The story of Dune Analytics and making onchain data accessible

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm Jaybird joined by my co-host Kyle reedhead and we believe that on-chain data is going to change the world that's why we're carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3. you know I've been really excited for this episode knowing that we were going to get Dune on the podcast we've been users of Dune for a long time if you're a pro member of ours we literally share Dune charts every single week all the time in our Discord channel so I don't know there's a tool in web3 that I use more than than Dune it's been a long time coming to

finally get them on the podcast and I think the reason why I love this conversation outside of just like learning about Dune and what they're thinking about where the on-chain world is going to go is dudes had an incredible story right they've been around their OG's they've been around since what 2017 they've gone through bull market bear Market bull market bear Market uh and what now we're whatever hopefully in a bull market so they've been through those ups and downs that roller coaster and he talks all us through that entire story in this episode and it was um just a great story here yeah I think the big thing that stands out to me from this episode my big takeaway is when you start a business you don't necessarily know what your product's gonna be you you know

what you think it's going to be and in dune's case they had a plan of a product they went and they sold that to a customer and then they ended up firing their customers because they realized that they needed to Pivot to a different product and that was probably the biggest Matt's talks about I was probably the best decision they made when they decided to focus on a community open source platform where anybody could build dashboards rather than a closed system which was a big risk that's difficult to do as a founder and mats and Frederick his co-founder clearly have got big kahonas to make these big decisions and that's part of the story that Matt's talks about is

really just that like written that grind to keep on going and really to make big bets and it's tough to make big bets in the space but that's what you got to do and so awesome to hear that story from from the founder himself yeah to give him a bit of context I don't think we really explained exactly what Dune is in the podcast just kind of funny we just delve into this story assuming everyone knows Doom but if you don't know what Dune is essentially it is a tool that allows you to pull data from um from on-chain across many different blockchains and you can pull it using SQL which is like a language code and and then you can turn it into charts and so you can pull you know ethereum transactions you can pull the volume that's locked in protocols on specific

apps you can basically any data from any smart contract so whether it's nfts it's you know fungible tokens it's wallets it's whatever you can get at all obviously that has incredible implications to it right this data is extremely useful from trying to understand who's using what applications trying to understand how much money is where how money's flowing how revenues are being created across apps where expenses are like it's especially when things are on chain you have so much more transparency and so you can get so much more data than we can on businesses and use cases that are not Unchained and dune is really that tool that's allowing us to get all that obviously again we use it all the time in our newsletter so many of you have seen it we often show

doing charts on YouTube for our podcast so you've likely seen it whether you know it or not but it's a it's a very very useful tool in uh in web3 then the other thing just to mention quickly is we talk about this episode one new feature that dude is working on is the integration with AI and Matt's talks about how important that is to their future and what they're doing really to allow crypto data to become more accessible to the masses I won't get into the details you have to listen to the show to understand that but uh really interesting always love seeing this combination of blockchain and AI we talk about the time on the show AI is part of web 3 and it is really what is it's equally part of this next big phase

the internet and here's an example of a company integrating both and a Founder who really believes that AI could be the next big thing in order to help them achieve their mission so yeah really really love seeing that we don't see that enough let's jump in but before we do we'll just take a minute to hear from our sponsors modern newsletters are built on paragraph that's right paragraph is a brand new newsletter platform that combines the best parts of web 2 and web3 to supercharge newsletters for both writers and readers build a community not just an audience paragraph uses blockchain Tech to allow readers to collect and own the words that matter to them this takes reading a newsletter to the next level where

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the opportunity of being early GM mats welcome the show thanks for having me it's great to be here we're so excited to have you for so many reasons one Dune obviously massive part of the web 3 ecosystem but also a big part of our business at web3 Academy we use Dune for our Pro reports every week we wouldn't be here without you so deep bow of gratitude really excited to get into your story I want to start off with sort of going back to the beginning because you guys have got such an interesting Founders story really a true story of what it's like to start a business to go through the trenches to you know pivot your

business your product along the way to struggle of not making Revenue in the beginning I know I've heard Frederick your co-founder talk about that before can you give us sort of in your own words taking us back to the beginning of the origin story of Dune yeah for sure and it's interesting climbing as well because we're just closing in on five years since we founded the company so take the the actual date it's like September 1st or something while the first piece of code was written end of July five years ago yeah we were to guys and Oslo with corporate jobs who got killed on crypto and 2017 lost a bunch of money

over the course of 2017 2018 drop and somehow still found ourselves talking about crypto you know at work over coffee over beers and eventually decided you know we can't be on the outside of this this is just too exciting there's too much stuff here it makes too much sense and so my background was as a data scientist so it was pretty natural for me to start looking digging into the data we had done some work already with prototypes smart contracts Etc but it wasn't really my strong series but touching the data structuring it was both the strong suit for me but also like non-existent in the space 2018 like

literally every application was you know very recently funded and was enrolling their own search data indexing stuff I think Doom was founded about the same time as the graph which is another project that you know tries to solve data for crypto companies and so it's just a massive lift at the beginning and we like our journey took us back and forth we had no salary for I think eight or ten months something like that in the beginning that was pretty brutal we were quite literally two weeks from folding down the company when we were accepted into like our first incubator and so at that point you know we spent

all our money to go to eat Denver like literally the last piece of money we had in June which was I think two thousand dollars or something 1500 to go to Denver fly to Denver and go to the hackathon and meet people and we found investors there it's pretty unimaginable that could happen what year was um what year yeah what year was that it was 2020 must have been 20 20. 2020 really okay no no two no it could have been because we didn't answer this thing this year 2019 yeah okay that makes sense 2019. what was the initial product that you planned when you first started Doom what did you

think the product was going to be who did you think your customers were going to be we thought we would build something like Google analytics or mixed tunnel or amplitude for the product teams you know people need to understand how their products are used and we thought that you know just like in the web 2 world it's like the internal stakeholders that matter the most like our vision was to build you know basically that preset dashboards that would measure your attention your core analysis your activation rates all that stuff and we were working on that until someone said just stop just give me the data just literally give me access to your database and I will pay you and

that was Nadal who's the CTO at openc today you were this back then it was the CEO of a company called Dharma and that's our first customer first break like literally the first mummy we exceed and I scrambled like I'm the engineer in the co-founding relationship and so I scrambled hard to get in that data but we did so you thought you were going to be this Google analytics you got this customer you got in this incubator whoever that incubator is I want to kiss them on the lips because thank God that they brought you in and you were two weeks away from closing what we would do without dude so happy that we have you so but you mentioned that you had like eight to ten months of no salary like and I think

this is the thing that so many startup Founders and so many of our listeners Miss in this space is it's so easy to look at the projects that make it and be like they must have always been successful right we don't hear enough of the stories of like the struggle and the suffer and I think right now A lot of people are feeling that we're in a bear Market you started doing in the bear Market of 2019 how did you keep going what kept you going during that time of that suffering and that struggle yeah that's a great question and Hyper relevant for today where you know if you look at the amount of funding that goes into crypto it's falling off the clip right so what kept us going was ultimately

conviction and crypto and conviction and you know the need for like a data layer for the people who are building this stuff 10 months even after we arrest our corresponding you know all we heard was like this is not big enough this isn't going to work there's slight enough crypto companies it's not novel enough we need State uh you know and the people we try to sell to at that time they would go to etherscan and check how many transactions happened the day before because it was you could literally count that like you could if you were the CEO of some company you could go to either Scout and count while there was 12 users on my product yesterday so actually he's

telling someone who's in that selling a data tool to someone in that position it's pretty hard you don't need a chart if you can you know just calculate unsolicited advices you know like don't give up you have to stay in the game be alive in order to succeed I think I think there are many companies many startups over the last couple of years who basically could race without showing to anything and you know that's very comfortable but at the end of the day I have to show show something and money is not always the answer to that actually so like he kind of took us up to 2019 2020 you guys made it through you got some investment I think the next few years were really

good in crypto right 2020 2021 things went crazy there's two things that come to mind for me is one when you built Dune nfts didn't well technically didn't really exist or at least we're not prop like popular at all right now it's the it's a big use case for Dune for sure everyone's looking at what's going on with nfts and you can see it all from on there so interesting to hear like the story around that of did you guys catch on to that right off the bat was that something that you guys kind of missed or like what happened there and then I guess the other thing is for Doom to succeed the one thing you were really waiting for was like everything needed to go on chain and now we're in the middle of on chain summer right it seems like a lot is happening on chain finally

there's a lot of things launching even though we're not yet in a full-on bull market on chain activity is definitely picking up and we'll talk a bunch about that after but just curious about those two specific points in your guy's journey of like okay nfts came about how did that go down with Dune and then now that finally things are really happy on chain what's happened like yeah those are great questions and spot on we at one point fired our customers and before there was a lot of we said you are paying us a thousand dollars a month to access this data in a database however we will offer this for free on a website so you can create an account here and do the same thing that you do for free and hope you'll create an

account and did you have investors at this point your investors must have been like what the heck are you doing yeah we we had that first investor and that was pretty crazy but it was like the pivotal moment for the insurance so we basically took this data and turned it inside out right we built a platform that that that's anyone look at the data points not just the product manager and the company but the product manager of their competitor their token holders their investors anyone who's interested in the entire world like internally we call this like the stakeholder explosion like there's just so many more people who are interested in the data in crypto then there is an

what two or other Industries just so many more people um so we did that and that was like didn't really work for a long time it did not really work not a lot of users came we had a feud we had a few really good ones that you know Frederick and I were basically I was spending my Friday nights with a user in New York and on telegram helping him write secrets like one-on-one with one of them as a user yes and Frederick too when I Didn't Do It Frederick did it with the one user and we did it with a couple and eventually we formed a little telegram group where these people where the users could help know each other and before we knew it this thing that didn't

really work what kind of hit was defy summer remember that like suddenly there were like a new crazy D5 product being created every day and there was one key property of being that made us so saturally not which was our data stack allowed us to basically make sort of decoded or human readable data for any smart contract in a matter of seconds like any user could give us like the ABI that decodes the encoded data and we would be up and running and so we had such fast turnaround and while it wasn't like permissionless like I was

like 24 7 like just like adding all these requests and suddenly during that summer like Dino was everywhere and after that we were able to actually raise the seed round that we kind of had to scrape together to be honest but we managed at least then the second sort of huge moment obviously was nfts and I think these two moments are pivotal and crypto history nfts uh were everywhere a couple years ago and still are and so June also that was fantastic for Deuce growth and I think also Dean was fantastic for the growth of nfcs because we could help everyone understand and ought to help with transparency volumes whether or not you're a Trader

or yeah whatever it didn't work for you during that time it still does so yeah those are the the two big moments and yes I'm hoping on chain summer is something similar not just because it would be great for Jin obviously but also because I'm having a lot of fun yeah there's a lot of cool apps and I think the word on the street is obviously friend Tech which is novel and cool and weird and buggy but there's just exploding right and so I feel like someone like if it's coinbase or Optimus and whoever it is they're manifesting some sort of like bull market for on-chain activity and

I'm here for it yeah us too The Vibes are back everybody's excited our podcast the roll up that we do every week we do a news roll up every week and it's been fun again and the news is like the energy is good you know it's yeah it's exciting to see so we talked about what it's like to struggle through a startup in the bear Market I just want to flip it because we talk a lot about on the show is trying to encourage people like Hey we're almost there right who knows when the bull market comes but we're seeing early signs you mentioned on chain summer The Vibes are high things are happening and you mentioned that you had to scrape together your seed round which I think was 8 million that you raised for your

seed round but then two million two million okay two million yeah but then you did a much bigger raise during the bull market and I've heard stories and correct me if I'm wrong that you turned down some big money at that point because everybody wanted a piece and all of a sudden things were happening so I'm just curious for our listeners I'd love to hear you tell the story of like that difference of what it's like to when all of a sudden all the energy is coming in people are coming on chain and how that impacts fundraising how that impacts your team and the energy how that impacts the users and your community versus what it was like during the bear just because I think we're getting close to that and I

want our users to like know that that is coming and to hear from you what that's like at this Freedom Wall actually when things turn around like overnight They Don't Really Turn Around overnight or they didn't for Dune but it felt like over the course of a very short time Dean went from something that was very Niche into like more of a mainstream product and and last year is that we had talked to before and they had passed on us many times we did hundreds of calls and emails and telegram things Etc they would submitting us so after after we had raised the seed so be a year after we haven't spent any of that seed money really

and but suddenly we were getting messages like hey you racing it took a few of those to ask ourselves should we be racing maybe we should race and so we talked to to some first some mute and someone some who had rejected us before and we went with USB for our series rejected us for the seat and so those were sort of the partners we wanted to we were very happy to secure that running and with that far but yeah the whole that week I think I speak for both myself and Frederick was the most intense week of running you never we were basically uncool

we were not in the gas like we were flying to this crypto that's trying to pretend we were part of the scene and then in the course of one week we went from like not racing to having fun our eight million dollar Series today with one of the world's best VC terms and we signed that on Friday night after coming off a call where we turned turned down another investor with a higher offer and it was brutal it was super brutal and as a founder of course it's kind of like the best situation you can be in but it's still brutal so we needed to decompress a little bit after that yeah this boy scene was like five people

okay five or six people how big is the team now around 40 45 wow okay so you guys seems in good growth when was that that you guys had your um your eight million dollar investment it was so I'm notoriously bad with dates but it has to be 21 right yeah that's a good thing must have been or early 2022 but probably 2021 well because I know that you did your series B in 2022 so when you raise yes so it is 9 million 420 000 which is just the most beautiful web 3 crypto number of all time yeah I think it that number reflects the Mania of the bull market

if I'm being perfectly honest that race was you know very well timed again we had the opportunity to decide whether or not we wanted to race and we decided to make a joke out of it there were other companies that also raised a lot of money who made jokes about it yeah that was also intense I'd love to hear your thoughts on sort of where things go from here and you can talk in the perspective of Dune specifically or on chain specifically if you prefer I think one of the things that we've seen a big trend on we just had the founder of zapper on our black ass as well and we talked a lot about just like a lot of things are going to happen on chain I think they already are but I think more and more things will go Unchained and the one big thing is we

need that there's a lot of data there and we need that to be readable there's many ways to make it readable right there's the etherscan way which is like tables there's Dune which is charts there's zapper which is like a feed and more sort of a social aspect of it and I think we need all them for many different reasons right and so I think Dune plays like a massive role in sort of that charting side of it and having the ability to do whatever you want with that data curious on what's next like you said okay it used to be D5 and you guys were sort of charting all that then it was nfts any thoughts on like where things go or like maybe even what's just the vision of Dune heading into the future do you guys have other products different ideas do you have maybe a

certain thought of where the like things are going to go on chain and you're preparing for that like what are you guys preparing for right now yeah great question I think it is very hard to predict what the next big thing is in crypto we don't necessarily try to predict what the next big thing is but we definitely you know we don't work on one thing all the time we have a period that's right in the fire so if I were to say like what are some things that we need to work on that's like preparing doing even more for a world where there is more chance and maybe a world where the chain doesn't matter as much like a more

application focused way of doing sort of data analysis I think right now we're all you know analyzing this up on ethereum or on base or on Solana but I think at least in the sort of evm ecosystem that part is like kind of slowly but surely being abstracted away a little bit at least with some of the walls that I use like this process is becoming more seamless the bridging I didn't know what chain bass was on like that's pretty seamless onboarding experience and even if I knew it was sorry friend.tech was on base even if I knew it was on base didn't matter to me

like and so I think that's that's one of the things that it's going to get really interesting is like I guess leveling up leveling up that because we also see you know some protocols like unit swap being deployed on how many chance right and doing that is really interesting and then of course our mission is to make crypto bid accessible and I think this year probably the most impactful technology to make anything accessible hit the spotlight which is large language models gb4 and chat GPT right and so we've been investing a lot and making more accessible through the use of a natural language interface So currently we have a a few different features out that lets you interact with

the SQL query and in natural language let's say specify in English what you're after and these are building blocks towards like a greater mission of like interacting with doing maybe with only natural language and not necessarily the sequel underneath so baby steps and building blocks but yeah that's what we're trying to do but let's just touch on that one a little bit further so for those who haven't used dune you need to use a I don't know if you want to call language or whatever called SQL or SQL and I mean not everyone knows that so that means that the data in Dune is not necessarily accessible to everyone I mean we use doing all the time I don't write SQL which means we had to hire someone to do

that for us and so what you're saying I guess or tell me if this is sort of your idea here with using AI large language models is eventually there's a world or maybe it already exists I'm not sure where I can say I want to see how many users are transacting on friendtech you know over the last 30 days and show me it weekly instead of writing that in code via SQL I can just write that in normal language and AI will basically translate that into the SQL and then it'll spit up the data for me is that the end goal exactly right that's exactly the angle and so we think that this you know enables anyone out so everyone who goes to Dune whether or not they write SQL or the Rouse dashboards

they come with a question like inherently they're trying to figure out something right that they did not know before and so I think English is kind of the ultimate interface for Q a and so we're pretty excited to to build towards that Edition and I want to make it clear I don't think it's like next week okay but for some limited use cases you can go and do today and actually say you know what were the top grossing nft pair on openc the last 24 hours and we can actually answer that without you writing a single line of code and yeah that's huge that's huge like I

think that it's easy for maybe if our listeners haven't used Doom before that is a massive unlock in terms of bringing you closer to your mission of making crypto accessible to everybody because as Kyle said most people don't know SQL so and they're not going to go learn SQL but now you're able through this new tool which I believe is called create wand I think is the name of this new llm tool in doing prep for the show I was I was playing around with it and I think it's just amazing what it can do here's what I think it's such a big deal is I see ethereum or or blockchains in general as like a truth machine right like you can go to it and you can verify what's actually happening in the world

you can't do that with anything that's not Unchained for the most part and so the interesting thing is like on Twitter all the time I see data that's just completely wrong people making up numbers and then you just go to I go to do and immediately and I just search World coin or I search friendtech and like I can either like we either have the dashboards or someone else has created them and I can go in and I can just see the live data and to me it's like okay there's the truth right what I got on Twitter was completely wrong button go to Dune and so two things kind of come on this I see Dune as like and I don't know if you guys see it this way it's like does dude end up becoming almost like a search engine because I find myself you can't go to Google and

be like how many users are on friendtech there's no information there you're going to read some shitty articles and some headlines but I find myself going to do and more frequently and actually searching on Dune and so like there's not social components yet undune but this is my other question is like not only just a search Ender but does it become a almost like a social platform because people have accounts on there I have names that I typically go to you can already like Star their dashboards and stuff you can't comment and things like that but like I could see it as a social media tool at some point and a search engine I'm not sure if those are something you guys think of a dude but that's that's sort of what I've gathered yeah no that's great definitely have thought about both and you know like

a few years back maybe I've caught myself in a delusional moment comparing ours ourselves to Google or something like that so I liked rephrasing about a truth machine but it's a very like cumbersome truth machine and there needs to be tools like viewing and others that help circus that truth and so if you think about how June does that basically we do that through a community of analysts so one valid approach when we sort of pivot the Dune from being this Google analytics thing would be we're just going to handwrite all the dashboards that matter like Frederick and me and RT are just going to specify what matters and there were a few different competitors at the time that did that

and they're not around and so what Dean really did was like capitalize on the sort of collective intelligence of the people in crypto and I think that was our best move ever and try to create as good of a move in the future but it's pretty difficult but yeah like that goes to say that there's a social element to it too like these are human beings people who are creating content sharing on Twitter getting Cloud getting gaining Stars some good jobs others work on Dune as their full-time job so I wouldn't rule out sort of any of those two I don't think Jean has decided

to be a search engine and I don't think we've decided to be a social network but there are elements of both but I think we we should have and be better oh like social media needs to be better that's just period whether or not student is a search engine company it just needs to be better right we're working on that there's definitely something in the content creation because like even us like our Twitter account we have weekly posts that go out that are just screenshots of our Dune charts right and I know it's all over Twitter I follow a ton of I think you called Dune Wizards they're doing the same thing so like a lot of content and really good content is being created from Dune but unfortunately we have to screenshot move it over it'd be nice if somehow it's integrated into lens and firecaster and

maybe one day Twitter but I could see that because it's a great content creating machine with very very valuable information sure yeah there's no excuse for not having those like share buttons the engineering boundary is like right away he's like you're right they're all right I I want to pull out one thing that you said and you've brought it up sort of twice now I think which is community around dude you said early on you had that telegram group and you brought people in the users could help the other users kind of use Dune and then you just said there was others I think you're referring to things like D5 pulse and others where you could just go on the site they would give you some data but they would make it themselves and there was nothing else to it most of those are

no longer existing except for like I don't know defy Lama I guess is one but dude the power of Dune is like there's so many people creating dashboards like on a scale that you and Frederick could have never done yourselves and also I mean I just met a lot of people in the Dune Community if you go on the discourse as well there's so many people in there and so many people building things talk to us a little bit about building Community because we always talk about the importance of that in any business web 3 or otherwise but obviously that's been probably the key thing for you guys it sounds like walk us through that story of community building maybe if there's tips you have I'm not sure what that brings up for you but we'd just love to hear you talking about Community with dude yeah and

like I want to make it clear that for a long time we looked at tools that were more prescriptive and you know their way of presenting data or their dashboards and we said oh man they have it so easy if we knew what people were trying to do with doing like it would be a lot easier we've definitely looked to some tools like that and NVA from time to time because the flexibility that Dune gives you is like a double-edged sword and it sounds it means that you know probably the world's best nft dashboard probably not going to be built on tune as it is today why because June is a general broad tool that lets you go infinitely deep and

Broad into the data it's hard for us to do that and build like the world's best interface for a specific use case so that was something we grappled a lot with in the start like figuring out where the right balance to strike is should we so during B5 summer we would we're asking ourselves should we build a D5 dashboard we actually built a D5 dashboard but on June which was pretty popular but not as popular as some of the dedicated side and then yeah I guess we probably asked ourselves during the nft boom as well or should we build something specialized in this use case it's a difficult trade-off but speaking of community I think we've always opted on the side of the Creator

and the people who create and this is a I think glorious thing with June and other tools that are sort of free form is that we all have a Creator inside of us we all have cure curiosity and a drive to create and so being on the sort of team of the Creator is something we've always tried to do and in fact we had a strategy a company strategy at one point that was called Wizards Wizards Wizards well it's literally the strategy it's all about the people creating the dashboards on diet I don't know exactly how the community formed around in I think there was

a part of it I attribute to Frederick and to a little bit my myself like actually talking to all these users and people and getting them in a virtual room together and they're being like a tighter core in the beginning like your power inducer said you all kind of like you know at very early user Council in a sense like they would send feature requests they would help each other with queries Etc and you know we would mostly listen and discuss and chime in and and from there I think you can't understate the importance of X or Twitter has had on Dune the distribution channel that it has provided seeing that the crypto Community is mainly there

has been just an incredible boost to the distribution of not just student as a company but also like the individual Wizard or Creator right yeah when you create on you and and you share share it on Twitter sometimes you hit a nerve and you yeah million of Impressions and thousands of stars I'd like to say that we were very deliberate and building with Community but um it's a nice product Market fit just can do that right like it was just a tool that people needed and enough people needed them at the right time that boom a community pops up around them that can be sometimes community's just as simple as that I think but I think you were deliberate without maybe

knowing it in that probably the best thing that anybody can do to build community is to go slow in the beginning and to have a great good time to meet your users and your customers one-on-one and to give them that special attention like a one-on-one telegram with the founder think about how many companies would start and they would never give their customers one-on-one support right like they would never even think about that but that's the web two-way because in web 2 it's like scale scale scale right whereas in web3 I think what we learned is we've all learned that if you build slower in the beginning and if you build with your community and you give

them that one-on-one attention you know telegram group you take the time to do this Zoom call with them right Kyle and our community has done Zoom calls one-on-one with so many of our community members the exponential relationship that you get from that the trust that you get from that is huge so I think you guys were doing it and you had the exact tactic nailed yeah just maybe didn't write the strategy down it's kind of counter-intuitive in a way that if you focus on like a few that may grow a lot that is sort of virality in a sense not you know like if you have 10 people and each of them tell 10 people in nature and top 10 people I remember though now actually that we did

do a few things with the product to build more of a community or to like lean a little bit more into it like the first version of Dune didn't have the notionable user profile like you just had a randomly generated like a photo next to your query or dashboard and there is a username but you can click it or anything so basically your twit you didn't have a profile so unless you reduce the profile and the second thing we did was we added sort of favoriting or Stars starring in 13 was we built a leaderboard of wizards uh we basically just write people with the amount of stars that

they had and that's then interesting I think add a few occasions that has come up it's a feature that I thought that doesn't matter but you know occasionally there are people who care a lot about being number three it's silly but they're sound like extra incentive to like put the extra work and and build something that a lot of people want one collect feature you said there's star that's an engagement I won't collect I want to be able to make a chart that ninja doesn't nft and allow people to collect it just like we do we do that with our articles in paragraphs that'd be sick idea and my brain's going Kyle's is coming to this book podcast

I just thought right now I was like oh they're Starry we should have collect just because we've been using that with newsletters and it's great if you want to hire a new consultant here uh yeah I'll send you a telegram after this okay I I want to touch on just a little bit more about the universe the Dune Wizards because I do think it's important to highlight that this entire economy is being built on top of Doom and these creators are leaving their jobs making you know having full-time income coming from basically working on Dune dashboards and building Dune dashboards and whether that leads them to get Consulting gigs or whether

they're just growing on Twitter and becoming influencers and they're monetizing that way I'm not exactly sure how they're monetizing and and I remember one particular says oh my mind is Hill Dobby during the nft royalty Wars that happened and everybody was all of a sudden you know blur was exploding and everyone was trying to figure out what was going on with royalties and how blur was growing so fast and then Hill Dobby started diving into it on Dune and realized that most of blur was all wash Trading and oh my gosh that was like a big unlock I'm just curious do you have any any stories like that what's it been like to see these people grow into full-time businesses and to be creating

on top of Dune and making their own their own income and their own salary as a result of your product you know first of all that stuff is really rewarding like the few messages that we've gotten that you know something like June changed my life I didn't know SQL now I work at X or I'm an influencer or something like that I think if you ever if you build a product there's literally nothing better you can hear it right but you change someone's life and their chip trajectory there's a few cases that comes to mind that first user that we talked about that we chatted with one-on-one Friday nights and telegram Elites now

and did not you know sequel be when starting to work on the was a journalist at the Block I think early journalists at the Block and was interested in data and so started nagging me and Frederick and so that was an incredible journey to to witness a little bit and I think the three of us consider ourselves friends now pretty special relationship in the beginning at very least that's the thing with crypto and maybe with every service maybe specifically with uh is that there's just so much opportunity like if you put some work in like if you apply yourselves not just on Dune but like

building prototypes on your favorite chain or with your favorite data indexing framework or whatever there's a lot of space for like growing and building and maintaining a following there's a lot of jobs I think started maybe a little bit less right now but great thing about bear markets it's creating your own job we touch up a touch on that a bit earlier that even though it's a bear Market it's a great time to build be very so early we're so so early and that's the thing that we remind our listeners of all the time and when you're so early there is so much opportunity right like that's the thing that I think it's hard to see that right now in a bear Market because there is

Less jobs and a lot of stuff that is being put out by social media or by news Outlet let's is negative and nfts are dead I mean God if I hear that one more time I'm gonna freaking flip my desk like they're not dead folks just pfps we're a hype Cycles just pfps like we're gonna get past this entities are huge so I think that like when you are so early and you guys experience this you know you went to hackathons you show up again and again and if you do that it's so funny the opportunities that will come from that will be tenfold more than you could ever expect yeah yeah I think the other thing is like in an industry that's still so new as you said we're so early billion business is hard enough to

figure out how to make profitable but then doing it in an industry where you're like I don't know what the next thing is going to happen in this industry like just talked about with nfts Etc it makes it even harder and so I kind of want to transition this conversation into the business of Dune right there's a lot of businesses in crypto web3 that just don't have I mean in tech in general that just don't have a real business right they're like they're just they keep getting funding and there's no profits come but dude I mean dune's got something real here like we said real Community a lot of people using it a lot of people getting incomes and salaries and jobs as a result of doing what students and feel free to go you know talk about whatever you want here but like what students

business model and kind of future with this obviously there's been a lot of talk on Twitter about Dune token and we won't touch on that here today because it's not a thing it doesn't exist so don't even try people but you know so then outside of that like what is the model for Dune do you guys have something in mind already or do you have plans for the future or what's what you talk about there din For Better or Worse pretty traditional in a sense and how we approach making money so obviously most people I think knowed you and as a sort of like a community around a data tool and there's all these individuals that create and all these individuals that consume but there are also a bunch of crypto startups crypto companies

financial institutions Etc about Houston and need this data and so our approach so far to sort of monetizing or becoming a business has been you know we want the best crypto teams out there to you student for their data and we take a lot of things follow from that if we can sort of convince or build something that commits us data teams at yeah prominent crypto companies to build one to unlock follows from it and also the observation that sort of led to that is exactly this of opportunity for individuals on DNA like

a lot of people who quote unquote sir grew up on gin found themselves with a job at some crypto companies right and we want them to be able to continue to use due in their roles and so our Focus there has been I think the main focus has been to shift doing from like a single player like individual product to something that you can use in a team something you can use with your co-workers or you know your co-community or however you call that so that's our approach we like you said aren't doing it token we're pretty pretty standard in our approach

so are you making Revenue right now yes how we sell to these companies okay so and what's that is that like a monthly subscription yes yeah yeah sorry yeah it's a pretty normal SAS subscription fee monthly we have two self-serve plans that are priced at 400 and a thousand dollars they are both as many seat sets you'd like so you can invite your entire company be that 10 people or a thousand actually then yeah we also have sort of Enterprise features that are more tailored to the the bigger companies and then how do you balance the free

side will there always be a free side obviously that's a big part I'm guessing of your user base is those just single users building dashboards coming and viewing dashboards how do you think about that in comparison to the revenue side yeah I think there there will always be a free side to the end I think historically the free side has been sorry pretty like infinite free and is that in the last week's ever figure out where the rights or how the right ways to slice it would probably do and we've experimented a couple of times and honestly the first time we tried something it didn't work and people didn't like it so we had to change that and the situation is better now what's

that yeah well we created pricing plans and then they were expensive and didn't contain what users wanted so that's a problem if you need to pay something you reduce yourself want so we had to go back to the drawing board redo that and yeah here we are it's amazing how much you have to Pivot in a startup but also in an industry that is changing and growing so much how do you plan for pivoting do you do like monthly pivot sessions where you're like okay where's the next pivot coming like you're a small I wish so like that obviously makes it easier to Pivot you know small teams you're very agile it's

not like you're a thousand people change management all that BS that you have to deal with the corporate level so that makes it easy but like I'm just curious what is your strategy planning approach or how do you make sure that you're able to Pivot constantly yeah so when you say pivot I think of like very big changes like changing from a community data platform to something else but I think what is that is often necessary we have them out in June right but what needs to happen at a more frequent basis is to learn it and looking at the stuff that you're doing and figuring out do you continue doing it do you drop doing it do you change what you're doing

dude lean in and we don't have a process for that although we've become a lot more deliberate in how we plan our work like in thinking about you know is this really the most impactful thing for our users we've shifted our thinking to measure the impact of what we do like I think there is there are stages companies go through when like in the beginning they're just two Founders and you're just shipping things and then you start doing something else but as the company grows and there are more people you have the capacity to ship more things and maybe a lot of those things don't make sense in which case you need to sort of consolidate or figure out how to move forward

and so like the key thing we're in law and it's like our okr process so it's pretty standard okay ours night yeah yeah right now that's like corporate yeah and that's like For Better or Worse like we didn't want to invent any way to to prioritize or to to move forward but at the very least like we we take a good hard hook every quarter nice okay before we wrap up one final question and then I want to get to a speed round got some fun questions for you I just want to ask like it seems like you must have just a

wealth of data that you and I'm sure members of your team and this kind of connects into the okr question are salivating about like ideas about like hey we should do this with the data we should do that is there for you personally like is there any untapped potential that you find yourself you know dreaming about or waking up in the middle of night and writing down in your phone about that you can share with us I think there are two things that I dream about one is making all that data accessible through North shires and almost and my team will laugh at me when I say that here because I say that all the time entirely the second thing is

making so Dean is great at answering like big questions and big and analytical questions can't really use the universe you know your application or your any up anything operational and I think where I personally Aspire is like where I if you want is like trying to see how Dean can use this data in a more operational fashion because as you mentioned there's a wealth of it there's hundreds of terabytes and more pouring in every day right and so we know that people don't only have a need to you know do analytics to understand how people are using applications they also

have a need to build those applications and so while we haven't done any major strides in this direction I think it's pretty natural to think about it how these two things fit together and so yeah if you catch me with a coffee staring into the air that's the two things that I don't envy you in the it's so exciting to be part of you know you found a company that's grown so fast and has been so successful and it's now such a household name in the space but then also that brings with it this like burden of opportunity where you know you got somebody like Kyle who's coming with his marketing mind who's got all these

big Ideas you know you're bringing your engineering your operational mind you got big Ideas it must be a lot of fun when you guys get together and brainstorm but it also must be completely overwhelming yeah it's both fun and challenging obviously and that's the thing I think there's a lot of opportunity for any company for any individual who wants to build or create like the key thing is to say no and prioritize and place your bets you can't do everything and it's better to do a few things at a time sequentially than it is to try to do a mall at the

same party and I've played during historically it's been pretty good at that but of course when you hire more people it's tempting you know to just do one more thing at the same time and then one more and then one more so focus is pretty important and maybe maybe the thing that is the most difficult right because you have marketing Geniuses and genius engineers and genius sales people and genius product manager and there are all these valid directions and opportunities for a company like noon and sort of placing the right bat is challenging and I think that's uh I guess always the role of the founder to to play a part in that but yeah it's not an easy one well good luck to you sir at

Tiff you're doing great so far just keep doing what you're doing before we jump into a speed round I just want to give you a chance to tell people where they can find you online where they can follow you and any any show you have for for Dune maybe you want to get everybody to try create wand or something like that to really push this large language model progress that you're working on for sure so you could find me on virtually any platform with my handle me wwts it's terrible Handler but I've had it since I was a teenager so I'll just stick with it I'm mostly acted on Twitter and I used to be a big GitHub user unfortunately I now lead a team and so my coding the Sr our paused myself for again or for the

audience is yeah trying to try out our AI features I think you'll love them we're working on the ux making it more prominent making it easier to find these are building blocks into a bigger Vision that lets you interact with you and using natural language if you help us now why asking a question that data is valuable to us and how we build for the future so if you're a person out there that does not know how to write SQL and try it and yeah we'll be super thankful for that awesome okay speed round first question what's an nft you'll never sell this is funny because I don't own a single pfp

because I miss that wave completely focusing on the and so before I knew it it was the peak of you know the nft bull market and so I missed that book completely for good or bad yeah I was pretty envious of some like pfps on Twitter back in the days I was like damn I should have bought that penguin or whatever and so I actually merely bought I nearly bought a pfp the other day and I was like spend 100 on this like yeah so I'm uh yeah anyways the nfts like can't sell are naturally not pfp so popes and get popes I'm pretty proud of actually

having contributed to go with theory in 2019 and I gotta get Coke for that that's the only thing I got but I feel proud of that so I won't tell it I don't think you can it's a pull out right you can't sell them if they're sold down in the teeth okay one prediction for the rest of 2023 I'm nothing to business prediction though but I'll phrase it as I hope and that on-chain summer Bass upstock all that's coming on friend Tech naughty song gaining momentum because I'm having a lot of fun and I know a lot of other people are having a lot of fun and the energy is different and so we always use friend tag everything's gonna be okay

yeah that's a dangerous part of me wants to clip that and put that and friendtech would just love it and that would go totally viral but the other part of me is like ooh speculative shaky app dangerous dangerous yeah it's pretty jacket but it's fun at least and I think that's like one of the cool things with being in crypto is that there's a lot of fun weird stuff name another industry that have this these weird Dynamics and I think that's what brought us me and Frederick to the industry in the first place and what keeps us there for the long term is part of that quirkiness part of that

ambition of like changing the financial system making a better world like this last week our head of finance and I have been trying to kyc at a major financial institution it is impossible for June pretty big company to do and so I don't know something's a little bit broken at the very least for sure for sure and it's you gotta have fun along the way I just I always think about crypto is the only space where you could go into a Twitter space and a bunch of people are making Goblin noises for two hours straight and then jumping off like there's no other no other space in the world that's like that okay last question if you had a billboard that one

billion people were going to see what would you write on it deal.com it's a big marketer now not an engine Market you're not the only one that's that's answered that question with a marketing mind I don't know I feel like I could also like swing something like don't ban AI or like open source Like We Can't Ban open source AI open source AI is the best thing maybe I put that yeah open source AI is the best thing let's open this it's a big message right now it's an important message

Matt thanks so much for taking the time to join us today incredible to hear your story very excited to continue to be active users of Dune shout out to you and your whole team what you guys are building is amazing we're so grateful for all your effort in the space it's been a joy thank you for being a Doon user and for having me it's been a pleasure awesome thanks for listening to everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for a free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web3 insights so you can

confidently build and invest in web 3. make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one