In one of his earlier talks, developer and entrepreneur Rob Walling who was previously founder of drip.com said something seemingly small but profound (paraphrased):
To increase conversion rates (people sticking around to keep using your product, and ultimately paying), get people to their “aha!” moment as quickly as possible.
The “aha!” moment is where it clicks for the user exactly why this product is awesome. It's the shortest path to awesome. Once the user sees the value in the product, they are more likely to stick around.
Product designers and developers who are aware of this, know that the name of the game is providing value, and hopefully overdelivering, as quickly as possible. This means setting aside their own desires to showcase the product in its full glory, and focusing on the essentials - minimizing the number of steps required to get to the aha moment.
Design by omission becomes important. What to not include becomes equally, if not more important as what to include. So does reducing friction. The fewer, less painful steps involved in getting insane value out of a product, the better.
This concept is a great rule of thumb for every product founder.
Instead of thinking “what feature should I add to make people love this product?”, founders should be thinking “what features do I absolutely need for people to love this product?” Then de-emphasize everything else.
Nostr clients are no different from a typical startup - they should be trying to figure out the “aha!” moment, and how to get the user to it as quickly as possible.
A useful exercise I often perform is to reverse the process and start at the end - the action the user needs to take to have their minds blown. Once you figure out what that action is, work backwards to the steps where they first land on the product page, or install the app, whatever that may be. The goal is to cut out as many steps in-between as possible.
I’ll demonstrate with a hypothetical, but practical example.
Let us assume we are building a music app where people can earn sats when others listen to their tracks.
Nostr has several layers and steps that most people typically go through, for example:
- Generate key pair
- Save keys warning
- Pick a username
- Import follows (perhaps)
- In some cases add relays
- Navigate to some sort of a feed, either from follows or general
- You typically need to set up your profile if you want people to take you seriously
- Have to figure out what sats are, why anyone should care? What are these play tokens?
- If care enough, find settings to connect a wallet
- Learn about wallets (now you leave the platform to do a bunch of reading), chances are you are gone for good.
- Connect a wallet, test a payment.
- Do something for someone to find your action worthy of a zap / perhaps upload a track?
- Aha moment! You can get paid easily and fast just for interacting with people.
Perhaps you’ll also have a realization that your comments are showing cross-platforms which supercharges your content distribution, but for now we don’t need to worry about this.
Of course, some of these steps may be optional, but if we are talking about someone who knows nothing about nostr, sats, zaps, key pairs, that’s 12 steps to get to some realization of what is possible.
12 steps!
The barrier to seeing value is very steep unless you already understand the benefits of decentralized social platforms, know about bitcoin and understand the possibilities.
Sadly, this is not what an average user looks like.
In fact, if you look on Nostr.band, the stats show that the number of profiles with an LN address has remained largely flat for a long time. It’s likely that these people are mostly bitcoiners who already understand the value proposition of a lightning payment.
Now, let’s work backwards and just think through which steps could potentially be eliminated. Keep in mind, we are talking about a music client.
Let us assume that the aha! moment is someone getting paid for their creative work (music). I think this is a safe assumption.
Final step: Pay bills with your creative work
This is going a bit beyond the aha moment, but we’ll roll with it.
Let’s ask some questions…
- What’s the fastest way to demonstrate that a user can collect payments for uploading tracks? How about a web client that is visible without logging in? Perhaps you can see some songs right away and notice that they are earning money? It’s not a personal aha moment, but it’s a preview.
- Can we get the user to skip signup entirely?
- Can the user upload a track as step 1?
- Can they see their local currency as a payout option?
- Can they collect payment in their local currency?
- Do they need to know what sats are? At least initially?
- Do they need to care about relays and everything that this entails?
- Do they really need to connect a wallet to get paid?
- Do they really need to follow anyone to see a feed?
- Are usernames even important to see the value in this product?
- Do they need to learn about cryptographic key pairs? How can we delay this step?
Having asked all of these questions, we can draft an ideal scenario. It may not be realistic, far from it, but at least we know what an ideal and amazing journey would look like.
- Land on a website and see that people are getting paid in your local currency for the same work you offer. Hey, maybe I should try this? 🤔
- What’s this.. a button to upload music? Ok, I have a file sitting on my drive, or have a link handy, let’s do it! Go ahead and add the track (as few steps as possible). Holy shit, I can add splits? Sounds crazy.. ok, let’s keep going.
- Now that I’ve made progress in adding some information, it seems I need to sign up to finish. Makes sense. One or two clicks, I’m in and my track is added.
- Aha moment: I go eat dinner, come back an hour later and see that I’ve just earned $5. It ain’t that much, but it didn’t take long! Turns out new tracks go into the new tab and people can stream them which goes directly to your wallet.
- Final step: I click a button to cash out, in my local currency. The funds arrive in my bank account. Now I can pay my bills.
It may not be a feasible flow, or even a desirable one, but at least we can see that an amazing journey might only take 3-4 steps. It is still using the old money rails for some parts of the app, but the artist can get paid for their work fast and can come to a realization that there might be something to this.
We don’t need to create this specific journey and outcome, but we can use it as a baseline.
As a technical founder / developer you will have a better idea of what is possible. Perhaps new services need to be created to get to our end state? This exercise gives us a lot to think about.
In our example, we might be able to:
- Let users preview the product without signing up
- Have built-in wallets that require no additional setup (with the ability to customize your experience later in the options)
- Display earrings in local currencies while slowly introducing sats, zaps (surely there is an API that can handle sats to local currency conversion in real time? If not, maybe it has to be created?)
- Allow users to cash out into local currency. Why do we need to keep them in sats? Why not let them make their own option? If this is not possible to do - Why? What service needs to exist to allow lightning-enabled apps to tap into easy, plug and play fiat conversion?
- Let users discover relays later on instead of right away to keep them from being overwhelmed.
Even if some of these things are not technically feasible, at least we are now thinking about the flow from a user’s perspective and empathize with them. We start thinking about their time, their needs, their existing frustrations and how we might be able to brighten their day.
This user-centric approach helps founders skip the fluffy parts and focus on the guts that truly matter.
New founders specifically tend to enjoy adding features, thinking the next one will do the trick, only to be disappointed.
I encourage Nostr client developers to start thinking about their users as customers who are looking to solve their own problems.
- How might you make that journey as effortless as possible?
- What is your customer truly seeking? Is it distribution? Is it attention? Is it money?
- Are you delivering it in as few steps as possible?
- Can the “customer” take a more familiar path to get to the same decentralized destination that we all love?