Oddbean

I get all that. But “competing against everyone” is a losing strategy. Who / what are we competing against first? And this needs to be a relatively precise target. And perhaps we need to change the paradigm a bit. Maybe it’s not Nostr that’s competing, but the businesses themselves? But if that’s the case, it maybe means we should be talking less about Nostr and more about the respective products? It’s not so clear cut. Hence why I said it’s “struggling” with comms. We don’t have a tech problem. We have a go to market problem.

"But “competing against everyone” is a losing strategy." Who says that? New times require new dimensions in competition. There are a lot of devs here, we're all here. It's just a matter of structuring and incentives. And I think we _have_ a tech problem. No product is fully developed and everyone knows things are buggy. Even with good marketing, we would have a lot of disappointments after onboarding. For example, how do you explain to the masses in a non-technical way that you can't change/delete things? The lack of such a basic function alone will cause a rethink in online behavior and will also cause some regrets.

Fantastic thread, totally agree with Svetski's points and was good to see some half decent responses. nostr:nevent1qqs8lem04dpjyzfu5wf9zn5zgapggcxsedfxhk07jdcefvdclgdqcdgpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqzyp4dpquj6xa28ahl022qnc4vte2yxkrjvhvtffvpccr8mz82xq2cgqcyqqqqqqgflq8h9

i’d flip the question—it’s not about who we compete with, but who we’re delivering value to. once that’s clear, knowing the competition becomes relevant. there’s a simple 4P framework for early startups struggling to find product-market fit: persona, problem, promise, product. the product must deliver the promise that solves the problem for your persona. if anyone wants to dive deeper into nostr marketing, i’m happy to help—got a good bit of marketing/startup/tech experience 🤙

Best response so far. I got sucked into the competition frame, but what you said is really the correct frame. That being said, same principle applies. Our market isn’t just “everyone”. That’s a retarded take, which too many nostr people have

I'd argue that it stems from the mind viruses we got from fiat thinking, that creates this expectation that something needs to be adopted by critical mass user base in a very short timeframe. nostr grows with builders, building their idea. we don't know which use case is going to turn everyone. it might be cat memes, it might be freedom money. time will tell

i’ll start with my personal 4p that led me here: persona: i’m a startup founder (in the eu) with 10+ years in proptech. i had a bitcoin story years ago, similar to what @Derek Ross described once (“old discs turned into a multi-million dollar mirror”). i’ve always been into privacy and osint. problem: i never had instagram or facebook - it’s just not me. i like good conversations and interesting people. i tried twitter, but hated the ads (problem 1) and even more, (p2) the algorithms serving up the same quasi-influencer content (“ten ways to this…” and “what i’ve learned from…”). this led to a third problem - every social media platform today is a selling tool. if not through ads, then through influencing. ads are annoying, but influencing feels fake, and i don’t want that in front of my face. product: that’s how i ended up on nostr, probably through some article on @jack involvement. i read the paper, explored tons of websites (com, org, band, watch, you name it), and found @primal available on iOS. here i am. nostr promise: i see no ads and no influencers. value-for-value and full control are the promises that hooked me. if ads show up in my feed, i can switch clients. if i encounter annoying influencers, i can mute them. last but not least— i’m still short here, but i already like you guys. i enjoy reading your notes, discussions, memes. you’re a bunch of smart people, and that’s a promise hard to deliver on the web 💜 pv 🤙

Appreciate you laying it out. But I don’t think what you laid out is a viable pathway to something large or significant. If nostr is going to be some minor little network where a few people congregate to avoid ads and just chat to each other - sure. I see value in that. But that won’t change the web or make any meaningful impact in the world. The future is content creation, and that means more and more content creators and a larger and larger creator economy. (Yep…more influencers). Sure - 80% of them are cringe, but 20% are excellent educators and there is loads to learn. (Maybe it’s 90/10, or 99/1 ). The web is going to become the future of education. And that means content creators, selling stuff, and that also means ads. Will Nostr play that game ? Or will it remain small and fringe ?

thanks, i get what you mean about significance and changing the web. i’m in that too. not just here - my company is pushing to transform the commercial real estate industry towards full information transparency. it’s a hard task, but that’s the fun part in the end. ambitions should be high, but timing (is the market ready for my solution?) and strategy (start small, dominate, then expand) matter too. the result of these two factors is pragmatic tactics that let you keep moving forward, day by day, step by step. about ads: > selling stuff, and that also means ads if it comes to that, i’ll just start my own client 🙃 and that freedom is exactly what i love about nostr! but… i think we’re underestimating the potential impact of value-for-value. @jb55 created something incredible with zaps; you won’t find that anywhere else. still looking with a fresh outsider's eye, i think vfv is a big opportunity that could lay the foundation for a new, humble, and healthy creator’s economy. in my mind, it’s an ads-free model (of course!) where clients can earn fees (like patreon, substack) and, instead of disrupting MY feed with THEIR paid content, they invest in new mechanisms to discover worthy things. and as i see these ideas are already popping up in discussions.

the problem with commercial real estate data is that it's fragmented (many players, each aggregating the same/similar information for their own purposes). as a result, there's at least a double cost - one to collect the data, and one to verify it, multiplied by the number of players. this leads to many implications, including information gray areas and institutional players exploiting insider insights. today, our platform solves the problem of data collection (we act as an integrator), but the missing puzzle is verification. a few years ago, I was working on the idea of "property digital passports" - we built a theoretical model, the idea that each property could have its nft-like token with its history records chained in it (so there shouldn't be a need to double verify information that has been confirmed in the past). didn't develop it further because we needed to put more effort into the core business, but... when I came across nostr, I was very excited because the concept is very close to what we were looking for. to answer your question if we will use nostr, i still need to learn more and understand it better, but I'm very optimistic.

Pablo has a really good angle on this with how he intends to build @Highlighter I think that approach is infinitely more compelling than V4V. I personally don’t think V4V scales. That’s why busking is not really a viable commercial strategy for 99% of the market. Either way - this community needs more minds like yours around. PS: You should also connect with @Tanja and give her some feedback on her new initiative.