Halluce

A Web3 Saas platform to help video creators monetize videos in new ways. The MVP is an NFT platform built on Solana for users to create, collect and sell their favorite social media videos as NFTs

Comment

Inspiration

The initial idea came about because we have domain expertise in videography and content creation. We realized a few problems:

  • Video monetization is very difficult when you do not have thousands of followers or subscribers
  • There is no NFT platform dedicated to video creators
  • People online are gaining popularity and tokenizing videos that are not theirs
  • Video creators who use strong language in their content or talk about adult-related topics are excluded from making money on streaming platforms
  • Video creators are limited by technical skills, time, production costs, and language

What it does

Halluce integrates with social media platforms to allow video creators and their fans to very simply use Solana's blockchain to create, collect and sell their favorite social media videos as NFTs. Users can bet on the virality of a video to sell an NFT for more than its initial purchase price. This allows video creators to make royalties every time an NFT of their video is sold.

At a later stage, we will be able to offer creators a suite of tools (other than NFTs) to help them monetize their videos and get credit for their videos wherever they are posted online. Through the use of AI and social media authentications creators will also have the ability to prevent other users of the NFT marketplace from tokenizing their work without permission.

How we built it

  1. We created a design for the marketplace
  2. A react project was created to allow a user to arrive at our website and sign in using any Solana wallet of their choice
  3. The Metaplex project was started. This part of the project will allow for GIFs (representing users videos) to be minted as NFTs for the marketplace

Challenges we ran into

  1. It took me (Obakeng) a long time to find team members but I kept trying different platforms such as Discord, Twitter, Y Combinators Co-Founder Matching platform, Reddit, etc. After meeting with over 20 different people I was able to find 7 interested team-members
  2. After joining the team most team members were not actively participating in the development of our project.
  3. In the last week and a half there were ultimately only three people (including myself who were enthusiastic about the project enough to put in considerable work. As a result, Jean, one of our top engineers decided that he was going to leave 4 days ago due to him feeling like he was doing most of the development. He was also in another hackathon team and it was a team of six members who were all active in the project and had experience at FAANG companies.
  4. After Jean left we had a shortage of talent and this resulted in losing the setup for our database, our Twitter API access, and the ability to keep on creating many functionalities.
  5. At this point I had to urgently find and hire a developer so unfortunately, we are still working on the project ## Accomplishments that we're proud of
  6. I created a basic design for what the marketplace would look like
  7. Jean learned the basics of React in a few days and made a basic website to allow profiles to be created
  8. We were able to understand why we weren't attracting team members. The problems were:
  9. We pitched to them the ultimate idea which is very large in terms of the scope of work that needed to get done to complete the project, so many people were discouraged.
  10. We didn't pitch the idea in a clear and concise way that allowed for anyone to understand what we were building
  11. We simplified the idea and created a short pitch deck and Notion to explain what we were building and why. ## What we learned
  12. This is my first hackathon, so I learned that you need to find creative ways to attract team members and keep them motivated
  13. I learned that for hackathons and for a project that entails doing something you have never done before it helps to work with a team who are experts related to the project at hand. This is so that problems can be solved easier and tasks can not be underestimated.

What's next for Halluce

  1. We would like to officially launch this project within the next a week
  2. We will be exploring entering an accelerator like YCombinator to try to get seed funding to continue with the project as an actual product
Share this project:

Updates