How I Made $1,000,000 With NFTs (& Lost It All)

we just made one million dollars with this chunky little dinosaur to explain how I got here we have to rewind a bit nfts nft nft 2021 the year of nfts they were everywhere redefining the art world and making people money 69 million dollars people making a lot of money you can really make some money with nfts and so with my developer friend Vin and artist friend velvet we embarked on the crazy adventure of building an nft project from nothing this is the story The Power made one million dollars with nfts and how I lost it all thanks to Fiverr for sponsoring this video Our Story begins in October 2021 we needed an nft idea the typical nft project is a collection of profile pictures while these nfts are cool in their own as art I wanted to create something more than just jpegs one of my earliest nft ideas was crayons I just loved their colors and Vibe the team and I wondered what if we made crayon nfts that worked like real crayons where you could use them to color in coloring page nfts to create personalized nftr that would bring customization and interactivity to the blockchain we started to think about what we drew as kids growing up what represented childlike Wonder a dinosaur a crayon dinosaur a crazilla we were ready to begin then got to developing velvet got to drawing and I got to marketing when it comes to selling nfts marketing hype are half of the equation if not more than 50 space mostly hangs around two platforms Discord and Twitter in December I started doing the basics like tweeting posting our art and sharing our Discord and by the end of the month we climbed our way to 200 followers we were making progress and then we got suspended at that time nft projects were somewhat being targeted by Twitter and it didn't help that the very next day I got scammed 1 500 just right now on Discord I'm in a bunch of nft project servers and I got this DM from what looked to be a verification bot and it said I had to connect my wallet or get kicked out of the server versus the suspension and then now this I just I just feel like these are just signs telling me that I should just quit now forced to wait on Twitter I was seeing new nft projects gaining thousands of followers in a single day likely being pumped by influencers whales Alpha groups Bots I didn't have access to any of those I didn't know if we could compete in this Cutthroat Market I did have one thing though that was persistence I made a new Twitter account and started posting at least three times a day liking or replying to every single comment we got I had velvet draw a fan art of other popular nft projects with a crazilis Twist which helped spread the word in their Community with Discord we set our server from public to private and began doing Discord invite giveaways on Twitter this created a sense of exclusivity encouraged engagement on our posts in our Discord I brought on a community manager chaos and we worked together to bring on moderators artists and event coordinators we would play games to strengthen our community and give away a loud response and the loudest spot essentially the ability to Mint an nft from the project during its launch they were the best marketing tool Barna on Twitter we held giveaways for what we call them waxless spots that went to capture thousands of likes and comments per post we started holding art contests that received hundreds of entries from illustrations to songs to animations sculptures plushies tattoos clothing food yes that's a crazy on a loaf of bread crazy [Music] to create content at the speed we were going we realized the final we used Freelancers from the platform to design our website make graphics for our social media and create an amazing crazilis animation velvet had this really cute idea of a crazilla coloring itself in with a crayon she drew a storyboard for it but we didn't have the time or skills to animate so I searched on Fiverr for an animator and quickly found one that had the perfect style for a brand working with them was really easy they guide me through the entire animation process from the animatic to the first draft to the final colored version it came out so good I was seriously impressed especially for the time it took and amount it cost fiber was a big help with growing crazy list so I'm happy to say that they are today's video sponsored they have Freelancers with all kinds of skills and experience could help you at every budget there are artists marketers programmers there's a freelancer for every area of an nft product if you're looking for help with a project or your business head over to the Fiverr link right here and check out the services available and get 10 off with code Jesse link is in the description phrases crazillas crazy Cinemas the first nft that you can color I really do like the concept of this one I really think that this Project's going to do well by March of 2022 chrisillas had essentially blown up we had organically grew from 0 to 10 20 30 40 50 000 Twitter followers in a matter of three months people were mentioning Us in YouTube videos articles lists and we had landed insane Partnerships with big nft projects that naturally brought up the question when were we going to Mint our plan from the start was to just work on crazy laws at our own pace until coloring was ready but at the end of March we started to notice the landscape changing nft trading volume had fallen by 2.5 billion 50 from its peak projects were struggling to sell out we knew we were running out of time the team and I decided .077 each per nft a 7777 Supply and a launch on April 26th that would leave one more month to finish things up VIN and velvet said it'd be tight but likely doable I took their word on it and made it official for our final marketing push we revealed our biggest Partners launched our website and ran a public raffle that received over 30 000 entries in four days everyone was saying we were going to sell there was only one way to find out it was Midday velvet had completed all the art and Vin was uploading the smart contract we planned to launch at 2PM I held a Twitter space to countdown with our community this was it we needed to sell out everything came down to this day the clock ticked and ticked and then I got a message from Vin we had to delay the mint by three hours ethereum smart contract had failed to upload internally I was freaking out I knew that if there was any reason for people not to have big or small people would not mint this was a reason not to me I was scared this would be the end of our project luckily our community seemed cool with it so I found my composure and continued on and three hours later we went live the Discord was going crazy people were minting it felt incredible seven months of hard work were finally being realized but just when we thought we could celebrate the party ended people started reporting that people were getting scammed through our official open C URL they were being sold fake crazyla nfts made by scammers our Discord was panicking and filled with fun that's when we discovered an Open Sea exploit when we uploaded our smart contract our collection was named crasilla's V2 on open C we changed the name to crazilis right as we went live assuming that the URL would immediately update and direct users to the renamed collection it didn't there was a brief moment where the URL continued to direct users to any collection that was called crazilis V2 that's when a scammer pounced in created a fake collection called crazy Littles V2 and sold fake crizilla nfts to innocent buyers we immediately paused them in to ensure nobody else was getting scammed and contacted openc to shut down the fake collection they eventually did but by the time we turned back on the mint it was too late we ended the day off selling a thousand nfts far from the original 777 we initially planned for I couldn't help but feel devastated not because I couldn't sell more nfts or make more money but because I felt like I had failed thousands of people that believed in me it went all downhill from here we had to delay the reveal of our coloring page nfts when it was time to release the coloring desk the app that lets you color in crazylas and is fundamentally the core of the entire project we weren't ready and had to delay it until further notice every morning after that I woke up to hate comments directed towards me I struggled to eat sleep shower I argued with my team I lost trust in my team I felt like I've just lost control of the project I slipped into a depression after that I had to take a step away from crazilis for a bit during my time away I met up with a friend that knew nothing about nfts and I just asked what to do what she said really changed my perspective sure we didn't have the perfect launch we didn't sell out but we still ended up selling 2 400 crazily we still had a community of over a thousand holders among the vocal haters were patient supporters that continued to believe in our vision my goal moving forward was not to satisfy everyone that's impossible my goal was to pick myself up from the rubble and just deliver what I promised at the start I got the team back together Vin continued to finish the coloring desk while velvet and I worked to thank those who are still sticking by with us we created mystery surprise gift packages filled with goodies like a crazilis coloring book pin and sticker and sent them to our holders all across the world for free we soon followed with metaverse parties gave way crazily's metaverse land and even a crazilis branded luggage we were far from smooth sailing but we were rebuilding ourselves Brick by Brick people appreciated and for the first time in a long time we slowly started seeing the community light up once again I'm happy to say say that by the time this video is out the coloring desk should be live it is done so now you may be wondering how much did I end up making with crazilis was it really worth all the headaches we made 178 which at its all-time high price equates to 816 000 US dollars convert that to Canadian dollars because I'm Canadian and we have one million dollars had to finesse some numbers to get that catchy YouTube title with each being valued at around a thousand dollars right now we have a 170 000 US Dollars never mind that we have yet to pay taxes startup fees contractors the majority of the eth will be reinvested into the project so I'm becoming no crypto millionaire anytime soon the team and I will continue building crazillas and seeing where the nft market takes us thanks again to Fiverr for sponsoring today's video visit the link in the description to check out their services and get 10 off with the code Jensen if you enjoyed this video check out my other video here and be sure to like And subscribe peace out

Channel: Jensen Tung

Views: 253,501

Keywords: jensen tung, Nft, Non fungible token

Id: rAVMSa_B8OM

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 01 2022