Northstar

Northstar is a daily AI companion for founders, plus a community that backs them for real.

I've watched this up close. My brother has run a startup for seven years, and at this hackathon I met founders wrestling with the same thing, how to shape their next roadmap without losing sight of the goal. Founders build while doubting themselves, and they rarely have a companion keeping them pointed at their North Star. That's what Northstar is, a companion and a coach.

A founder writes down the goal they want to reach. Every day Northstar gives them one personalized question, designed to help them focus on what they should do today to get closer to it. It's coaching toward action, not journaling. Every 7 answers a new constellation forms, and over time those constellations fill out their own personal universe of progress, which they can open full-screen and watch grow.

Just as Duolingo praises you for showing up daily, in Northstar a founder's daily answers become proof of their authenticity inside the community. The feed shows what each founder is building, the problem they're stuck on right now, and how close they're getting to their North Star.

And anyone who wants to help can back a founder with USDC on the Arc network, plus a message of encouragement or an offer to help. For this demo, every new member is gifted a little USDC on sign-up so they can pay it forward immediately. Support like this only works because of crypto. A founder in any country can be backed by anyone, instantly, in stablecoin, with no bank, no borders, and no middleman taking a cut.

Northstar is a Next.js 16 + React 19 app on Vercel. Auth and wallets use Dynamic SDK, so founders sign in with just email or wallet, no seed phrase, and instantly get an on-chain embedded wallet.

That embedded wallet is what makes backing a founder feel like a normal app action. When you donate, we read the donor's own Dynamic embedded wallet via primaryWallet.getWalletClient(), switch it to Arc, and have THAT wallet sign and send the transfer directly to the founder's address, no copy-pasting addresses, no external wallet popup beyond a one-tap confirm. The user is paying from their own wallet, but it feels like tapping "send."

The daily coaching question, encouragement, and progress summary are generated by Anthropic's Claude (claude-opus-4-8), fed the founder's full answer history but tuned to coach toward today's action rather than over-analyze the past.

Donations run on Arc, Circle's stablecoin L1, in USDC, via viem. One nuance we handled: Arc exposes USDC both as a native gas token and as an ERC-20, with different decimals, so we send donations through the ERC-20 interface (the amount displays correctly) while native USDC covers gas. To keep onboarding frictionless, a server faucet auto-funds every new wallet with the small amount of gas (and, for this demo, some USDC) needed to transact, so a brand-new founder can back someone in their very first session without ever touching a faucet. Because the embedded wallet is self-custodial, a founder can also withdraw received USDC to any address.

All user data lives in Upstash Redis as a single source of truth, so the same email sees the same data on any device. Dynamic's embedded wallets + Arc's stablecoin-native chain are what make the borderless, one-tap backing flow actually feel effortless.