Oddbean new post about login | logout Observation: On Nostr I follow a bunch of indie hackers building open source stuff creating immense value, most notably in nostr and bitcoin. They’re all grant funded. On X I follow a bunch of indie hackers building proprietary stuff creating immense value, most notably in AI. Many are making insane monthly recurring revenues (MRR) and are all bootstrapped/self-funded. Question: How do we create a culture of open source indie hackers in bitcoin/nostr that are making self-sustaining MRR?
have them buy more bitcoin
If you see longterm bitcoin gains as MRR, sure. I’m just wondering if we’re all missing something that the AI indie hackers are getting right.
Sadly, we can't compare AI apps to Bitcoin apps. AI gets attention like TikTok, and Bitcoin is like WordPress, powerful yet a grey area to ordinary folk. Jack is loaded, but even buying more Bitcoin isn't going to bridge the gap. It is about priorities in life, if you want money, you'd choose AI.
What if they need some sort of income stream in order to buy more bitcoin?
AI's independent hackers can earn income from their products, and they can buy Bitcoin. The problem is that Nostr's independent hackers' products cannot generate income, so they can't buy Bitcoin. And many Nostr developers invest time and sell Bitcoin to develop Nostr. For example, me. Please don't misunderstand that there are no complaints, because we are willing to pay for Nostr.
#metoo 🤷♀️ That said, AI is one of our main topics, and we actually see concrete potential for selling our services and products to customers who _aren't_ on Nostr. Including the AI stuff. The Nostr protocol allows for some interesting use cases that have relevance outside of us Nostriches. It's a solution to some very particular problems.
I know I’m a nobody but I think we have our incentives wrong
In what way?
In that we many companies offer an incentive to buy from them by offering a “discount” for transacting in btc and some are “spinning” that as they are “charging” an additional fee for accepting FIAT. I think a better business model is simply charging people the price you feel is appropriate and “fair” or the price you believe the market will support. If you want to really add an incentive for me to buy something from you, give me a share of the appreciated price of the bitcoin I give you for some time variable time period? This way we both benefit from the FIAT price going up, which also acts as a flywheel as the incentive is greater as the network becomes more valuable and it incentivizes me to keep using the network by first paying an honest price and second sharing in the possible future price.
Pieter Levels is a good example. He makes almost 200k MRR with various project (most around digital nomads and AI). An extreme example. But reaching 10k MMR seems like a realistic goal. https://image.nostr.build/f1b4a16f5f3a923712d41670d8dfeccd2575b3e00d5fcfe484d12f6bc29badac.jpg
I think the main reason is that these services are targeting the entire internet of customers vs nostr, which has the more difficult price of entry, using public/private keys and bitcoin for payments. There is also too much of a focus in nostr on "what is possible" vs "what problems do people need solving". This is actually fine IMO, for now we're frontier tech, we need to experiment and try wacky stuff without too much of a focus on business dev. Also, @levelsio is a special case. He's been at it a LONG time and has an incredible distribution network (his following) built up for all his products. Not many indie builders come close to his success.
nostr bots/services will be a good way to get recurring rev i expect. Plenty of low hanging fruit.
Maybe bring AI to nostr
Doing what?
Maybe humans and machines working together. Pair programming. Writing. Music. Art. etc.
I building nostr:nprofile1qqs2um8ftr5qf05xk9z7dfeumndg5s4mte2z04gynlnztxmd6rczclgpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsz8thwden5te0dehhxarj9e3xjarrda5kuetj9eek7cmfv9kz7qg4waehxw309aex2mrp0yhxummnw3ezucn89uf6pfyx to boost development processes using #BDD , I believe it will unlock decentralized development diving it through behaviour definition
The value in proprietary software is in its ability to monopolise a given space. Open source cannot monopolise, by design.
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Oh I don’t know - maybe by building an app that makes it easier for them to Bitcoinize (monetize) their business by incentivizing customers with a 50/50 split in any future price appreciation of the Bitcoin those customers use to pay the business for variable time periods dependent on market conditions???
Provide enterprise support for the software you develop. Everybody thinks "no one will pay for my software if they can just install it for free" well guess what, businesses will. Red Hat Enterprise Linux was bought by IBM for $34 (quick web search because I thought it was million, but it's more) billion. $34 Billion. Some makers of Bitcoin software have already figured out that selling support is profitable.
These are my observations running a hackerspace in bitcoin. I see two main issues: Nostr is a niche within a niche and Bitcoiners do not like to pay for things. So you have to be creative and charge significant amount more for services rendered. The last thing is most Bitcoin companies and Nostr projects need help just punching through the noise. At PlebLab everyone to my knowlege is + on arr vs opex minus a few companies. I suspect it has more to do with general support pleblab provides them.
Many in Bitcoin aren’t grant funded, and even more so in the broader open source world. The AI guys are the anomaly not the other way around and it’s pretty much all due to ethics I’m personally building a FOSS tool that’s being sold by glassnode for 700$/m, there is in my opinion no ethical way to charge for it besides tech support
With limited context around who these people on Twitter are… Someone who has MRR in their profile is clearly money focused. Their primary goal is to make money? Right? Your average Nostr dev is likely more interested in making a difference, money is just to live on and not have to work a regular job.
