We don’t need a Nostr marketing team

We do need a Nostr growth team.

nostr:npub1kuy0wwf0tzzqvgfv8zpw0vaupkds3430jhapwrgfjyn7ecnhpe0qj9kdj8  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 nostr:npub19mduaf5569jx9xz555jcx3v06mvktvtpu0zgk47n4lcpjsz43zzqhj6vzk  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 nostr:npub1w9wuqc3s6lr25c4sgj52werj3tngvt43qrccqrher4wvn7tjm32s2ck403  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 nostr:npub13qrrw2h4z52m7jh0spefrwtysl4psfkfv6j4j672se5hkhvtyw7qu0almy  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.