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Cover image for The world's simplest paywall — moncon
Diego
Diego

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The world's simplest paywall — moncon

#mozfest

Project overview

moncon is an open-source framework that lets content creators securely monetize their content. moncon is composed of an API, a dashboard where content creators can manage the site configuration, payments and metrics, and a wallet that will allow users to pay for and store the content they buy. Users can consume content, paying for the time they spend, and storing content in their wallets. Creators can define the number of copies allowed and can set content to expire, making it exclusive and special for users.

Project team

Diego Torres is the CEO and founder of the entity, a telecommunication engineer, with more in business MBA by ENEB and master in cybersecurity with INISEG. He has more than 15 years of experience in digital project development, multidisciplinary and multicultural team management. He has worked for companies in the multimedia content sector and consulting firms. In the banking sector, he has worked for Banco Sabadell, leading Blockchain projects (such as DIGITALIS, event), participating in the working group of the EBA (European Bank Association) to define the European challenges and actions derived from Blockchain and IoT. Diego is also a member of the architecture of Alastria ID Workgroup. From a personal side, Diego is a member of the research group of the "AI & Human Rights Community" of the Open Society Foundations.

Jose Juan is a computer engineer with more than 15 years of experience developing complex software projects. He has helped La Caixa in several solutions, highlighting the high-performance ticketing platform for the sale of tickets in concerts with more traffic in Spain. He has worked together with Diego Torres for the last 8 years, developing IA technology and Big Data, an engine capable of generating questions and answers in real-time from digital content. For the last 5 years, Jose has developed pilots in Blockchain for Banco Sabadell and Peninsula.

Irene Martínez is a business developer and marketing manager, with an entrepreneurial mindset, she has managed several digital projects and events. She has successfully launched a diverse marketing campaign for new products, always using the bulls-eye technique for the last 5 years.

Carlos López is a full-stack developer, with more than 20 years of experience. He is an all-rounder in terms of software construction, both can program in C + +, objective C, Java and use Rust, React, or Solidity. Carlos has been collaborating with the team for more than 6 years, having participated in common projects.

Nuno Figueiredo is a product designer and frontend developer with 10 years of experience. He is Portuguese, and from a very young age came to Barcelona to study industrial engineering. Since then, he has collaborated with startups, advertising agencies, and small businesses.

From Infinite Labs, we collaborate with the UPC research department, specifically with cryptography and mathematics.

What we are doing

Right now we are fully committed and working on having the first version of moncon, you can find more information in our Gitlab
https://gitlab.com/infinite-labs/moncon-framework/ and check our promotional video https://cinnamon.video/watch?v=520906893154059537.

By another side, as experts on product development, we are following the lean startup principles of idea -> validate -> measure and start again. We had defined two types of targets: big and traditional publishers and new native digital content creators. We are doing questionnaires to both types and here we have the most important concepts:

  • They are in big trouble with current monetization.
  • Subscriptions are slow but they know the path is "user must pay".
  • Most of them are not familiar with micropayments.
  • Almost no-one understands the new vision of the next-generation internet about privacy (where users choose where they want to share data), SSI (self Sovereign Identity)-
  • All of them would like to have a pay-as-you-go solution.
  • Most of them continue wanting to have user emails for marketing campaigns.
  • It's very important for them to have metrics and statistics about the content sold.

After these interviews, we have designed a product fitting their pains and needs.

Here are the mockups

User payment flow: https://www.figma.com/proto/53lKmWMWRVi7LJe4qeDG0W/Moncon-Flow-Mobile?node-id=596%3A1596&viewport=826%2C601%2C0.7664292454719543&scaling=scale-down
Content creator publisher: https://www.figma.com/proto/53lKmWMWRVi7LJe4qeDG0W/Moncon?node-id=123%3A0&viewport=384%2C368%2C0.3576352298259735&scaling=min-zoom&hide-ui=1

📻 Diego Torres, the CEO of the company, had an interview with national economic radio (Intereconomia) in Spain (audio in spanish): https://cinnamon.video/watch?v=535235304072677187

Finally, we did a PR action with that results:
📰 News: https://www.europapress.es/comunicados/empresas-00908/noticia-comunicado-moncon-micropagos-contenidos-cambiara-internet-20210223123105.html
📰 Report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14hQ3L7YvpmXR2PBc7mYaShnVzY5F6eGh/view?usp=sharing

What community support would benefit your project?

We are looking for small and medium content creators (<1M Monthly Users) hungry of tasting new monetization ways 😎

Link Round Up!

📢 If you want to follow us or join our community, follow these links:

Highlight other projects

As a team, we had been working together for the last 10 years, now, we are aware of the privacy and security problems nowadays internet users suffer. At Infinite Labs, we want to put our effort to create new solutions for the next-generation Internet. This is the main reason we are developing moncon and other products like pdata (http://pdata.org) and many more. If you want to know more about us, please, send us a message hello@moncon.co!

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