pull down to refresh

I heard about LightSats via Stacker News. The post title was #Buildinpublic: Bolt🔩Fun Week 6 - Lightsats ⚡️. I happen to have a few people in my life who I talk about Bitcoin to and they happen to put up with me for whatever reason. In particular, I have a co-worker who I've explained how Bitcoin works to. I also have a girlfriend I've gotten to use pouch.ph and phoenix, but its still a bit rough. She still does things like try to send LN payments to on-chain addresses and on-chain exchange withdraws to on-chain addresses (neither work thankfully). This is the feedback I've gotten so far.

Myself

So of course before I try something on someone else I'm going to check that I can understand it. I put up my sats clicked my own donation link and was met by a QR code to withdraw. This was actually a hurtle for me, but a hurtle that I had already overcame with Stacker News. I'm not used to LNURL-Withdraw requests. I'm used to the on-chain way of pasting the address in or scanning the QR code to send, but scanning a QR code to receive is still new to me. Through trial and error and thinking back to some specs I've read, I remembered LNURL-Withdraw was a thing and used the "Use LNURL link" button in phoenix.
Well a bit of a stumble for me, but I didn't use the recommended wallets. I wonder if the wallets that were recommended would have guided the user through all of that? So I started trying it on the people I know.

Co-worker

My co-worker didn't actually withdraw the sats. Didn't want to bother downloading an app. The entire rest of the experience they said was pretty nice. Thankfully, lightsats has that time limit so you can know for sure your donatee isn't interested (which you can manually set) and also tells you if your donatee has even opened the link. All very nice so far. Lots of resources for learning about Bitcoin as well and I thought that was nice too, but I needed to try it on someone who would download the app.

My Girlfriend

My precious girlfriend opened the link and I didn't really get any feedback on the extra stuff, but I did see when she opened the link. I had already taught her Pheonix and she said she couldn't do it because it was on another device but I asked her to just follow the process on the phone she had right at the moment. So she did, and without me answering any other questions (I hadn't used the wallets it suggested afterall so I didn't really have a direct way to answer questions like "what should I do?") I got a message back from her that read: "Boyfriend? Why I got the money when I scan the code?". Oh wow! It seems she got it on accident almost. This message was followed by "Whos money is that? Maybe its a scam." Which is funny, because of course its my money.
I know that users are going to use the first thing that is suggested. They have no point of reference for being picky. So I'm glad lightsats was recommending breez. (This is also the story of how I found out breez is a pretty nice wallet though currently in beta).
I’ve been using Breez for a few months now. It’s an amazing wallet.
reply
This is amazing @nerd2ninja I am forever grateful for the time you took to test our product and share it here on Stacker News!🙂
I was very curious to see who it was that jumped right up to position #2 on our Leaderboard 🏆 https://lgt.st/scoreboard
I really enjoyed all experiences you have written about, from yours to your co-worker to your girlfriend.
With your experience, LNURL-withdrawal is one of the easiest ways to get someone new to withdraw their funds to their own wallet. Our first proof of concept had it where you had to first generate an invoice on your wallet then go back to Lightsats and paste it there and authorize the transaction which is what you mentioned you have been used to do. But for a completely new user experience we wanted to cut down the steps the user would have to do in order to get them to withdraw. I think we still need to do work on that withdrawal page, the QR code is not intuitive for a new user and they don't know they can just simply click on it to open the wallet they had just downloaded, we did add a button at the that says "Open in wallet" which helps with this.
For your co-worker experience, I really like this one given that I have also tested with a few co-workers and they did not follow-through the onboarding and did not download a wallet, so once the tip had been expired I was able to reclaim those sats and sent them off to my own wallet. We just introduced notifications via SMS or Email which notifies the user that their tip will expire within a 24hr period of time. We have to continue working on this to make sure we notify the user and incentivize them to follow through and complete the onboarding. We will not be able to get 100% success rate so there will be some cases where Lightsats won't work but maybe in a few years when the price of bitcoin has gone up they will remember that first experience and be more receptive to it. Also one of the awesome features we have is the live user journey update, so you can tell where the user dropped off and if you have a personal relationship with them you can guide them through yourself and at least show a few examples of things they could do with their sats.
Your girlfriend's experience I'm glad she was able to follow-through with one of our wallet recommendations, from the testing we have been doing Breez & Phoenix really has one of the easiest onboarding experiences, you just need to download the app and you're ready to add sats right away. The wallet backup is not intrusive and the UI is a really nice one. I'm glad she was able to withdraw her sats using the LNURL-withdraw QR code. not sure if she opened up the link on a desktop and was able to scan the screen with her phone or if she opened the link on her phone and clicked on the link to open the wallet.
Again thank you so much for the detailed feedback and for taking the time to test our product and test it with your other users!
The final submission for the BOLT🔩FUN - Legends of Lightning ⚡️Tournament is tomorrow, so we will be submitting pitch video and a final story about the product, our progress and the future of Lightsats!
Hope to have some updates for you guys soon on how it goes.
Whoever makes it to the end of this comment can claim these 1000 sats https://lightsats.com/tips/clatx8t4w000rcyf68mn70oad/claim
reply
Thanks for sharing
reply