Patron21 was my first real entrepreneurial experience that I entered into with my brother, Jeremy. He is a musician at heart and we both share a love for the artistic communities.

Jeremy observed a need for artists to be able to make a stable income and wanted to provide a way for fans and supporters of artists to provide that to them. He asked me and a mutual friend of ours if we would be interested in helping him build a platform for this, and we both jumped at the chance. We decided to use Drupal as our framework, because the other engineer working on it had some experience there already. My role was to manage the payment system and provide emotional and comedic support.

We labored for several months, with Jeremy building relationships and support within the artistic community, and my friend and I building out the front and back end. Unfortunately, Patreon came along, targeting a broader community with backing from a current YouTube and blew our business model out of the water. It was still a fantastic opportunity with a lot of valuable lessons learned, and is an experience I still treasure. Plus, I got a cool coffee mug with the Patron21 logo that I still have to this day.