Karnage on Nostr: This is a sneak preview of bootstrapped startup land - long hours, zero rewards for a ...
This is a sneak preview of bootstrapped startup land - long hours, zero rewards for a long time, burn out, little hope. Even if you do manage to monetize, it may not last long - a competitors swoops in, a new tech, an algo change, search engines get angry. There are thousands of well-built, well-designed software that go nowhere, collecting dust. Most of it is due to lack of marketing. Nobody knows they exist.
Building is nothing special. We worship devs here, but what we should really be worshiping is a dev who can pull the necessary marketing strings to get eyeballs on their product that solves an actual problem.
And this is the easy part. The hard part is doing all of this on nostr / lightning / bitcoin. You need a large enough user base paying your asking fees to justify working on the thing and bitcoin narrows this market quite a bit.
Then you have to consider whether you're in b2b or b2c. It's a lot easier to get people to pay in b2b at the right price point (usually under $100/mo). Jason Cohen writes about this a lot if you look up his blog (asmartbear)
As they say, first time founders focus on the product, 2nd time founders focus on distribution. You've got to learn quickly, make adjustments and try again.
The worst part, is that nobody is going to tell you whether you're on the right path or not, because they have no fking clue and know it. They might be inclined to say "this won't work" but there's always a chance when something does work and it's really up to the founder to make it known and used.
In the bootstrapped startup scene there's this movement of doing dev week / marketing week - rotated. One week you focus on the product, the next week you focus on marketing. Marketing doesn't mean spamming links everywhere, there are many types of marketing activities - but you have to get the word out or else you'll be part of the thousands of apps that is built, solves a problem, but nobody knows about.
Building is nothing special. We worship devs here, but what we should really be worshiping is a dev who can pull the necessary marketing strings to get eyeballs on their product that solves an actual problem.
And this is the easy part. The hard part is doing all of this on nostr / lightning / bitcoin. You need a large enough user base paying your asking fees to justify working on the thing and bitcoin narrows this market quite a bit.
Then you have to consider whether you're in b2b or b2c. It's a lot easier to get people to pay in b2b at the right price point (usually under $100/mo). Jason Cohen writes about this a lot if you look up his blog (asmartbear)
As they say, first time founders focus on the product, 2nd time founders focus on distribution. You've got to learn quickly, make adjustments and try again.
The worst part, is that nobody is going to tell you whether you're on the right path or not, because they have no fking clue and know it. They might be inclined to say "this won't work" but there's always a chance when something does work and it's really up to the founder to make it known and used.
In the bootstrapped startup scene there's this movement of doing dev week / marketing week - rotated. One week you focus on the product, the next week you focus on marketing. Marketing doesn't mean spamming links everywhere, there are many types of marketing activities - but you have to get the word out or else you'll be part of the thousands of apps that is built, solves a problem, but nobody knows about.