A Week in Prague: Inside Synonym’s Marketing Hackathon

Adoption, distribution, identity, and ownership. Multiple experiments aimed at the same problem.

For one week in April, nobody at Synonym worked on the roadmap. We flew the team to Prague and spent two days trying to answer one question.

The question was about adoption.

Most of what we build at Synonym is for a particular kind of person, someone who already cares about owning their identity, their money, their data, their tools. We’ve made a lot for that person. Pubky, Bitkit, the Homeserver, PKDNS, etc. But the hard part isn’t building anymore. The hard part is reaching the next few thousand people… and demonstrating why this matters.

That’s mostly a marketing problem, not an engineering problem. So we tried to build as many answers as we could in two days. We sorted them loosely into four buckets.

Onboarding

Whether someone sticks past the first week depends on two things: how familiar the door feels on the way in, and whether they have a reason to come back the next day. A one-click sign-in flow for Pubky that preserves its self-sovereign identity guarantees. And a Bitkit feature that turns ordinary wallet activity into visible progress (Garmin-style milestones), so a new user has something to celebrate and return to instead of churning out early.

Distribution

How do existing users and the open web pull more people in? A drop-in comment widget any blog can embed, with threads that round-trip into the Pubky app. A “link in bio” page where every shared profile is a tiny entry point into the Pubky ecosystem. An invite-a-friend button inside pubky.app that lets real users onboard their friends in a breeze, bypassing spam protection.

Identity and ownership

Most people don’t switch tools on principle. They switch when something they trusted breaks on them: a domain gets seized, an account gets deplatformed, a payment processor blocks them, the algorithm decides their audience doesn’t exist anymore. For any of those moments to convert into adoption, there has to be a credible alternative waiting when they go looking. So we tried versions of all of these where no middleman can pull the plug. A payment page anchored to a Pubky identity that supports invoices, currency conversion, and most of the rails an actual freelancer uses. A prototype for letting users sell access to their own data on their own terms, with a revenue share that flows back when third parties profit from it.

The market itself

Half the work of adoption is showing up where the audience already spends its time, instead of waiting for them to come to a new site they have never heard of. That thinking shaped some of the hackathon projects: a short film testing how a censorship themed message travels before the algorithm throttles it, two quiz sites built around deliberately uncomfortable questions about Bitcoin and Big Tech, and an outreach push to get the crossposting tools used by the open web crowd to add Pubky as a default target.

A lot came back from the week. The key-as-domain DNS installer hit npm and Hacker News the day after it was built. The “link in bio” page and one of the quiz sites are live. Others are nearly done, a few were always research, and a couple are shelved. We’ll write about each one over the coming days.

Here’s the bottom line. At Synonym we’re building some of the best tech out there for the open web, for people who want real sovereignty over their identity, their money, their data, their attention. We think it’s good work, and we’ll keep delivering.

But tools sitting on GitHub don’t change anything on their own. They only matter once enough people are using them that a network forms. The work that’s actually left isn’t only ours to do. It’s reaching the next batch: the people who haven’t run into a kill switch yet, haven’t been deplatformed, haven’t watched a payment rail decide for them. It’s the ones already inside this circle bringing the next ones in.

That’s how an ecosystem grows. The week in Prague was one swing at that.

Follow @BitkitWallet and @GetPubky to keep up. Better yet, try Pubky at pubky.app