Coordinating Ideas into Reality with Updraft

GM, GM. Welcome to another fantastic episode of DevNTell. This one is a feature of the Builder Series powered by Arbitrum DAO. Today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Adam and Paslar, who are the co-founders of Updraft. If you didn't know, Updraft is a decentralized coordination platform where ideas come first and everything else follows. If you stick around for today's episode, you'll see Adam and Paslar show us how Updraft works and how you can use it to find your idea without a business model, investors, or time-consuming grant applications. But first, a word from our sponsor.

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GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Paslar and Adam. Ecstatic to have you both on. You guys are the first guests of many who are going to join us for our Builder Series highlighting amazing founders who are building in a given ecosystem, and in this series, focusing on Arbitrum. Before we get into all the fantastic content you have around Updraft, would you both like to give a brief introduction about yourselves?

Sure. I guess I can go first. I discovered what I would call the decentralized space about seven or eight years ago. I was looking for a way to pitch my ideas about universal basic income, and I had been heavily researching how to make an online community currency. I had just barely realized that this Bitcoin thing that I initially dismissed, you could actually build a coin on top of that. From there, I discovered Ethereum, which was a better way to launch your own token, so I got really excited about that. Griff Green from Giveth is the one that kind of brought me in and held my hand and said, 'Yeah, you have a good idea, let's work on that.' We started through Giveth working on BrightID, which is a decentralized unique identity platform that needs to underpin something like universal basic income. With some grants from Aragon and Giveth and others, we got started on that seven or eight years ago and officially launched it in January 2019 at a conference in Germany. From there, I've just been building and trying to solve these problems. As I went, I didn't realize that there was also this problem about funding public goods and how hard it can be if you don't want to exclude people and you don't really want to charge fees. That was the case with Updraft; we just wanted to build something that everybody could use. That makes it really tricky because everyone asks, 'What's your business model? How is this going to make money?' We pitched even to VCs, like Tim Draper, and basically had to admit we didn't have a business model. So, all those frustrations with DAOs and getting grants led to what is now Updraft.

Awesome. Every product has an interesting origin story, and Updraft is no different. Paslar, did you want to give a brief introduction about yourself?

I'll try to be brief. I started my journey in Web3, I think with BrightID in 2018 or maybe a bit later, with Adam and Philip. As Adam said, we started through the Giveth and Aragon funds. I've been in the space consistently since then. More recently, I worked with Giveth and General Magic with Griff Green. I've been following Adam and his experience and his journey with DAOs, with public fund platforms, and foundations. It just makes sense that Adam, through this journey, has come up with the idea of the Updraft platform, which puts all these different aspects of his experience together to solve a lot of these problems we've been facing. I'm excited about Updraft because it has to do with a lot of different dimensions: public goods, identity, DAOs, how you work with VCs, how you get funding, and how you present your ideas. It's a very minimal but very comprehensive platform, and I can't wait for people to learn more about it.

Awesome, amazing. I love that. Let's get right into it then. I'm very curious to learn more about Updraft as well. Starting very high level, what is Updraft?

Go for it, Paslar. You're better than me at explaining it.

What I think Updraft is, is a platform for everyone to jot in their ideas and earn money through posting their ideas, earn money by supporting ideas that are going to be supported by others later on, and earn money by providing solutions for the ideas that you like. It's basically a new way of creating products that you have the ideas for, without having to turn into VCs and getting into all the troubles with business models and convincing VCs that this is a good idea. You're motivated to post your ideas on Updraft rather than going through all the hassles of business models. On the other side, it's a very good way of generating revenue and earning money by finding ideas that other people might have missed and supporting those ideas by your UPDs, and then having those ideas be on top of other ideas so more people see them. The more people come in and see that idea and support it more, you earn money. If you previously worked on a VC and you were excited about identifying exciting ideas, Updraft is there for you without working for a VC. On the other side, if you're looking for work and you're looking for earning money by development, there's this huge list of ideas on Updraft that you can go and look for and see 'Okay, this is a good idea, I want to make it happen.' So you provide a solution, you detail the way you want to solve a problem or do the work, and then others can come in and fund your solution, and then you can start working and be compensated for that.

Interesting. So it kind of sounds like it's a mishmash of Product Hunt, crowdsourcing funding for a project, and kind of like a bounty board of things to do for each project, correct?

Yes, that's a very good way to put it. It's also a new way for foundations like Arbitrum itself, because before they had to have these grant missions and then have these people who were gatekeeping the grants and finding the proper solutions for the things that they wanted to happen. But now in Updraft, they can create campaigns and say, 'Okay, these are the problems that we have, these are the kind of ideas that we want to support,' and then just support the ideas that they see on Updraft. Then the community itself, with their two cents, come in and support the ideas that they like, support the solutions that they like, and then the community itself is building the products without having to employ gatekeepers.

Yeah, that's what really convinced me that Updraft was worth building—talking to DAOs and grant makers and just learning their process. Working with Gitcoin, working with Octant, working with the Ethereum Foundation, and Arbitrum DAO as well, I understood that these organizations would love to have feedback and input from a wide community. They've tried various ways to do that, and it's really hard to wrangle people and beg them to vote on things. We want to alleviate that struggle. We want to say, 'Okay, here's people that have already identified for you, you didn't have to beg them or ask them because they've been earning little bits of money by doing this already, identifying for you what are good ideas, what are good proposals.' So all you have to do is come in and see what the community has already done and put your funding there.

Awesome. I have some more questions, but I think they might be answered once you start doing your walkthrough. So without further ado, I will bring your screen on stage.

This is the Updraft app. This is what it looks like when you've been using it for a while; you'll have a bunch of updates from things that you've been following and funding. This is more what it'll look like if you're brand new; you'll have these tasks that help you along the way. Building off of what I said about grant makers coming in, right here on the homepage you'll see these campaigns. Right now we have three active campaigns, and this is the opportunity for grant makers like Arbitrum DAO to come in and say, 'We have a campaign, we want someone to build an improved sequencer for our blockchain,' and they make a campaign around it. That's where ideas come in. Right now we've got a lot of ideas around this campaign, which is kind of a fun campaign. This is not about building things; this is actually more of a scavenger hunt. This is for Song A Day. Jonathan Mann has been writing a song a day since 2009. He has over 6,000 songs, and we've been doing these fun campaigns where we highlight songs with certain tags, like food jingles. We've been discovering these hidden gems and posting them here, and then other people come in and add their support to these songs. If there's an idea that you like, and it fits the campaign, you can add your support to it. What's cool about this is there's this 10% funder reward. At the beginning, it starts off as a fee that you pay, but then you quickly get that back as more people support this idea. You try to pick ideas that haven't been saturated yet and be early enough that you're collecting the funder rewards from those funders. You may ask, what's the endgame of this? With campaigns, they have the option to do an airdrop to their favorite ideas and solutions. So let's say Arbitrum DAO was doing a campaign. They could make a commitment upfront that once the community has identified the best ideas, they are committing to putting in a certain amount that they're going to airdrop to the ones that they feel fit what they were looking for. And then it's up to the community to signal those and they rise to the top.

Awesome. And I guess it looks like the only way to support an idea is through the UPD token. How would one obtain tokens?

That's a great question. We wanted to make sure that anyone can get UPD to get started. So if you come to our Discord, there's a UPD faucet. We give away tokens, and those fees that you saw, the 1% fee, all of that goes into this faucet. Anyone, every week, can come to our Discord and collect more UPD tokens. It's a small amount, but it's enough to at least get you started. You can also buy it on Uniswap. We put 100% of the UPD tokens into a liquidity pool on Arbitrum paired with USDC. Why did we choose our own token? When you're comparing ideas and you want to figure out what the best idea is, we need a common denominator to compare. If we allowed the initial support for ideas to be in a thousand different tokens, we'd have to figure out how to compare them. It's easier for our algorithm that is indexing all of these if we just have a common token. We decided it doesn't need to be stable. We didn't need to pick ETH. By having our own token, we can take the fees, which we call anti-spam fees, and just recycle them into a faucet so we have full control over that. We want to make it easy to get UPD.

You basically can just open updraft.fund, connect your wallet, and you can start experimenting with it for free. Just jump in our Discord and put in your wallet. Your mission is to either start creating an exciting idea or be on a witch hunt for finding exciting ideas that haven't taken off yet, so that others might come along after you and earn you money. It's very hard to lose money on Updraft. It's just a percentage for fees that are keeping the spams out. You have nothing to lose, but you have a lot to gain potentially if you're a good hunter of great ideas or a good developer or someone who can provide solutions. The main way you lose money is by being a grant maker like Arbitrum DAO where you're happy to lose the money to reward everyone for surfacing all these great ideas and solutions.

Gotcha. And I guess, so we went over one side of it, the people who are making ideas, the people who are supporting ideas. What are these solutions? I imagine it's the people who are actually doing the work to make the idea a thing.

You got it exactly right. Every solution has an idea that it originated from. Once these ideas bubble up and rise to the top, that encourages people to build solutions because they say, 'Okay, well there's a lot of interest here.' This solves a problem that a lot of founders have, because founders want to have early feedback. They want to know, 'Is my idea worth building?' You don't want to waste your time building something that nobody cares about. So you start with an idea, you don't even have to have it mapped out how you're going to solve it yet, you just have to have a fairly clear problem statement and vision. Once an idea has proven itself, then you get people building solutions for it. To draft a solution, you put in a name, a description, and then you pick some funding details. You pick a deadline, you pick the token—I imagine there will be lots of stablecoins that people will be using or DAO tokens. One of the campaigns that we're actually doing is we want people to help us figure out what networks to support and what stablecoins to support.

And this is another aspect of Updraft that Adam is now unveiling: ideas can be about voting and how you can ask others to show you which kind of idea to support. We wanted to ask the community which network is the best to have UPD on. You earn money by voting because one of the concerns that we have in DAOs is participation. You have to go around and beg people to please come in and vote, but here you're incentivized monetarily. I want to be early in supporting this network because I'm going to earn money if others come in and support my ideas.

So you pick your funding token, the goal, the deadline, and then staking is an interesting way to reward people that are willing to take a bet on funding your solution. What you're saying here is, 'If we don't make the funding goal by the deadline, this is how much we're giving out as a reward to people who took a risk with us.' If the solution fails to reach its goal, then this stake gets split. Everyone gets their funds back plus they get this stake. If you can find someone to help you stake, it really does help because funders are looking at your solution and they're seeing that if this goal fails, I'm going to collect this stake. So it quickly gets you funded more quickly. It's just another way to get people interested in taking a risk and funding your idea. Then you can also set the funder reward, so you can say, 'Every time anyone funds my solution, I want some of that to go to earlier funders.' This puts funders in a situation where it just always makes sense to fund the public good. After you set all these parameters, you create your solution and then you share it. Anytime you create an idea or fund an idea or fund a solution, you're going to want to share that with anyone that you think might also be willing to fund so that you can earn from them.

Awesome, it seems like you both built quite a feature-packed product here. As we're coming to time, how can people get started with Updraft? The best way is to come to our Discord. We will hold your hand, we'll give you free UPD tokens. We're hoping to attract new users that have never used a wallet before and show them how to do it. I wrote a couple of blog posts recently to help people because I saw people were struggling with taking their ideas and turning them into something they could put on Updraft. So read our blog, try this out, spread the word. GM GM, definitely gang, you got nothing to lose. So check out updraft.fund, and all links and everything is right there. It's linked in the description below. Thank you both, Paslar and Adam, for coming on the show today. That's pretty amazing. You mentioned it was only one month old, so you guys have been building like crazy. Keep up the great work. Happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be, and we'll catch you back here for another great episode of DevNTell next week. Cheers.