Oddbean

We don’t need a Nostr marketing team We do need a Nostr growth team. @dk just published a good essay discussing whether Nostr needs a marketing team. I believe the answer is yes—but not marketing in the same way cryptocurrency projects have typically approached it. https://www.curiousdk.com/p/6885aeab-251e-412b-bbba-1a0b09896558 We don’t need people running around buying ads. While having booths at conferences is beneficial for a community-driven project, I'm skeptical about the value of billboards or sponsoring athletes as ways to promote Nostr. It’s fun, sure, but it mostly reaches people who are already aware of it. What we really need is a focused initiative to grow Nostr—distinct from the fantastic teams already building Nostr itself. In a typical company, this would be the Growth Team. They’d focus on how people discover and learn about Nostr, the path they take to join, how they choose their app, what their experience is when signing up, whether they find engaging content, and how to ensure they stick around and invite others. This is not to dismiss the great work OpenSats and HRF are doing, but a growth team is something distinct. Each app can handle some of this, and that's working to an extent. But Nostr is more than just a collection of apps using shared code. It’s a network that becomes more valuable with every new app built on Nostr. For example, when a user joins Primal, it enhances the experience for Amethyst users, but it also becomes much more interesting for someone using YakiHonne or Zap.streams. So, we need people focused on cultivating the Nostr ecosystem. This isn’t marketing in the traditional sense, like buying ads, but more of a Nostr Community Growth Team. We need people who can work with creators and community founders to help them get started on Nostr. There’s a lot to grasp, and some hand-holding will be necessary. We also need better internal Nostr news—something like @NostReport but aimed at two different audiences. First, for users, fans, and developers on Nostr: how do you keep track of all the projects and what's happening? There’s so much going on that it’s hard to follow. The second is external: we’re doing tons of incredible stuff, and we should be building excitement about Nostr by showcasing these amazing projects and content to the wider world. The team at @wedistribute does cover Nostr, which is awesome, but their focus is on multiple social media protocols. Journalists write when they feel there's news to break, and we haven’t been doing a great job feeding stories to them. We can improve on this. One initiative coming out of Nostriga is better coordination on getting Nostr folks on podcasts, especially beyond the Bitcoin bubble where most people have heard of Nostr. At Nostriga, I talked to a lot of people about how Nostr keeps being framed as an alt-right protocol in the media. That’s simply not true, but we need to work on changing that narrative. Nostr is for everybody, how Nostr is framed does matter. People don’t join a social app because of its functionality, they join because of the other people who are already on the app. Projects like Trustroots.io, Causes.com, and Protest.net will help showcase a different side of Nostr and build new communities beyond our Bitcoin-focused core. Nostr has already grown in new languages and communities, thanks to creators sharing about it on centralized platforms. We saw this with the Thai community—it’s fantastic. Let’s develop a program to support these creators. We’ve been discussing with @Ainsley how she wants a space to onboard her fans into a community together. There’s a lot of promise in Ditto, which I’m excited about—I’ve set up an instance at social.protest.net. What if we helped each of these creators build their own communities on Nostr? From that initial onboarding, their community would be able to connect across all Nostr apps. This isn’t exactly traditional marketing—it’s more like cultivating and nurturing a healthy Nostr ecosystem. If we make it easy for communities to create their own spaces on Nostr, we can grow organically in countless directions. Every new user will feel ownership and be inspired to bring more people along. To achieve that growth, we need to lay the groundwork. We’ve got the apps, but we need to work with the people. After all, we’re building social software, and both the technology and the people are equally important.

Great share. I'm right on the edge of temptation to build a travel families style community and try to get more nomadic families involved with nostr. I'm not really sure where to start and if I should (I'm not sure that's my strong skill set) 🙌

You’re not the only one, @PABLOF7z is also nomadic and world schooling his kids. I did that until my kids got to high school and really wanted to settle down. A worldschooling / nomadic families community on nostr would be awesome.

Yep, @PABLOF7z is the reason I'm here 😂 We met in Vietnam in February last year (because I had to say hello to the guy in the Bitcoin shirt at the smoothie bowl cafe) and a day or so later I arrived here ⚡️💜🙌

great post! my first thought with the communities was how we could build something like skool.com that allows people to build/interact with/monetize communities but in a nostr permissionless style. its much easier to get people over who have existing communities tied to them than convincing people to move a few folks at a time.

Retention is equally important. We need to ensure those who did join, actually stay and are supported, informed and connected - this is particularly important for new organisations like us that have joined Nostr. One large organisation can be a Nostr ambassador, on boarding hundreds and thousands of users in no time.

Well said. I think organic growth can happen rapidly once the foundations are solid. I’ve come back to the protocol as a creator a couple times and have seen big improvements and a deepening community. Look forward to seeing these grow

Very true nostr:nprofile1qqs8d3c64cayj8canmky0jap0c3fekjpzwsthdhx4cthd4my8c5u47spz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qz9rhwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxzmt4wvhxjmcpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wvh8xmmrd9skchd02dz - how do we concretely put that in action? nostr:nevent1qqsxy6clkyua9srhex8lelxfnad6cxwpxsg2zfcp7858k5dss404kmgpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5hsygrkcud2uwjfruweamz8ewshug5umfq38g9mkmn2u9mk6ajru2w2lgpsgqqqqqqsgng8n7

I like that idea because it touches on the fact that, in order to grow a concept or community here, one needs to change their way of approaching it. Many potential creators have come & gone, I think for a simple lack of understanding. It's a difficult thing to convey as or take seriously from the reply posts of what is usually a traditional audience.

I saw Nostr on Reason Magazine a few weeks back, forgot what it was called, and tried to find it by searching for decentralized social media. It didn't even come up. I spent ages looking. Seems like Nostr has a big visibility problem.

💯 Twitter sucks! Let’s all leave and build 10x the number of apps all with reverse order timelines where you can view one way declarative statements from strangers competing for attention. 😂

That's our focus at @PurpleKonnektiv, as well. Meeting people in the regions and away from the conferences. Giving us all a calm place to touch 🌱 together and talk about how we can get the protocol to work for us, rather than the other way around. We want human-centered software development.

When I started I posted regularly with an eye to adding value in hots it would grow. I’m not tech savvy. But it was easy I just followed the prompts and I could share anything. Apparently hosting videos at scale is expensive and I was no longer able to share videos I wanted. I have tried subscribing to paid relays but not only did they not end up allowing me (with my limited tech knowledge) to share video content, they were expensive for a guy like me: casual user. I wouldn’t balk if I were a company. I’m surprised I can’t pay to simply host a video and then pay again to host another. Nostr will grow from many efforts and one is addressing problems like this so Nostr just works OR resources are available and findable for folks like me to overcome these problems.

You can pay nostr.build to host your content and longer videos. There’s also software you can run yourself, but paying nostr.build or another image host is a simple solution. I believe if you post with primal or satellite.earth they’ll use their CDN.

Thanks! Nostr.build isn’t connecting but my point wasn’t to ask for help (but I appreciate it!). If we want Nostr to grow, and I do, the information you have there needs to be readily available and people who are used to just tweeting can make the information work. crApple didn’t just market and grow well but they had a product and ecosystem people could access easily. I know these are still early days but that is where we need to get for broad adoption.

@Rabble asked, "What does a Nostr Community Growth Team look like?" Maybe a coalition of folks from the different teams working on Nostr? Team Damus, Team Primal, Team @wavlake, etc all joining together virtually to foster growth is what comes to my mind. I’m on Team #V4V, which includes my podcast, #RadioDetox, @Ainsley, Wavlake, @tunestr, @RSS Blue, @fountain_app, & @PhantomPowerMedia. (Much of the above stems from @NostrPHX) I’ve onboarded 4 people to Nostr and I’m observing them having the same experience I had: You join, kick some tires, and go, “OK, this is cool, but now what?” You don’t “get it” yet or don’t get the interaction you’d hoped for so you bounce for a bit. The learning curve scares you off. Or maybe you just don’t use it often enough because you’re still having to “be everywhere” to promote music or business. I joined Feb 2023 and didn’t come back til the end of the year. I just onboarded 2 coworkers who didn’t need my help setting up wallets and who haven’t been very active. I onboarded a social media client of mine who likes it but doesn’t have the time to be active and who wants to learn more about Bitcoin. (Because, again, we’re very Bitcoin-centric here). I onboarded @Chrisnicholsmusic, who hasn’t been active since. He’s a musician in the UK with a day job, and I keep poking at him to get on here more. Which leads me to the purpose of #RadioDetox, and that is to tell the V4V story. I’ve so far had 3 music artists plus one music business executive on as guests. An interview with a dev is next. I’m currently on a journey to talk to a few devs and BTS folks right now to make sure the podcast covers this aspect of the story. I do plan to get back to talking with people like Chris to see what their impression of Nostr is (so far). Radio Detox is about detoxing off the old systems of the music business, money, and social media. Guests (so far) like Ainsley, @Sara Jade, and @abeljames have shown a good use case for V4V using Wavlake and Tunestr. I’ve talked to @OpenMike, who runs Tunestr about the use case there and where he sees that headed. There’s so much potential here and we’re only getting started. I was talking with Phantom Power about how some of what we talk about on RD can become case studies in this movement. I agree 💯 that we need a plan or program of some kind to support the creators we onboard. It can’t be just, “Hey come join!” And then we walk away… We also need to ensure these creators gain traction by being active on here and sharing content, which means some community involvement. The #Nostr community as a whole needs to embrace these creators—whether they’re in music, art, photography, etc. If you want to continue the #GrowNostr conversation, LMK 🔥 nostr:note1vf43lvfe6tq80jv0ln7vn86m4svuzdqs5ynsru0g0dgmpp2ltdksrpepap

Just as an aside I think billboards don't work but they are fun lol;). At least they aren't the orangepilling 'memes' which are on here, which neither orangepill anyone or are even memes, or funny lol. (I thought I escaped infographics when I left Instagram). I do wonder about what an actually effective marketing campaign would even be for nostr. Look up nostr on YouTube or twitter and if you were to look at it as an outsider, it looks like spam. nostr:nevent1qqswt8nxp6w7pyp35m72vtlwhn5mlthg95d9w70w0l4twp0u4wsshcspzemhxue69uhkummnw3ezuerpw3sju6rpw4ej7q3qnjst6azswskk5gp3ns8r6nr8nj0qg65acu8gaa2u9yz7yszjxs9sxpqqqqqqzzc9crk nostr:nevent1qqs0tv5lvnqh0nc0484pjtl8yh8z2ke9vl9p3577d47khh4fm2hay0cpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtczyzw2p0t52p6z663qxxwqu02vv7wfupr2nhrsarh4ts5stcjq2g6qkqcyqqqqqqg783x7p