Back in 2020, at the beginning of the whole pandemic/lockdown thing, I turned live streaming as a way to keep Rainbow Phil going. It was a crazy time and I ended up doing Facebook Live shows every single morning for 100 consecutive days!

I decided it would also be a good idea to set up a Patreon account, just like all those youngsters on YouTube seem to have – unfortunately when I tried, I ended up with this error message…

Needless to say I was very unimpressed with this, but did a little more research and found a similar sight called “Buy Me A Coffee”, where people can support their favourite “creatives” for the price of a take out cup of coffee. So I set up an account, linked it to my Facebook Live shows and the parents of the kids who enjoyed my lockdown live shows got on board with the idea and where very happy to keep Rainbow Phil caffeinated!

One year later..

Fast forward to earlier this year and an email pops up in my email from Taryn Arnold with the subject field “Guest on BMC show??” – I immediately assumed this was spam and went about my day. After a while, curiosity got the better of me and I opened it up. Taryn claims to work for Buy Me A Coffee, making a series of YouTube videos called “My First Dollar” where she talks with “creators” about their work, their creative process and how they manage to monetise what they do. A quick bit of Googling and I found that it all checked out and this was indeed a genuine email – I couldn’t quite believe it!

We exchanged a few emails over a couple of weeks, decided on a date and time and had a coffee and chat over Zoom, which is now up on YouTube – The whole experience was completely surreal!