Bunchd AMA：Building a platform based on DFINITY for the benefit of creators and subscribers
Yesterday we invited the genis developer @Hazel, the founder of Bunchd, a creator-owned subscription platform, to do an AMA in the ICP League community. We talked about Bunchd’s vision, future plans and the advantage of building dapps on top of the Internet Computer. Here is the article.
Intro
Q:
Hi Hazel, happy to have you here today, to begin with, please introduce yourself and the Bunchd project?
A:
Very excited to be here! I’m Hazel, the founder of Bunchd. We’re building a creator-owned subscription membership platform on the Internet Computer.
We believe the emerging creator economy is the next big era of the internet, and don’t think it should be owned by Wall Street. Big Tech platforms have made it clear that their intention is to use creators as a means to try to exact the remaining life out of the attention economy. We think its time for a change of pace.
About Vision
Q:
Thank you for the intro. Our second question is about the platform itself. As mentioned in Bunchd’s material, your first iteration should be focused on bringing a familiar feeling platform onto DFINITY. How can you achieve this task, and why should users and creators from the existing platforms move to Bunchd?
A:
In my opinion, the existing platforms feel awfully immature. I’ve spoken with a number of creators and the common story is they rely on other services to actually provide their subscribers with the experience they need.
In the case of the adult platforms, they unfortunately are more locked down, and this isn’t an option.
So, early on we have a lot of low hanging fruits we can just build to entice creators. Next, ownership! Bunchd creators earn ownership of the platform just for serving their fans.
Competitors, can’t and won’t ever provide this option. It’s a no brainer — do the same exact thing you’ve already been doing and get more.
Token Economy
Q:
Bunchd has an incentive token economy to reward early adopters, creators and developers, can you show the community about the incentive part?
A:
It’s short and simple. Creators are rewarded Bunchd for having* paying subscribers on the platform, and the fees charged are deposited into the “governance chest” which is controlled by the creators.
This is a ways off — but, the Bunchd Dao (anyone holding Bunchd) will be able to propose to spend these funds, or allocate tokens to hire developers to extend Bunchd.
Soo technically, I’m only hired by Bunchd Dao to build Bunchd — I can be fired. Which is something I hope doesn’t happen, but protects the creators.
Q:
There are products like onlyfans that content creators can create and sell the content to subscribers. What do you think Bunchd is more advanced vs the existing products? How to keep a balance between pay and earn for subscribers?
A:
So unlike other platforms, creators have all the say in what happens to Bunchd and how it allocates resource — it’s their tool and they will have the means to extend it as they see fit.
Bunchd isn’t a walled garden either, so even without the Dao funding efforts, developers will be able to come along and build all sorts of extensions or use Bunchd components as building blocks — service composability!
Regarding fees, the intention is they’re largely offset by the ownership and the ability for creators to propose to allocate funds. Its more like a creators guild fee.
Why DFINITY?
Q:
Bunchd brings every action on-chain, what is the benefit to do so? And the protocol is deployed on top of the Internet Computer, why DFINITY instead of other blockchains?
A:
Great question! If you have read or listened to any of my other content my big thing is getting content on chain. Media, interactions, everything we possibly can.
Only the Internet Computer can do this at scale, and at very reasonable costs. Once all this is on-chain we start to put shape to these actions and content. What is creator content, how do we value it, how can others use it, how can we find new uses for it?
The critical bit is having this done on chain — this lets us build trusted platforms around these things with well defined rules we all agree on. Imagine if all of Big Techs creator data was avaliable today for us to use and hack on?
Q:
Patreon and OnlyFans are top creator platforms, creators with huge fans can easily get income through this platform, although there are some platform fees inside. What do you think of these existing creator platrorms? How can creators of Bunchd earn competitive income, and the creator economy please?
A:
I’m hesitant to share my personal feelings on existing platforms — its easy to throw punches. I will say I think the idea of shifting ownership of any platform onto the people who rely on it is a far superior model — imagine if all our gig work apps were built for and owed by the people who rely on them instead of Wall Street?
One feature I haven’t touched upon just yet is we’re planning on making Bunchd collaborative first. The goal is to enable creators to work with one another to serve larger niche audiences.
Existing platforms have shown the super-fan model works, and is profitable — think I make my content and my super fans pay me.
However, we haven’t given creators a tool to serve the massive niche audiences that exist today. Not everyone is a super-fan for a creator. However, I believe most people are super-fans for specific niches.
Think about your friends, do they consume specific types of creator media? Maybe its tech youtube, or those adventure channels — we want to give creators the power to build their own networks 🙂
Q:
How does Bunchd attract early adopters, do you have any incentive programs to get your seed users?
A:
We do! In fact, this is a critical component of the Bunchd governance design.
Bunchd is designed to be creator owned, early success relies on giving creators a strong, overwhelming, voice in Bunchd — and keeping it that way.
I can’t give the details just yet but we’ll be vesting a massive number of creators on the platform.
Bunchd is creator owned first.
Roadmap
Q:
What’s your roadmap, when launching the dapp?
A:
We’re working on 6 month sprint now to build out what I’ve been calling the “Minimum Lovable Bunchd”.
it won’t be something ready for production, but it will be quite close. Once we complete that we’ll be focusing on polishing up the subscriber-creator experience, and then will begin working on the Dao.
Our top priority is making sure creators have all the tools they need to be successful serving their fans.
( I will say we do have early adopter bonuses, but also long term adoption incentives)
About Development
Q:
Could you give us some suggestions on developing dapps on DFINITY, what’s your advanced experience?
A:
So the best advice I can give is start small and iterate quick. That above the project shared started out only supporting 80Kb images -not it supports 1,8MB — next unlimited size.
You won’t need to deal with scaling early on — really you wont. Stick as much as you can into a single canister, and see how far that takes you. It seems silly, but it will get you to the point where you are able to prove your product.
(On the IC you can upgrade your code, and it is cheap to experiment — once you have a better version just update!) Next, save all your code, and start following other IC developers on github.
I have a ton of repos on my github, and I pull code from all of them quite often — saves a ton of time.
I also pull a lot of snippets from the offical DFINITY github — this is very useful for Rust
Finally, don’t over engineer. This might appear obvious, but the IC removes many of the traditionally challenging aspects of software engineering (while adding new challenges of course). Out of the box you can quickly build pub-sub / message workers / restful servers — ask yourself “Do I need this yet”. Its tempting to go do it because its easier.
Community Q&A
Q:
What are among the first group of niche domains that you would like to penetrate into?
A:
Personally, I think NFT artists would be a great group, or generally Digital artists. We’ve “figured out” the media hosting for that pretty well aready. Moreover, people tend to follow lots of artists of a similar style.So, it might be a early win for content bundling.
Q:
Honestly, I’m a faithful user of Pornhub and Xvideos. And the adult platform is one of the best concerning issues to which you’ve paid a lot of attention. That’d literally favor people like me, so I’m grateful for that. But would that bring trouble or disagreeable regulations on DFINITY from the authority?
A:
This is a great question. So, we have talked with many OF creators — suprisingly OF isn’t a great platform for the creators… The adult creator world is very difficult to build for if we’re being honest and even if Bunchd launches we don’t they wont* adopt the platform until they’re given the tools they need for compliance.
Adult Creators don’t use platforms without strict rules.In the absence of rules, they have created their own communities to create / enforce them — interesting stuff.
Q:
And can you describe the minting process，any difference between that on ethereum？
A:
Minting is much easier — go try the ic-image-thing demo shared above — once you upload its all on chain — done. We have Bunchd NFTs coming soon!
Q:
I’m curious how you avoid a governance situation where one group buys up a controlling interest in Bunchd?
A:
Bunchd tokens are actually minted by having paying subscribers over time, and we’ll be vesting a majority ownership in creators out of the gate. This is always a challenge, but the thought is — if creators are making money, have a voice, they won’t rush to sell off tokens. So, this type of an attack should be hard.
Q:
Just now, you mentioned that you could be impeached, correct? No offense, but … in what circumstances would that happen? If that happened, what would you say, a good thing or not？
A:
Yes! No no, no offense at all — this is important. Creators choose the development shop — so to speak.If we start doing bad things for them, they can hold a vote to revoke our access.This is a design choice — think about how Instacart was caught stealing tips.
Q:
I also have a question. We have seen very little in previous blockchain applications related to the creator economy until mirror.xyz came into the limelight recently. Are there any insurmountable problems with these types of decentralized applications?
A:
The biggest challege is the cost of hosting rich media. However, the IC is pretty reasonable, and my research has suggested we should be ok on that front. The next big challenge is trying to figure out how to model the gov’t system — creators are here to create.
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