My name is Cody Clarke, and Kill The Lion Films is my film studio. We are truly independent—just us and our supporters, no middle man. If you would like to build something like that for your own creative endeavor, the following is a brief overview on how to do it. A more detailed step-by-step guide is forthcoming, but if you are a bit of an autodidact, you can probably just run with the information below and teach yourself the rest. Enjoy!
You are a creator. You have creative stuff you make. You would like to make it possible for fans to support you. Patreon sounds enticing to you, but the large percentage they take from what you earn is a deal breaker—not to mention the fact that you are literally handing over the light switch to your entire endeavor to them (they can switch off your ability to make money whenever they want). So, you would prefer to not have a ‘middle man’ like Patreon standing between you and your fans’ monetary support of you. I will show you how to bypass that.
Virtually every middle man like Patreon or whatever uses a payment processor—something that processes the transaction, whether it be credit card, debit card, whatever. But a middle man is not required in order to work with a payment processor—you can do so directly. While yes, in theory, a payment processor can switch you off as well, if it does happen, it is for a very specific, rational reason, such as that you’re selling counterfeit products or something.
There are several great payment processors out there—two popular ones are Stripe and Square. I only have experience using Stripe, and I am happy with it, but you should explore the differences and see what’s right for you.
Payment processors all take roughly the same small percentage fee per transaction, whereas middle men like Patreon take that plus their own extra fee as well. If a middle man advertises a lower percentage transaction fee than a payment processor, it is usually that they are just pretending it’s lower and making up the difference in their own extra fee (like when a site offers ‘free shipping’ by merely billing the shipping cost into the price of the item).
Stripe, like a lot of payment processors, is free and easy to create an account with. The only hiccup occurs in then implementing Stripe on your website—if you do not have coding knowledge, you will have no idea what you are doing. I would suggest asking a friend who has this knowledge, or hiring someone from Fiverr, to help you out. It’s not complicated work for someone who knows what they’re doing, and should not break the bank. I hired someone off Fiverr to implement what I wanted, and it cost $75, which was more than worth it to me to not have to keep trying to figure it out myself anymore. It’s also way cheaper than using one of the costly no-code programs that Stripe works with, which can be many hundreds of dollars a year.
Before you sign up with Stripe or wherever, you should have your ducks in a row as far as your business. You should figure out if you want to be a DBA or an LLC, and set that up, and then you will also need a checking account associated with your business where your funds will go to. With all that figured out before you even sign up with a payment processor, you should be able to start receiving payments as soon as the code is implemented in your site.
If you need more information than just this in order to get started, please read part two! Hope this helps, and I hope you will check out what we’re doing over at Kill The Lion Films and consider supporting us!
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