The reason I made the point about early monetization is that the current cohort of nostr users are not representative of a larger audience in a much more drastic way than typical early adopters.

Most of nostr's current user base is here for ideological reasons and that's an entirely different appeal for which most people make change in their lives.

Startups monetize early for validation, typically not revenue (value prop, user flow, sales cycle, etc) but if your current demographic looks extremely different that your target demographic, then your validation just leads to the wrong conclusions: what seems monetizable ("we received X zaps! if the nostr GDP grows 10x we'll receive Y zaps!") might not be and viceversa ("nobody wants to pay for this app!")

Unless people are trying to validate by monetizing via a non-nostr audience a nostr product, then I think the validation will be very low signal.