Last week we announced $7m in pre-seed financing for Airstack (makers of web3 developer APIs and the Jam app for Farcaster)

Today: Ask Me (literally) Anything 




chef at moxie.xyz - the ecosystem for creators on Base. Launch & own Creator Coins. 🔜 Creator Agents with skills to help creators earn, trade & grow!

First, we had reasonable expectations relative to the market. These are not the days of $10m or $30m pre product pre seed rounds. 

We set out to raise $2M August last year; that was all we felt we needed to launch the product in beta in March this year; we ended up getting $3.5M in commits... longcast.jam.so/jjEdxq

Non developer?
Got a hunger for growth?

We are looking for passionate and technical community leaders to join the Airstack core GTM team

✨ Head of Growth
✨ Developer Relations Lead
✨ Business Development Manager

Thanks for the congrats! 

We think of Airstack and Jam as akin to AWS and Amazon. Having Amazon as the first and best customer enabled/pushed AWS to be amazing and fast, ahead of the competition

I don't choose favorites amongst our children :)

How do you split your time between Airstack and Jam? Long term, which of the two are you most excited about?

Also congrats on the raise!

👨🏻‍🍳 /homemade pot luck dinners zachharris.xyz

👋 naming is really important to me. My companies have included Fab, Hem, Pepo, Ost, Moxie, and now Airstack and Jam -- i like them short and impactful. 

We did all the naming internal @ipeciura.eth is the naming master and has a process 

Jam was originally called Purple - because a lot of people... longcast.jam.so/jjIK8L

@betashop.eth how did you arrive at the name Jam for your FC Client product? 

Do you have any decisions making steps or frameworks available in public to better understand what inspired this name? 

Was there a predilection for Jelly or Marmalade? Did you work with any outside branding agency? 

Why Airstack? Why now?

building families as ED and cofounder of The Surrogacy Foundation; pfp /beans

Happy to! Message me on telegram @jasongoldberg

Will you come on my show and talk about it?

a jiraffe on the internet • nf.td/morereese

Sorry, not particularly. Investor meetings don’t usually veer too far from the project being discussed 

Throughout the raising process, did you discover any new or surprising problems in the web3 space that investors value and the ecosystem would benefit from being solved (and that don’t compete with Airstack…maybe even complement it)? 


building degencast.wtf /degencast, ex-synfutures, binance, bitmain

Chiang Mai, Mueang Chiang Mai District, Chiang Mai, Thailand

it's a very very challenging fundraising environment

We raised half the pre-seed in Aug/Sept last year and the other half just now

What made the difference both times was having live product

Even then it's a very challenging environment

With each fundraise you have to think what the... longcast.jam.so/jjnBFL

has it been easy raising fund in this market? tips for others considering raising?

Building @kiwi 
Writing @ https://kanfa.macbudkowski.com/

That's a great question

For now we're looking at regular users of Jam as a % of total/regular Farcaster protocol users

We're currently at about 1000 installs of Jam apps for iOS and Android which is a fine start considering the # of overall FC users and weekly actives

Over the next few... longcast.jam.so/jjdlLB

How do you set and monitor your growth goals @ Jam when one of the most critical factors for your app - Farcaster protocol DAUs - is partially outside your control?

Blockchain data analyst. Interested in data science and blockchain.

Analysis-
https://www.hypersub.xyz/s/yesyes-analytics-qr0v8onrvev4,
https://dune.com/yesyes

We get this question a lot 

Airstack is foremost a develops platform not an analytics tool. We want to be the first choice of devs to build data aware apps that can easily interoperate with the web3 ecosystem — we’re not trying to rebuild or compete with Dune or Nansen 

Right now we are... longcast.jam.so/jjEocN

I gotta ask - do you see yourself launching a dashboarding tool that helps people make dashboards out of airstack queries?

/frontend dev・founder/decentralized data wrangler /blockhead・UI/UX abstractionist・DeFi/web3 builder・dropout・24・prev /dydx, ritual.net・x.com/darryl__yeo

In the future, yes 

We debated starting with a decentralized infrastructure but we heard from potential customers/users that they cared a lot more about speed & reliability rn vs. decentralization -- so we optimized on performance to start and will decentralize over time

Any plans to decentralize your infrastructure?

TogetherCrew.com | single parent x 4 | seeker of adventure | survivor of chaos | host /togethercrew /kbc /single-parenting
seemore.tv/free/fc/kbc

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas, Spain

It really depends from product to product

Airstack came from thinking about the enormity of traversing blockchain data and thinking of it as virtual stacks of data = airstack

Jam came from roots as "Purple" and thinking of words that were associated somewhat with the color purple but also had more meaning

How did you come up with the names for your products?

🕯️They/them. Scaled cos from 0-$300k in arr, 7-35 employees, 0-100k users. Now I make beautiful, functional, and ethically made candles at humankind.place

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!

We have 7 open roles 
https://www.airstack.xyz/#hiring-section-new

What’s your short/medium/long term thesis for why you’re building in web3?

Woah congrats! No questions just congrats 🤩

Are there any opportunities for primarily Java/Gradle experienced devs? If not, are there any ways to contribute/gain experience for opportunities that do exist?

What were your communicated goals for the first half of the pre-seed? 

What was the forcing function that made you decide to stop with the first half and continue building before raising again? 

Lastly did you set out to raise the total of (first + second) or did you decide more was needed & started raising again

Do you like to give/get movie recommendations?