The Renaissance Will Have Good UX

Most people don't come to a market hoping checkout will change their worldview. They see something they want, and they want to buy it. If you screw that up, there's no further conversation.

In our previous update, The Market Answered Back, we were preparing to turn our Chicago booth into a working bodega using our own apps. September put that idea in people’s hands. Their experience showed us both what was possible and how much work remained.

I also took the stage at V4V Chicago to talk about how we describe what we’re building and the exciting future it brings. We keep calling freedom-tech a "revolution". I think it should be called a renaissance, and that distinction matters to the people we hope will join us.

“Revolution” is bad marketing for familiar ideas. Owning your business, dealing directly with customers, keeping your affairs private, and carrying your reputation with you all existed long before the internet. We’re bringing those possibilities into a digital world where people have gotten used to asking a platform’s permission to exist in exchange for convenience.

What if we could have convenience AND sovereignty? That feels like a renaissance to me.

Later at the same event, I heard a friend repeat a common phrase from the freedom-tech space: “The revolution will have bad UX.”

I proposed an adjustment: the renaissance will have good UX. People deserve an experience that makes that future feel inviting. September brought us closer to that ideal: we shipped upgrades across both Shop and Sell that made the experience smoother, faster, and easier. We also added a lot of missing features.

...but the past month also showed us we have a lot more to build to get where we want to go.

Dollars In. Bitcoin over the wire.

Someone with dollars in Cash App can now buy from a merchant on Conduit. As a guest. On their phone. Without needing to understand either Bitcoin or Nostr.

They find something they want, check out, and pay with money they already have.

Our Pay with Cash App option connects guest checkout to Cash App’s ability to pay Lightning invoices from an eligible customer’s dollar balance. Passer-by shoppers don’t need to buy Bitcoin first or configure a Nostr account. For merchants, that opens the door to a lot more customers.

Better yet, we’re working on a partnership that will bring the same experience to credit card payments. This would allow the cash register of the future to open for anyone.

We'll write more on the card payments option when we have something ready to show.

More Ways Into the Market

We've been saying since the beginning that people should be able to discover products through friends, social feeds, and other applications. Merchants should be able to meet them wherever that interest begins.

Conduit now supports links that bring a product, or a cart from one merchant, directly into checkout. Independent apps can help someone find something worth buying and send them to us to finish the purchase. Brainstorm is one of the places already sending shoppers our way:

We’ve also integrated Brainstorm trust scores into public profiles and storefronts, giving shoppers an additional network signal they can inspect at its source.

This really showcases the beauty of open and permissionless networks. Different teams can contribute discovery, reputation, payments, and merchant tools that work together. Each participant has room to specialize, and merchants gain more ways to reach customers. The transactions stay peer-to-peer.

Two events... one week to learn in between.

When I wrote the first letter, we had one event ahead of us in Chicago. Little did we know, but that event would lead us to joining a second & much larger event in Ohio the following week for the Midwest Bitcoin Summit. Hosting two event markets in two weeks gave us a short turnaround to ship what we were learning live.

The bodega in Chicago was a success, but not without challenges. A critical bug in our checkout flow made purchases difficult the first day- but luckily we were able to unblock it quickly... and adding Cash App purchases during the event made the second day pretty magical. Products from Born to be Free, Oshi, Ketolishus, Cinco Doggos, Sound Coffee, Delgado's Fuego, and a few more independent merchants (including Conduit Merch) were purchased at the event.

Live events make product decisions sharper. A merchant needs to join the right market, a shopper needs to find their pickup, and someone at a booth needs to know whether an order is ready to hand over. All of this needs to happen on phones, amid conversations and interruptions.

In Chicago we saw how much we needed to improve to make a larger event successful. We pushed hard to make Ohio a much better product experience.

Fortunately, things went a lot smoother. We had several successful checkouts with zero handholding. But Ohio wasn't perfect either, and ultimately the everything we learned led to a substantial rebuild of the event market feature and protocol.

We had invested a lot of time and had something promising, but patching around its limitations would have made future improvements harder. Time already invested is a reason to learn carefully, not a reason to defend a design that needs replacing.

So we went back to the foundation.

Since September closed, the core Event Market rebuild has merged, followed by simpler event creation and merchant timelines. We’re now re-testing and validating the upgraded (and far simpler) experience and excited to launch it at upcoming events.

Connecting Should Be Enough

Regular merchant feedback and testing combined with those two events gave us very clear marching orders: make it easier to arrive, get set up, and get on with buying or selling.

Connect your identity, have your profile, settings, and wallet available, and start participating. Return on another device and pick up where you left off. That is the experience we’re working toward, and it means taking more of the complexity off people’s hands.

The changes we have in flight for October should make the ordinary parts of commerce feel ordinary, even when the network underneath works very differently.

We’re also getting close to a payments upgrade that opens up something important for Conduit as a business: revenue. This includes revenue sharing with partners, event organizers, and merchant suppliers. It provides a way for all of us to earn from the commerce we help make possible.

This feature also unlocks a huge upgrade to the merchant order management experience. All while continuing to keep our "mind your own business" slogan true.

We'll be able to drop a lot more details about our blind payment router next month.

Pioneers Are Showing Up Early

We’re asking early merchants and shoppers to use unfamiliar software, work through rough edges, and tell us where we’ve made something harder than it needs to be.

The most inspiring part is they’re actually doing it. By the end of our second month since activation, total recorded usage had more than tripled from where it stood at our first update.

People want this technology enough to participate while we’re still making it easier. Our responsibility is to turn that early patience into an experience they can confidently recommend.

To everyone putting real products through these early versions and telling us what happened: thank you. You're shaping what Conduit becomes.

The renaissance will have good UX. We still have a lot of work to do, but we intend to make this true.

Cheers,
Eric FJ - Conduit CEO