61–70 of 97 posts
There is absolutely no shortcut in this things. As soon as you are paying users there will be all sort of legal requirements/side effects which you need to be aware of. Starting with money laundering, taxes (yours and from your users even!), pleasing your payout provider that your content is not illegal, beeing able to payout in US&Europe or even global and ending with costs (you will probably never be able to compet…
This is a really hard problem. You do not want to have to register as a bank or hire an expensive compliance team. Use Stripe.
Does Stripe actually allow this type of use though? Does it have to be special agreement / account with them or just a regular plain stripe account?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there’s a possibility to not handle the tax i would use that service in a heartbeat. The less i have to do the better.
Heh "Like Uber, but for tax accountants": attract tax experts from the creator's state/country to work for a percentage of their earnings. Does it get more complicated if the creator has donations from different states/countries? I have a feeling yes. Oh geez.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly what streamlabs does is a thing I thought I might make some day -- now I can wipe it off my list since it seems like they are already producing a fantastic product. I really think that the streaming world could benefit from a decentralized streaming application but this seems like something streamlabs could easily pursue in a pivot or as a new feature so I think it could happen some day. Thanks for sharing ho…
Decentralization would require the streamer to have enough bandwidth to upload to each viewer. Uploading one stream to a CDN is ideal.
I personally think you could find a lot of people who would be willing to help CDN/share/host for streamers they support, a nice step between watch for free and upvote/like and send the streamer money.
Even if you didn't want to go the P2P route, there's no reason that streamlabs can't step in to help provide that infrastructure if it's cost effective (i.e. if the streamer is paying) -- surely a streamer is going to be willing to drop $50 on extra resources for a stream if they think it's going to bring them >$50 worth of recognition/good content for their streamers. Streamlabs wouldn't even have to keep these resources on hand, they could spin them up on demand and just charge a slight premium. Even better, streamlabs could give streamers easy tools to enable purchasing cloud resources for better stream quality, and charge them for the convenience (and let them know of course that they pay the AWS bills at the end of the day).
There was a story on HN a while ago about Bootstrapping 10er, a Patreon-similar service for Danish creators https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18820196 It was a single person running it.
Sod'em
/rant
I’ve worked in the fintech space for 6 years this month. I’ve been a ceo/founder, vp of product, and managing partner. there’s no way to shortcut this, you’re going to need a chief compliance officer and to adhere to the right financial regulations, likely money transmission but possibly others as well. you need to contact a lawyer and get started BEFORE you process your first payment. i will warn you, starting down…
Let's not get everyone in the mindset that venture capitalism in the US is a good thing. Many startups and entrepreneurs in Europe and other continents have found success without raising any capital.