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.