The purpose of this doc is to explore the broad space of ideas around how to increase awareness and adoption of the Nostr protocol. It's my (hopefully non-controversial) assertion that a precondition of broad adoption by end-users is adoption by developers, designer, and others active in building tools, products, and services on Nostr.
A vibrant ecosystem gives potential users many ways to come into contact with Nostr and novel, beautiful, and useful products and services will give users something to "run towards" as @jack put it.
A potentially more controversial assertion is that builders are the only users that we should care about for the time being. Scale at this point would be a bad thing, as it would likely lead to centralization. And other builders (again, in the broad sense) have better taste, give better feedback, and are forgiving on the shit that doesn't matter. #BuildForBuilders
Contributions are very welcome. Ideally, lots of independent projects spin out of this doc.
There has been plenty of work done over the last 15 years on how to bootstrap platforms and marketplaces. I think that we can learn a lot from those efforts. We should also be aware of how we can exploit (in a positive way) human psychology to help Nostr spread among the types of people who will maintain and improve on Nostr's decentralized ideals.
Fundamentally, successful developer platforms are usually driven by well-aligned and adequate financial incentives. If a builder can see a path towards a profitable business, they'll jump through plenty of pain to get there. This is the seed of strong product market fit (PMF).
On the other hand; education, developer tools, and a vibrant & supportive community serve two functions.
- Awareness: Potential builders are more likely to find Nostr via other builders rather than using a product. This is especially true in the early days.
- Adoption: A platform which is easy to understand and has great tooling which makes it easy to build will gather more momentum. Another way of looking at this is from the oppostite side, e.g. churn. The faster builders are able to make something real (get value from their efforts), the less likely they are to leave the ecosystem.
We need both strong financial incentives and education, tools and community. But I think the second is more important for now. There are ways to patch the finanical incentives in the short-term.
Why would someone come to build on Nostr? Right now, we depend almost entirely on ideological and social incentives, rather than financial ones (other than those with high conviction and very low time preference).
Over time, we need to build better and more obvious financial incentives. Right now, however, we should be focused on finding the missionaries and true believers who want to build and believe in freedom tech like Nostr. We need space and time to harden Nostr's core and to experiement with business models and revenue sources as quickly as possible and share our learnings with each other.
Sharing, especially sharing what might feel like a competitive edge, is critical because the faster we find a path that many can use to find profitability, the sooner we can start growing the size of the overall pie. This is how we all win. Most growth in technology adoption actually comes from market size expansion instead of winning market share from competitors.
- subdomain on nostr.how is just a suggestion – this could be it's own standalone site...
- design resource and guides
- forum/community/telegram to help push forward the cutting edge in design for decentralized (interoperable) systems
- subdomain on nostr.how is just a suggestion – this could be it's own standalone site...
- dev resources and guides to help developers and push specific patterns that reinforce decentralization.
- NDK
- NDK will have it's own docs site soon.
- nostr-tools
- Other developer libraries, incl. UI component libraries for major frameworks
- Directory of open source projects
- Who is looking for help, on what
- Broken down by language, etc.
- nostrapp.link or something similar: App directory of known nostr projects.
- Multi-format: Short-form, long-form, video, audio. All content helps new people find the protocol or think about it in a different way.
- Platform agnostic: Building only nostr-native content will ensure that we bring zero new people to Nostr. We need content for a variety of platforms; youtube, tiktok, instagram, etc.
- nostr.world
- Bitcoin conferences (Bitcoin, BTC Prague, Honeybadger, bticoin++, etc.)
- We need to expand beyond ourselves and bitcoin. Who else needs Nostr?
- Oslo freedom forum
- Journalism conferences?
We need to be in as many of the traditional places builders hang out as possible.
- Product Hunt
- Stack Overflow
- Hacker News
Chicken, meet egg. All platforms and marketplaces have a bootstrapping problem. So far, Nostr has been growing and functioning on goodwill, donated time and energy from the community, and the insane generosity of @jack and others. Because Nostr is a new platform, with potentially profound ramifications, there is also early interest from the most forward-thinking & imaginitive VCs.
Let's take a closer look at the types of funding available and what they're useful for. These are obviously not mutually exclusive.
| Funding source | Best fit for | Not fit for |
|---|---|---|
| Donations & Grants | Non-commercial projects, content, dev tools | For-profit ventures |
| Venture funding | Business that have a chance of becoming HUGE | Content, scale-constrained businesses |
| Crowd sourcing | Businesses or ideas with mass market appeal | Anything that isn't flashy or mass market |
| Advertising | Content with large or niche reach | Most things 😅 |
| Revenue | Any business that can get profitable before dying | Businesses with high capital investment reqs. |
Real businesses provide value to their customers in exchange for money. As much as possible, Nostr should optimize for creating as many real businesses as possible that don't depend on outside sources of capital. VC capital is a great tool but it's not fit for every use case and carries very real trade-offs.