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Fireside Chat with Notifi
Recorded: Oct. 20, 2023 Duration: 0:33:42Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you for listening.
I just noticed that the Spaces now supports desktop.
Oh, do they?
Big upgrade.
Thanks, Ivan.
Yeah, it took like, I don't know, two years.
Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?
Hey, Unique?
Yes.
Last time I did it, it was like a dead silence.
I rejoined the space.
Nice.
Unique, where are you calling from?
You think, everything, yeah.
do you say frisco fresco yeah frisco so f-r-i-s-c-o i thought you were saying san francisco in a cool
way for a sec oh no no i've heard that before yeah no it's uh no it's where they're building
the next like uh is it universal studios or whatever like the theme or in texas nice
oh interesting
actually there's like a fair bunch of people in crypto out of texas
low taxes man yeah everywhere from like austin to dallas yeah i always thought that dallas was
kind of weird uh just a random place all right so is this everyone i know we had technical
difficulties but we can probably get started yeah sorry i'm trying to like log in from our
corporate account but something's not working
but yeah go go for it we can kick it off cool so context for the the listeners is um nibiru partnered
with notify to add notification support which you may have seen in the new web application so this is
just a chat to learn more about the founders and team members on the notify team and then also just
more about their product offering
cool so i guess let's just start with um can you guys introduce notify what is it
true yeah um let me introduce myself too first uh just for the audience and whoever's listening
uh my name is paul i'm one of the co-founders notify um you know my background's mostly been
in web 2 uh worked at most of the fangs i've done like a fair share of my tour there uh worked at
aws uh microsoft one point of my life and uh worked at oral cloud um and uh you know came over to build
out this product uh called notify because we saw like an opportunity slash gap in just communication
tooling uh for web 3 projects and users um i think most of us know like you know twitter
discord as like the only means of communication for projects and users but um you know we always
thought that there is something you know going back to basics of uh providing things like you know more
insights but also like programmatic messaging uh things that are happening on chain that you don't
normally get to see uh too much of uh to be persisted uh in channels that you know you're familiar with
so you know sometimes you do want a liquidation you know notification or um you know proposal alerts
that are sent to your email because you check them more regularly than anything else so uh notify
provides a lot of the tooling and infrastructure for um you know on chain monitoring and messaging to
actually happen uh so that users can kind of be a little bit more uh you know accustomed to kind
the web 2 experiences that they you know spent the last whatever 15 20 years experiencing
got it and so how did you guys come up with the idea to get started on it and what were some of
the what were the early days of those i like yeah so um i think the reason why we got started was um
you know i came into defi around like the tail end of defi summer uh got really excited about it and
uh you know definitely a big learning curve for everybody coming in um and i thought that you know
in order to get this or to unlock the next kind of uh big user adoption uh things have to be simpler
and uh you know it's hard to navigate uh if you're not really like you know web3 native so in order to
get like my parents or my friends or my you know my family to kind of like convert over um i just
thought that there had to be a better way to stay connected to things that are happening on on the
blockchain and uh you know we wanted to start with how do we enable like better customer experiences
um and that's a place that you know we feel pretty passionate about so it was very easy to kind of think
about like okay well you know we love middleware we love helping other projects uh that's kind of
like our affinity um if we can also like you know push forward you know enhancing customer experiences
um you know why wouldn't we want to do this place uh uh you know you know play in this space because
uh it's something that we you know feel always super passionate about and something that connects
users together so that that was one of the main reasons why we thought that you know this area
needed to be you know built out uh in order for more adoption to happen but of course at the same
time uh you know it's a crucial area that it it's kind of a chicken or egg problem right um if
infrastructure like this isn't available and user experiences aren't given and built in a similar
matter it's always going to be always difficult to onboard the next batch of folks so uh we saw it as
like a perfect storm for us of specializing it but also feeling super passionate about you know helping
uh the community uh and you know pushing the utility of of a blockchain even further is like
an added bonus did you find that with what you thought the project would become on its initial
onset and what it is now it's uh similar to your initial idea or did you guys kind of like
evolve the like strategy or your approach over time well it's definitely evolving i think everything
in crypto moves so quickly uh you know when we started like just for just for context of like
the scale of changes when we first started we started on solana and tara you know uh that was our
first two chains that uh we wanted to like support the tooling for um and this is like last last april i
guess um so we had like a firm definition of what the product or the vision of the product should be and
and how how like we were we're kind of addressing a lot of the gaps in user experience that's never
changed um but what has changed is really about you know things about like what other tools that we
have to add or education that we have to give and bringing projects who who require the tool but also
consumers who are starting to like um you know experience other ways of of comms is like it's
something that's ever it's been evolving every quarter right um even the chains that we initially
like identify to push forward um you know some of them are here and some of them aren't here but
we always saw ourselves as uh you know very chain agnostic and we thought that communication infra
should be pretty much available to any uh blockchain so like core principles like that haven't changed
it's i guess it's really around like you know the details of the execution that has been a little bit
different got it got it cool so i guess what what are the different communication channels that
people can use with notify i know you mentioned like governance and announcements and like different
on-chain interactions um i guess what are they what sorts of ways do people get notifications and
then what are the different areas they can get them yeah so uh we initially started uh our our very
first poc uh was a governance proposal tool uh for uh one of the bigger i guess like the biggest uh
dow platforms on solana and essentially it was like very simply um the pain like the problem was how do we
increase voter participation right because there's always a quorum that needs to be met sometimes for
some of these proposals and uh you know previously before like it just wasn't meeting any sort of like
it was getting like five percent seven percent turnout right um so like you know dow's you know
weren't super efficient in that sense um so one of our first pocs was just simply just do like a
proposal alert and a reminder um that it was like expiring or you haven't voted um to come vote
and we did that through email and i think sms those were our first two channels that we supported
um and this is like very much controversial at that time um because a lot of folks believe that
nobody wanted these communication um channels that you know doxing or whatever uh was something that
you know people just wasn't a big favor of but uh with that poc uh i think we had something crazy
in terms of like we got like 3 000 4 000 users who signed up uh in a period of a week uh voter
participation in like you know tripled um so it it turned out like people you know if if it was um
helping their use case like it's like if you're buying governance tokens for a project you want to be
informed so nobody really had had any hesitation on uh you know providing these like uh channels or
these like uh you know emails or phone numbers to get this information uh in fact people were kind
of the opposite they were like they wanted it and they were demanding this um much to kind of like
the i guess uh surprise of a lot of like crypto desises right um and it turns out i think uh you know
when we see this uh you know kind of like proliferate a little bit more so in the world defy
it happens the same way too i think people who um you know have this idea that like um you know
not taking too much monitoring or like not taking too much proactive measure of seeing your positions
and stuff uh in in defy is it's kind of missing a component uh people just assume that just never
happened but it doesn't mean that people didn't want it right and i think that's been happening for
us a lot more and we've been getting asked and requests to do more uh types of alerts um whether
it be order fills limit orders um you know there's a whole plethora of different like defy use cases
um that people are just familiar with in you know different centralized exchanges or any kind of like
you know uh you know portfolio management tool um so we're getting a lot of those asks to go deeper
into some of these like uh alerts but also like adding additional support for different channels
um our biggest request has has been telegram in the last like i think year year and a half
um and now like 30 40 percent of our volume comes through telegram in terms of like preferred channels
like we give users the option to choose how many they want and they simply always kind of go with
email and telegram as like one of the two biggest uh you know participations uh discord is something that
we also support so if you want alerts to your discord channel you can get it that way as well
uh we're supporting things like twitter as as a communication channel too but our our thesis and
our our promise was that you know we will continue to add more and more user channels uh that people
are asking for and uh we don't dictate um you know how like you know you want to get alerts like
everyone has their own preference everyone uses their own tools uh how they want to they want to
actually consume the data and we just give optionality to everybody to uh you know get as many
notifications across different channels as you want yeah that's awesome i'm curious though across like
you know with that many different platforms you're supporting and then you know obviously you support a
lot more l1s and l2s that are like evm and non-evm since like you're you know since the early days
like now uh notifies got support on a ton of chains how do you guys kind of like manage being compatible
with so many different stacks or like what's kind of the architecture that supports all this yeah i think
um it's always definitely been a challenge uh for scaling uh and that's kind of the interesting
problem and area that we kind of tackle um you know to simply kind of answer this question though
like i guess our original architecture and our solution was always oriented around multi-chain
or chain agnostic um so we always made sure that that was like our core uh tenant that we kind of like
built our product around and i think that's one of the biggest things that uh is very challenging for
a lot of projects out there is that sometimes like back you know two years ago plus everyone
was a little bit more tribal and you know this uh singular chain uh monotheistic you know approach
of you know building for one was the only reason like the only like practical idea then right so like
when you support multi-chains i think your entire solution and design has to be re-architected
um so we kind of work backwards from you know what we thought was you know the the you know the end
state which is like you know we're gonna we're gonna support multi-chain notify will be across you
know whatever 100 plus uh in the future um so our architecture wasn't too bad like we we made it
we built it so that we could scale this and i think that's what's been kind of our secret sauce is that
um we've always had a plan in terms of how we built and what our solutions could do
so therefore like it wasn't always an issue um expanding into things it was always built purposely
for that and uh you know supporting a new chain honestly takes us somewhere around two to three
weeks at the most um i mean if it's evm it's even simpler right and i think that's kind of been
that's been kind of the most interesting aspect of of kind of web three is that there's a lot of
similarities in kind of web two and i think if you plan ahead and you know you make the right bets
um sometimes it's a lot easier to kind of scale up
got it what would you say kind of sets notify apart from other like similar products
i think we look to optimize like a very user-centric uh product approach um so we believe um i mean i guess
it's like a more web two principle is that you know we're we're in for providers or service providers
or tooling right and tooling should never be kind of forefront um if we do our jobs correctly like
nobody should know that notify powers any project slash consumer notification right like consumers
should never know right and that's kind of how we built our product structure around is that you know
when users go into like uh you know a product um you know on nibiru they see it as a notification
natively uh on their ui and they just see it as like any other notification uh preference they would
have in web two right like if you go to uber and you sign up for alerts or you go to i don't know like
your robin hood and sign up for notifications you don't know it's being powered by other providers
or other infrastructure services right um and we call that like being first class native to be very
customer centric um and i think we try to optimize uh and you know build our product around that right
the relationship that a notification service provider has with the consumer is always via the project or
the company right um and i think a lot of our like web three like parallels um kind of go the opposite
way is that like composability is big but from a ui perspective and i think you know that's something
that we don't really you know kind of subscribe to is that composability should be at the infrastructure
level it should never be from a user experience level all right um and that doesn't really scale
uh at the same time so where we kind of differentiate a lot and we programmatically like programmatically
build our product around is that you know one day like you know i think today we have a logo that
says powered by notify but you know at the end of the day like that should never be that right like
you could you could remove that and customers shouldn't care and wouldn't care uh they just
know that they're getting alerts from nibiru they're getting alerts from uber um or twitter
or whatever it is right um there should be no like middleman in a sense right and i think that's
kind of where we built our a lot of our product um you know structure around and we provide that
at like a scalable solution um and uh yeah that's been kind of like our secret sauce
yeah i especially noticed like um one of the things we found early with me and you guys was like
it is really custom catered more so than like uh i think it was like dialect and then you know if
you're going to push notification service i guess like close things in my head um but yeah notify
supports like basically anything you could you could monitor like if you can think of how to
programmatically get it then you can make a notification for it which is pretty awesome
yeah i mean that's kind of how that's like like a early thesis that we had was that eventually i think
also the weird thing in web3 is that not many things are monitored even though it's like on chain
i think because it's on chain folks don't think about like um actually indexing it right and because
they don't index it it's hard to alert or notify anybody on top of that right um and that's kind
of like the unique uh angle that we also kind of saw early was that a lot of projects uh don't have
like a you know their own database tracking different um you know statuses or or orders and
transactions is like you know the database is you know it's web3 it's on is decentralized it's on
chain um and i think that's what we realized was that you know if we're gonna do this um you know do
this product uh in this space that we would have to provide a lot of like the end-to-end tooling uh to
support uh a last mile notification to the user and that's why we went super custom or provided a lot
custom um dynamics so that people can you know pick and choose how they want to craft um the alert to
to eventually get a user message to them
i see and how has been how has the feedback been so far does it like through what avenues do you get
to ask people and kind of have that dictate your future roadmap um yeah love to kind of chip into this
uh and then i think alex can probably give a little more background he's our chief product officer and
he's the one kind of like uh you know setting the roadmap direction um but for for kind of like our
perspective you know we like to be as close to our customers as possible i think we bring a lot of that
principle like understanding of discerning you know how to you know figure out collectively uh what our
product is doing and how we can best fit or kind of address any problems or requests from uh our user base
um and i think that's kind of maybe a little bit different like i think you know um being customer
obsessed and and having feedback loops to provide directional um you know insights about where we're trying
to go and how we're trying to get there together um maybe a little bit different i guess um in in kind
of like the b2b space like for us you know projects are our customers so you know there's less projects
than there are consumers right uh like we don't need a discord server or a community to manage feedback
coming into our product we can go directly to our customers um and we distinctly know who they are and
and how to reach out to them in the frequency um but yeah maybe alex can kind of give a little bit
more insight into kind of like the how we kind of scale this out yeah and um good to good to meet y'all
um so unique are you looking for i guess how we get feedback or or your plans for future
um i mean you can take it in either direction i i guess one one thing i was looking at too is uh
how do you know what to build across time i guess yeah i think you know paul alluded to
like being a b2b company makes it a bit easier you know we have hypotheses on where things are going
like you know cross-chain multi-channel communication um bringing some of the best of of our web 2 experience
and into into web 3 and d5 specifically you know like frankly i like the biggest sales pitch that
often works works for me is you know we need to level up d5 to where c5 is today all right user
experience is amazing um it's super fast from the notifications engagement standpoint um it all works
really well re-engaging your users bringing them back stealing them from from other other competitors
so we take a lot of these core principles and then we kind of socialize it with the team and evangelize
it and i guess with the teams we work with and um yeah you know that's really that's really been the
direction i think you know fortunate for us there's like a really nice roadmap on how the world has been
dealing with engagement acquisition notifications for for many years so you know we try to try to push
everyone we work with to go down this path and sometimes it sticks and um sometimes it doesn't
make sense actually in web 3. got it so in in terms of like um let's say on your site there's
developers marketers and individuals there's like the breakdown what are the we've largely talked about
like i think developers and individuals um how does it cater to marketers when you're actually
working with yeah so our core product is the ability to go and send real-time really tailored
personal one-to-one messages to your users um and so you know we think it's time that web 3 marketers
really like step it up and use our tooling there's so much available data on chain to to learn about what
your users are doing what's important who's really a whale who's not um and we give the ability for a
to go and blast these messages and these announcements to to one to all your users so
um you know viewership is going to be much higher than just posting randomly on twitter and hoping
someone just like happened to be on at that time or set an alert um as well as the ability to send
something really tailored to a unique subset of audiences um like you know maybe maybe you know jesse
wants to send something to just your whales who you know who hold more than you know whatever whatever
adam or have transacted more than like fifty thousand dollars in the in the last couple days
all right so we give that power to her and to marketers as well um and this goes to where we think
web 3 needs to evolve it you know it needs to level up in your engagement your ability to be really
targeted and so yeah we take that power and um we give it to anyone who uh who wants to use it
and you know we see adoption here um increasing pretty rapidly
do you get to uh what sort of analytics do you get for the notifications you have
yeah so we provide data back on um every notification that's been sent and we don't have
like the actual user data in it but it's like this template went to this wallet address and this
wallet address is subscribed to x notifications across x different channels or destinations so we
give all that all that um i guess power back and then also on the email front for any wallet or any
dap that wants it you can see read receipts as well of of email addresses so um you can know that
you know 30 percent 30 percent of users actually like opened and clicked on this specific email
that a marketer may have sent
got it very cool
i guess for as we're kind of wrapping up here um what would be kind of like a closing remark you
guys would want to say to i guess the listeners users or maybe potential partners
yeah um we think obviously this is this is the future and a very important step in
of easing the usability for all love three and really bringing defy up to par with you know frankly
your bank in a weird way to to say that or you know schwab so um yeah we think this is like really
a table stakes feature that everyone everyone needs and should add and i think we've seen a lot of
traction in the market from it um if you're interested in checking us out just go to our
website notify.network you can see our github you can self-integrate um we're happy to go chat with
you as well and so you can find everything on our website it's pretty easy awesome yeah thanks again
for joining and letting us learn about what you're doing great i appreciate it thanks for thanks for
coordinating this cool and then i guess if one of the audience members if you guys have a quick
question we can do that live
and say going once going twice
all right guys
awesome i guess we'll end it here thanks unique thanks everyone
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