In the past month or so I’ve heard multiple stories from people who have almost been scammed or have been scammed via phone, email, text etc. The grifters are having a moment and it’s one we should be aware of when it comes to branding and marketing of Nostr.
A key element of brand positioning and marketing is to understand the context in which a product is entering the market. For Nostr three contexts we need to keep in mind are:
1. Most people are frustrated with platform social media’s dopamine engagement approach and endless ads, which boils down to a lack of control.
2. We live in the golden age of grift. All of us know at least one person who has fallen for or almost fallen for a digital scam of some sort.
3. The scammers did not stick to phone, text, email and social. They took full advantage during the web3 heyday. It doesn’t matter that reading a text message is nearly as risky today as holding a crypto wallet. The narrative is that the scammers concentrate in crypto.
ABC News
Americans lost $5.6 billion in cryptocurrency scams in 2023: FBI
The impacts of these schemes are devastating.
The average person does not care enough to learn the difference between Bitcoin and other crypto. Unlike Farcaster Nostr does not require crypto/Bitcoin to participate. This is a feature.
In addition we need to remember that the crypto scams are just piece of the overall grift / scam culture pervading digital spaces. Phone and email scams are more sophisticated and text scams are emerging as well as social media scams. When I reached out to a contact in the game streamer space earlier this year about the Creator Residency, she expressed skepticism because of the web3/blockchain association, noting “Web3/block chain are considered risks and/or ethically the Boogeyman in a lot of creator circles”.
It’s too much for individuals to navigate all the spaces scams can come through on their own. In the US at least the phone companies are not using the tech they have to prevent the scams from getting through. Gmail is decent but not perfect. Meta just 🤷♂️.
I spent the summer onboarding a lot of new people to Nostr. I talked about the user-led approach to social media the protocol provides: build your own feed, own your social graph, choose your own content moderation, post the formats of content you want to post. At the end I asked if they would be interested in experimenting with micropayments via the pennies of Bitcoin. Some were interested. Others initially were not and then came back to me later asking for help to set up a wallet.
Nostr is amazing on its own. It solves many of the problems people have with platform social media.
By taking a Nostr-first approach to marketing, onboarding, and branding we’re much more likely to broaden the set of people interested in the protocol and its corresponding apps and services. In turn growth will accelerate.
And some of those folks will eventually want to learn more about zaps, satoshis and Bitcoin once they understand Nostr isn’t over run with scammers and grifters.
For those trying to onboard others, I’m curious if you are seeing the pushback because of fears around crypto or if you avoid that topic altogether?
