The problem Meme&Earn solves

Content creators struggle to get sponsors at an early stage of their careers. But they may have a small loyal fanbase who see potential in them and are willing to financially support them. Donation or Patreon is the usual solution. But in this case, the fans who supported their favorite artists usually don't get anything in return.

I present a better solution where Artists get financial support from their fans with the help of Blockchain(smart contracts, NFTs). In return, the fans get to share the success of the Artist. For example, say Mr.Feast is a small Youtuber. He wants some financial support in order to increase the quality of his videos. He makes an NFT for one of his videos. Varun sees potential in Mr.Feast and buys this NFT for the price that Mr.Feast offers. Mr.Feast can use the money he made from that NFT sale to buy a new camera, hire editors, etc. In return, Varun gets 20% of the revenue that the video makes. Varun can also sell this NFT to some other buyer if he wishes. Whoever holds that NFT gets 20% of the revenue that the video makes.

To draw an analogy, this is similar to the stock market. Here the Artist is the Company, his fans can buy the Artist's shares(NFTs). Royalties(20% revenue) are the dividends and the NFTs are the shares. These NFTs can change hands. However, there is no central authority here. Everything is controlled by smart contracts.

To show this in action I have built a website where people can post memes. The creator of the meme can turn it into an NFT and put it out for sale at a price he wishes. He also mentions the percentage share of revenue the buyer of the NFT will be getting forever. There are ads on the website which generate revenue that will be distributed amongst the creators and NFT holders according to the % revenue share stored in the smart contract.
Imagine discovering Mr.Beast or Pewdiepie when they had very little subs, seeing potential in them, and buying their NFTs. You would earn millions in passive income

Challenges I ran into

I struggled with the automation of transactions.
A key aspect of this project is revenue distribution. I made a new token called BRO and revenue is distributed in the form of these tokens. These tokens need to be distributed at regular intervals. But each transaction needs some gas fees. If I was manually distributing revenue I could have authorized the transactions using my wallet (metamask) but i didn't know how to automate this process. I found OpenZeppelin defender which can automate transactions. But I would have to spend a lot of gas fees to execute multiple transactions.

I later decided that the best way to do this would be by asking the users themselves to pay the gas fees in order to receive the tokens they earned. Until they transfer the BRO tokens to their wallets, a count of the number of tokens they earned is kept by the platform. This way there is no need to automate the revenue distribution transactions. Users can claim their revenue whenever they want.

I also faced issues while deploying the website. Configuring environment variables and making express serve the client-side react application was a bit challenging. I managed to deploy the website to Heroku but not to the domain name I had bought from GoDaddy.