Technical and Functional Innovations of beBOP (solutions provided vs identified problems in the ecosystem)

The priority of someone who wants to share content should be the creation of it and its sharing.

While we willingly accept that a certain pragmatism must be present (regarding preparation, work to be done, communication, and economic and fiscal regulation of earnings), we believe that the processes currently enabling people to share content are at best biased and at worst obstructive.

Someone who wants to share their content is someone who, in addition to creating it, must:

• make themselves visible, virtually or physically

• offer or sell the product of their creation

• benefit from patronage by collecting support, donations, sponsorships, and other forms of assistance from their first, second, and third circles

• simply declare the product of their creative activities to the competent authorities

Support, on the other hand, whether it be close, as a patron, an enlightened amateur, a dedicated fan, an enthusiastic stranger, or a mere curious observer, should be able to:

• access the news and creations of the person sharing their content

• obtain or acquire said creations in the way that suits them best

• support the person sharing their content in alternative ways, beyond a simple purchase, through a donation, encouragement, service, subscription, or other means

And if, in recent years, the emergence of solutions like Sum Up or Twint has allowed content sharers to more easily monetize their creations with their audience during physical encounters, others have suffered the hardships of the Fintech ecosystem that was supposed to be built around content sharing with communities:

• platform specialization (one for sales; another for donations; another for subscriptions; another for crowdfunding) has, on one hand, fragmented the visibility (via SEO) of content creators, and on the other hand, complicated public support by requiring them to identify and share their information across multiple centralized sources; which exploit and monetize, on one hand, the personal information of the public, and charge, on the other hand, substantial margins for actions that should be exclusively between the person sharing their content and their supporting audience.

• platform censorship: whether it's sudden service shutdowns depriving hundreds of thousands of content creators of their income by unilateral decision of the payment service provider (Mangopay, with UTip); attempts to modify the Terms of Use of a community site by these same payment service providers (OnlyFans); or abusive demonetization of multimedia content moderated by algorithms that sometimes allow the claiming of rights to free musical excerpts or non-compliance with fair use, resulting in the abrupt loss of revenue for a creator with a presumption of guilt to overcome; or simply service interruption, changes in economic terms of use, platform closure, or content or access bans in certain countries.

Self-hosted solutions, on the other hand, can be so versatile that they could equip large e-commerce groups, integrate PIMs, MDMs, and mimic the functioning and organization of giants (via a freemium base and quickly indispensable paid optional plugins, sometimes even for legal compliance), where the needs of content creators are much simpler, and their skills are creative, not managing an advanced e-commerce system requiring expensive interventions from web agencies.

Therefore, to address these issues, increasingly prevalent among content creators, we have decided to designate beBOP:

• by offering a hosted solution without plugins, open-source and free, for greater stability, and to take advantage of a complete ecosystem, activatable or not according to needs, without additional hidden costs (merch, CMS, ARM, analytics, billing tracking, i18n, accessibility...)

• by directly including the simplicity of SEO: no more double entry of product information and static pages versus meta tags, what is displayed on the site is what is referenced by SEO crawlers

• by allowing support, within the same process, to be able to make both a purchase, a donation, a periodic subscription, and a pre-order without needing to juggle between multiple specialized platforms

• by natively including connection to resilient and uncensorable payment methods (Bitcoin and Lightning), to popular and widespread payment service providers (for online credit card payment), to more exotic or localized methods for global sharing (iDeal, SoFort, AliPay), to payment methods used by unbanked populations deprived of international access to culture (mobile money and Machankura-like solutions), but also to disconnected payments to enable both online and in-store cashier system operation

• by respecting customer's personal information (connection via temporary session link or third-party connection via SSO, without storing customer passwords in the database to preserve their digital identity in case of merchant hacking; minimal use of customer's personal information -no request for postal address if no physical counterpart during a purchase or in case of a simple donation-; explicit request to the customer for the retention of their IP address in case of accounting need by the merchant, similar to the acceptance of the T&Cs during the ordering process...)

• by offering content creators all the tools to manage their legal and accounting obligations according to their regime, location, and that of the customer (complete access to transaction logs; one-click export of transaction, VAT, RTT files...)