No business will want to touch nostr the censorship-resistant social network for freedom tech ruffians and generally disagreeable Bitcoin people with a ten foot pole. That's nostr the people.
But when you look at what problems the actual protocol tech (as decoupled from the people) can solve for businesses there are some big ones there. As in the tech can solve these problems without the business ever having to know that this part or that part emerged from a protocol called nostr.
I'm still not seeing your full vision. What business would you pitch it to, and how?
That’s a long post. Trailer goes like this. Start with identity in business systems, Okta, Entra (née Active Directory), Ping Identity, Google Cloud identity, the rest. These don’t work well for frontline workers, vendors, and so on, for many reasons, cost just one among them. And depending on the company frontline workers can far outnumber desked workers.
There’s bring your own identity, which is a thing (sign in with Google, as in your own Google, and so on) but now you’ve brought the worker's personal baggage into the corporate picture. Then you have to think how can nostr identity offer a more baggage-free BYOI? And the there’s OIDC in the background, how can that be bridged with Nostr (OIDC is ED curve but still doable). Sure a lot of work to augment nostr identity for a hybrid business setting, but doable, and could be pretty attractive if you can articulate to these businesses what it solves in BYOI realm (there is a solid pitch there).
Then once you see that there’s a use for nostr identity in the frontline and vendor space it’s about what to build on top of that identity foundation, vibe-coded internal apps that make sense for frontline workers in unique frontline situations. Shakespeare stack could rock that. (None of this touches nostr the existing social network in any way.)
We're rolling out a few things along those lines out in Asia, but never do we say the word nostr when describing what they are and do.
I think the lack of key rotation is the biggest obstacle to these things you mentioned. 🤔
Personally I think it's not a huge deal for users. But businesses will want control, and they'll see the key system as a huge vulnerability and oversight. It's optimized for user freedom, which in a business would enable stupidity in uncontrollable ways.
I've drafted a heretical centralized approach that let's the user still be sovereign over their root key
nostr:naddr1qqgrxwfj89nrvepkxq6njc3sxf3n2qg4waehxw309aex2mrp0yhxgctdw4eju6t09upzqvr92hlwgse4s2ej7m2x7ydkgndr8zt9j5qk3y7hmgvvwh7hlhcjqvzqqqr4gu3jp7lg
Ignore Frost in the title, I took that bit out (looking forward to playing with my Frostsnap when it arrives.... soon!)
Business have full control. They control the relays. What's a key without read/write access to the business's internal relays?
Keep in mind this is BYOID, the bring your own aspect being something businesses actually want (often for legal reasons), they just want it to work better. For other forms of BYOID, such as a frontline worker using their own Google account to login to the company's slack, the company does not have control over that user's Google account and that's fine, it's the application or infra layer where control resides.
The real question is not why nostr keys for comapnies but why redundant websocket relays for companies
Its the early hours of the morning here so, quick thought and can flesh out later.
1. I was vibing a docusign using nsec signing. Few lazy afternoon sessions and good progress. Docusign market cap $16.5B. I don't need or want to do another startup, let alone a replacement strategy play but a small team could displace chunks of the b2b stack with new economics. Pipedrive disrupted Salesforce. Can a nostr CRM disrupt Pipedrive because trojaning npubs into business is 🔥. But don't talk about nostr, talk about solutions.
2. nostr:nprofile1qqsphkn7raeed0dz68hejqea4r7jmsmzsyrephumuch4jypchwtufkgpzemhxue69uhkummnw3ex2mrfw3jhxtn0wfnj7qghwaehxw309aex2mrp0yhxummnw3ezucnpdejz7qgewaehxw309aex2mrp0yh8ymmyvf5hx6r0wqhxu7303hr2v8 may want to share what he is doing. Another sector with significant incumbent revenues and less friction.
3. The point being, products (not hobbies) first. Monetization is a deliberate act. Jack can code bitchat without concern for monetisation. But that is a byproduct of silicon valley success and mindset. I've built startups outside SV and you have to be pragmatic about monetization.
4. There was an excellent 30023 about a year ago by somebody who tried to build an app using relays as a data store and how slavish commitment to a protocol may be the wrong formfactor for the solution. Maybe some apps just stand on the shoulders of the protocol but aren't prisoners to its original libertarian ideology. It's a protocol so you need zero permission to use it in the way it serves your customers.
5. Shiny objects. Vibing clutters the landscape with broken projects. We need a badge for apps that have a product person and a malevolent tyrannical committed QA function that demands the product serves customers, not the autist hobbyist creator (I'm talking about me of course)
Back to bed.
Two $bn businesses here.
1. Video streaming sales. Whatnot ($5bn GMV), Tiktok Shop ($50bn GMV). Fast growth commission on sale model. But what is it? Live stream discovery and chat (NIP-53) and ecommerce (NIP-99). Build on Nostr rails solves chicken-and-egg, reduces time to market, and then pitch it to Whatnot users who can just use it, without knowing how Nostr works. I am building this with nostr:nprofile1qqsgthcq5tm2jxz9x4xg6tvlh26qq2actdpztwh2kc86lvjc03gr36spzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgtcpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtcpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgtckgrenr
2. ERP with workplace chat. Slack (aq by Salesforce for $27bn). SaaS MRR model. But what is it? A workplace identity (NIP-01) and SSO (NIP-42&98) system with chat and where data can move between silos (on Nostr!). Compete with other ERP and workforce systems on two key principles 1) interoperable with vast open source ecosystem for free. 2) no platform lock in ever, take all your data and leave whenever you want.
There are more. These bones are great. Just need businesses on them.
If you were to integrate the live stream component with a global/following feed with strict video nevents (NIP-71), could this potentially displace more of the b2b stack with that additional feature?
I understand it would be extending more into a “tiktok” replacement strategy play, but consumers will want what they are familiar with as long as they aren’t expected to handle the heavy-lifting technicals behind it.
I agree. There's lots of cross over. Creator interface for lives and videos is similar. Twitch/Kick profiles feature lives and clips prominently. Whatnot sellers clip hits from their lives and market those on other socials. Tiktok Shop sells product on both lives and clips.
One day!
For now very focussed on getting from lives -> live streaming sales and ecomm
Thanks for your interest
This is pie in the sky stuff. Like when olas beta launched and you had people saying nostr was the next instagram.
What slack offers businesses now is utterly incomparable to what any nostr slack clone offers now or can offer in the future. The same is true for say Okta.
It's about nibbling around the edges and solving problems that nostr can actually solve, now today. And not mentioning nostr. And soft forking it. And all this in the context of solutions where nostr's architecture offers some explicit advantage outside of some [music] future vision.
Well I agree to focus on Nostr's points of leverage, and not needing to name Nostr at the time you try to cross the chasm. But, I don't see any reason to pull punches, so if you're not pointing yourself at a $bn+ competitor incumbent then I would say you're aiming small. The benefit of aiming big instead is you're not taking any business model risk, you get to simply copy and incumbent and be a fast follower riding better rails.
Think big never hurts, but when you look at what Okta alone does, for IAM and the rest, a nostr equivalent (if you want to call it that) offers like 1% of that (and maybe with millions in investment in a nostr-based Okta then 5%). Sure with nostr you get bonus things that Okta can't do, but the things you have to give give up are non-starters for business.
The same for slack, nostr is just not an architectural basis for a piece of software that can do what Slack does, and giving up these things that Slack does again is a non-starter. Nostr at best can augment these platforms by filling in certain gaps or serving certain niche demographics.
For a reality check, the closest thing to Slack on nostr is chachi.chat.
