AMA
p/ama
Official ask-me-anything conversations with notable guests
Pascal Pixel
AMA w/ Maker of the Year, Pascal Pixel! (ノ°∀°)ノ⌒💫
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you probably know me from horse, but i’ve been tinkering with design and html since the game boy color first came out! before i even learned to code, i was making wallpapers & windows xp themes trying to win "daily deviation" awards on deviantart. when i *did* learn to code i built a pokémon battle with jquery right after coding my first working rock-paper-scissors game—just so i could do battles on my kindle. later, i designed poolside fm’s (now poolsuite) iconic icons, launched johto mono (formerly “pokémon-font”) on product hunt, and kept making weird & fun experiments with design + ux at their core thanks to the power of ai, i went from building websites to building a browser. horse is built with electron, and we’re currently pushing hard to get extension support merged (https://browser.horse/extensions) with the hope that once that happens, we’ll see a wave of other niche browsers that help so many people i say "help", because i could never get anything done with normal browsers, until i made horse, and to my surprise, i found that it's because i have adhd, and horse also helps other people with adhd—letting them switch topics, come back to things later, and actually follow up. i’m currently working on getting recommendations from therapists who are seeing how much horse helps their clients ask me anything—why i made horse, what being a super cool guy feels like, or whatever else you’re curious about! i’ll be around all day answering questions (´・ᴗ・ ` )
Replies
Other than horse, what has been your favorite thing to work on and why? How do you balance working on your "favorite" thing vs something else that might have more impact.
Pascal Pixel
@gabe probably johto mono, my pokémon-inspired typeface, i’m making a new version right now—properly kerned, corrected x-height, spending months on a thousand pixel characters, even writing my own scripts to automate kerning because i refuse to do it manually (〜 ̄▽ ̄)〜 as for balance… i don’t. i just work on whatever i’m obsessed with. it’s a huge failing, frustrates my friends, and makes no sense strategically. but if you keep going long enough, eventually, you make something insanely great. hopefully. ( ̄︶ ̄)↗
Charlie Coppinger
How are you so handsome _and_ successful? I thought it was one or the other?
Pascal Pixel
@thecoppinger i just roll a natural 20 on charisma every morning (ノ◕ヮ◕)ノ*:・゚✧
Charlie Coppinger
@pascalpixel ヽ༼ ຈل͜ຈ༼ ▀̿̿Ĺ̯̿̿▀̿ ̿༽Ɵ͆ل͜Ɵ͆ ༽ノ
Pascal Pixel
@thecoppinger ૮꒰ྀི⸝⸝> . <⸝⸝꒱ྀིა
Rajiv Ayyangar
Makes sense! Someone smarter than me said: talk to users but don’t build what they ask for. I’ve learned you gotta dig for the “why” underneath it.
Pascal Pixel
@rajiv_ayyangar exactly, if i built what they asked literally they'd be pretty upset at the mess! usually they're quite happy with a more thorough and integrates solution that attacks the root of the problem (ง •̀_•́)ง
Rajiv Ayyangar
You've built quite a variety of different tools and apps! How do you smooth out UX for each app - do you do user interviews in the classic sense?
Pascal Pixel
@rajiv_ayyangar oh hey rajiv! (。・ω・)ノ゙ i used to avoid user interviews completely—just vibes, gut instinct, and whatever made me happy to use. but with horse, i finally caved and started actually talking to users (ノ_<。) turns out, they have thoughts and opinions?? wild. the biggest lesson i had to learn was compartmentalizing feedback. i’ve always been someone who thinks deeply and speaks the truth as i see it, so when people gave me feedback, i’d take it at face value—completely. if two people told me opposite things, i’d spiral trying to reconcile both as absolute truth (×_×)⌒☆ last year, i finally understood that different people have different needs, and two opposing things can be true at the same time for different users. once i figured out how to pick and process feedback properly—giving it the right weight instead of just accepting everything as universal truth—it changed everything. that’s actually why horse is doing well now. i rewrote the website copy based on this new understanding, making it clearer who it’s for and how it helps. and suddenly, more people got it (╭☞°▽°)╭☞
Yamato Kaneko
Hey @pascalpixel Huge congrats on being named Maker of the Year! We are also building a new browser with Electron as our background is frontend dev/game dev/design. (tablbrowser.com) So seeing you win really encouraged us to get going. And I really hope this extension support happens. If you have a tip for the Electron browser builder, what would it be? p.s. I have a lot of fun with your kaomoji collections from Tokyo ( ◑ٹ◐)
Pascal Pixel
@yamatokaneko oh wow, that’s awesome! (ノ°∀°)ノ super cool to see more electron-based browsers popping up—and yes, really hoping extension support gets merged soon, please send your users to leave emojis on the PR as well! biggest tip you already know; don’t turn on node integration, lol (〜 ̄▽ ̄)〜 oh, and bytecode is handy! それと、俺様にもっとカオモジを送れや、この野郎 ( ` ω ´ )
Yamato Kaneko
@pascalpixel ┗(^o^;)┓┏(;^o^)┛(´·`;)┗(^o^)┛┏(^o^)┓
rameerez
how can you handle being so cool all the time? asking for a friend
Pascal Pixel
@rameerez years of intense training, a strict diet of sausage rolls, and just the right amount of cheese
rameerez
@pascalpixel blueprint 3.0
Tasos Valtinos
hey @pascalpixel ! did you make horse as a solopreneur? was it hard to reach its current viral state? any particular marketing techniques you would recommend to other solopreneurs?
Pascal Pixel
@cryptosymposium yep, it's just me and my partner eleanor (ノ°∀°)ノ she handles the community + support side, and i do the design, code, and existential crises (〜 ̄▽ ̄)〜 getting it to go viral wasn’t some grand plan, just years of posting, refining, and people slowly catching on. most assume it just blew up, but it’s been two years of grinding (×_×)⌒☆ as for marketing—honestly, just be extremely online. post about what you’re building all the time, even when it feels like no one’s watching. and when people finally notice? act like you’ve been famous this whole time ( ̄︶ ̄)↗
Tasos Valtinos
@pascalpixel ahh nice, and yeah what seems an overnight success to some, lasted years for others. I love the "act like you've been famous this whole time" haha, niiice! what stack did u use if I may ask?
Pascal Pixel
@cryptosymposium exactly, the overnight success illusion is just years of refusing to quit ( ̄▽ ̄)ノ for horse and the site i use electron, react, next.js, supabase—a beautiful, unstoppable beast. i'm also pushing hard to get extension support merged into electron so more people can build niche browsers (browser.horse/extensions). i also get my code reviewed by an electron maintainer from time to time, and they say i’m way too humble because it’s actually brilliant. so yeah, turns out i’m a total genius (ง •̀_•́)ง
steve beyatte
What's the one killer feature that Horse has that gets people to pay for a browser?
Pascal Pixel
@steveb trails; it removes decision fatigue normal browsers force you to constantly decide: do i bookmark this? leave it open? close it? horse removes that entirely! everything is saved, so you can jump between topics without losing your place ( ദ്ദി ˙ᗜ˙ ) people don’t pay because it’s a browser, they pay because trails fixes how they think on the internet
Mike Kerzhner
@pascalpixel Congrats on winning Maker of the Year! Curious, have you encountered any popular developer tools that you consider a dead-end? As in, they seemed super promising, you tried them, and then decided they weren't for you.
Pascal Pixel
@mikekerzhner thanks mike! sadly, i don’t have much to share on this... I’m extremely boring in my technical choices (-‸ლ) i care more about consistency than perfection, so i stick to tools i can reuse everywhere instead of chasing whatever’s new whenever i have been in a team leading position this ‘nerd herding’ i do can get frustrating for people when they bring me something cool and new they really want to use (¬_¬) my ultimate weapon is a "shock repo"; it is a weekend project i made using react *without* jsx, written in coffeescript 2, running on express. the code looks super crazy. i can pull it out and go, “this is my perfect code. do you really want us to start making opinionated choices? or shall we stick to the most common, sane thing?” (¬‿¬)
Max Blade
Would you say there was a singular marketing event that launched horse into being what it is today, or was your success a collection of a million little things coming together? I know it can be hard to pin point at times, but always love hearing the founders take!
Pascal Pixel
@_maxblade it’s years and years in the making, and every day a new group of people discovers it. sometimes it goes a bit viral, but people always think it’s new and that i made it last week in response to whatever event just happened (¬‿¬) honestly, it’s been a mix—viral spikes here and there, but no singular moment that made horse the thing. every time i post about it, a new wave of people finds it, and then it’s back to baseline until the next big push (∩`-´)⊃━☆゚.*・。゚ indie stuff kinda lives and dies by how often you remind people it exists also, congrats on going indie full-time! hope you’re treating yourself to some well-earned recovery reps (ง •̀ω•́)ง✧ (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Max Blade
@pascalpixel wow this is like exactly the insight I needed to hear thanks Pascal <3