It started the way most of my projects do: accidentally. A casual chat. A strange new word. And then ... seven fateful words that mark the start of every designer’s slow descent into madness: “Have you heard of Nostr?”

My friend Aziza, AI enthusiast, chaos magnet ... had been suffering through Nostr clients like Amethyst, Iris, and Damus. Technically functional, but emotionally scarring. Imagine Twitter, coded in the dark during a thunderstorm, on a borrowed 2004 VPN. She said: “Let’s build something better. Something usable. Something that doesn’t make you question your life choices.”

And just like that, Wedaage was born, a Nostr client designed to work without the digital trauma.

Every existing Nostr app felt like a Craigslist fever dream:

Minimalist to the point of vanishing (Iris)

Running purely on vibes, bugs, and hope (Amethyst)

Smooth, but gated behind iOS exclusivity (Damus)

Users just wanted a normal app. Not a hackathon Frankenstein. Not a beta graveyard.

Two weeks. Zero sleep. Too much coffee. Week one? Crickets and Post-its. Week two?

One actually-usable design

Real validation from real humans (not just my reflection)

An eye twitch from 72 hours of prototyping

We cherry-picked the good stuff:

Damus’s sleekness

Amethyst’s core idea (minus the chaos)

Iris’s minimalism, but with actual substance

Wedaage went from concept to something people wanted to use. Revolutionary for a Nostr client.

People liked it. Even the snarky testers. The UI felt… pleasant. Aziza went into full hype mode, launching development like she’d just been handed free electricity. For a Nostr client, “actually good” is practically a miracle.

Designer-dev sync = actual magic.

Time is a lie, good things happen in 2am chaos.

Skipping A/B testing hurts, but deadlines hurt more.

We took Nostr from “Why does this app hate me?” to “Wait, this slaps?” Wedaage became the one Nostr client you don’t uninstall out of shame. Now we wait for launch… and pray the bugs stay extinct.