For now, even manual curation works. You can broadcast recipe events to your relay, whether that's just you and your team, or your users. Minimal incentives like getting back the sats they spent on the relay could help as well. By default, searching those words to just your relay and/or the user's relays mitigates the spam.
Automated discovery from the wider nostr ecosystem can come as infra evolves. Lot's of behind the scenes projects, I'm even working on one. I think when those projects are ready, that's when you should consider looking at that level of openness. Because otherwise, you're stuck with things that can be broken easily like key words and hashtags.
Thinking it through, I think there are two things to keep in mind to balance out a quality community with discovery.
1) start however small and narrow you need so you can guarantee a good experience. If you can keep quality high by follows of follows (possibly further) from zap.cooking users, that's a lot already. Keywords and hashtags have the most effectiveness when you're confident in the sources you're pulling from.
2) Every step you take looking into the open nostr ecosystem opens you up to more potential bad experiences, so you need to deeply consider every step you're making, because what you display from your app is representative of the community you're cultivating.
Replies (2)
I already broadcast recipes and Nourish profiles to my relay, and I don’t charge for it. I’ve offered 5,000 sats for recipes, free AI uploads, cookbook PDFs, and tried all sorts of A/B tests. Getting people to change their habits is hard.
I love the idea of bringing in a smaller group of high quality people, and I want to get there. I appreciate you opening my mind to it. I do think it’s the right direction, we just need to get the timing right.
The cold start problem is one of the most brutal problems for any beginning project, and there really aren't any easy ways around it. Right now, nothing really beats manual curation and direct engagement. You're right that changing habits is hard, which is why I think most in the kind-1/social nostr space aren't the best to market towards, even if it seems like a good starting place. I think it's a crowded place to market to (you're competing for attention from kind-1 users, in a space with lots of kind 1 clients). Odds are they've found the type of app that suits their needs.
Finding fresh eyes without nostr/freedom goggles (😅), who are already enthusiastic but fed up with their current alternatives are where to go. Working for them, and building for what they're crying for is where the growth happens. Knowing you're invested in _specifically them_ helps them invest in you.
But I'm also someone stuck with many cold start problems, always refining my message and audience - so take the answer with salt 🤣
