In this video, Eric Siu, creator of the Leveling Up Heroes NFT, reflects on the launch of his project and outlines several "boneheaded" marketing mistakes that hindered its performance, offering insights for future NFT launches. He first discusses the lack of an aggressive, early promotional blitz, noting that a longer, more intensive promo period with more partner projects could have driven better results, and emphasizes the need to push the team hard when promotion stalls. He then critiques reliance on paid Twitter and Facebook ads, arguing that organic influencer promotion is far more effective in the NFT space. The second major mistake highlighted is launching without unique profile picture (PFP) NFTs, which confused buyers accustomed to PFP collections despite offering extensive utility. Siu also describes the confusion caused by releasing two utility tiers (Epic and Magical) simultaneously, suggesting a single‑tier launch would have been clearer, and notes that external timing factors—such as launching during the Ukraine invasion—further hurt momentum. Finally, he stresses the importance of rapid hiring and onboarding of community managers, as a strong, responsive community is essential for post‑launch success. Throughout, Siu frames these lessons as learning points, mentions upcoming plans like a June PFP drop and future events, and invites viewers to engage, comment, and apply these insights to their own NFT projects.
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When you're going to launch a product, right, really you're, you're constantly iterating, you're constantly testing. You don't want to launch to a large audience and have a bunch of things broken. And I think that's kind of what's broken in the space right now. It's really iterating, testing, iterating, testing, collecting feedback, and just constantly doing the same thing over and over and over. And, and that's what it is. All right. So in this video, we're going to talk about a few boneheaded NFT marketing mistakes that you have to avoid if you are trying to sell out. So my name is Eric Siu, creator of Leveling Up Heroes. It's a personal growth NFT here to help level up the world. So let's get into it. So what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to go through a couple things that I shared in a thread. I'm going to expand on what I actually mean by each of these. So let's take a look over here. So the first one over here says, uh, not blitzing hard enough with promos. So I'm going to open this one over here. So for us, we did really well with our promos And we crushed it maybe the last 8, 9 days or so leading up to our launch. Now, the problem with this one was that if we had pushed for maybe 3 weeks, 4 weeks ahead of time, the results would probably would have been a lot better, right? So, and by the way, we're not really unhappy with our results. I'm just saying like these are some mistakes that we made where it's like, oh, like next time. And we are gonna do like a profile picture drop in June. But, you know, for us it's like, man, we could have just done better there. Because if you look at our promo partners over here, I'm just gonna read it off like. World of Women Alpha, 8Gen, Alien Friends, Doodles Alpha Group, Wild Whales, which is YPO, Ascendance Illuminati, Knights of Degen. So these are some pretty cool capsule houses, like pretty cool projects to work with. And we're like, man, we totally could have done way more of these. So we just needed more of them. And I would say also kind of related to that too is if you don't find that the team is pushing hard enough, you have to push them like really hard and It took a couple wake-up calls to get this moving forward. So it always comes down to people at the end of the day. You have to make sure that you have the right people on the team. So first one is not blitzing hard enough with promotions. Now, the other thing I'll say kind of related to that too is if you're coming from a Web2 marketing background, which I am, trying to run paid ads for this using Twitter ads, it seems obvious. Like, oh, let's run Twitter ads. Let's run Facebook ads. Like, this is going to work. Unfortunately, it doesn't work right. It's really the organic stuff that works because it comes from like when you have influencers that are pushing things, people trust the influencers for who the influencers are because they're putting their name behind something. Now, when you're just running simple ads, you'll find that a lot of these people running Twitter ads for their NFT projects, when you check the volume for the projects, they actually don't do that well. Right. And they're actually heavily undersold. Now, going back to my screen over here, So the second issue, the second boneheaded mistake that we made was not having unique PFPs at the drop. PFPs meaning profile pictures. And so we created an animated version of one of our characters and we're like, you know, we think this is good enough. Like, this is pretty cool. It's cute. Like, you can see this one over here. It's called the Guide. And, um, you know, we're like, yeah, this is really cool. So, um, the problem is when we, when we launched, people were like, when reveal? When reveal? When reveal? Right? So it's like Trying to row against the tide is pretty stupid because people are used to doing things a certain way in this space. And so like, you got to make it easier for people, right? Like, keep it simple, keep it stupid, right? Keep it simple and stupid. And so over here, like, we, we thought what we did was we would put on so much utility and, um, you know, that's gonna be enough, right? Look at this utility over here. So they get, they get, uh, the NFT itself, they get the book They get free mints for future profile pictures, live audio town halls, like, from time to time with myself, exclusive online community, one free ticket to an in-real-life event, and access to Leveling Up School, which is one of the courses that we have, which we're selling for $2,500. Like, this is a no-brainer. This is a really good offer. But still, at the end of the day, you have to understand that people in this space, they know things to be a certain way and they don't— a lot of these people come from— they don't really understand, like, what all this other stuff is. They just first start with the PFPs, right? So, um, again, not trying to roll, roll against, um, the, the tide. And, uh, that's what it is. And by the way, you can see for our project, we have our future PFPs coming, right? Like, we have, um, you know, we've been working on this already for a while, and, uh, that's why we're slated to do this in June. But we think this launch is going to go a lot better. And, um, I will make a video on that too when we do the launch, because, um, that's going to show, like, that's going to kind of validate the mistakes that we've made here. So I would Advise you to come back to this channel later and check it out. And by the way, don't forget to hit the like and the subscribe button if you want to see that video in the coming months, because I'm going to continue— we're going to continue to build. We're going to continue to build and it's going to be great. And, you know, for us, it's focused on building a nice brand in the world of NFTs. Number 3 is launching with 2 tiers with different utility at the same time. So what that means is, you know, for us, we had a magical tier and an epic tier. And all you really need to know is for the epic tier, that's more of like a mastermind. and like a deal flow type of, you know, you're sharing deal flow in the mastermind and it's more for like founders. Now for the Magical tier, it's like more for people that are kind of earlier in their career, maybe they don't have a business yet and maybe they don't want a business, but they just want to grow, they want to get better, they want to become the best version of themselves. And so the problem is we launched the Epic tier first and then it's like, okay, you know, now let's launch the Magical tier, right? So we shouldn't have, we should have just focused on one and then like the other one maybe done a couple months later. You can see the theme here is like too much confusion, right? It's like launching with 2, Different tiers, and then it's like, you know, trying to, you know, go against the grain on the PFPs. And so there's a couple things there, right? It's one is being too ambitious, right? The other part is going against the tide, right? So being too ambitious, like, this is— if we had just focused on the formula that works right now, focused on the PFPs, focused on one tier, and, you know, launch accordingly, like, arguably we would have done a lot better, right? Now the other thing I'll say too, this is a Something we couldn't really control. But when we launched, it was actually when Ukraine was first invaded. And that's not good. And when you have news when everyone's focused on that, that's also not good. I mean, obviously that, you know, those are things that matter more than just like a launch like this. But, you know, if you can delay it, you would. It's just for us, we had delayed already. So we're like, you know, let's just freaking push through. And it is what it is. And so what I would say is we learned a lot from that. And, you know, timing matters a bit. Focus matters a bit, right? It's a little bit of everything, right? Focusing, timing, making sure that you have the right team as well. All these things kind of play into, well, making sure that you have a successful project. So let's take a look back over here. Not hiring and onboarding people quickly enough. So the note here is even if you sell out, if you don't have a community member, if you don't have community members or community managers ready to step in, you're going to fall flat because a community is a living organism and you have to be prepared for that, right? Because people in the space, they're going to eat you up alive if you're not moving quickly on this stuff and if you're not executing well. So for us, I think we're doing a relatively good job right now. And by the way, if you're a content creator or if you're a good community manager, you can also tweet at me @EricOSiu or just DM me or hit me up on Instagram. We're always looking for really good people. Show me examples of what you've done. But hiring is the name of the game here. And firing quickly too is the name of the game. We did move quickly on firing when we could tell that it wasn't the right fit for certain people. And so really, I mean, these are just a couple of examples of mistakes, boneheaded mistakes that we made with our launch. But we're still very proud of what we've accomplished. And we have our PFP drop that's coming in June, which is really going to be the main launch. This was kind of like a little tester for us to kind of test the waters. You know, see if things are— see how things are working. Have our first event coming up next month too. So really working out the kinks. And then when you're going to launch a product, right, really you're constantly iterating, you're constantly testing. You don't want to launch to a large audience and have a bunch of things broken. And I think that's kind of what's broken in the space right now. It's really iterating, testing, iterating, testing, collecting feedback, and just constantly doing the same thing over and over and over. And that's what it is. Let me know what you think in the comments. Do you think I missed anything? Do you agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments below and we will catch you later. Someone came to you right now, they're like, hey, Brian, I'll give you 10x on your AR. I'll give you, I'll give you $5 million. What would you say to them? I'd probably say yeah. Yeah. Okay. There you go. 10x is pretty hard to turn down, man. There you go, everyone.
