Howdy Kyle! I’m hoping to swing by soon! Maybe later this week while BitBlockBoom is going on? I’ll be there 🍻

More onboard materials are in the works and I hope the community helps us create more of them through Vida Partners!

I haven’t spent a lot of time with Nostr, but I’m a fan. I think there’s potential integrations as we open up our API and spec for SIP 402.

that I’m not crazy and people actually want to use it 😂

For messaging, one thing we're doing in the short term is we will show you the creator's response rate, so you easily see if they usually actively respond.

A benefit of calling is that you only pay if they answer, so there's no risk of paying for a "no response".

Short term: acquiring a beachhead of creators that will seed the network with their audiences. Long term: keep incentives aligned toward continued network growth

Both of these are basically: acquire users. This is why I think its so important to build an army of word-of-mouth partners that help me grow the network via Vida Partners

My goal for Vida is to give 1 Billion people their first Bitcoin via Vida Partners. Its pretty lofty, and honestly crazy, but introducing people to the benefits of Bitcoin, Lightning, and real-time settlement is a core purpose of Vida. So, I'm in total alignment with you here!

We've been fortunate to have many creators that are also Bitcoiners reach out to us, but we've also been successful in reaching out to existing users of products like LinkTree. When we talk to these people, we always focus on our Vida Partners program, which aligns the incentives such that, as they use Vida, they also help grow the network, and in return earn residual ongoing bitcoin. Vida Partners incentivizes each creator to bring on their creator friends, who then bring on their own audiences, who then grow the network even more.

We're working on multiple integrations that will allow users to withdraw to Fiat (similar to how our Strike integration works today) and we're also working on rolling out support to add "Vida Credit" funds to your account with dirty fiat (Apple+Google pay.) This will come with the unfortunate side affect of having to hold funds sourced from credit as well as other things, but it will open the product up to a much wider audience and still flow into Bitcoin eventually after holds, etc.

Ultimately we want this experience to show exactly why Bitcoin is better, and we hope each creator on our platform will ask their audiences to load up their accounts with Bitcoin to reap the benefits of instant settlement.

building a network is all about aligning incentives!

this is definitely in the works!

We need a standard set of APIs that get bundled with each and every node that lets a user authorize an external service (like Vida) to spend (and receive) directly from the node with user defined limits. Currently its still way too difficult to do this and beyond the reach of most users.

The battle isn't won...It's going to be bloody...but we can speed up the timeline by building products and services that actively show people the benefits of using Bitcoin as money. Show, don't tell. Do, don't talk. We've got way too much talking and telling in Bitcoin circles, and not nearly enough showing and doing.

After my last start-up I swore to myself that my next one would be targeted at a massive global market that I had plenty of room to compete and iterate in. A business needs plenty of room to carve out a niche and expand in. Finding customers is hard enough for any business, but a big market makes things easier.

Ahh, the classic "chicken or the egg" 2-sided market place problem! This problem is why the product is currently focused on helping Creators monetize their existing audiences. Creators have a need for new tools to monetize their existing audiences, Users have a desire to have access to Creators and Influencers they respect, and Vida provides the tools to facilitate this (while also growing our network). Today we do this via our Link Page and Twitter Bots, but soon also with plugins to let users Pay to Post messages on Twitch/Youtube live streams, and many other similar features.

The unfortunate fact is that we will have to KYC and impose certain limits on users that use our service custodially (who don't connect their account to their own node or to some other custodian like Strike). I wish I could do it differently, but it's something we're forced to work on.

Here's a "Wayback Machine" snapshot of VGPro back in 2009. Boy I'm getting old... https://web.archive.org/web/20090131042248/http://www.vgpro.com/

I've always had a mind for entrepreneurship and come from a long line of entrepreneurs. One of my first start-ups back in my college days was a website called VGPro (video game pro) that let users upload/download mods for games. Users could put their own Adsense ads on their mod pages to earn money, and we facilitated the bandwidth and infrastructure needed to get their creations in the hands of gamers all over the world (this wasn't so easy back in the day before "the cloud"!). We had over 1M unique users per month before selling it. I created it with a good friend that actually recently also joined Vida as Chief of Product Noah Hayes (Noah is a big reason why the V2 of Vida is so much more awesome).

My last start-up which you mentioned was one of the first online-only business phone system platforms. I didn't have any telecom experience before but dove in, made a ton of mistakes, learned a lot, ultimately grew the business, and sold it to the largest wholesale telecom operator in the world by traffic volumes: Inteliquent. I worked for them for the past 5 years before leaving to start Vida.

by far and away, messages has been much more popular on Vida so far. Part of the reason for this is just because messaging is preferred by most people today, but it's also because of product deficiencies we're working to solve like no ability to limit the time frame that you're open for calls.