pam on Nostr: I hope the following helps 1. There are many types of funding for startups, many ...

I hope the following helps

1. There are many types of funding for startups, many types of grants as well. Opensats for now is for development, and funds developers (a) while they build and (b) while they penetrate the market.

2. The (b) above on market penetration is not marketing. This is an important part of the build process where you engage your target users, then go back to your product, improve or maybe rebuild even pivot, then go back to the market, test repeat until you to penetrate the market. Karnage (npub1r0r…q9ac) and I have spoken about this at length over a year ago and he is the best person to explain it if you want to know further.

3. Market here is not your morning meat market. It's also not a global market. You may want the whole world using your product - but always best to start small. Who do you imagine your first 100 users to be ? are they existing Nostr users? How are you going to get the next 1000 users? Are you going to find ways to encourage the 100 users to reach out to their network ? That’s Dropbox’s way of finding early adopters. Or are you reaching out to new places where your target audience might be ?

4. Who are your target audience ? What’s your user profile - age group, interest, income level etc? Where would they hang out ? How can you find them ? What type of information is most relevant to them - long articles? Memes? YT videos ? Tik Tok videos? This is your early stage marketing. It's not some fancy shit, high $$$, heavy travel expense, pretty influencer, and all the dramas. It’s really basic.

5. Bootstrapping works if you have enough out of your net profit to reinvest into r&d after your revenue deducts cogs and opex. SW startups are normally lower cost compared to HW startups. Bootstrapping blindly is a very painful affair.

6. Finding more users at early stages has two parts : reaching out to more people and converting them to users. The first part - reaching out to more people is your No 2 and No 3 above. The second part - keep in mind that only <20% (highly optimistic figure) will be converted to users and even lower will stay on. To have more users you need to constantly reach out to more users and improve your user conversion process until you can penetrate the market

7. Nobody is going to pay you if they don't see a value to what you do. You can get really mad at people here right now for not seeing the value in your work or you can find better ways of reaching out to your intended users and explaining it to them

On a personal note, I have seen you get very emotional on Nostr often. Instead of whining non stop, try finding ways to solve your own problems. If you don’t know marketing, learn it. If you don’t know finance, learn it. If you are not comfortable meeting users, get over it and get out there and meet people. All of us have shit to deal with day in day out, and some of us don’t have the privilege of whining non-stop because if we did, we would be dead by now. Cry it out if you must, then pick up your big boy pants and get rolling.