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Hi everyone!
It’s been a month since my last update, but rest assured, I’ve been busy with exciting developments in the Onchain community. I’m thrilled to share all the latest news with you today. I hope you’re all enjoying a wonderful summer. 😎
tl;dr
In the last month, we've been busy building Maester, an AI-powered platform designed to help creators discover and use dApps effectively.
We entered the Base Onchain Summer Hackathon, built an amazing team, and tackled challenges to make Maester a valuable tool for onchain creators.
I’m excited to share our progress and can’t wait for you to try Maester soon. Stay tuned for more updates! 🚀
The last time you received a post from me, Supermigrate was just about to kickstart the great migration, and everyone was anticipating Base’s Onchain Summer. That was about a month ago. So…what have I been up to since then? 👀
To give you a better understanding of these screenshot, let me provide some background on what inspired this build.
When I started the Onchain Entrepreneur newsletter, I wanted to focus on creators and entrepreneurs in the space, spotlighting good dApps that can help them monetize, create, sell, connect with friends, grow their community, and enjoy all the benefits of being onchain. I never imagined myself building anything because I’m not a seasoned developer. Rather, I considered myself someone who would one day consult for creators and businesses migrating onchain. Not that I’m scared to get my hands dirty — I’ve been doing that as long as I can remember — but it just didn’t feel like my path to build a software solution.
Post-Base Onchain Summer, I was excited to see the incredible things coming out of the ecosystem and looked forward to telling you all about them. But then I noticed a problem among the crypto natives: half the time, they don’t know where to look when searching for dApps that perform certain functionalities. It’s not that dApp registries don’t exist — they do — but they function like dictionaries. You look up a word to find its meaning, but it’s harder to find the word if you only know its meaning or attributes. Similarly, people looking for specific functionalities or use cases in a dApp, but not knowing its name, won’t find the dApp registry helpful.
For instance, someone might search for “a wallet that can help me spend my cash like crypto,” but unless they know the platform name “Onboard Wallet,” they won’t find it. There are people looking for token-gated platforms for web3 publishing, crypto-music platforms, onchain Shopify, etc. These are use cases and functionalities, and you can’t search a dApp registry for that — you need to know the platform’s name.
Every week, someone is looking for a solution to this or that, and I thought…
The grand goal is to onboard the next billion people and build a better onchain experience. Solving this problem can make it easier for newcomers to find creator tools and dApps tailored to their specific needs and start using them effectively. A few weeks ago, I joined a Base Twitter space where I talked about the onchain creative space. A lot of people resonated with what I had to say and connected with me after the call. Five thousand people tuned in because Jesse Pollak and Yele Bademosi were hosting. I was nervous the whole time (I love to be heard but don’t really love to be seen 🤭).
I called my friend Dennis to tell him what I had done. He said he was on the call the whole time and was excited to come onchain. He suggested that if I could identify a problem worth solving, we should build a solution. I told him about how I had been pointing people to dApps weekly because they didn’t know where to look, and I wanted to build a solution for that. He said, “Build it.” And with that, I felt pumped to give it a shot. Why shouldn’t I ship a product as well?
Below is the journey of how I went about the last month, what got built, the team, the challenges, and what’s next. I hope you all enjoy and find some inspiration to pursue an idea that’s been in the back of your mind as well.
Sections in today’s post:
The journey so far
The Team
Maester v0.1
Challenges
Reflection
Let’s dive in 🚀
The Buildup
I began reaching out to friends and respected individuals in the space. They all agreed it was a brilliant idea. I consulted my friend Justice, one of the engineers behind Supermigrate, about the tech stack, and Dami, who is spearheading Base adoption in Africa. Dami and I were supposed to get on a call, but it didn’t happen until he heard me speak during that Twitter space. He was then eager to connect, and we spoke at length about my intention to build a platform for the onchain space to help creators showcase their decentralized solutions, enabling users to explore and engage. He suggested I sign up for the Onchain Summer Buildathon and join the creator track.
I knew I had to get my friends involved in this idea. They were interested in getting into the web3 space, and I felt this was their way in.
The Team
We all got on a call where I began pitching the idea and my research. Two minutes into the call, they fell in love with the value proposition and overall goal of the product. Paul, our engineer, suggested we integrate ChatGPT, Google Translate, and other features to enhance user experience, focusing on the engagement and effectiveness of the discovery process. Dennis, our all-round design geek, began working on the design. He created the book cover as the banner for any dApp listed on our platform, and we both came up with the name “Maester” from Game of Thrones, as it suited our platform’s aim.
The team reminded me of an article I read by Chloe Langford for Creative Independent about being in a collective of three. She talked about accommodating different voices as individual creators while sharing ideas that exist in the same universe but have their own identities. This resonates with how we work together. We are stronger together, with more resources and reputation, even if not massively famous. Our collective work supports our individual efforts.
And that is how I began building Maester with my friends — a collective of three (a product manager, software engineer, and product designer).
Maester
Maester addresses the significant challenge of discovering and effectively using decentralized applications (dApps) within the blockchain ecosystem. It’s a faster and easier way for on-chain creators to discover dApps with AI. Maester helps on-chain creators find dApps for various creative purposes, such as publishing, music, art, and more, making it easier to find tools that match their specific needs.
Maester is free to use and simple to get started with. Just ask, and Maester will help you find and explore dApps based on your specific needs and interests.
Let me show you how it works. First, you enter a query. For example, let’s say you’re looking for a token-gated platform for publishing content. Just type your request into Maester.
Maester uses advanced AI to interpret your query, even if it’s phrased unusually. It then searches its extensive database of dApps to find the best matches for your specific requirements.
In just a few moments, Maester provides a list of recommended dApps tailored to your needs. Each recommendation comes with a brief description and key features, making it easy to understand what each dApp offers.
You can then click on any of the recommended dApps to explore them further. check out the details, user reviews, and see if it fits what you’re looking for.
Over time, Maester learns from your interactions and preferences, giving you increasingly personalized recommendations. This makes it even easier to find the perfect dApps for your projects.
Product owners or developers can also submit their dApp to be listed on Maester. After going through our vetting process, your dApp could become part of our extensive database, helping more users discover and utilize your solution.
Whether you’re a seasoned crypto native or new to the blockchain space, Maester simplifies the discovery process, saving you time and effort.
Challenges
Some of the challenges we faced while building included implementing an effective search function. Users might ask for platforms in very unusual or specific ways, making a hard-coded or keyword search unreliable. To overcome this, we integrated machine learning to improve search accuracy and handle the varied ways people might phrase their questions.
Currently
We submitted our project for the Base Onchain Summer Hackathon, which ended on July 31. I’m so proud of how far we have come, considering our build time. We still have some tasks to execute while we continue updating the database with more dApps that creators will find valuable. It’s been all-around fun, and I can’t wait for you all to test it out with us.
Reflection
In summary, this has been an incredible journey!.
I wish I had brought everyone along when I started, building in public and sharing regular updates on our progress. But I plan to do that now, which is why I’m writing to you. I’m so happy to have worked on this with my friends and to have such great people around me. I truly understand the saying about not being the smartest in the group, as every day I get inspired and learn something new from doing this with them.
It’s been a tough week because I didn’t push out any articles during this time, and we were also juggling our project, Futuro. Aside from Onchain Summer, we also got into Build Space Season 5, where we are building functional objects we would like to have onchain.
-brainstorming on distribution; how to make our functional designs accessible on the blockchain
cc :@_nightsweekends s5
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It’s actually fun to have two projects you truly love running at the same time — it feels like breaking the saying “you can’t serve two masters at the same time.” But that’s the beauty of being in a collective: different skill sets but mutual interest, with all-around support.
That’s all for today. I hope you all have a great weekend — see you next week! I hope to share the link with you all then.
