In 2013, YouTube musician Jack Conte was looking for a solution to his problem: millions of people loved his videos, but only hundreds of dollars were hitting his bank account. This didn’t add up, so he drafted up an idea for a website that would allow his fans to pay him directly for the value he was giving them.

He brought that doodle to his college roommate, Sam Yam (now the co-founder of Patreon), who turned that chicken scratch into a fully-functioning service in only 6 weeks. Fast forward 10 years, and Patreon is the solution to this same problem for 250,000+ creators who have collectively earned over $3.5 billion directly from their patrons.