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Re: NOSTR FUNDING.. In my humble opinion, people should seek profit. We do have a lot of funding available from OpenSats (new grants approved every week), HRF, Angels and VCs. But they won't make you "rich". PHILANTHROPY and/or VC, are great means to get boosted but are not sustainable long term. (aside from protocol and research work, which is basically academic work and take the academic philanthropy route) Profit is freedom, profitable ppl don't need to ask for permission. SUSTAINABLE and ETHICAL revenue positive businesses last generations. And very satisfying if you don't mind me saying. Timing is EVERYTHING! We are ultra-early in nostr, almost too early. Almost everything you see around you won’t be here in the same shape/form in a year or two. Find ways to cockroach the early days, survive another day. Build expertise, build value, build IP, build relationships. All this fun and pain of the early days can have very good returns for those who survive. I'm here (and many others), If you need help, advice or just a capitalist to scream at. 😘

Replies (21)

its good to make profit, but 1. be tasteful and have a goal. trying to desperately charge now when the product/concept is raw would yield a small amount of subscribers and miss the boat on the larger adopters 2. if one is funded for 1-2 years, now would be a good time to build loyal users. And that's all. If you have a million loyal users using your social media app in a year from now, you will have higher conversion rate moving to a subscriber or other chargeable business model options. But ensure this is an additive model and not a deductive model. Nostr should still be open and free for everyone by fundamental principles. 3. And if you have a large amount of loyal users, you can also build on the "other stuff" which is an advantage for your loyal users. And you can also go full blown capitalist with that. People though assume making profit is through VC's pump and dump funds. Don't do that. Build real businesses with or without VC funds. VC's fund will just speed things up. 4. Making profit is not just generating revenue, but also cutting cost. headcount is always the higher cost. At early stages you don't need a large team. You just need to focus on your product and user adoption. That's all. Even if you have a large team, your early employees - as per all early employees - are gonna be paid shit, do crazy work from A to Z with a promise of some profit sharing if the business works in the future. Its not the same as normal employees. 5. Another high cost is marketing to reduce from PnL. You don't need fancy marketing. Marketing is just about who your target users are, where are they are what information fancies them. That's all. You may need fancy marketing in 2 years from now if you have a million loyal users and want to expand towards chargeable business model. But not now. 6. Also, innovation is a subset of entrepreneurs. You can be innovators, but if you want to run a business, you have to expand the skillset and mindset to be an entrepreneur. If you are funded for 1-2 years, leverage on this time and go all out to work on yourself while working on the business. 7. That and Nostr is this huge new digital canvas. You can build anything on it. Go crazy with imagination. If you are a dev, and you love to code, 50% of your problem is sorted. The remaining 50%, you probably just need a good smack. If you are funded for 1-2 years, that's incredibly precious. Make the most out of it. And have a larger goal, bigger dream and work your arse out for it.
i think nostr devs should stay frugal for a while simply because there are not many users. the controlled opposition is uniting and this means people wont flock to nostr. of course i want to believe that they are uniting because of nostr but this may be a biased over thinking. freemium model may work. the reason i don't do freemium is because i like my freedom and don't want to deal with people who pay and things going wrong and then trying to refund etc. right now it is best effort and it is working fine. but if i am killing the economy by providing the relays for free, i may change the model and do some coding to add premium users, if a lot of minds think there should be an economy forming already.
Thank you for your sharing, we should try more possible to make the sustainable development here. Because Nostr is open, there should be different clients trying different ways to survive. This is the advantage of Nostr, as long as it doesn't do evil. 🫂💜
This. Under appreciated is the freedom and sovereignty that comes from being cash flow positive in your ventures from this flows choices - *your* choices without being beholden to any one or anything .. be bold, be stupid, succeed or fail, grow or stagnate .. it’s now all before you 🧡
If some venture can't be made profitable, then people don't want it. Protocol and research work are best dealt with by patronage. We don't want such things to be proprietary, and that means donating directly or donating to a patronage charity like OpenSats. Other things are best paid for. Hosting, client hosting, websites, etc. Cost can be worked out, but the right price isn't free. Having a plug and play setup where when you zap anyone, you also zap those services you care to use as a percentage set by you needs to be universal. An example: I zap 100 sats to @DETERMINISTIC OPTIMISM 🌞 for this post, but instead of all 100 sats being sent to NVK, 2 sats are sent to my client, 1 is sent to OpenSats, and 97 are sent to @DETERMINISTIC OPTIMISM 🌞 because I have 2% set for client and 1% for funding patrons. Can we figure out a way to make this happen. Even better if the client can be adjusted based on what the client is at the time of usage.