jack wrote his own Wrongness Playbook, as he learned to answer questions like: If something isn’t working, is it time to trust your instincts? Or is there critical feedback you’ve been ignoring?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now, |
| 0:07.8 | with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed. |
| 0:17.0 | We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time. |
| 0:24.7 | So search for rapid response in your podcast player and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes. |
| 0:31.2 | I'll see you on the other side. I was touring up and down the west coast. |
| 0:39.9 | Playing for empty bars. |
| 0:47.3 | empty. And when I say empty, I mean empty. |
| 0:55.7 | Zero people bartender leaves halfway through the set I am alone playing in a 500 person room by myself. Oh man I did four tours like that it sucks Let me tell you that is the worst. |
| 1:06.5 | That's Jack Conte, he's the co-founder and CEO of Patreon. He's also a working musician. |
| 1:17.4 | And the start of his career was a bit rough. |
| 1:27.0 | This was about three years into my career as a full-time musician. I had not yet quit my side hustles. |
| 1:30.0 | I was actually working as a contractor doing corporate background music for in-house Google videos. |
| 1:40.0 | No offense to the Google in-house video department, but this wasn't Jack's dream. |
| 1:46.2 | He wanted to be a full-time songwriter and musician. He wrote prolifically, publishing original songs to the |
| 1:55.4 | Premier Music Discovery Platform of the day. My Space. |
| 1:59.3 | I've upload a song and I'd get five plays and I was feeling like I was just |
| 2:10.0 | beating my head against a wall. I'd spent six months working on this album. It had |
| 2:15.7 | a hundred tracks. I'd EQ the crap out of it. I was meticulous about crafting this |
| 2:21.0 | thing. I spent 10,000 hours in this album. |
| 2:25.4 | And I felt like I was making good music. |
| 2:27.3 | I didn't feel like my music was bad. |
| 2:29.0 | I didn't think I was prince or anything, |
... |
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