WWBtB is over. What's next? (Patreon)

Before anything else, I want to say a HUGE THANK YOU to my patrons. I'm incredibly grateful! Who Will Be the Bimboest? belongs to you as much as me. It would have been impossible without you. That's not a figure of speech: WWBtB has been my main source of income these past 10 months. Your pledges literally put food on my table. I want to especially thank my top supporters: CorruptiveJade, johnsamsmithdoe and Megane for pledging more than $100 each!

I'm also extremely grateful to all the players. You were the best cast I could have hoped for. Every single one of you was a pleasure to work with. Thank you for being understanding, for putting up with vague, arbitrary rules and last minute changes. Seeing you interact with the audience and each other, receiving your challenge submissions and your artwork(!!) was an absolute delight! Thank you for spreading the word. Thank you for trusting me and working with me.

Also thanks to everyone who commissioned me these past 10 months! You offered me much-needed breaks from WWBtB and helped create artwork for me to share. The extra income didn't hurt, either.

So without further ado: will there be a 2nd season of Who Will Be the Bimboest?

I have no plans for more WWBtB.

So what's next?

I'm restructuring my Patreon starting next month in an attempt to find a better work-life balance. I'm getting rid of the $3 tier and the Discord server. A new, $2 tier will have access to the latest month's artwork. $5 unlocks the entire archive. Patreon can be very stressful. That pledge total is like my stock value, constantly fluctuating. The idea is to make it more of a side thing for people interested in updates on whatever I'm working on rather than my main gig. The focus will be on each month's patron request, like a "community commission".

To celebrate, I'll be posting "Party Girl", a 5-page minicomic! The first page goes up on the 29th and there'll be a new page every Sunday throughout August. $10 patrons will have instant access to the whole thing. It's a sexy and explicit M2F and F2M TG story written by praedatorius. I drew it almost 3 years ago but we never published it until now!

Aside from that? No idea. I'd like to compile a "definitive edition" of WWBtB with notes, commentary, sketches, etc. I also want to make Bimbo Sequencer 2.0 (if you haven't played the first one, you really should! It's fun!). I have a bunch of paycomic ideas, half-formed scripts I want to get back to. We'll see!

That's the gist of it. Read on for more perspective/background info.

I WAY underestimated how difficult WWBtB would be. Its pace was exhausting. Drawing poll results and player actions as they happened meant I had no way to "build myself a buffer" for some time off. Between designing challenges, organizing polls, coordinating with the players and drawing everything out I felt I was pulled in a million directions.

Who Will Be the Bimboest? wasn't financially succesful. When I started, I set $500/month as the absolute minimum for WWBtB to be viable. It took 8 months, most of the project's run, to reach that goal. I kept telling myself I can't be working full-time on something that's not making enough money, but I also needed it to be as good as possible to attract pledges. I had so many plans for higher goal rewards: More confessionals! More attribute theft! Bonus rounds! Loser transformations! I wanted to do a cooking contest! Set up an online poker room for a strip poker round! I had all these ideas in case the show was successful but no contingency plan in case it under-performed.

After the first couple of months, I felt trapped. Just as things were looking up, Patreon had their fee restructure fiasco. I considered quitting several times. I was eating into my savings. I felt alone: I couldn't even share my misgivings without casting doubt on the entire project and negatively affecting pledges. Through gritted teeth, I pushed on: rushed pages to stay on schedule, only to hate how they looked. I was miserable, constantly on the verge of burnout. Thankfully, as the game progressed, fewer players remained, the workload lightened, pages became easier to draw, I developed a system for each "episode", I had more space to highlight fun player interactions. I managed to muscle through.

I thought reaching $500 would be easy. My paycomics do that within a day. But paycomics are different: a one-time charge for immediate access to a sexy story vs a monthly subscription to a freely available communal role-playing project.

More than an experiment in storytelling, WWBtB was supposed to test out a novel monetization model: I hoped I'd be able to offer new TF content to everyone for free. Fuck paywalls! Instead of charging for access, I'll charge for participation! It sounds nice in theory. In practice, nothing moves the needle like a paywall. As I write this, out of 156 patrons, 127 have pledged $5+ or more, the tier which unlocks exclusive content. More people are paying more for access, instead of participation. WWBtB didn't make money, it was marketing for the paid stuff.

Part of the issue is technical. Originally I envisioned a proper reality TV voting process: public, live poll results and the ability to sell individual tickets.  Polls would be tense races, with people rallying behind their favorites: "Oh no, my fav is about to be eliminated! Let me give them a boost!" We'd have bidding wars, multiple votes per person and bulk deals (get 50 votes for $45!). Even something simple like Patreon support for weighted polls would make for a very different show. Higher tiers would have a louder voice. Players could appeal to specific audience members. Perhaps, someday, it'll be possible. For now, I did the best I could with what I had. 

I'm proud of WWBtB! It was a new and original project. I'm proud of my commitment to seeing it through. I think we managed to craft a compelling story, while also allowing the players to safely explore their femininity and bimboness. I'm grateful for the opportunity to draw sad and dramatic scenes. I'm happy I got to know some of you better! I've also grown as an artist! I learned to work faster and more efficiently. I'm excited! Excited for the future and for new stories!

I hope you'll be there with me.

Thank you.