The problem Fanment solves

1. Problem faced by content producers (creators)

Tech giants web2 monopoly

Creators are dependent on web2 platforms, which levy ridiculous amount as platform tax/charge (YouTube takes 50%.)

Heavy dependency on sponsorships.

77% of creators depend on brand deals, that’s 3x as many as every other revenue source combined.

Web2 platforms are not open, creators don’t own their fans directly.

Platforms do not provide options for creators to be discovered through their algorithms. The biggest challenge for creators on these platforms is the layer of algorithmic feeds and ads that separate them from their fan base.

2. Problems faced by content consumers (fans)

Banned by platform, not the creators

Often times, a user is banned from a platform. Now, he could not really follow any of his favourite creators.

Indirect payment to creators

As pointed out earlier, platforms levy tax/charge; only a portion goes to the creator.

Solution

Build a web3 platform for content sharing/streaming and the access to content should be gated by NFTs which are launched by the creator. So, if a user has an NFT of a certain creator, then only they could access the content.

How does it solve?

If we see closely, the root of all the problems are centralized web2 platforms which exploited creators because they did not have any choice. With the concept of blockchain and NFT, their involvement could be removed. Creators mint their NFT collections and guarantee that any holder of these NFTs would have access to their content (Of course they can further customize, e.g. which NFT collection should gate which contents: our product (Fanment) would be configured accordingly).

1. They sell/auction to get direct monetory benefits (Additional monetory benefit when fans trade their NFTs (royalty income))
2. They don't have to rely on sponsorships (fans are sponsoring now)
3. Fans cannot get banned by anyone else than the creator
4. By virtue of NFTs, creators are directly owning their fans

Challenges I ran into

1. This is built on top of an open source video sharing project called Owncast. Understanding the project took some effort.
2. Making changes to the owncast code in order to integrate wallet-signing and generating access tokens was a bit challenging.