What If You Could Build Your Own Patreon?

A look at Daniel Kitson's new enterprise, "An Accumulation of Failure".

Hello and welcome to the 7 new subscribers since my last email, Did You Know Eventbrite Tickets Can Be Attached to TikToks?. It seems like, overwhelmingly, the answer was “No”.

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Today I want to talk about An Accumulation of Failure, an expanding collection of UK-based comedian Daniel Kitson’s past and future work made available only through a subscription on his personal website.

This includes previously released and unreleased, full-length, filmed performances, archived audio recordings, poster art, backstage photographs, notebook pages, and fully annotated scripts of his shows. It will also be the only location for a new audio storytelling project, to be released in chapters throughout the year.

If this is your first time hearing his name, and you instinctively went to search it on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, good luck. You won’t find much.

In fact, Kitson’s only presence on anything resembling social media are his mailing list:

The ‘Marketing Permissions’ options when signing up for Daniel Kitson’s Mailing List.

And on Bandcamp, where he has nine full-length audio recordings of live shows available for purchase, many of which are “pay-what-you-want”.

Highly encourage you to read the description box on the right-hand side, it’s a perfect introduction to his comedic sensibilities.

I briefly highlighted Kitson in an email last year, called Let’s Talk About LinkTree:

As every social media app has pivoted from displaying new posts chronologically in favor of the never-ending “For You” Page, do you know which platform still has the highest delivery rate across all forms of mass digital communication?

Email.

Want to know why comedians like Daniel Kitson and Stewart Lee sell out their Edinburgh Fringe runs months in advance? It’s not because they made a series of viral TikToks, or were the highest bidder on Google Ads for “comedy show tonight”.

It’s because they send hilarious promotional emails and show announcements to tens of thousands of inboxes. Inboxes of people who explicitly opted into receiving hilarious promotional emails and show announcements.

Where the delivery rate is 100%.

Now, the actual open rate may be closer to 50-60%, but this level of engagement is a significantly more valuable asset at scale.

This recent move from Kitson tells me my hunch back then was correct.

The Accumulation went live on Monday, March 3rd with the first batch of releases.

Drop #1 included three full length concert films, three archive films, seven live shows as audio, one studio recorded show with frequent collaborator Gavin Osborn, and the house music from a recent live show that he made himself.

Kitson plans to upload more stuff on the first Monday of every month, which he did this past Monday, March 31st. Here were this month’s additions:

In other words, four shows (two to read, one to listen to, and one to watch).

Predictably enough, in order to access everything, you’ll need to $ub$cribe¹.

There’s monthly (£5) and yearly subscriptions (£50) available, and you can cancel your subscription at any time.

Once you pay, you can navigate to either a “WATCH”, “LISTEN”, or “READ” tab.

And Daniel, if this ever gets back to you, please change the color of the font here. Red on Brown is tough!!

After two releases, the sitemap within looks like this:

WATCH

• Concert Films (Full length shows filmed on proper cameras by people who, by and large, know what they’re doing)

  • Tree (with Tim Key)

  • It's Always Right Now Until It's Later

  • The Interminable Suicide Of Gregory Church

• Archive Quality Stuff (Old shows cobbled together from in house archive footage, recorded live streams, mini dv tapes and the occasional VHS)

  • Keep

  • Dot.Dot.Dot. (at the Union Chapel)

  • Stories for the Wobbly Hearted

• Extra Bonus Special Features (Stuff that doesn’t really fit anywhere else but which i firmly believe might be interesting)

  • Grape (Tree Extra with Tim Key)

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LISTEN

• Solo Shows (Stand-Up and Storytelling shows arranged here in, pretty much, chronological order.)

  • Dancing - 2004

  • Midnight at the Stand - 2005

  • Weltanschauung - 2006

  • It’s The Fireworks Talking - 2007

  • The Impotent Fury of the Privileged - 2008

  • We Are Gathered Here - 2009

  • After The Beginning, Before The End - 2013

• Things with Gavin Osborn (Gav and me have made eight or nine shows together over the years and i’ll gather those bits and pieces on this page.)

  • The Ballad of Roger and Grace -2007

• Miscellania. Bits and bobs of audio this and that. (Hopefully Interesting).

  • Pith

  • Clumsy Child

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READ (Scripts, Notebooks, Post it Notes, etc.)

• C-90 (2006)

• It’s Always Right Now Until It’s Later (2010)

• Polyphony (2015)

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Now granted, Daniel is uniquely qualified in having something like 20+ works of art worth paying attention to for over an hour.

But I think it’s instructive that there are a few things you’re not seeing from him:

• Crowdwork clips.

• A new podcast that’s just Daniel and Gav on a couch, yukking it up.

• A made-for-TikTok series where Daniel interviews people on the tube about what beverage they packed for the train ride, powered by Liquid Death™ .

• Any sort of “community building”, like a discussion forum where Daniel interacts with the paying subscribers.

Strangely, simply offering high-quality, full-length, live footage is counterintuitive to what a lot of comedians think are the norms for paywalled offerings these days.

There’s no junk food or slop here, no parasocial relationships being cultivated.

But just like using an email list to communicate directly to his audience about his upcoming live shows, Daniel is then giving that ticket-buying audience exactly what they would enjoy in his version of a Patreon – additional ways to engage with his live performances, which is the whole thing they’ve indicated they’re interested in.

Granted, it’s not perfect.

The site is a bit awkward. The UI is not super intuitive. I’d prefer to see the categories sprawled about in horizontal rows a la Netflix, rather than have to click amongst a sea of links to remember where a certain special resides. And a search bar would help.

But it feels so gloriously alive, and old-school cool in a way that this was what the internet used to feel like, when you’d actually browse websites, and stay a while.

And best of all, Patreon isn’t taking a 20% cut for being a glorified middleman.

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I don’t think this model works for everyone, by the way.

But it does point to something deeper: when you’ve built real trust, you don’t need gimmicks. You just need to keep showing up with substance.

Even the way Kitson labels a website tab, or has seven footnotes in a simple promotional email, it all feels like bonus material you’re getting from your favorite comedian. It’s alignment in the deepest sense: the marketing, the distribution, the packaging, and the personality are all in sync with the product².

If you’re a comedian with more than five shows under your belt, ask yourself: what’s your version of An Accumulation of Failure?

What would it look like to build a digital theatre of your own, on your terms, in your voice, for the people who already love what you do?

1. Or, rather, subscrib£, since it’s in GBP.

2. *barfs*