Paper 22: The Week Before Launch
How I am dealing with 5 pre-launch challenges
GM team - hope you are having a great day.
Today I am providing a behind-the-scenes look at 5 key challenges we have been thinking about in the run up to our NFT launch and our strategies for dealing with them.
A quick point for those who provided their wallet address for a WL spot for Airdrop Szn 1, thank you! We’ve had well in excess of a 100 WL spots privately reserved with virtually no major marketing - that’s amazing.
If you have already signed up, there is no need to do so again, but you may like to check out our brand new website in any event. There are a few kinks to be smoothed over, but I wanted to share before the morning when they should be fixed. Let me know what you think - and stay tuned to 32 Dreams for the latest updates!
Enjoy the read and have a great week.
B
1. CUSTOMER INTERACTION
There are all sorts of ways you could interact with your customer to sell an NFT.
The way you choose is likely to be determined by your supply, price, nature of the product, and perceived demand of the product.
In our case, our supply is 3200, price is 0.16ETH, and our product is an educational NFT.
Before everything I decided I wanted to reward my earliest supporters and subscribers first, so that meant I created one WL opportunity for subscribers who just needed to reply to my weekly email. All of these wallet addresses have been added to one database.
Beyond this, we needed to collect more wallet addresses of those who were not subscribers but liked the product very much. In the product deck we produced, I called people to contact me privately for a second phase of WLs.
In hindsight, this may have been a mistake.
It was great to feel the demand and I personally received just under 100 messages this way, but it diverted a lot of time and attention away from other operations.
I think we should have gone with a Premint raffle straight after the initial WL allocation. This would have automated the wallet collection process and allowed me to focus on other tasks.
Having said that, I had so many great conversations on the project as a consequence of doing this “extended DM WL” process.
In any event, I’m glad we can move on to a less manual part of the sale now!
2. WEBSITE / MINTING
Your website is your home on the internet. When showing other people your home, you want it to look nice.
Though we didn’t feel it was necessary to have an overly elaborate website for our purposes, we did think that the website needed to be a minimum viable product which conveyed the relevant information and allowed users to mint securely.
Why is this a challenge?
Making a standard “Web 2.0” website is in practice not too difficult anymore, however, making a “Web 3.0” website which has minting functionality is slightly more complex.
The difficulty comes from the fact there are smart contracts involved and there must be trust between you and the people who are building those for you (since all of the funds from your primary sale will end up in that contract.)
As such, it is very important to find people to do this who take your work seriously and are reliable and trustworthy. (It’s also more technically difficult.)
When I was having some issues in the website production process, @KingmakerEth provided me so much support, went over and above to ask me the right questions to understand what I needed, and was accommodating enough on timelines and price for me to trust him with the work. (I have also known him for for more than a year and we have regularly shared experiences, thoughts, project ideas, so no small amount of trust was gained in this process too.) He also just believed in the project, which was simply nice to know that he was “on our team”.
We had a call with him to get an overview of where we were and what we needed for the mint day, and he went away and provided us a really good first cut after which we got fast updates.
How we were going to finalise the site was a huge cloud over our heads. Bringing @KingmakerEth on board took that stress away and allowed us to focus on what we really needed to do: marketing.
3. MARKETING / REACH
We have received so much great feedback on the product which makes us believe we have a great product. We even used some of our feedback as part of our marketing (!) - which I would recommend as a strategy because it shows you are engaging with your community.
The challenge, however, is still that we need to reach more people.
We are speaking with bigger players in the space on how we can work together to make sure we get more exposure, as well as going for collaborations with protocols for whom it would be natural to want us to drive participation to them.
This is all a work in progress. In the end, one of my main reflections:
Reach is important for scale. Even if your product is good and you have good connections, it feels like you can never reach far enough.
Me, Today
4. PARTNERSHIPS
This is a cool late addition to the mix for us.
We were thinking: who else would be interested in our product?
We’ve covered the contacts we know; we’ve covered the communities/projects who are interested in WLs; was there anyone else?
We then thought that the protocols who are involved in the Arbitrum Odyssey may like to collaborate in a way that is mutually beneficial.
We’ve had some positive responses so far, and this is a conversation we will continue to explore.
I think this shows it’s important to consider all the potential stakeholders in a project as early as possible. We almost missed this one, but it’s great we’re exploring it now - even if a little late in the day.
5. THE ENDURING NATURE OF NFTS
So what happens after Szn 1?
What happens to an NFT once it has been “used”?
Well, I guess that depends on the real nature of the NFT, the psychology of the buyer, and what the NFT can effectively communicate about the buyer.
Up to this point in the development of NFTs, NFTs have typically been discarded when they they do not effectively communicate something about a holder in a way which lines up with that holder’s perception of themselves - or it is no longer financially profitable to continue to hold.
In the normal world, however, there are real goods and services which we consume which we would never treat this way.
A section of my bookcase: When I’ve moved accommodation, I’ve always taken my books with me, despite “finishing with them” long ago
When we participate in an educational pursuit, for example, we often like to demonstrate to others that we have indeed endured something challenging such that we have improved ourselves in some meaningful way. This is when we keep humungous books like War and Peace around: as a memory of the story, a reminder of the challenge, and an indicator of our fortitude.
Taking this one step further: when you read many books, often thematically similar, over a lengthier period of time, you often receive something in exchange for your endeavours and to “qualify” your achievement.
If you read, understand, and apply well, you receive something more significant than the person who reads, understands, and applies less well.
Many of us will recognise this process as how degrees are given out at the end of university - though accreditation is not limited to universities.
Some NFTs will come to represent meaningful qualifications in the same way.
The question is how to make this qualification meaningful to a buyer. Will it be powered by pure data which demonstrates your skills and development on-chain? Will it help you gain employment as you can use it to demonstrate your commitment and competence in a sphere of Web 3.0? Will it serve as a memento of a time in your life where you learned with friends and had a great time?
We are actively thinking on this.
Have a great day,
B
Please do leave me any questions or thoughts here - I respond to every one!
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Our long-form podcast discussions can be found on YouTube and Spotify.
Disclaimer: The content covered in this newsletter is not to be considered as investment advice. It is for informational and educational purposes only.
I hold some of the NFTs mentioned in these newsletters.
Questions:
1. I am wondering the NFT will gain access to discord with information regarding your research. Will you guys keep delivering the research of different protocol for long term with this NFT or it only available for short period of time?
2. Based on the current NFT market, what if didn't sell out all 3200? What you gonna do regarding the rest of NFT and will the research information continue to deliver?
As for after the NFT has been used, as a teacher I think there is a different type of value than we are currently experiencing in the NFT market (hello PFP) in been able to either pass on this information, make it available with notes to students, embed it into a high school coursework on NFTs, (we are probably almost there in terms of interest and significance to including in mandatory technology curriculum. Partnerships with individuals or companies that can facilitate this would be a bleeding edge strategy.