Replies (161)
so close to that 210,000 stack tho 😆
View quoted note →
We still have a long way to go to figure out how to monetize #nostrclient and #relay projects to make it feasible in the long run.
Wishing best luck to @jb55 with it.
And the rest of you beautiful birds, how much would you pay to use Damus ?
What!?!? No we can't lose Damus!
View quoted note →Clients will come and go but if they don't solve the issue of regular income, many will end up being a memory with abandoned code on GitHub.
Relying on grants and Bitcoin price appreciation to increase your runway can only take you so far, and with the user base still so small how many can be monetised through subscriptions or through ads that can make it worthwhile?
This is going to be a tough problem to solve, considering clients fragment the user base, it makes it even harder than if you were just trying to compete with traditional social media for users
View quoted note →150,000 from opensats which I split with
@Daniel D’Aquino , so that comes to 75,000 a year, or about a 2.6x pay decrease, my expenses are up 2-2.5x to run servers and flying around doing nostr promotion at conferences which I won’t be able to do this year. Squeezing by… 😅
We have this in the works!
10,000 active users, maybe optimistically 50% damus users. If 1% of users buy a subscription at 6.99 a month, thats $350 a month?
🫂
I don’t think that you need money from VC.
You already have the tech and it’s working. I’m typing this using Damus.
The issue is the business model. You can spend next year trying different business models to see which one scales.
I’m happy to help brainstorm business model options and how to test them if you’re interested.
I thought social interaction = money like instagrams says
Here's a potential solution, albeit unpopular:
You'll need to pay a 10 Sat fee for notes, while a single edit comes at 100 Sats. This not only cuts down on spam but also encourages more deliberate messages.
The earnings would be divided equally: 50% for Damus development and 50% for personal stacking goals.
Zap splits was working, i just need an android client so i can continue doing that
🫂
Zap splits scales with economic activity, so then I would be incentivized to increase commerce on nostr, which would create a feedback cycle. Thats the only thing I can think of that would scale well.
Is there some way we can help? Can we pay for the app or something like that? Sorry if my ideas are silly…
You haven't even done a seed round Will…
Incorporate, value will find you.
Happy to help in anyway I can.
I will add an option but with user numbers its not looking promising. This is why i spent so much of this year doing outreach at different conferences. Not sure if it had an impact or not.
@Vanessa has some great marketing ideas so looking forward to seeing what we can do next year with that.
Cool! Let us know how we can help too 💜🙏🏽
24 😅
Que sucede aquí por qué tanto alboroto 😪
View quoted note →Why not take a split from each #zap conducted using damus?
Damus has this feature when you unlock zaps and use one tap zaps
Either way thank you. And I'm sure you'll be highly successful in whatever you choose to do next.
One thought I had to fund apps was to take a small portion of total value zapped through it. Basically zap splits. Each time a zap is sent take X% for the dev team to pay its bills including salary. Haven't implemented but just a thought. Prism API may help with speed of transactions if alot. Sure Will has thought of this before. Why not feasible? Not enough value being moved via zaps to make it work?
@elsat @Vanessa
Happy to pay a subscription. I used to pay 17 bucks a month for shitflix until I canned it. It was crap. Damus and the protocol as a whole gives me way more value than shitflix ever did.
Do the math and put the number out there. What have you got to lose.
I am sure you will be pleasantly surprised.
You guys are gonna make it 🧡🧡💜💜🤙🫂🫂🫂
I just recently purple pilled my wife and got her to set up on Damus. She likes it so far.
Thanks so much sharing your thoughts on the future of #Damus. I appreciate your dedication to making this project sustainable.
I completely understand the challenges you're facing, and I want to express my support for your efforts to keep Damus alive.
A subscription-based model, I think it's a very good idea. I'm more than willing to subscribe and contribute to the sustainability of #Damus. I believe many others share this sentiment, and it could be a viable solution to ensure the continued success of the platform.
Additionally, as you may all have noticed the success of the #Primal app, which integrates a lightning wallet to facilitate sat top-ups. I think implementing a similar feature for #Damus could be beneficial. I think the idea of receiving a reasonable share from top-up sales to contribute to the financial health of #Damus.
Al the Best!
Also, I don't know software development so please ignore this if I'm just an idiot or someone else commented on this (I didn't read EVERY note), but I see AI cutting the cost of that industry drastically. I'm sure you leverage AI as it is, but I envision an ever-increasing leverage of AI can spread and automate the development across more bodies in less time, ultimately toward the marginal cost of production, being so low that zaps in an increasingly valuable asset could easily compensate. This may serve as an area of focus, along with the many other things people have suggested. I have been impressed with the brain power of
@Guy Swann on the off chance that you may have questions in this area. Just trying to be helpful. Keep rockin 🤘
A years a long time, things might look very different dec 31st 2024. Best of luck.
It has been really fun to follow Damus since it's inception and I hope to see you build on it for a long time into the future. A lot can happen in a year JB, let's hope for the best! 🤞
@jb55
Here are a few things that come to mind that may help!
Getting sustainable/consistent income:
1. Have a dialogue that pops up once after installation, that allows users to opt-in to zap-splits, so that every time someone zaps a post, Damus gets a %
2. A "Damus+"/"Damus Pro" etc paid subscription tier with extra features
3. Turn amazon/walmart/etc links in posts into referral links, and have that be opt-in of course.
Not for everyone and so maybe take as a general tip, but one suggestion is to move countries to take advantage of the lower cost of living and extra runway you get while building a new business. Mexico? Thailand? El Salvador? Argentina? Lots of places.
Latin American destinations have sinular time zones to US and are easy to get back to USA from...
In Mexico I'd recommend Mexico City, Merida (carribbean side and safest city in Mex), Oaxaca City for a smaller city feel than Mexico City and San Miguel de Allende a nice mountain town and lotsa expats.
Thank you for damus 🙏🏽😭💜🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂 there’s still hope though 🙏🏽🥹
Thank you 🙏
Lets take a look at the nostr ecosystem and learn about self hosted nostr relays
🫂🫂🫂
If you have an app or relay instructions please share
A lot of people would enable splits on Damus Android including myself. Seriously fuck Apple and their shiny walled garden, it's time.
I believe every software developer can live on the Value4Value model. You must remember to ask, and ask regularly.
Is Damus Purple / premium subscription still in the works?
Yup will be launching that soon, be we would need a lot of subscribers
Oh please… 🙄
I hope OpenSats changes their mind. I support #Nostr LTS grants for vital projects like Damus.
I wish
@OpenSats would focus on funding relay infrastructure and a few solid clients, rather than throwing funds at like 10,000 clients. What’s the point of reinventing the wheel 10,000 times?
These clients are open-source — there’s a reason Snort and Iris merged, because a lot of the work is redundant. We need a few open-source gems, not more sloppy clients.
Quality over quantity.
I highly doubt OpenSats would not renew damus
But members of their board are vc funding competing clients? Why would they?
I definitely love that part of No Agenda. It’s something to think about for sure.
I would happily pay a monthly subscription for a premium feature: logging in with multiple accounts I can switch between
Will the #Android version come out before the project ends?
thats the plan, as that will help with monetization since we could have zap splits again
You played an enormous part. 0 to banned in China in 60 days 🤣. You write great software (and fast). You are brilliant and generous but you are terrible at incentives. You have disincentivized the birth of relay businesses by giving arguably one of the best relays away for free. This is bad. As your bank account proves, great relays aren’t free!
Turn the Damus relay off IMMEDIATELY (or please stamp an industry leading premium entry fee on it). High volume relays are a huge money sink. If Damus client doesn’t work well without it, then you know what to work on: making Damus client great without subsidizing the traffic.
I'm not okay with the end of Damus. I think this can probably be remedied.
You'd have to ask them
Btw, I will NOT pay money to use any client to use Nostr. Screw that! Good luck finding source of funding!
Then you will get ads
You can't do this on Damus? You can do this for free on Amethyst
most clients you can do it for free, it doesn’t make sense to charge for it.
this will be true for any feature you can think of charging for unless it provides a unique experience that can’t be easily replicated
I had a similar idea. Here's some bullet points I jotted down a while back:
The value 4 value client
1. Every event/action should cost something, minimum of 1 sat.
2. Costs to post, like, boost, quote, reply, add relays
3. Could charge sats to See More on a note (first part would be like a sample or preview).
4. You receives stats every time your post is boosted or liked.
5. Zaps are split with the person who made the post, the developers, the client you're using, and relay operators.
And
@fiatjaf should probably get a kickback on every transaction, too 😄
2024
when he starts handling all his errors maybe
Running the numbers with current user numbers its a bit rough unless you crank up the price by a lot
So we have less than a year to figure out how to make this work, but more than 2 days. Good.
Please guys, lets group zap this note.
We need devs like
@jb55
View quoted note →Thanks for pushing things forward.
I know how it’s been funded. I’m just curious what needs funding? Servers or something?
Will likes to eat and live in a house. Infrastructure isn't all that much. It's more about spending 80 hours a week working on Damus and not having another job to pay the bills.
Just adding to your comment: There are a long list of people working on Damus, of which I believe Will and Daniel are full time. That’s a lot of work to fund all by itself.
And yes, Damus relay undoubtedly costs some decent $$ with the volume of posts going through it.
Pay up you freeloaders!
View quoted note →🙏🫡🎄#2024 🧡💜 #damus #bitcoin ⚡️ #nostr 💜🧡
Winners don’t lose, they pass away, and until the end they figth!
If your financial strategy isn’t working, change the strategy not the goal!
Completely understand, it’s hard running a small and expensive business.
Hopefully a positive path will open up in the coming year 🫂💜
#Amethyst me encantaría apoyarte cuáles son los planes 2024? No quisiera una sorpresa de que también te vayas
@Vitor Pamplona
View quoted note →I don’t understand. What is costing so much money?
I agree
@miljan and I almost demand that we see
@jb55 through. Together we are way stronger. To see the primal dev extend that nod, goes to speak of our protocol. Respect sir. And let’s get our boy back in the game.
🫡
Intentar la donación por empresas de minería sería una loca idea 💡?
Lo digo por qué si los clientes Nostr triunfan las transacciones de Bitcoin escalarian y por consecuencia las empresas mineras se verían beneficiadas,
#Nostr #Hispano #Venezuela #España #Argentina #ElSalvador
View quoted note →Maybe a very simple (?) fix would be to impose a minimum zap of 1,000 sats, going up in 1,000 sat increments. If we’re talking about value for value, we should stop this ‘21 sats’ crap. $0.50 equivalent is “fair starting value” for an idea that provoked an idea or enhance learning or created an emotion you were not expecting.
Intentar la donación por empresas de minería sería una loca idea 💡?
Lo digo por qué si los clientes Nostr triunfan las transacciones de Bitcoin escalarian y por consecuencia las empresas mineras se verían beneficiadas,
#Nostr #Hispano #Venezuela #España #Argentina #ElSalvador
View quoted note →Intentar la donación por empresas de minería sería una loca idea 💡?
Lo digo por qué si los clientes Nostr triunfan las transacciones de Bitcoin escalarian y por consecuencia las empresas mineras se verían beneficiadas,
#Nostr #Hispano #Venezuela #España #Argentina #ElSalvador
View quoted note →Sorry “a very simple fix (for differentiation)”, a differentiation for users to create a preference for high quality content creators and consumption. Given you already have as big of a user network as can be offered on NOSTR. How do you differentiate so that people like me (not a ‘PV GM’ ‘GN fren’ user) want to use your client instead of another…?
Intentar la donación por empresas de minería sería una loca idea 💡?
Lo digo por qué si los clientes Nostr triunfan las transacciones de Bitcoin escalarian y por consecuencia las empresas mineras se verían beneficiadas,
#Nostr #Hispano #Venezuela #España #Argentina #ElSalvador
View quoted note →Charge for the relay, people will pay
don’t give up before asking users for payments directly. i would have paid
I have a year… lots of time to get something working
lol I mean I understand that. I wasn’t aware that this was a full time gig for him. We need to find a way to fund this.
Like I said. I was really ignorant about it all. I really didn’t know
I'm being facetious of course .
I don't use the Damus app , but it is a vital part of the Nostr ecosystem , and shit , I don't know what the solution is here , how do we fix this ? Do we crowdfund using Bitcoin ?
Hey
@nobody , what's happening ? What would you say are the biggest costs associated with a project like Damus, speaking as someone that knows nothing about this sort of thing ?
That's it , that's the name of the movie : "Damus : Zero to banned in China in 60 seconds . "
What's the name of that nerdy actor that did the Facebook movie , we could recycle him for this .
Honestly , you wouldn't have used any of the other clients ?
*ahem* Bluesky *cough*
It would be so much fun if we had nostr devs working behind frenemy lines
Who is to say we don't . I mean , they are doing a really shit job if you and me know about it .
I'm gonna get a job at Aldi and make sure all my fellow nightshift shelf stackers use a nostr community to swap shifts and bitch about the line manager.
I'm going to get a job in Lidl , and get them all into Bluesky , but bitch about them all on the Aldi nostr community .
Crowdfunding is a band-aid fix and is not sustainable. It's probably fine for the first year or two, but not much longer than that. It needs an actual funding model in the future. Build the tech. Survive on funding/donations. When the tech is ready and able, get a million users. If 1% pay for premium subscription services then you're set.
Coming in HOT , love the honesty .
This is how nostr grows! 👀
This is the way
As someone who has built a decentralized crowdfunding/donations platform, I agree with this. That method is not viable long-term and should only be used for once-off rounds of funds.
@jb55 should turn Damus into freemium model and either accept the ~30% cut to Apple. Or, in some way remotely unlock premium features using a 3rd party subscription API like Stripe or buymeacoffee.com
Not even sure I'd be on nostr without watching the reasonTV episode with Will and NVK.
💜
I disagree. Zaps scale. When bitcoin moons, or when user count moons Damus won't know what to do with the money. Stop being a bunch of Malthusians.
The only thing that I ever heard NVK in was Saifdean and him were talking about something or other .
I actually had a Coldcard before I knew who NVK was .
Sorry , NVK , your hardware precedes you , and that's nothing to be ashamed of .
Netflix is such a waste of money man , totally agree , it is like rumaging through a bargain bin full of DVD's at a dollar store for 17 dollars a month .
The person should always come after the idea. Working as designed.
Would also pay for a subscription! Doesn’t even have to come with extra features but that would be cool. Damus on my iPhone just works. Wonder what the numbers would need to be in terms of $/month, year, etc to make it happen.
I think it's useful to talk about the skills and tools that are needed.
While up until now the skills that you (probably?) needed were programming, memory optimization, UX, user requests and the tools were libraries, ChatGPT, Algorithms, ObjC… the next steps will require you to use different skills & tools.
The needed skills are more towards leadership, planning&prioritization, raising funds, marketting and your tools will be people, connections, processes, coordination/partnerships with other businesses.
And note here that learning skills requires effort, but also note that it essentially requires the same approach like learning a new programming language. Watch youtube videos, get a book, try&fail couple times, practice…
Now just to brainstorm couple ideas for what could be done:
- create a list of all potental ideas that could bring in money and sort those by "result/cost" (= bang-for-buck)
- ask for donations once a month (post a note, do a popup in the app…)
- gather funds in any way possible (create project on geyser.fund, reach out to opensats, hrf, jack…), make it clear to your friends that you need money for Damus.
- create a complementary product targetted at businesses (not end customer) and sell them what they need. Handle the Nostr infra for them, etc.
- get a part time job next to Damus
- sign up for incubator, for new app competitions, etc.
- you may be able to get a loan
- freeze work on Damus for couple years until there's much bigger userbase
- if you would want to go to the VC/Angel route, you can likely get couple bitcoiner angel investors (I think you could get $200k@5M pre-money fairly reasonably). With others we would be happy to support you this way even if we are unlikely see the money back. That said it's also fair to say no.
I understand this 110%, have been thinking the same for
@Relayable.org since as the price of #bitcoin went up the donations dried up with the exception of a few awesome nostriches. 🤙🫂
View quoted note →Utter dogshit
Inject ads into the feed. Don't over complicate it.
Thank you bevo! 💜😍
I agree with this, team Primal/Damus/Whatever ftw
The wages of the developers is usually one of the biggest costs in this business.
The only thing we don’t know, and I am not trying to be negative or make judgments.
But the Damus team could be working on features users don’t care about, and not delivering on features they need.
I’m not saying they are miss managing, what I am try to say this is that all of this very very new. Alignment between the dev team and what the users want is probably so ambiguous makes development very hard.
This clarity only comes with identifying very super freaking clearly who your users are. Creating a user persona, and serving them first.
Developing for “the people” is near damn impossible at this stage.
I appreciate your post.
I think users funding development solves a great deal of this concern. Especially if a lot of the income cycles monthly. If developers aren’t serving the needs of their users, then they will see that funding dry up.
I’ve also had direct interactions with the entire team a few times. I’ve attended a dev call, submitted a very badly done patch, and reported bugs a few times to the team. During that process, I’ve found each and every one of them to be open, responsive, professional, patient, and kind. I know not everyone has had the opportunity to have that experience, so I thought id share mine with you as some anecdotal evidence that this is a good team trying to steward what they’ve been given in as good a way as they can.
There are very few projects or teams that I give blanket endorsements to like this (indeed, I am one of the angry, critical, kermudgeonly purple cats) but team #damus has my support.
I am not terribly worried about changes in the future, because while Damus is the flagship on iOS right now, we have alternatives if things go bad (and those apps are *good*) and Damus is open source under a permissive license. If I donate money and find out later I no longer support the decisions made by the team, I can move or fork. I consider supporting app developers of FOSS apps for Nostr very low risk because I always have access to the code I helped fund.
As far as running out of money, Damus, Inc is doing a lot more than they started out doing. There are two clients (at least) in devlopment, two developers being paid, travel, and tons of other code Will contributes to the whole community. I follow him on GitHub - I see the repos going up and commits happening.
Again, a lot of this is based on experiences I know non-devs may not have had the opportunity to have with the team, so I thought id share.
If I missed your point, or if I didn’t touch on anything, let me know. It’s late where I am. 😵💫
Really appreciate sharing your experience with the team. While I don’t know any of them personally, I can easily sense their values and ethics in all of their interactions.
I now live on Damus. So I might be biased as well.
I like your idea of user funded features. I even mentioned this to Will and other nostr devs before. I think it’s a great way to provide the teams with predictability and help them plan. I don’t believe it will pay the bills, but it will sure help with direction.
💜💜
I totally agree with your final assessment. I believe the road to a sovereign Damus will be paved with several streams of revenue (donors, subs, merch, purple) that could in aggregate support it.
I’m reminded of streamers.
That reminds me. I was going to suggest to Will he hosts some coding streams working on Damus. People like to zap dev streams. 😃
He’s been doing that lately!!
I hope I can catch one. That’s lit.
I don't sympathise.
Bitcoin Maxis poo poo shitcoiners but they have something we don't: *they know what people want*. So it pays to clip our noses, dive in the sewer and backspat some shitcoiner types (explore-exploit).
As to devs complaining FOSS doesn't pay i don't agree. i've seen one dev complain about their app which allowed users 10 torrents going at the same time on a free version. Why didn't they just make the free version 3 max, a pro-paid 10 and allow anyone, giving detailed, secure and working instructions, to build the pro without paying if they wanted to so keep the FOSS ethos?
On #nostr why am i always context switching? Every time i context switch to upload a longer video to be hosted so i can link it here etc is a lost income for the dev.
** #contextswitching is lost money.**
i've also spoken abou t #ti pQ without success.
But supposedly "nostr doesn't pay".
🥱
#tipQ
Thanks! Sometimes, I’m a little too blunt but can adjust depending on who I’m talking to or my mood.
Boi we got u this ship ain't stoppin'!
Not stopping on my time chain watch. We got u
@jb55
View quoted note →Same +1
110%
sorta seems a little passive aggressive and unmanly to say such a thing, i get images in my mind of the crying bro meme
Ads would suck... Zap splits would work well.
I'd be happy to split my zaps at a high ratio towards Damus!
What is the best way to contribute. I like Damus a lot Primal doesn’t work on my phone at all not sure why posted about numerous. Damus just works!!!!
Damus reliability is still in its infancy. Soon it will work offline and in very low bandwidth situations. Reliably and efficiency will always be the priority. The new client architecture I’ve been working on is pretty mind blowing, can’t wait to demo it.
Damus is awesome! I enjoy the you all continue to innovate as well as keep it operating smoothly. How do we support the team? How can we get involved to make the run way longer
You blue balling bastard!
I want it just as bad, it’s coming together slowly.
I see what you did there. 💸
Seems like it would be worth the time to continue this conversation?
I wrote to you about a donation but you ignored me.
I offered to fund it and work together. He ignored it.
Why not get funding from bitcoin-only VC? They are a few good one out there that truly understand
Considering it
Maybe he deliberately wants to can it! Since the zaps went away, the project is on downswing. He is probably wanting to work on something else.
Let us know how we can help keep it alive. Paid version/features?
I want to build a business built in bitcoin. I can’t do that by building an app exclusively on apples platform, which is why i’m building a multiplatform client where I can do whatever I want.
So no I do not want to work on something else, I’m just fighting to keep it alive and it’s very stressful because Ive had to start over from scratch and am playing catch-up against well funded companies.
We’ve been working on that all last month. We have a few features that I think are pretty useful (high quality translations that don’t need configuration). So it wouldn’t be just a donation subscription which is just ugh to me.
So would the Damus app go away or would it be incorporated into the bigger project?
I feel bringing zaps back will revive Damus and the monetisation issue. Not sure if Cake can help here. But it will be a third party similar to WOS and might be able to help with App Store compliance. Cake is a well used app with its own user base. It supports btc and xmr. Just a few random thoughts.
> I feel bringing zaps back will revive Damus and the monetisation issue.
This is why im building an android app…
Good
I’m still rooting for you and Damus
That’s just trading one centrally controlled App Store for another.
I put up a 0.1 BTC bounty to get lightning polls implemented on nostr and since March it’s only in Amethyst.
Sure another OS opens up your TAM but why not look at user-funded upgrades for things Damus Users want?
Yeah I hear that. Well whatever it is, you’ve got one customer here when it’s ready 🫡
👍
Typiquement Fiat ...pires Systemes à proscrire
Why should a nostr client need centralized hardware ? I thought the idea was a nostr client runs in client machine ( laptop or smartphone) ...
web interface should be optional .. only if the developer is supported by web-bros ..
People have become so comfortable with being the product... 😔
Just pay to opt out of ads? 🤷♂️
I appreciate your work in making the internet opensource and decentralised.
@jb55 earned my hard respect when I learned what he has built to make this community what it is.
He deserves the utmost accolades and awards, and probably a few #bitcoin for all his work.
This year will see some radical evolutions in the #nostrvrse, and I hope the OG,
@Damus and
@jb55 get credit where credit is due.
Thanks for all the fish! (And #zaps and #npubs, and more!! )
LFG 🙌🏼
View quoted note →
