HOW TO MAKE NFTS - THE NFT LAUNCH PLAYBOOK

today i'm going to be talking not about art and drawing nfts but i want to give you a little bit of insight into the nft launch process these are thoughts that i've had after recently launching crunchy cows nft line i did a lot of things right but i also did a lot of things wrong and i'm constantly analyzing my process my decisions and trying to document those so i can learn the entire community can learn and sort of have a path laid out for them save them a little bit of time save them some headaches so they can innovate faster and create nfts faster so this technology stays around for a very long time so without further ado let's dive into what i'm calling the nft launch playbook if you want to learn how to draw and generate your characters take a look at my other videos but this is going to be more on the marketing side and the launch side of your nfts this video will be good if you don't know where to start if you're a total newbie totally fine i was there but it's also going to help you understand that even though the clock is ticking you really don't have to rush your nft line out there there's a long road to go for nft so if you're feeling like you're freaking out you got to scramble to get your artwork or all of your materials together you'll learn some things in this video that teach you to sort of slow down and use what you don't have is your advantage to launching your nfts if you're like me the art and the technology of creating nfts is the fun part that's the easy part that's the part that i look forward to that i could do all day every day the hard part the scary part the part that i avoid is the marketing and the publicity and getting the word out there like i said before you don't have to rush the biggest mistake i made on crunchy cows was minting too soon i have a partner on crunchy cows he was talking about how we should probably delay the launch build up our following a little bit but i kept i was insistent but that was the totally wrong way to look at it so you really need to put in the work do the marketing but most importantly build the community those three words build the community if i could go back in time on the crunchy cows launch that's the one thing i would have done differently at the beginning build the community building this community takes time it takes time to build connections with people for people to trust you to nurture those connections what i recommend the i mean anytime somebody dms me on instagram and ask me how should they get started they don't know where to start with the marketing of their nft line the first thing i say is create in public sharing your thinking your process it's going to get people familiar with your work with your thoughts with your work ethic with your consistency to show up and the more repetition that people see the more times you show up in their timeline and their feeds the more involved they are with their journey the more likely they're going to go on that journey with you so i recommend putting the reps for months before your nft line launches create in public talk through your process even if it's total crickets at first just start wherever you are and say hey i'm starting at an ft line this is where i am this is where i want to go follow along with me hopefully you learned some things along the road and sort of build this together now once people are watching your project being created in public you can slowly guide them and point them to your other social media discord or a mailing list you'll want to take the momentum from creating in public and try to ramp it up at a perfect rate for the time that you met now for crunchy cows i built in public for too short of a time i did it all in about 30 or 40 days and then i launched and when i launched it did all right there were 100 selling at first but then the sales tapered off because the the process the journey of creating in public was almost like that bubble burst and there was couldn't go back to the excitement of the beginning and generate that interest all over so what i wish i would have done was create in public and not rush the mint don't rush to sell build up the anticipation build up the story the journey get people involved build your discord community then really snowball that momentum into your sale if you've never created in public before here a few ideas just to get you started steal these ideas make them your own and just start posting hopefully you see how thinking in micro topics instead of talking about entire tline dive into the very specifics and create short form videos around each one of these topics and you're going to build out a library and when people do see your nft line when they get interested in it there's going to be a whole library to consume to get to know you and to get to trust you before we move forward if you do the like and subscribe thing that'll be awesome thank you this point is going to be a little bit tricky if you're an artist if you're a marketer it's a little bit better but you need to know and get to love discord set it the d word discord it's not going away i know you wish it would go away i know it's a huge time suck but let's change the way you think about discord right now before i launched crunchy cows i had heard from many people that discord was the place to drive all of your traffic for your nft line it was the place to build your community to get to know people and i just didn't understand it when i started crunchy cows i thought my following on other platforms would be enough to sell crunchy cows and i neglected the fact that these are people buying a product they're investing in my product and selling nfts is a little bit different than just selling a product that somebody's gonna go use and in the shower and it's gonna waste away these are nfts that sit in people's wallets and they're expecting to get a return on me so it's very much like somebody is investing in your fund and it's your responsibility to get them an roi so how do you change your thinking around discord i personally just visualize discord as the heart of crunchy cows it is the heart of my line it is where i put all my messaging where i go in to check with people to talk to people and they then go and spread the messages on social media and it's just it's a heartbeat for my nft line it's a heartbeat for the community that i'm building and it's it's gone from something that i wasn't sure of that i was felt like i was wasting time on to something that i look forward to doing every single day also if you think about discord as a flower that is where you're gonna put all of your high quality pollen and then all the bees are gonna come in there and take it and spread your message around so it's like a marketing power engine you need this for your line i wouldn't neglect it in fact i'd put it at the forefront of your thinking the first thing you think about when you wake up in the first place you stop in every single day while you're marketing your nft line and after you launch your nft line i'm not an expert at building a discord i'm doing it slowly with crunchy cows i wish it were faster but i sort of like the slow snowball effect so i get to know each and every single person in that discord rather than flooding it with 8 000 people but you'll see that it is a numbers game the higher your discord numbers are the greater your chances are selling more nfts and people investing in your project one of my main focuses launching crunchy cows would be to build the discord up organically through partner outreach through social media and creating content aim your goals high so your discord numbers are well into the thousands by time you launch your nft line a great example of this is what mick did with national parks nft you can take a look at them on openc he built his discord up into the thousands he was engaging with them he was gamifying it which i'll talk about in a little bit and by the time he launched he sold out over 4 000 nfts in seven seconds let's talk about something i did right with crunchy cows and it's a little bit controversial in the web3 space because a lot of people don't like to give up their email but i built an email list from day one this was the spot that i drove all the uh people interested in crunchy cows and i said if you would like access to the pre-sale join this mailing list and at this point we're still in web 2 we're not in web 3 fully so people are willing to give up their email addresses just don't take advantage of them don't do anything evil just talk about your product and your product only in that email list don't spam people send one out every two weeks and you may find that it's sort of fun to send these emails out to update everybody on your line and you can even figure out ways to offer as much value and incentive as possible for your energy buyers to go to your discord maybe you do a mentoring event where you buy people one of your nfts or you pay the gas fees for one of your nfts but i find the mailing list and discord the connection between those two and then out to social media is what makes a really strong marketing and distribution messaging channel let's talk about gamifying your drop a lot of mistakes that i see other people make and i am absolutely guilty of it myself is they ask people to come and look at their project they are asking somebody to take their attention and their time sign up for my whitelist buy my nft or share this on social media looking back with the crunchy cow launch i did this so many times i can't even count what i wish i would have done is reframed my messaging to whitelist available only two spots open at 5 45 pm tonight the small window period the scarcity urgency i would gamify my drop gamified the way i message people to generate more interest more demand and be able to control that scarcity look at the way imaginary friends is doing it i haven't even launched at the time of this video and i will guarantee they sell out in half a second because what they're doing is they're not letting people sign up for their whitelist every whitelist spot is gamified it's you have to answer quizzes or riddles or buy merch just to be entered in a raffle for a whitelist spot with a lot of these nft lines that are launching they're begging please come and look at my nft line come and do this over here step over here i want your time and attention and that's not it when you shorten things down to window periods great scarcity don't allow everybody on your white list respects people's time it says at 5 45 you have five minutes to do this if not okay we'll get back to you in a little bit people can program that in their brains and their calendars i'm gonna be here i'm gonna have a shot at this if i don't get this great i'll come back and they can have their day free i don't like his messages all the time just hammering people please come and do this please come and do this don't do that gamify and when you create these short window periods that actually gives you more time to go and do the real work to build your nft line rather than sitting there at twitter and your email all day every day creating these messages so let's do a quick recap if you haven't yet put your full focus on driving people to your discord aim to grow it into the thousands gamify your drop and build an email list take your attention and anxiety away from trying to sell your nft and put it on building a meaningful community and a product that people will really like let's talk about two things that your nft line must have to appeal to people a simple way to think about utility is it adds value to the buyer somebody owns your nft and it gives them access it gives them future revenue it gives them staking abilities it gives you connection to a community it gives you in real life events there are many ways you can add utility into your nft line it's really up to what your nft line is about connected to a charity let people see where their charitable donations are going there are many things you can do get creative but pick three to five strong utility features for your nft this second part also brought to me by mick of national nft parks is the concept of having a mission all great brands and all great products have a mission when i launched crunchy cows i didn't know what it was about all i knew was i wanted to build it in public so people could learn from it and it wasn't until 10 weeks later that mick messaged me and he said crunchy cows is missing a mission what is its mission what is its purpose and it hit me like a brick crunchy cows is an nft line for people who want to and like to create nfts so they can learn from the process that i put out there all the content i put out there and the documents and it will save them a little bit of time so they can innovate faster not have headaches and not go through all the stress that i went through so they can leapfrog where i would where i started and where i was going and just be miles ahead of me so by the time i create my next thing i'm going to learn from them and we're all getting better and the nft technology just getting stronger and stronger and it's going to be around for a very long time i don't know if you're the artist if you're a developer if you're a marketer if you are just a business person funding this nft line i myself am very independent and solopreneur like if that's a word and i love to try to do everything myself at least try to learn everything myself but within two weeks of being in the crunchy cows and making all the art figuring out how to generate characters i realized i can't do the business operations i can't do the development myself and i need to bring on team members to fill all those roles these are the four buckets of the nft team that i see are extremely valuable to focus on art and or animation development promotion and marketing management and operation i assume if you're at this point in the video you sort of have a feeling that those are the buckets you need to fill as well so i won't dive into each one if you do want to talk about them let's talk about it in the comments but if you haven't filled the role for your nft launch make a list of perspectives for each one of these buckets and then reach out to them and offer those people value you're gonna have to give up a percentage of your nft line to bring them on board to make them interested and invested for the long term or you're going to be paying a lot of cash to get a talented person to help you out don't shortchange this don't shortcut it do the right thing offer the fair amount and know that you're going to go much further much faster with a talented team during your pre-launch you want to show up absolutely consistently all the time every single day for months whatever platforms you're on post two to five times on each platform to build up the visibility people will get to know you and you'll get to drive people to your discord and to your email list in your pre-launch keep your art mysterious at the beginning of your launch you can just tease silhouettes you can just hint at a little a few pixels of your artwork it doesn't need to be absolutely perfect absolutely done you don't need to rush through that process to get the artwork done so you can go to market it and run pr and run press that's the wrong way of thinking about it your product does not need to be done by the time you're marketing it in fact you should be marketing before your product is even built with crunchy cows is i teased the artwork i showed combinations of cows but not final cows i created silhouettes and then on my minting site sold in packs of one two or three so what that did was force people to either buy one invest in it be happy with the cow they got they won't know what it looks like until it shows up in their wallet or they buy packs of two and three knowing that they're gonna keep one and try to flip or sell two of them be ready to experiment one thing i've learned from crunchy cows is there is no one strategy that works for every nft line there are no tactics that work for every single nft line you need to build up your community and talk to your community and get to know what drives them and makes them tick and then you need to go out and experiment with what gets the most visibility the most attention and gets the most eyeballs on your line take that advice with a grain of salt it's coming from an artist i definitely skipped this step at the beginning i wish i experimented more i wish i was marketing before i created my line but if you go back in my tick tock feed you'll see where i started crunchy cows and it was just a spur of the moment lightning bolt that i had to run with if i could go back i wish i would have paused right there done two months of marketing before i focused on generating my characters in the artwork leading up to your launch you're going to want to get listed on every single nft calendar site possible and sites like rarity tools they cost a pretty penny but you're gonna need to get on these sites they will drive traffic to your discord you can google them but here's a list of a few all right we're getting close to wrapping up this whole nft launch playbook which i realized was just a scramble mess of thoughts that i'm gonna put into a more organized document that you can follow week one week two week three etc hopefully i'll do that just a word on some habits to develop during your pre-launch and your launch reach out to five to seven people in your niche every single day show up on social media every single day check discord daily be involved with your community get to know people there they're going to help you your owners of your nfts are you're going to be your greatest marketing asset tweet two times per day and if you don't know what garyvee's dollar 80 strategy is google that dive into twitter and run that dollar 80 strategy for the length of your nfte campaign i don't know if it's needed an nft launch playbook but a few words on ethics don't be spammy don't be scammy cash grabs are absolute garbage and share what you learn as you go i made a ton of mistakes launching crunchy cows i hope that this list of scrambled thoughts will save you at least five minutes in your nft launch i know if i could go back i would follow a lot of this advice i hope you have a much smoother nft launch than i did and i hope we can chat about it in this comments and continue pushing nfts into the future [Music] foreign

Channel: Ryan Maloney

Views: 10,376

Keywords: youtube artist, #nfts, #nft, #procreate, #makenfts, #howto, #nftcollectors, #crypto, #ethereum, #draw, #digitalart, #learn, #nfttutorial, #nftprocreate, #howtomakenfts, #opensea, #imaginaryfriends, #boredapeyachtclub, #crunchycows, #nfttips, #learnonyoutube

Id: S51H0nV57KE

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022