Tuesday, May 17, 2022
5:43 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I guess today is something of an interesting day. On Sunday night, I had the final YouTube Premiere for the Mae Hong Son Loop Series (second trip around the loop). And with the Sukhothai Series also completed, that means that I have no archive or backlog of unposted videos or raw video clips to work through. For the first time in a long time, I’ve caught up with real time in terms of my YouTube existence. It probably doesn’t really matter, though. One thing I’ve figured out lately is that the average person doesn’t pay nearly as much attention as you think they do. I was worried that people would be annoyed or upset or confused at the odd timing of these videos. That’s why I decided to post these older videos as Premieres and my new videos from Mae Sot as regular videos. I thought it was very important to make a clear distinction between them. But most of the people that I’ve interacted with, whether online or in real life, didn’t even notice. People just assumed that if I posted a video from Chiang Dao that I was currently in Chiang Dao. No matter how many times I made it clear that I was currently in Mae Sot and that my trip around the loop was over and that I was posting Premieres precisely because they were older videos, people didn’t generally seem to notice any of that. As always, I was overthinking everything.
Today is also an interesting day because I might be able to finally bring my covid-19 booster shot saga to a close. I’m not sure that I even have it straight in my head anymore, but I think my walk to the hospital this morning will be my eighth trip there. And if all goes well, I will be able to pick up my updated International Vaccine Passport. When I dropped it off, I was given an appointment slip instructing me to return on May 13th. That was last Friday. But when I returned on the 13th, the hospital was closed for a four-day holiday weekend. Friday was Royal Ploughing Day, which marks the start of the 2022 rice growing season. And Monday was another holiday. It was Visakha Bucha Day, which is the Buddha’s birthday. The hospital should be open today, so my goal for today is to get that errand taken care of. I don’t know if there will be any filming of this errand going on.
My original schedule also had me going to immigration either yesterday or today to apply for my next extension of stay. However, the Monday holiday almost certainly applied to the immigration office as well, so I assume it was closed. And I don’t want to return there on the very first morning after a long holiday. It could be busy. Therefore, I’ve scheduled that small adventure for tomorrow morning. I’ll get all my photocopies done today and fill out the forms. And I’ll walk there early tomorrow morning.
The last week or two has been largely spent on technology. My ongoing war with technology opened up several new fronts. For one thing, I got this idea to look into eBooks. Unfortunately, I haven’t made much progress there. I don’t know what it is about me and technology in recent years, but I can never quite come to grips with anything. I’ve spent a lot of hours looking into how one makes and sells an eBook, but I haven’t made any progress at all. I’m still just as clueless now as I was when I started my research. I looked into Canva for quite a while, since there were quite a few tutorials on YouTube about using Canva to make an eBook. It seemed an easy route to go, since Canva had templates you could use. However, in all the tutorials, no one ever talked about the things that I needed to know. It was so frustrating. And then I finally came across the reason for that: Canva can’t do the simple tasks I need it to do. For one thing, it can’t handle large sections of text. It’s more like a program for creating a simple brochure or 5-page guide. It’s not designed to format an actual book that is two or three hundred pages long. I assumed you could set up your format for your eBook and then copy and paste your two hundred pages of text into the template and it would be laid out with proper formatting and page numbering, flowing naturally from page to page. But no matter how much research I did, I could not figure out how to do that. And it turns out that the reason I couldn’t find it is that Canva can’t do it. In Canva, you build each page one by one separately. And you have to insert the page number manually for every page, which is insane.
I did the usual Google search for the best ways to create an eBook, but I was still left confused. The top recommendations were things like Microsoft Word and Google Docs. But even after reading these articles, I didn’t understand. Of course, I can copy and paste hundreds of pages of text into either Word or Docs and I can add page numbering and I can save it as a PDF. That’s easy. But how does that make it an eBook? I don’t get it. Anyway, I’m still struggling with the most basic concepts of eBook creation and publishing.
I’ve also been nibbling around the edges of my thoughts about Patreon. My initial thoughts and research brought me to this idea that having a Patreon account with just one tier was the best way to go. It was simple and democratic. It would be easy for me to keep track of, and it would keep all potential patrons in the same group. The more I thought about that, the more I liked the idea. But after a few days had passed, I began to wonder if I was, once again, overthinking things. Perhaps this concern about being democratic is unwarranted. The reality is probably that no one cares but me. It’s possible that anyone who is active on Patreon is quite familiar with the concept of multiple tiers and is absolutely fine with it.
In fact, I had a long conversation with someone that gave me a whole new perspective on the topic. I’ll call this new person Barry. I met Barry just recently. He’s someone that lives and works in Mae Sot, and we got together for coffee last week. I knew of this person through social media and YouTube. I’d seen his online name before, and he had left a couple of comments on some of my Instagram posts. I just hadn’t seen those comments, since Instagram is still something of a mystery to me. But Facebook recently purchased Instagram, and they have a new program called Meta Business Business Suite that combines Facebook messages with Instagram messages onto one page. And I was suddenly seeing all these Instagram messages that I had missed previously. I replied to Barry’s comments, and we ended up arranging to meet in person over coffee.
I really enjoyed meeting Barry, and we had a long conversation about lots of topics. And one thing he talked about was his experience with Patreon. He had sponsored a couple of other YouTubers, including PaddyDoyle, and I asked him some questions about that. And one thing he said was that he gravitated towards a tier or an overall Patreon experience that limited any action on his part. He wanted to support this person, and that was all. And he had no interest in any perks that required any kind of work on his part or any kind of interaction with the YouTuber. For example, he had zero interest in the YouTuber sending him free gifts in the mail as part of a perk. He didn’t want to have to communicate with the YouTuber and give them his mailing address. He didn’t want to sign up for anything special.
And when I heard Barry talk about this, I could understand exactly what he meant. And that got me thinking that perhaps having multiple tiers is one way to offer this kind of experience. What I mean is that if you have just one tier, then perhaps that is too much for some people. If I had just one tier, I would put all the perks and benefits into that one tier. Everything that I came up with would be available to everyone. And I was thinking that that was a good thing. It would keep everyone at the same level and keep things simple. But for someone like Barry, that would likely NOT be an incentive. Such an all-inclusive tier would be too much for him. He wouldn’t want all the perks that a one-tier Patreon account would likely offer. For him, it would be better to have multiple tiers with the lowest tier being so simple as to require nothing from him. That tier could be for one or two dollars a month, and it would be a simple tier for someone that wanted to support the YouTuber and get nothing in return, and which, perhaps more importantly, would require nothing of him.
And Barry offered another perspective that I thought was quite interesting. He talked a bit about what your goals might be in terms of a monthly income from Patreon. And he talked about how difficult it would be to reach even $1,000 a month if you had just one tier with a low fee attached to it. He talked about how much easier it would be to achieve your goals if you had at least some patrons who were willing to pay quite a bit more than $1/month. And that got me thinking that having multiple tiers allows for a more generous person to take part. A very generous patron is probably quite rare, but perhaps it’s a good idea to have this “platinum” tier there as an option, just in case.
Anyway, for multiple reasons, I am back to thinking about having multiple tiers. I’m still looking over existing Patreon accounts to see how their tiers are organized and priced and named. And while I was sleeping a few nights ago, I found that my brain was thinking about my idea of naming my tiers based on types of luggage. And I had this idea to link the type of luggage with the type of person and the type of travel. I turned on my phone, and in the middle of the night, I recorded this description of five potential tiers:
Knapsack Crew – Traveling light is your thing. You don’t need a ton of space, because you know where you’re going and what you’re going to do when you get there. You’ve got just the essential Planet Doug perks in your lightweight and streamlined knapsack. And that’s all you need!
Backpack Crew – Rugged and independent, your world fits on your back, leaving you free to go anywhere you want no matter how rough the road. Specialized pockets and compartments and a rain cover provide protected space for some well-organized Planet Doug perks.
Wheeler Crew – You’ve got this travel thing dialed in. Your wheeled suitcase zips effortlessly through the airport, whisking you from your plane to your Grab to your rooftop Airbnb condo with infinity pool. You’re enjoying your Planet Doug perks before other people even get out of customs!
Steamer Trunk Crew – Elegant and romantic, your steamer trunk has enough room to bring it all. You can travel for years and return home a changed person, or start a new life on the other side of the world. Ocean voyages are your specialty, and your spacious steamer trunk provides room for lots of Planet Doug perks!
Camper Van Crew – The best of all worlds? You have your whole life with you, even your two cats, three rescue dogs and vintage kite collection. Fully independent, able to go anywhere you want, you enjoy four-wheeled freedom and the space for ALL the Planet Doug perks and then some!
Too much? Perhaps. Of course, the Knapsack Crew would be the lowest and simplest tier at $1 or $2 per month. This tier would be for those people like Barry who simply want to support that YouTuber but want to minimize any personal involvement. And the Steamer Trunk Crew and Camper Van Crew would be for the few very generous patrons that might want to get involved. And the Backpack Crew and Wheeler Crew would cover the more basic levels.
And as if I didn’t have enough fronts in my war with technology, I also looked into Discord. In fact, I went so far as to sign up and open a Discord account. And even though I had no idea what I was doing, I created a Planet Doug server. I read through tutorials about how to connect your Discord server to Patreon as a perk. I see it listed all the time as “Discord benefits”. But I didn’t really understand anything that I was reading. I still have no clear idea of what Discord is or how people would use it or what benefits it brings. And Discord seemed to fall squarely into Barry’s idea of wanting to minimize effort. Offering Discord as a benefit feels odd because it’s like offering something very complicated and which would require a lot of effort. The person would have to open a Discord account and figure out how to use it. And that doesn’t seem like a benefit at all at this point. It just seems like a lot of work.
I also opened a Substack account. I was curious about Substack because Ariel Helwani uses it and refers to it all the time. Substack is how people leave questions for him to answer on his podcast. At least Substack seems relatively simple. It is a very basic publishing platform, very much like a website. People use it to publish their own newsletter, and they often charge money for subscriptions to that newsletter. I doubt I will ever use Substack or Discord, but at least I now have the Planet Doug name on both of them.