Eight Weeks in the NFT Wilderness: Part II

This week, I joined Andy Milonakis’ Twitch stream giveaway of his Goat Soups collection. Seamless and entertaining, we entered virtual races as marbles with Andy sending winners Goat Soups in real time.

Three Goat Soups

Nearly 2,000 Goat Soups were minted by the whitelist that day. And 24 hours later, the last of his 3,744 creations were taken after just nine minutes of public sale. Roughly estimating, Andy may have generated over $10 million in Eth.

Even without an Andy Milonakis to promote your NFT, frenzies are alive and well with real money and engagement to be had on the creation side. Let’s look at the makeup of teams.

Big Pot, Few Hands

Most project teams I’ve seen ranged from three to seven or eight people.

Core teams include a mix of artists/designers, smart contract developers and marketers with community members subcontracted to patrol and admin Discord servers.

Into the NFTverse

Now let’s review common components of an NFT launch.

1. The art and lore is your value prop and catch. Other considerations for buyers include team member backgrounds and whether their identities are doxxed.
   NFT investors deal with scammers on a daily basis; knowing who they’re dealing with is a reassurance.
2. Projects build further buy-in with a strong roadmap or whitepaper, various utilities and a well-defined rarity system of traits.
   Deflationary incentives seem to be part of newer projects and offer things such as trait composability, staking token pools and floor sweeping.
   Perks like event access (Andy Milonakis is polling which city to throw a Goat Soup party), merch, charitable donations and metaverse bridging are also value adds.
3. Attractive mint prices.
4. Discord community building is the main form of engagement. Discord bots can track and rank users by the number of messages a user sends. Getting a certain number friends to join a Discord can buy a whitelist spot. Twitter raids, contests, games, topic-driven chatrooms and regular dev announcements are all part of the playbook.
5. Marketing campaigns can entail giveaways (airdrops, WL spots, blue-chip NFTs), partnership perks with other projects, influencer promotions and AMAs/Twitter Spaces, on top of a steady stream of tweets.

Round-Up

The NFT digital space is booming … for now. There’s for sure deeper nuances and optics to navigate in running a team and prepping for launch, but the way the numbers shake out (revenue ÷ team split/overhead) plus speed of deployment can make for a sweet payoff.

So far, I’ve spread about 4 Eth into a dozen or so different projects. I plan to double this investment in the coming weeks. With Adidas’ entry into the NFT world today with a Bored Ape, I’m also hoping to join the creator side and soon :)