Why are you participating for Based India?

We are participating in Based India because of our deep-rooted connection to the Indian artistic community and a passionate desire to empower independent artists in the region. Growing up in Bangalore, we immersed ourselves in the local music and art scenes, forging friendships with artists and witnessing firsthand the struggles they face. These artists have profoundly influenced our lives, and we feel a strong responsibility to give back to the community that has given us so much joy and inspiration.

We are on a mission to create a platform that genuinely supports artists and fans alike. CultureCo is not just a startup; it's a love letter to the artists who have shaped our experiences, and a commitment to nurturing the cultural landscape of India. Participating in Based India offers an opportunity to leverage cutting-edge technology to address the unique challenges faced by artists and fans in our region.

Base provides the ideal foundation to build a scalable, secure, and user-friendly platform that brings the benefits of blockchain technology to the masses without the complexities typically associated with it. By integrating with Base, we aim to create a seamless experience that can attract a large number of users in India, fostering a vibrant community where artists can thrive and fans can engage more meaningfully, and Indian art can find its forever home onchain.

Our participation aligns with our mission to uplift the local artistic community, bridge gaps between artists and fans, and utilize innovative solutions to solve real-world problems. We believe our product directly solves the problems of local Indian artists, and have extensively worked with them to validate it. We hope to create a lasting impact on the cultural fabric of our region and contribute to the growth of the creative economy.

What challenges are you focusing on?

We are focusing on several critical challenges faced by the artistic community in India:

1. Lack of Sustainable Monetization for Artists: Independent artists struggle to earn a stable income due to fragmented platforms, middlemen, and the devaluation of art in the digital age. They own their distribution yet do not own their deals, and likes and follows rarely translate into meaningful financial support, making it difficult for artists to sustain their livelihoods.

2. Weak Artist-Fan Connections: Current platforms do not facilitate deep, meaningful relationships between artists and their fans. True fans often go unrecognized and unrewarded, despite their loyalty and early support, leading to a disconnect that hampers community growth.

3. Unfair Access to Events and Content: Scalpers and inefficient ticketing systems prevent genuine fans from accessing events, and artists miss out on connecting with their core audience. This undermines the value of the fan, the outcome of the live experience, and the potential revenue for artists.

4. Complexity of Blockchain Technology: While blockchain offers solutions like secure transactions and authentic ownership, its complexity becomes an obstacle widespread adoption among everyday users and artists who might benefit from its advantages, and begs to be abstracted away

How does your submission address this challenge?

CultureCo is a creator commerce platform designed to empower independent artists and enrich the artist-fan relationship, and immortalized by tokenizing these transactions onchain.

Project Description:

• Unified Platform: CultureCo offers a single space where artists can sell memberships, digital and physical art, merchandise, and event tickets. This eliminates intermediaries, allowing artists to retain more earnings and manage their businesses efficiently.
• Fan Engagement and Recognition: Features like badges, achievements, and exclusive content recognize and reward true fans. This strengthens the artist-fan bond and fosters a loyal community where fans feel valued and artists build lasting relationships.
• Simplified Blockchain Integration: By integrating with Base, we record transactions on the blockchain, ensuring authenticity and secure ownership of digital assets without burdening users with technical complexities. Blockchain interactions are abstracted, providing a seamless on-chain experience for users.
• Fair Access to Events: We create fair ticketing systems that prioritize genuine fans, reducing scalping and ensuring artists connect with their core audience. This enhances live experiences and maximizes revenue for artists.

Potential Impact:

• Empowering Artists: Artists gain financial independence and can focus on their craft with a sustainable income and supportive community, leading to the legitimization of the artist occupation in India (via their fans).
• Enriching Cultural Landscape: By supporting artists, we contribute to the growth and diversity of India's cultural scene, making art more accessible and valued, and becoming a cultural exporter of Indian art. Fans actively participate in nurturing this culture, and also owning a piece of it.
• Mass Adoption of Blockchain: Simplifying blockchain integration through Base encourages widespread adoption of blockchain technology in India, bringing users onchain by focusing on the culture.

Challenges we ran into

Non-technical challenges:

• Productizing the Commerce Stack: Understanding all the ways artists had to sell was difficult. We did user interviews with 34 artists to find a common set of ways creator often sell to their fans and transformed that into a simplified sell form.
• Onboarding artists via demos: The early alpha product was still rough and some initial creators were disappointed by the buggy experience of onboarding. So we built demo creator pages that allowed us to build out the creators pages for them, and they could approve and claim their profiles with a unique creator code that we generated in the backend for them, smoothening out their onbaording process, and wowing them off the bat. We selectively onboarded 10 Indian artists for alpha testing with real art, merch, and events for sale.

Technical challenges:

• Payment options: Our artists insisted that we integrate all forms of payment, and not just crypto. So based on user interviews, we integrated Razorpay (INR via UPI), Stripe (USD via Credit/Debit), and CopperX (USDC via Base) for all payment options.
• Alpha testing: We ran an alpha test with 50+ users and they registered 14 bugs at 6 different interaction points that we fixed and deployed in under 48 hours, and drastically improved our user experience. We still have 4 major bugs that we will fix after hackathon that would require platform rearchitecture efforts.
• Minting onchain: The challenge of abstracting away all onchain interactions proved to be tricky since there are multiple steps involved. We started with abstracting away wallets, by creating wallets ourselves for users in the backend. We abstracted the minting process by building a factory smart contract that deployed a unique 1155 smart contract per creator (co-owned by us) that read the transactions on our database and batchminted all new tokens and airdropped them to wallets of new collectors, resulting in a proper onchain token system at no cost to the end user.

Additional Features

Before the hackathon, we only had a simple Google Auth with the card for digital art.

Hackathon features built in the last 3 weeks:

• Creator profile (Feed, Shop, Events)
• Sell form (Digital Collectibles, Physical Sales, Tickets)
• Demo Creator and Creator Profile Claim flow
• Tribe memberships and discounts
• Payments via Razorpay, Stripe, CopperX
• Explore feed to explore alpha creators and randomized art
• User Profile with collectibles view
• Ticketing flow with early fan and tribe presales
• Badges & Achievements system
• Collaboration posts with other artists
• Music player for Digital Music collectibles
• Auto wallet creations
• Factory Smart Contracts for 1155 token airdrops
• Landing Page (3 iterations)
• Founder's Letters
• CultureCo GitBook
• Alpha Testing