Q&A with Patreon CEO Jack Conte and Memberful CEO Drew Strojny on Patreon's acquisition of Memberful, building an SaaS startup, and the history of the companies
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2018, Patreon bought Memberful, a WordPress-native subscription tool that let creators run paid memberships on their own sites rather than inside Patreon's walled garden. In this Stratechery Q&A, Jack Conte and founder Drew Strojny walk through the deal, the SaaS-building playbook behind it, and both companies' histories.
The acquisition reads differently with hindsight: Memberful stayed a product line long enough to launch its own newsletter feature taking a 4.9% cut in 2021, while Patreon itself scaled to $10B+ in cumulative creator payouts and 25M+ paid memberships by 2025 — making this interview an early record of how Patreon thought about owning subscription infrastructure versus renting it out.
First-order effects
- Patreon gains a self-hosted membership product it can offer to creators who want their own website and brand instead of a Patreon page, with Strojny joining to run it.
- Creators choosing between platforms get a new option: keep Patreon's payment rails but host the relationship on their own domain through Memberful.
Second-order effects
- Memberful becomes a monetizable surface in its own right — its later newsletter tier pricing shows Patreon charging separately for tools beyond the core membership cut.
- Owning a WordPress-compatible stack positions Patreon against the broader wave of creator-tool funding, including its own $60M Series D a year later, which raised the bar for what the combined company had to deliver.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward creator-economy consolidation around multi-product platforms: one company selling hosted memberships, newsletters, and eventually services like the HR and health-insurance support Conte floated in 2019.
- It also foreshadows the sector's reckoning — Patreon's later 20% layoff and restructuring show that buying subscription infrastructure doesn't insulate a platform from having to prove the bet at scale.
The trend: Creator platforms are evolving from single-purpose membership pages into consolidated infrastructure vendors that own every layer of the creator-fan payment relationship.