Dear Nostr users and developers, in this article, I will share with you our plan for the Blowater client in September.
It's September 1st, a windy, cloudy day in Iceland. Yet my mind is clear and my morale is high, like never before.
What happened
We had our 1st public plan on July right after the open sourcing and a follow up on August.
We have only finished 1/3 of what's planned. There are 3 reasons:
-
My partner
was recruited by me after he was laid off by his company. He worked hard for Blowater for months without any payment. But he has a family to feed and we had no funding. He had to go back to the fiat mine. Therefore, Blowater's development since July took a big hit, especially in UI because he was the UI wizard. -
My move to Iceland has taken lots of energy and time. I did not have enough mental power to execute the development at the same speed.
-
I got into BJJ on Feb 19th, 1 day after Blowater was launched. I was obsessed with it a bit and probably spent too much focus on it during July and August.
You have my apologies for not being able to execute and deliver the plan.
September Plan
Team
The great news is, we have received funding and
is back. He will continue to improve the UI of Blowater, in a part-time capacity because both of us agree that it's important for him to have a secure source of income. He will go full-time again once Blowater receives more funding or starts to generate sustainable revenues.We also have
to join us in a part-time capacity as well! I will have her onboard our tech stack slowly and work on community engagement and product design as well.To summarize, with 3 people, we will have ~2 full-time engineer capacity for the next few months and I am confident that we will deliver faster and higher quality.
Product & Engineering
First we need to finish the left overs from July and August. Most importantly, there are
- Full NIP 19 Support
- UI features
- Bug Fixes
Funding
We are happy to receive a generous grant from OpenSats. We will survive for the next 9-12 months which will be the vital period for Blowater and related projects to grow so that we can either raise a seed fund to become a commercial company or to generate revenue to sustain itself.
Many people in the Nostr community don't like the idea of VC funding or fiat funding. But in order for Nostr to win, we need external support. We can't rely on OpenSats or other charity donations alone. If Nostr is the right thing, it should be commercially successful.
We might develop companion paid projects in the ecosystem but the Blowater chat software will remain open source and free.
Outro
The winter is coming and it's time to work.