Streetmix — Grant Report #1

Project Update

We've been deep in the weeds of integrating Coil, Patreon and Paypal as different ways our users can subscribe to new features on Streetmix, our street design platform. With recent bumps from industry newsletters Dense Discovery and Morning Brew, it's more important than ever for us to depend on initiatives like the Web Monetization API to support our work. However, challenges in our personal lives, such as pandemic anxiety and health emergencies, mean that for our small team of freelancers, we continue to maintain that tricky balance between racing toward the finish line and making time to take care of ourselves.

Progress on objectives

An early win for us was that adding a Web Monetization pointer to our website was incredibly easy to do. However, we wanted to push the boundaries of what the API could do, which meant integrating our user account system with a user on Coil, so that we could provide individual users with new features, even if they didn't have a Coil browser extension installed. This proved to be challenging, as the Coil API infrastructure is still in its early stages. However, we remain confident that the integration will eventually be a seamless one.

Meanwhile, as the largest creator payment platform, Patreon has proved to be the easiest for us to integrate "out of the box." Our hope is that Web Monetization as a format becomes as widespread and easy to adopt.

Key activities

We're still on track to achieve our initial proposal in its "minimum viable product" state, knowing that we'll continue to iterate on our user experience and processes as we test monetization strategies with our user base. This will continue past our active proposal phase, which means targeted user experience testing is likely to happen later that we expected.

Communications and marketing

We've been relatively quiet in public as we keep our heads down and concentrate on our work. But this will change soon, as we've also been working on a new marketing site and landing page, which makes it much more clear to our users how to support us.

What’s next?

Right now, we're focused on wiring up the back-end and front-end portions to create a full end-to-end user experience. By the end of March, we should be able to have a minimal viable experience, a landing page, and a communications strategy which becomes our launching pad to test the success and viability of Web Monetization alongside traditional creator payment methods such as Paypal and Patreon.

What community support would benefit your project?

We could always use some additional help from members of this community who are looking for a short-term gig. We could use another engineer to help us over the finish line, as well as a designer, user experience researcher, or content writer, particularly those who already have significant experience and success building user onboarding and payment infrastructure. If you think you're that person or know of someone qualified, please send resumes to hello@streetmix.net. Thanks!