5 Step NFT Marketing Strategy That Will Sell Out ANY Project

Being that I wrote a book called Leveling Up: How to Master the Game of Life and how I look at life as a game, I wanted to design something around that. So I called it Leveling Up Heroes. And so thinking about what matters to you, what mission, what causes actually matter to you, you're going to do a lot better because you have a why that's behind it. All right. So let's talk about how you can sell out of your NFT project. This is a 5-step framework that you can follow. Before we start, my name is Eric Siu, creator of the Leveling Up Heroes NFT project, and here to help level up the world. Don't forget to hit the subscribe and the bell button. All right, so I'm gonna walk through a couple things, but I think, uh, context would be super helpful here. So we recently just released Leveling Up Heroes, and we sold a couple hundred grand worth in terms of US dollars. And we largely look at this as kind of our seed round of funding, and we've also worked on a handful of other Crypto projects as well, and I wanted to do a couple experience shares here because not a lot of people are doing that here on YouTube. They're not really talking about their project or kind of the the how-to practical steps here. So we wanted to do that whether you're watching or whether you are listening. So first and foremost, very simple thing is step number one is making sure that you establish a mission and vision, right? Because back in August or so, I had already started to think about creating a project, and I had noticed already that a lot of people were basically going for a cash grab. And so. I spoke to Keith Grossman, who is the president of Time Magazine, or Time, I should say. And basically he was like, look, is your project greed-based or is it community-based? And are you actually fulfilling on that community? And so I noticed a lot of projects were greed-based and I wanted to zig where other people were zagging. And so being that I wrote a book called Leveling Up: How to Master the Game of Life and how I look at life as a game, I wanted to design something around that. So I called it Leveling Up Heroes. And so thinking about what matters to you, what mission, what causes actually matter to you, you're going to do a lot better because you have a why that's behind it. And so for me, I wanted my NFTs to tie to kind of gaming history. Not only that, though, I wanted to layer on utility because I wanted this to be a project that would last for the long term. And when I look at these projects, if I say long term, you're most likely building a business if it's for the long term, which is why I call this the initial kind of crowdfunding when you when you sell your NFTs, right? That's crowdfunding, that support that you have, and then you have to actually fulfill and serve the community and continue to develop a strong offering for that community. And so that's why I look at it as a business. And so as we pull up my screen over here, first things first is you can see this is, this is email proof right here. When I sent an email out to our artist Tom, August 6th, 2021, I said, hey, have you done any NFT projects yet? Right. And so, you know, we go over here and this is September 8th. So we waited a little bit, basically a month later. And I said, hey, do you think you could do like a hybrid of anime style art combined with the image below? And so if I come back to this for a second and I think about it, I grew up watching anime, I grew up playing games, and I feel like I'm tap dancing to work every day, which one primary reason is because I feel like all this is a game, right? And so again, what causes matter to you? What mission? What values? Like what's the mission behind your project? And so for me, For the mission of Leveling Up Heroes, it is to level up the world. And that's a very broad mission and very— that's a mission one person can never accomplish in their lifetime, right? But that's something I can aim to get a little closer to every single day. So that's what a mission is. And so what are the values tied to your mission as well? And so what ended up happening was eventually we developed a Code of Epicness, which is kind of the core values that we have behind our project, right? So if you join the group and if you violate these core values, unfortunately we're gonna have to remove you from the group. So establishing those guidelines, again, it's like you're building a business and that's why I think people that have experience operating, or if you hire someone that has experience operating, you're gonna have a leg up over the, the other projects that are out there. Now, if you're a large brand that's looking to just get into space right now, that's fine. You are building on top of your, your business. That's fine too. We can see that these are some of the bits of value that we have with our, with our project, right? That's maybe different than the others. So you can see up here, I'm just gonna highlight it. So we have a docs team, which means you know who our team members are, you know what they've done before. We're not hiding behind anything, and that makes it less likely for us to run with the funds, which is also known as rugging. We have operating experience. So myself personally, you know, for example, we have my marketing agency, Single Grain, which as of this recording, we have about 60 people or so, and we work with cool brands like the Ubers, the Amazons, the Airbnbs of the world, right? And that's just to say that we have experience building things, and builders have an advantage naturally, especially when you know how to build teams. That's a huge advantage. Our long-term mission is to level up the world. But, you know, utility, true utility that we're talking about here is the conferences, the dinners that we're planning to do. Also, if you pick up the NFT, you get a hard copy of the book, you get our course on how to start a business, which we were selling for $2,500 a pop, and additional things that we want to layer on for the long term. Can we do games? Can we do utilities for businesses? Right. And so, you know, I even said this yesterday, like, we're going to raise the bar for NFTs. And the problem right now, at least as of this recording and early 2022 is that the bar for NFTs are set really low right now. It's just like you do some art, you throw it out there, and then people raise the money and then they run away with it, right? That to me is not very long-term. I, you know, it's just not for me, right? Um, I— what's been easier for me in my career is just doing things long-term, and, uh, it ends up working better that way anyway. And so, you know, my challenge to you is to think about and type into the comments right now, like, if you were to launch a project, how would your project be different? You know, what's the mission? What are the values? How is it going to be different out there? What unique utilities can you layer on, right? Can this serve as a membership pass? You know, can you share deal flow in here? You know, some of the NFTs I've seen out there, they provide courtside tickets or box seats for sporting events, right? And we're actually thinking about how we can add those as perks to our project too. So constantly thinking about how you can just do better, do better, do better over time. And that's what leveling up is all about, by the way. Now, in terms of how to find artists, so we're still on the step one right here, mission vision, but you got to find the artist, right? So you can use Dribbble, that's D-R-I-B-B-L-E. You can use Behance.net. Just go to Twitter and just type NFT artist. You should be able to find people that have it in their profile. And you can use a tool called Followerwonk, that's W-O-N-K, to see, you know, different people on Twitter. It's a nice Twitter search tool that's out there. And that's what it is. Now, the other thing I'll say too is If you want to be successful in this space, you have to be able to build relationships. And what I mean by that is you have to be able to collab with the right people. And so for me, knowing that I was going to launch a project, knowing this all the way back in August, I had started to commit to going to conferences such as NFT NYC and, you know, throwing dinners. And then I got lucky with one of my NFTs. I actually got to attend a dinner and then it led to me joining an alpha group called JPEG Morgan. So I ended up joining these, these, not only joining these alpha groups, but also attending the live events, throwing dinners myself, connecting people, being that kind of central point. And then I built a lot of great relationships that way, right? Knowing that I had something coming long-term. Now, again, I would just say again, I probably could have launched a lot sooner with this stuff, but I just wanted to take my time with it. And plus we had a lot of stuff going on, you know, business-wise, had a lot of priorities to take care of there. So, on my phone, you can see this right here. It says, slow down. What is the rush? And so seriously, what is the rush to get a project out that quickly? If you do it methodically and if you're building thoughtfully and if you're building for the long term, then what's the rush? So we talked about building relationships sooner than later. So what events can you go to next and who can you talk to and can you throw a dinner and maybe just invite people over, maybe just cover the bill? It's just easier that way. You know, have people do introductions and all that and that's going to go a long way. It's going to— It's going to not only just build relationships to help your project, but it's going to build these relationships for the long term. And getting anything done in the world, it takes a lot of relationship capital and you might as well start building it now. So, and for me, by the way, I'm not natural at it. I would say I'm an extroverted introvert and I had to learn that over the years. So you might as well start learning that now. Now, number 3, I would say is hiring people that have been there, done that. So I'm gonna pull up my screen again and you can see these are some of the people that are on the Leveling Up Heroes team, right? So we did this whole build in public thing. And you can see we took a picture here and, you know, this is us meeting at 7:30 PM Eastern because we have people from all around the world here. But this is what it takes to build something great. And for me, in the very beginning, I asked around saying, hey, look, you know, I'll look on Twitter, you know, just looking for community managers and mods, going into your favorite Discords and looking at the mods that work there and seeing if they're down to take on other projects, offering to pay them as well, and then seeing if you can incentivize them some other ways too. So there's different ways to incentivize people, right? You can Gift them an NFT or you can pay them. There are different ways to do this, but I just know that if you're going to try to get anything done, if you're going to try to go far, you have to go together and you have to go with a team. So it's better to work with people that have been there, done that. And so on our screen over here, we have people that have worked on Lives of Asuna, VeeFriends, World of Women, worked at companies such as Mindvalley. So you got to think about it. Like, also, do these people jive with your mission? Are they all in on the mission, right? Are they willing to crank hard on it? And so for us, I could easily say that, look, Getting a team together, that's one thing. But also beyond that, I mean, if I scroll down over here, you know, we do this thing called traction, right? So we run off of— my main business runs off of scaling up and traction. It's a meeting framework, right? So every Monday and Thursday, the team gets together and we meet for about 60 to 90 minutes or so. And we just talk about issues, right? So you can see, you know, the way this meeting is structured is we start with personal wins and gratitude. We start with headlines for the team. So everyone kind of goes around doing headlines for 5 minutes or so. And then we just jump straight into issues and then we rate the meeting on a scale of 1 to 10 at the very end, right? And you can see the framework that's up here. You know, coming down here, don't expect these meetings to be sunshine and flowers, right? So if everyone's agreeing, you have a bunch of yes people. Ideally, you're disagreeing but you're committing and you're openly debating things, right? Because things aren't— again, they're not always going to be easy. And but if you're able to have that alignment, for us, we made a lot of adjustments last minute, right? Like meeting 2 times, especially because the space moves so quickly right now. We got a lot of things taken care of like, hey, should we push the launch date back? Hey, like, what should we do about, you know, coordinating these partnerships? You know, what should we do next? How are we going to serve our people? How are we going to fulfill on this stuff with the live events and all that? So these are all ongoing issues and— or issues that we need to solve. And if we don't have a forum to discuss these issues, how are we going to get better? And we want to ultimately give people, you know, time to protect their mental health too because the space is so crazy in terms of the pacing. So that's what I would say. Now, the next thing is when we think about how we blitzed. So on my screen over here, you know, these are just a couple of examples of people that we partnered up with. So you can see 8chan, World of Women Alpha, Wild Pixies, a lot of these alpha groups, Capsule House, Doodles Alpha, Alien Friends, Y Whales, which is YPO, Ascendants Illuminati. So we actually got a lot of these together in the last week or so. Obviously the last 7 to 9 days we pushed really hard. And basically what these are, these are when we collab with these people, it's just people kind of allow— we're basically doing allowlist collaborations with them. You can call it whitelist, allowlist, whatever. You know, basically we'd offer them 150 to 200 and we'll say, hey, like, we'll get you, you know, you can be on our allowlist and then we will give you 150 to 200 that you can give away to your community. And they're incentivized to do so if they think you have an interesting project. And this is why building these relationships up ahead of time was super helpful, right? Like, I was in, you know, somebody's— like, I was in a chat over here for 8chan, for Knights of Degen, and also for Illuminati. It's because of the dinners I did. Why Whales? It's because of, you know, an entrepreneur group that I'm in, you know, and also people on our team, they knew people from these other organizations too, right? I'm not gonna pretend like I— I mean, the team was doing the heavy lifting, right? And I was assisting where I could. And so— And that's what I would say. And I would say if we were to do it differently, we probably would have blitzed hard, not just for one week, but for 4 weeks. Right. We would have just hit it freaking hard because if you look at some of these projects, they go hard every single day. There's like 2 or 3 collabs that they're announcing. For better or worse, this is just how human beings are. This is very FOMO-driven, right? People want to see other people getting into it and it builds the pressure and the pressure cooker eventually explodes when the launch date hits. And that's how you can sell out. And that's how we've seen a lot of these projects sell out. You know, when I say blitzing, that's There's the allowlist collabs where you're going really hard for like a month or so, but also thinking about, you know, how can you do a Twitter Spaces every single day? How can you do interviews, right? Like I interviewed the Zipseeds founder the other day who I actually happen to know from Clubhouse a year ago. And also, you know, keeping the hype up in Discord, right? Having community managers that are on top of it, having mods that are on top of it, and making sure that they're moderating a good conversation and you don't have, you know, toxic people that are coming into the Discord. You know, collaborations. I mean, that's what it's all about here. Paid ads. That's not going to work well for you. If there's other media that you have where, let's say there's a YouTube channel that you have, or maybe there's, say, like an email list that you have, definitely use those channels too and hit hard. And there's a handful of other things that we did to build up the hype, right? And by the way, we used a tool called Premint.xyz to help build up that hype list. And that's what it is. Now, the final thing I'll say is this, number 5. So step number 5 here, last but not least, if you're looking to build something, the work really begins after your launch. And so just because you launched and just because you sold out, quote unquote, doesn't mean you can just run away, right? Unless that's, that's your true intention, unless the audience knows that. Because a lot of people have been burnt in this space and that's what people's incentives are right now. It's like if the team is not doxxed and we don't know who they— like there's no incentive. Like they have the money already. What's their incentive to be held accountable to perform for you? So, A, looking for a doxxed team that's kind of been there, done that, aligning with the mission. Looking at their roadmap, looking at their utility, and not just any roadmap, right? Because a lot of roadmaps look the same right now. But really thinking about, hey, would I actually hold this for 10 years? And the saying in investing is, if you won't even hold it for 10 years, don't even hold it for 10 seconds. And that's how you can look at these. Because, you know, I do, I do believe that this space is a bubble right now and 99% of these things are going to zero. But the silver lining is the people that are coming in, the real money that's coming in. They are going to raise the bar in terms of art and they're going to raise the bar in terms of utility. So if you can do a better job, you're going to be levels above other people. And that's why I'm so confident in terms of the long-term prospects of our project, which is again Leveling Up Heroes. And you can go to levelingup.com/heroes to learn more about it. And, you know, that's what it is. We're building for the long term. Just anything that I've ever done that's quote unquote worked has been investing into the long term. Anytime I tried to do something short term, it just hasn't worked out well for me. So my lazy way of doing things well is just doing things long-term. It's just easier that way. So let me know what you think in the comments. Let me know what your mission and vision values are and, you know, how that might apply to a project that you're looking to build. Don't forget to hit the subscribe and the like button and to check out the next piece of content over there. And we'll catch you later. Bye.