Some of my learned lessons of my voluntary #growNostr job at the Nostr booth at Bitcoin Amsterdam.
- Don't count too much on the organisation taking care of nice place with a booth. After the BTC Prague conference their idea was to setup a similar booth. As the Amsterdam conference was getting closer, this setup was already downgraded in certains ways. At the end we just had to deal with a table in the corner of the expo hall besides other companies. This doesn't make sense. There is a community area as well at the Bitcoin Amsterdam conference and to me it's still a big question mark why a grassroots project isn't placed there. So for next year it would be a very nice to have to bring our own booth to the conference.
- So many people who don't know Nostr assume you're a company (because we were standing in the area with all the other companies).
- Some people assumed Nostr is an NFT.
- Some people assumed Nostr uses some blockchain technology.
- The concept of there is no single point of truth or a consensus mechanism is sometimes quite hard to understand for some.
- Search often doesn't work in clients we used to explain / onboard people. I guess many clients are running a background process indexing content. That content is not avaible immediately when you just downloaded a client.
- Using a NFC card with your npub is really use to share it with someone else and start following (thx nostr:npub1fldgkyxjm92mr7zlrejmhd3ymlzx2awhpxpwserzl5v2w7a7a93q0n7wu7 and nostr:npub1t6jxfqz9hv0lygn9thwndekuahwyxkgvycyscjrtauuw73gd5k7sqvksrw showing this). There is a huge market opportunity here selling Nostr NFC powered merchandise.
- At average it takes around 10-20 minutes to talk with just someone explaining all different Nostr stuff.
- Many people already understand why we need Nostr and their questions were in general about how to do certain stuff as they already have a Nostr keypair.
- Explaining my own story why I use Nostr seems to resonate. In this story I explain why Nostr is healthy and serving my digital wellbeing in a positive way.
- Helping at the booth is one of the best ways to meet new people.
- The livestream just worked, the wifi connection was really good! Thumbs up for that to the organisation!
- When explaining Nostr, you often just see the click in someones mind when they just see how different the protocol works compared to other (legacy) platforms we're using.
- People like stickers, almost our whole stack is gone now.
- People really like nostr:npub1gwa27rpgum8mr9d30msg8cv7kwj2lhav2nvmdwh3wqnsa5vnudxqlta2sz his art and style.
- We need informational flyers which people can take with them to home.
- We need rollup banners. Especially when you just have a table availble you can use as a 'booth'.
- We need more (free) merchandise.
- When people see a free power outlet, they will ask you if they can use it to charge their phone.
- I need to take notes of people's names who I helped onboarding so I can tag them later on. Tagging me was often a challenge for them (it's the same issue with search) when they took the effort to write an #introduction note.
- Nostr needs to attent to a non-Bitcoin event / conference to gather feedback from other type of audiences.
- Don't count too much on the organisation taking care of nice place with a booth. After the BTC Prague conference their idea was to setup a similar booth. As the Amsterdam conference was getting closer, this setup was already downgraded in certains ways. At the end we just had to deal with a table in the corner of the expo hall besides other companies. This doesn't make sense. There is a community area as well at the Bitcoin Amsterdam conference and to me it's still a big question mark why a grassroots project isn't placed there. So for next year it would be a very nice to have to bring our own booth to the conference.
- So many people who don't know Nostr assume you're a company (because we were standing in the area with all the other companies).
- Some people assumed Nostr is an NFT.
- Some people assumed Nostr uses some blockchain technology.
- The concept of there is no single point of truth or a consensus mechanism is sometimes quite hard to understand for some.
- Search often doesn't work in clients we used to explain / onboard people. I guess many clients are running a background process indexing content. That content is not avaible immediately when you just downloaded a client.
- Using a NFC card with your npub is really use to share it with someone else and start following (thx nostr:npub1fldgkyxjm92mr7zlrejmhd3ymlzx2awhpxpwserzl5v2w7a7a93q0n7wu7 and nostr:npub1t6jxfqz9hv0lygn9thwndekuahwyxkgvycyscjrtauuw73gd5k7sqvksrw showing this). There is a huge market opportunity here selling Nostr NFC powered merchandise.
- At average it takes around 10-20 minutes to talk with just someone explaining all different Nostr stuff.
- Many people already understand why we need Nostr and their questions were in general about how to do certain stuff as they already have a Nostr keypair.
- Explaining my own story why I use Nostr seems to resonate. In this story I explain why Nostr is healthy and serving my digital wellbeing in a positive way.
- Helping at the booth is one of the best ways to meet new people.
- The livestream just worked, the wifi connection was really good! Thumbs up for that to the organisation!
- When explaining Nostr, you often just see the click in someones mind when they just see how different the protocol works compared to other (legacy) platforms we're using.
- People like stickers, almost our whole stack is gone now.
- People really like nostr:npub1gwa27rpgum8mr9d30msg8cv7kwj2lhav2nvmdwh3wqnsa5vnudxqlta2sz his art and style.
- We need informational flyers which people can take with them to home.
- We need rollup banners. Especially when you just have a table availble you can use as a 'booth'.
- We need more (free) merchandise.
- When people see a free power outlet, they will ask you if they can use it to charge their phone.
- I need to take notes of people's names who I helped onboarding so I can tag them later on. Tagging me was often a challenge for them (it's the same issue with search) when they took the effort to write an #introduction note.
- Nostr needs to attent to a non-Bitcoin event / conference to gather feedback from other type of audiences.