Last Christmas I received a gift basket from a company I work with. It was a nice gesture, and it was full of sample-size packs of things that (5 years ago) I would have enjoyed. Crackers, cookies, honey, mustard, pretzels, and 10 other items I can't remember.
But this time, I couldn't eat a single one of those things. Everything had seed oils, refined flour, refined sugar, fillers, preservatives, or some other junk in it. Wish I had taken a picture of it but at the time it seemed so unmemorable that I didn't see the point π
That junk was better off in the trash than anyone's stomach.
This year, I'm working with a dozen of the best merchants here on Nostr to make a Nostr+Bitcoin Only Gift Basket.
And you know what? Every single thing in this basket is the exact oppositeβNOT shitty. Great, in fact. Great for you, and great for everyone you care about. Great for your health, wellness, mind, and body. Stuff you can give without guilt. Incentivized by the hardest money ever and the freest media ever. It's interesting how the default here is to not be shitty. Funny how incentives work.
Final details being worked out now. Can't wait to share more soon.
(yes this is the announcement of an announcement)
Just about 1 week in with zero marketing outside of Nostr, I'm consistently seeing >20 clicks over the course of 24 hours for a single ICKNO post. Total lifetime post click count is about double that.
I'm positively surprised at that level of activity. I take it as an encouraging sign for this project and for Nostr as a whole. To be honest, I can't imagine doing any better on any of the mainstream social platforms, which is kind of insane.
Buying from an ICKNO link doesn't earn me anything. There are no affiliate arrangements. There are no PPC arrangements either. Clicks are the only metric I have, and that's what I work to maximize. This means what I post must be consistently compelling. Eyeballs and glamour and sensationalism don't matter when it comes to pure quality products and sats. You're either getting uncompromised quality and/or you're saving sats. There's really no way around that.
In the medium term I'd like to be able to drive 100+ clicks to a product quickly, like within an hour. I think that could be a useful service: offer a quick boost to a merchant by getting them 100+ clicks from a crowd of self-selected folks who are likely customers. Along with a quick increase in sales, the merchant would blast their name to the ICKNO crowd for future name recognition. Maybe that could be worth a few sats?
The legacy social platforms, especially Instagram and TikTok, have all adopted a model of discovery and sponsored posts. This means they don't actually show users a whole lot of what they're following, but rather all kinds of other influencer junk that their algorithms decide to push on people. This means brands probably don't know who's seeing their posts, to some extent. Also, who's going to Instagram to follow all the latest happenings of beef tallow chip companies? Instagram in particular has become the go-to platform for brands to communicate to the world, but for many brands, and for many customers of those brands, it just doesn't seem like the right fit. It's kind of hilarious (and sad) to see the extent to which brands are going to make their protein bars sexy. It's all so tiring. Just tell me what's in your protein bars and how much it costs. Everything beyond that is fluff at best or malicious (i.e. hiding something) at worst. I don't need a barrage of pictures and videos making a protein bar look like the solution to all my problems.
So now you know why all ICKNO posts, emails, and even the website (to a large extent) is simple text. Small, single pictures. Value proposition & price up front. Just what you need to know and nothing more.
Anyway, I'm going to start telling the normie world about ICKNO. Maybe some of them will see the world like this too.