Running a successful Patreon is the dream of lots of artists, but reality is pretty harsh and I wouldn't put my hopes into that. There are people with thousands of followers out there, but often only a handful of those followers have money to spare. What I feel is often forgotten: Patreon isn't even a stable source of income, since people can just unfollow you from one month to another, or they cancel their pledge before it's pay time for whatever reason.
Like TomSawyer and carloswebcomic said, you need a comitted fanbase, but that often takes a lot of time (like... years), patience, and extra hard work. It's basically the same with doing commissions or a Society6/Redbubble/whatever-shop in my opinion. People won't respond to it immediatley.
