Bonsai.so - Patreon for Web3

The Problem: Centralized Closed Platforms

Whether it’s Patreon, OnlyFans, Teachable, Shopify, etc– they own your content, your audience, your business, and so they basically own you.

The Solution: Decentralized Open-Source Platforms

In the future, you will have a convenient open-source option. You will have the option of owning the software that you and your community use. You will own all of the rights to make the decision whether you want to run it on your own server, or pay somebody else to manage it for you. Either way, you own the full code repository and the database. You will own your business.

Key Differentiators

• Unlike Creaton, Bonsai gives you the option to pay in cash or other trades of value
• Unlike Patreon, Bonsai is open-source and web3 ready out of the box

Education

For now, I think going to focus on education as the foundation of the product. I know that you want Unlock Protocol to widely adopted, and I think more education on the topic will help. Especially in video form.

Bonsai DAO

I’m glad that I haven’t taken any investments yet, because a company like this needs to be formed as a DAO. Most traditional investors wouldn’t have allowed that. I would love to learn more about how you’ve structured Unlock DAO.

Focus

I’m going to focus on Patreon for now. I wasn’t focused enough in 2021. In 2022 I’m going to focus on a narrow vertical, rather than building a wide array of features. I will only add features when/if one of our grants receives interest, and I can find a good team to complete it.

Simple LMS

Patreon can be used as an LMS. But when people pay for content, I see little need in quizzing them. You give them the content they pay for, and if they value it, they will use it. That allows us to cut out most of the LMS functionality, and still use it as an LMS.

Freemium Content

Julien Genestoux from Unlock Protocol told me about a plan to allow people to unlock content with a Twitter follow or share. Also a Patreon OAuth integration. I see this as more of an OnlyFans feature where you can follow for free, then pay per individual post. Except instead of paying for individual posts, you could incentivize a visitor to unlock it with a subscribe, follow, share, comment, etc. It’s almost like a freemium version of Patreon.

Later on, I could build a custom way to do this with Stripe, but I will focus on using Unlock Protocol for now.

Use Cases

• Education
• Community Building
• Podcasting
• Blogging
• Vlogging
• Art
• Music
• Entertainement

User Benefits

• Community Owner: Create exclusive communities
• Community Owner and member: Use time-limited NFTs for access to communities and events
• Community Member: Resell your NFT if you want to rage quit

Team

Bonsai DAO

Founder

Mason Lawlor

Follow Mason:

Advisory Board

Chris Do

Follow Chris:

Advisory Board

Julien Genestoux

Follow Julien:

Basic Schedule

2022

September - Bonsai v0.0.11: Pre-Beta

• Release Steal My dApp, I Dare You on Youtube

October-December - Bonsai v0.1: Beta

• Raise $250k+ from grants and funds
• Find at least one grantee for our developer grant program
• Update Bonsai Speed Run course

2023

January-March - Bonsai v1.0

• Find at least one new grantee for our developer grant program
• Update Sage 9 to Sage 10 (and possibly tailwind)
• Release open-source iOS app
• Release a new Bonsai short film

Go To Market Strategy

2 week launch plan:

Specific: We would start with influential communities before moving onto influencers.

More Specific: We would primarily focus on influential communities who have shared technical skills, such as design, marketing, development, and art.

Each of these is it's own MVA (minimal viable audience).

Go To Market Strategy Summary

We could offer equity or revenue sharing deals to the most influential communities.

We start by targeting the most influential ones in design, development, engineering, and art.

Pre-existing communities similar to The Futur. Where we all met each other.

Each one makes up its own minimum viable audience (MVA). When we're ready to scale, we start stacking them.

Target Audience

Ideal Communities

These prospect communities are the Minimum Viable Audiences with shared technical skills.

• r/Wordpress
Web Development170k
• r/Web3
Web325k
• r/Webdedev
Web Development1.5M
• r/Entrepreneur
Business1.5M
• r/Startups
Business1M
• r/Webdesign
Design625k
• Unlock Protocol
Web3
• The Futur
Design
• Design Code
Web Development
• Hacker News
Web Development
• Product Hunt
Web Development

• Steal My App, I Dare You
• Steal My dApp, I Dare You

Bonsai was created on Roots, which is a modern configuration of Wordpress. Trellis includes a LEMP stack with Ansible, Vagrant, Composer, WP-CLI, and more. The Bonsai theme is a custom version of Sage, which is a modern starter theme by Roots which uses Laravel Blade.

In 2023, Bonsai will be updated to Sage 10 and Trellis >=v1.17

Standard Operating Principles

Bonsai at the core, is ultimately THE platform we want to run your community.

There will always be an open source version of Bonsai, which I teach students how to make. It will teach students how to build an MVP. This portion of the company is called The Bonsai Foundation.

I have a belief that the best design will ultimately win out. But that's just a belief.

In reality, the first to market usually wins, because they win free real estate in the customer's mind. Being first is better than having a better design in the short term.

So we will focus on being first in our category, but only temporarily until we focus on design innovation– which is our ultimate goal.

Enforcable by law for all time and across all universes:

No Data sharing of user data on Bonsai.so

Bonsai will be community supported, and we will handle our user data responsible. Since Bonsai is open-source, we can't control what other developers do with their user data.