The problem CultureCo solves

We've built a commerce first platform for creators where they can sell their art, albums, merchendise, tickets, services along with other financial tools like crowdfunding, donations and even streamsharing (coming soon). This is to enable independent artists to leverage their brand value to directly sell their art to their commerce without multiple middle men taking a cut.
On the flipside, we've built a gamification engine for the fans so that artists can measure their fandom and accordingly engage and reward their fan community. Fans can also dive deep into the journey of the creators, following their drops week after week, feeling closer to the creative process.
We're also artists ourselves and ensure we create art we love with artists we love; so we organise a lot of events, enable more creative projects, and build IPs of our own to support the scene. We've already executed one intimate live gig as a PoC, and hope to program more in the second half of this year.
We've made this extremely simple for the end users by providing all modes of payment and data at their fingertips, while abstracting away the Web3 infrastructure behind the curtains. With no cost to the end user, we want to build a social graph of digital collectibles around cultural commerce, where every creator, their piece of art, and meaningful fan interaction will be forever immortalized on the blockchain, allowing future builders to architect their ideas upon this cultural graph.

Challenges we ran into

1. Regulations of accepting crypto payments - We faced a major challenges with our artists where if we made this a pure Web3 product, they would struggle with managing wallets, tracking payments, and most had concerns with tax implications in their countries. So we decided to abstract this away with our own Web2 digital currency - CultureCoins. Users can buy CultureCoins using any fiat or crypto, and then spend these CultureCoins within the ecosystem to sell their art, merch, event tickets, etc. This also luckily provides two other advantages - we can price art more dynamically and globally for the artists so they don't have to worry about the economics of price discovery themselves, and also helps us measure demand across fans, where we can prevent any pay-to-win scenarios with fans. We pay creators monthly to their bank account as a split of the total value of coins accrued each month, proportional to the number of coins they've earned.
2. NFT abstraction - On our platform, the focus is on cultural commerce while the NFTs (collectibles) are a bonus breadcrumb which fits into a larger system. We don't want to sell speculation, we want to sell art. So we had to abstract away the entire minting process. Using 721s on Base with Coinbase Smart Wallet, the Paymaster, and Onchain Kit, we were able to create a smooth Web3 process. The user only has to spend one click to connect their wallet, and the rest is taken care of by our end. We hope to now be able to drop over 100,000 NFTs over the next 1 year.
3. Helping artists with crypto - There is no easy way to do this. Just spending a lot of time with artists, centering conversations around creative projects and the value of community, building trust within the product by including them as part of the process.