Our offering splits into two parts:

1 - The community & PDA (Growth)
2 - AutoBuy (Product 1)

To dive into each:

The Community & PDA
The Firm is an eccentric brand and LARP community which serves as a trojan horse for getting eyes onto our crypto products.

As our first step, we’re building an eccentric & fun brand world that people want to be a part of, regardless of what we’re selling. Making use of lessons and community/growth mechanics we’ve learnt while building various viral internet projects, we’re gathering people within a sticky community that’s both easy and genuinely entertaining to contribute to.

We’ll then begin releasing products specifically built for that audience, to a group of people who are already loving the world we’ve built. The day before this submission, we launched a ‘company issue PDA device’ (A Farcaster mini-app skinned like a 90s PDA) which acts as a companion app and engagement booster for the community channel. It rewards contributions and specific actions with HorsePower (HP) points. Some quick stats from the launch:

• Blanket Farcaster virality, with thousands of organic posts
• Onboarded >10k people in one day, giving massive visibility to The Firm and a solid foundation community to build on top of
• Became #2 mini-app on Farcaster
• Organic posts about The Firm from key industry figures including:
  • Jesse from Base (340k followers)
  • @dwr (353k) and @v (275k) - cofounders of Farcaster
  • Plus a host of the biggest names on Farcaster including @0xdesigner (148k), @farcasteradmin.eth (91k), @linda (256k), @toadyhawk.eth (86k), @matthew (140k), @grin (78k), @pugson (153k) and many more.

This mini-app and buzzing community will become invaluable as we move to release our first product. The HorsePower (HP) users have accrued will act as the gating mechanism for everything that comes next - all managed through the PDA, which >10k people have installed, with notifications enabled.

AutoBuy

The Firm’s first product release is named AutoBuy.

In our alpha, users can automatically buy new tokens the instant they’re launched by social accounts they follow. We index Base in real time, identify new deployments, and use the Farcaster social graph to link token deployers back to social accounts - executing trades within < 3 blocks.

Based on the reaction to this alpha, we will prioritise one of two directions:

A) Enabling token creators to use AutoBuy as launch infrastructure: i.e. an embeddable “Buy the minute our token goes live” button or landing page that lets them line up guaranteed buyers and initial liquidity before launch. A rapid feedback loop with projects keeps us aligned while iterating on this b2b version of the product.

B) Positioning AutoBuy as the ‘If This Then That’ (IFTTT) for on-chain execution. Or, if Zapier could make you a 400x…

• IF a high profile social account Clanks, THEN buy it
• If your favourite undiscovered dev Clanks, buy it
• If a miniapp finally launches the project coin they’ve been teasing, buy it
• If Jesse tweets “Base is for everyone”, buy $BASE is for everyone
• If late night orders spike at takeaways closest to The Pentagon, buy gold
• If BTC fear and greed tips into ‘extreme greed’, sell…

A few issues we’ve solved so far:

• Our first pass at AutoBuy relied heavily on a specific third party dependency for trade execution which proved unreliable. This was a blessing as it allowed us to rethink our architecture and build an intuitive interface for users - completely ‘owning’ trade execution in the process. We pair the great UX of the native Farcaster wallet with creating Privy embedded wallets that delegate signing authority to our server. This allows us to execute a trade on behalf of a user with only a transferFrom approval from them - allowing the user to retain custody of their assets until it’s time to buy.
• For a period our small team was developing AutoBuy and the viral Employee PDA miniapp simultaneously - context switching from our Quicknode stream delivering blocks to an Encore webhook which triggers a Temporal workflow (AutoBuy), into building a canvas element which mimics users physically signing an e-ID was jarring. In the end to maximise our chances of a successful PDA launch - we focused entirely on the PDA for the final 10 days.
• Instantly hitting $499/m plans on services like Privy (until their COO onboarded and hooked us up)
• Developing community management tactics on the fly as >10,000 people onboard within 24 hours
• Handling AI slop and low effort contributions in the community with will over time degrade our brand

https://github.com/the-firm-biz/base-batches-02

https://thefirm.biz

Unique value:

• Ability to instantly buy tokens from accounts you follow or track, within <3 blocks (no other existing consumer platform offers this)
• IFTTT for onchain execution
• Brand world, community, and unique marketing ability are a strong differentiator and, importantly, moat. As The Chairman once said: “Ideas can be copied, The Firm cannot.”
• As AI coding tools and developments that lower the barrier to building in crypto (like Lovable for creating apps, Privy for wallets or Syndicate for bespoke chains) the barrier to entry becomes incredibly low. We believe that building a trusted, entertaining brand which is able to draw the attention of thousands of people to its offerings to be one of the most valuable assets a company can have in crypto, and beyond.

How our community, brand & PDA alpha will validate this:

• Prove organic community interaction via our ‘80s Wall St LARP
  • 20+ organic LARPing/roleplay posts from community members per week ✅ Achieved (hundreds of organic posts daily)
• Prove growth mechanics work via launch of our PDA Farcaster Mini-App to funnel new community members into our channel, then AutoBuy
  • Onboard 5,000 channel members via PDA mini-app ✅ Achieved (10,000 channel members onboarded in 24 hours)
  • Become featured app on Farcaster ✅ Achieved
  • Become top 3 app on Farcaster at launch ✅ Achieved (Currently #1 at time of writing)
• Prove we can convert community members to
  • Over 20% conversion rate from PDA to AutoBuy users
• Prove AutoBuy works technically
  • Link new Clanker token launches to Farcaster social accounts within <3 blocks after launch
  • Execute trades for those tokens within <6 blocks after launch
  • Provide 100 alpha users with a >200% trade through AutoBuy

We will initially target active Farcaster users while we create a standout channel and community experience, offering them a tool to auto-buy launches using a deployer they’re already very familiar with (Clanker), tracking creators and projects they already know about that are pre-token. We already have evidence of the brand and community appealing with a very high-signal initial community group.

Once we find a fit with a niche, we will progressively support automations which have a less Farcaster/crypto-native audience: i.e. buy when Robinhood announces trading for a token.

Lastly, the cultural cache that we build via the brand and community growth will be leveraged to open up conversations with small, startup Base project creators - our third target audience for the b2b waitlist’ AutoBuy product described above, if data suggests there is opportunity in the product.

We do not see the competitors for AutoBuy as sniper bots, but rather, portfolio automation tools (re: IFTTT for crypto) or launchpads releasing ‘buy instantly on launch’ functionality. We want to create products not just for degens in the trenches, but for your everyday crypto holder who doesn’t have time to keep tabs on the latest janky Telegram trading bot or launches from one of 50 new Pump.fun clones. That’s where brand, trust and exceptional UI/UX gives us a major advantage.

Our moat, as mentioned, is brand and community - which is far more defensible than a pure technological advantage. If AutoBuy’s core functionality is replicated by an existing player with greater distribution which makes our offering obsolete, we can quickly pivot or move to our next release until we strike gold, with the weight of our community behind us.