MintStars launched in private beta, offering creators 100% payouts, unlimited, anytime withdrawals and 100% protection from chargebacks. Thanks to this differentiated proposition we quickly established a strong brand presence and creator following. However, we were having significant technical issues which restricted us from converting that creator loyalty into fan and revenue growth.
Having trialed ~40 different fiat-to-crypto on-ramps, we realised that crypto infrastructure was simply not where it needed to be for us to create a competitive fan experience with incumbent platforms like OnlyFans. We saw wallet top-up success rates of around 40%, subscriptions repeatedly failing and significant lags in the real-time movement of funds between fan and creator wallets. Alongside this, we were struggling to bring our engineering function in-house, having outsourced the original build to an agency.
~4,000 posts on the platform
~$400 GMV
~2,000 account holders
We changed tack and came up with an idea for a totally bespoke payment flow in partnership with a small payment facilitator, Coinflow, who believed in our team and business. We moved away from fiat-to-crypto on-ramps to a system where fans purchase a credit for USDC on a smart contract using traditional card network rails. This would allow us to maintain our payment differentiators while solving the issues with slow on-chain money movement, poor success rates and end-to-end subscriptions. The only issue was, this would require almost a full rebuild of the platform, which our CTO, Trevor, estimated would take ~4 months, and at that point we had 4 months of runway left.
We made the difficult decision to replace Trevor with two full stack engineers who could expedite the build and made a bet that we would see enough immediate increase in fan and revenue growth to secure additional funding before runway ran out.