Monetisation platform
Tapstar.tv (Plugin.IO)
A privacy-first creator platform with an app store, boosted posts, tipping and a Solana NFT marketplace where creators sell their work straight from their social posts.
- people on the team I led
- 5
- audiences: publishers, advertisers, developers and creators
- 4
- ad trackers: only functional cookies, like the login session
- 0
The challenge
Plugin.IO set out to give four groups (publishers, advertisers, app developers and content creators) ways to earn from the web without the tracking that funds most of it. That meant an app store, an ad network that matches ads to page content rather than people, social features and a way for creators to sell their work directly, all built and run by a team of five.
What I did
- 1Architected the full-stack platform: a Next.js and TypeScript front end on a GraphQL API, with Neo4j as the main database so social queries like friends-of-friends stay simple, and Redis for caching posts, short-lived tokens and rate limiting.
- 2Led our biggest launch, a Solana NFT marketplace built with Metaplex. Creators publish images and videos as limited or unlimited editions that appear as social posts, and other users buy them with a connected Phantom or MetaMask wallet. We launched on Solana first, with Ethereum planned next.
- 3Delivered the rest of the roadmap in phases, revenue-generating features first: accounts and profiles, an app store for HTML5 apps and games, and social follow features.
- 4Built the real-time layer: direct messaging over WebSockets with Socket.IO (a web-only take on Messenger), and push notifications through Pusher for likes, follows and tips.
- 5Built an in-platform token economy: users buy tokens with SOL or by card through Stripe, held in our own database, and spend them to boost posts into other users' main feeds or tip creators. Boosting was the first step towards the ad network.
- 6Built the publisher track: publishers create an app store listing for their web game or app, which then runs inside Tapstar.tv in an iframe.
- 7Set up GitHub Projects tracking, continuous integration and automated deployments, running the platform on Docker and Kubernetes.
- 8Led and mentored the team and ran user testing, feeding the findings back into design.
The outcome
The Solana marketplace was Tapstar.tv's biggest launch, letting creators sell their work as NFTs straight from their social posts. The platform reached early access, proving out the app store, social features, the token economy and creator tools on a privacy-first foundation.
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