Replying to Avatar HoloKat

Great talk by nostr:npub1l2vyh47mk2p0qlsku7hg0vn29faehy9hy34ygaclpn66ukqp3afqutajft , one I managed to see in person but rewatched again just now. 🔥

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTixqS-W1yo

- Winning = adoption 🎯

- Out-twittering Twitter = hard 🎯 (and also not what you may want anyway considering shifting demographics)

- Censorship resistance doesn't sell = 🎯 (this is just poor positioning if you want adoption, but good positioning for a niche audience)

- Wishful thinking not going to get you anywhere - nothing to disagree with there. 🎯

- Centralizing = failure 🎯 (of course.. why bother at all then?)

How it wins = other stuff 🎯 (compounding network effects from interoperability). I agree and this is what got me excited about Nostr initially, and later the micropayment stuff which I think could work at scale.

The only thing I will say about the other stuff playing nicely in other apps is that it must be world-class other stuff. Simply having other stuff within other stuff is not good enough. But, I think Pablo knows this, just didn't spell it out.

Need entrepreneurs = 🎯 I had this conversation many times at the conference, the various stages of players participating in the space, it's just natural and will unfold slowly. That's not to say that current tinkerers cannot become those entrepreneurs (I think some can).

The only differing opinion I had about his talk is monetizing too early leading to wrong conclusions. I spent a lot of time around startups and one of the best ways I've seen small startups / bootstrapped ones find signal was to monetize early. Nothing spells out whether you're doing something correctly or not better than seeing if people will fork over their hard earned cash. Of course, that's not always the right approach to every startup (where monetizing too early can actually kill the potential), but it can be a great way to cut through all the garbage. I guess the best answer here is "it depends".

As for compounding effects crushing businesses that don't take advantage of them - mostly agree, but with that previous caveat that the experiences have to be really good and not something half-baked. There is a reason there are a handful of giant apps people use beside the network effects (they had to join them somehow initially right?), the apps actually had to be much better at something than previous alternatives. Sometimes it's a very tiny thing that sets the apps apart, like disappearing messages.

Really good talk if you haven't seen it! 👏👏👏

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.

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Yeah good point! I guess I wasn't thinking about zaps with that comment, which tells you where my mind is 😅 🤫