There’s a lot of big tech coming on and often times greed is the main cause of it becoming spooky. now I know some of you people might say evil people are just gonna do evil. but we can mitigate that by having more options for monetization. there’s not much option with open source hardware for now. so I’m just gonna talk about software. mainly, messaging apps. y’know the recent news with signal.
with signal getting all corporate people are going to use it less. because most of us use it for that reason. privacy. if they are going to take away that. they inherently have no value anymore.
what are we gonna do now then? well, we should start building our own empire. our own minds are worth millions alone, so start making money with it. I’m going to tell you my own secret to success.
the copycat method.
if they want to do it to us, let’s do it to them again!. embrace extend extinguish.
Now, I’m not gonna tell you all of my ideas because all of you people are actually smart enough to think for yourself. but one example.
(We have already one point in this one, Open source. that means we are more private than any crap ass proprietary spookware. and we have to sell that to people. make sure they know our software is the best their is.)
You’ll learn more by observing how things that are proven to work.
- take notes from the examples we have.
for an example take something from LINE, they’re selling sticker made by artists. but make it authentic they use proprietary software to make sure there’s no counterfeits. how can we fix that?
- Optional Step two Implement to open software.
so it’s basically impossible to do it their way this time. Turns out we already have an example on this one! ever heard of NFTs? now the authenticity can be solved by us having proof of ownership. now the chat application can stay open source.
- Advertise it.
You need people to know you’re there in order to sell your stuff. you should know how to do it. you can use the spooky ads. this is kind hypocritical but the people you are targeting are the right people. you can copy the good old corporate psychological tactic. make them believe they have a “”“”““problem””“”“” they need to fix. this case is privacy. make them feel concerned and they will come to you.
the second target is the art consumers. let them know their favorite artists are making stickers here. also you can advertise jobs for art creators. maybe those japanese mangaka would like a raise for their jobs(?) who knows.
- EMBRACE, EXTEND, EXTINGUISHHHH.
so now you have a great starting point. you already made a chat app and have some neat little features. now for your homework is just this question; how can you make this app better than the competitor? what makes it different from them? now that you think about that just rinse and repeat the steps. don’t underestimate the power of your galactic brain.
kind of a shitpost, thanks for reading anyway.
Your example has a problem though, LINE can commission and sell stickers because they have a lot of users. Very few will actually buy anything, by far the most will always be freeloaders. So if you have millions of users, you can sell something to 0.01% of them and make enough to pay an artist with it (which are not cheap for decent enough quality that some people might buy those stickers).
You could always start gathering users by advertising. like featuring alot of manga artists. + open sourceness. or just make a platform for selling nft stickers than implementing it to matrix/element which already have a good amount of users.
You talk about users like about some apples that you can just buy in the nearest shop.
That’s not how it works. If you want users to use your app, you don’t need to create imaginary problem, you need to solve a real problem, otherwise all your “user gatherings” will give you users for a very short period of time, after that users will leave platform.
Your post is very naive view of current state of the world, sorry. Nobody will buy privacy, people who concerned about privacy don’t use data-mining services (like line or Facebook).
Do you want money? Do something that users will want to use.
I know one good example - etke.cc, those guys create and support Matrix servers for users, their work based on opensource and they get money directly from users, fair relations with users, IMO.
I know a lot bad examples, where sevice maintainers sell users data, even if they have paid service.
Be fair with users, be good one.
often times ads make people think they have problems and concerns and It’s a good and somewhat unethical way of advertising. but privacy is a real problem and everyone will want to use something more private if it is good platform. I’m posting this without much research. but my point is doing something differently or creatively will at least make people interested. adding things like stickers made by artists is to give this a little more value and uniqueness. and to fund things like ads and development you’ll need a good amount monetization. this one is just an example bad or not.
I know one good example - etke.cc, those guys create and support Matrix servers for users, their work based on opensource and they get money directly from users, fair relations with users, IMO.
something like this also can help monetize, some will be interested in this. although we need to target more things general consumer will be interested in.
As an artist, NFTs are not the way to go. I don’t think there is a need for authenticity in digital art. There are loads of other good ways to make money from digital art that is better for the art community.
It’s the only solution if you want authenticity without using a proprietary platform. stickers are definitely a thing people make at least in asian countries. well I don’t know a way other than NFTs…
