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McBain
@mcbain
Welcome @pfista to this weeks HumpDay AMA! He's been building on Farcaster more deeply than most, ask away!
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Zach
@zd
What originally got you excited about search, and how did that lead you to build on Farcaster?
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Michael Pfister
@pfista
I was actually excited first about alerts. Many of my products came from thinking about how I could productize APIs: iOS 16 PWA Notifications -> alerty.dev Lob Check Sending API -> check.supply Way before Buoy, I built Alerty when iOS 16 added native notifications for PWAs. Then I used @andyjagoe's alertcaster.xyz webhooks at the time to get notified anytime someone mentioned "contract / gig / part-time" on farcaster- and found a decent amount of contract work this way :) I'd been on Farcaster a while and built a bunch of small projects like sharecaster.xyz and farcast.club, but hadn't put any real effort towards a larger product. After some convincing I got @jj on board and we set out to build a really good alerting engine using Farcaster primitives, which turned into Buoy. As it turned out, we started with alerts, but to power it we needed to build a good search engine. So John went and built this great search backend that ended up being a core part of the product today.
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Zach
@zd
This makes SO much sense! Steve Jobs used to say "you can't connect the dots looking forwards" Did you think it would end up like this? Or do you attribute this beautiful story to the magic of life working itself out?
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Michael Pfister
@pfista
I never expected to reboot alerty because it was basically a failure. Focusing on the wrong user (developers) rather than social power users. In some ways connecting the dots you could say this was a pivot- taking a generic off chain dev product and moving to a farcaster native tool for consumers. I agree with Jobs. I think the most important thing for any aspiring entrepreneur is that you just have to go for it. You can only make progress by putting in the reps. And you'll be surprised by how quickly you build muscle.
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