7 Fatal NFT Marketing Sins | Avoid if You Want To Sell Out

A lot of people, especially in Web3 right now, they tend to overcomplicate things. And so Da Vinci has said simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication, right? And so how do you simplify your messaging and how do you make it very clear where if you say it in one sentence or a couple of words, people just get it? All right. So today we are going to talk about 7 deadly mistakes to avoid when launching your NFT project. Before we do, my name is Eric Siu. I'm the creator of the Leveling Up Heroes NFT project. It's a personal growth NFT designed to help level up the world. So let's talk about this real quick. So I'm gonna pull up my screen, and those of you that can see, this is our guide NFT. This is an animated character, and I'm going to come back to this in a second, but I just want to give you a little context on, um, you know, what we have going on here. So the first mistake I would say that we made was having unclear messaging. So when people would ask me about leveling up heroes, instead of saying it was a personal growth NFT, I would say it's a life gamification NFT loaded with lots of utility and it's for founders, creators, investors. And there's like this, there's that, there's just a lot of stuff in there, right? So how do you keep it simple and stupid? So KISS, right? Keep it simple and stupid. A lot of people, especially in Web3 right now, they tend to overcomplicate things. And so Da Vinci has said simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication, right? And so, how do you simplify your messaging and how do you make it very clear where if you say it in one sentence or a couple words, people just get it, right? So, personal growth is a word that's really well understood. And so, I just call it a personal growth NFT. Life gamification is harder to say and it's harder for people to understand as well. Like, do I think people will understand long-term? Yes. You got to get the messaging right first and you have to really think about what, what the messaging is. Now, similar to that is thinking about what your offer is. And so in the very beginning, our offer was not necessarily a no-brainer. So we had, we actually had 3 different tiers, right? And so we had a magical tier, we had a unique tier, and an epic tier. And within those, there's different sets of utility, right? And I wanna rewind back to number 1 real quick, talk about unclear messaging. We had too many offers, right? And so when you think about a menu, when you go to a restaurant, when you have too many things going on, then it's hard for people to make a decision. The more you confuse people, the more they're gonna wanna go elsewhere. And people just don't have the time. Don't make them think. It's a good book, by the way. Now going back to number 2. So thinking about a no-brainer offer. So what we ultimately did was we said, you know what, let's remove the middle tier, the unique tier, take all the benefits that tier has and just move it to the first tier, which is the magical tier. And basically what we did was we took our business course worth $2,500. We took our free ticket for our conference. We put that into the first tier, right? And we basically layered on all the benefits from the unique tier into the first one. And so as of this recording, people that are paying, you know, let's say $250 to pick up the NFT, they're basically getting $5,000 in value in addition to a vibrant community of people that are like-minded trying to help each other level up. So that's what I call a no-brainer offer. Now, even for our mastermind tier, which is, that's actually the group with other founders and creators, that one is really focused on the mastermind component and live events, you know, dinners and all that. And that comes in at a fairly cheap price versus all the other masterminds in the world. And so when you're starting out, how do you make it so good that people will be stupid not to take you up on that offer? Okay, so that's what it is. Now, number 3 is actually not launching with PFP. So even though this looks cool, it's an animated character over here. The problem was that everyone looked at this and they thought, oh, this is just the temp, the placeholder for a reveal, right? And that's actually a very logical reason. I mean, I mean, like, you'll look at this and be like, oh, typically when you buy an NFT, you know, when all the characters look the same, everyone's NFT looks the same, then they're assuming some reveal is going to happen. And what I learned is that even though we had a lot of PFPs set up, that was not the initial priority. It was more focused on the membership pass component. And now we're actually fast-tracking our PFPs, our profile pictures, because that's actually a marketable moment. And let me show you what I mean. So let me pull this up real quick. These are some of our other profile pictures over here. So you have the Shapeshifter, you have the Strategist, the Wanderer, and then you have a whole host of other ones, right? And so, uh, the Clear-Headed, and then I think this one's the, the Gambler, um, or the Magician. My point of saying all this is that imagine we had these characters and they were differentiated up to, you know, 10,000 or so, or 8,888. So if we had these differentiated, more people would be tweeting about them, more people would be sharing about it, more people would be talking about it behind the scenes. Because I'm in a lot of these different alpha groups. And if you keep sharing the same picture over and over, like, the novelty effect wears off. But when you have uniqueness that's tied to it, it's more of a marketable moment because more people want to share it because it's tied to what they own and it's unique and it's scarce, right? So I think we missed on that one. And, you know, you got to think about when you're launching a project, what are all the marketable moments that are available? And each and every one is a unique opportunity to let your brand out into the wild. So that's what I would say. Now, number 4, I would say waiting too long to launch. And so You know, I had started to already talk to people about the project in August, maybe even, you know, the month before in July. But I had started to already talk to artists in August, but I think I was probably again looking in July. And so we didn't launch until March of 2022, mainly because I had business priorities to tend to, and this was more of a kind of a for-fun project, right? And I would say, you know, now that I think about it, my mission in life is to level up the world, and leveling up is actually very important to me, which is why I own the domain as well. And so we should have launched this sooner and push things, push the pace a lot faster because now we're launching it in the middle of— there's like a crisis happening around the world and the world's generally a shakier place right now. And that's not a good thing, right? The last thing people care about should be NFTs. And I do agree with that. And so I think it's just launching quickly or quicker to also push the pace as well for the team is huge, right? So that's what I would say. And The next thing too is not doing enough collabs, right? And so what I mean by that is when I think about the collabs that we've done— so I'm gonna pull up my screen again over here so we can look at my Twitter, right? You know, we'll do things like we'll do giveaways, right? Or like, hey, once this tweet gets 500 retweets, we'll give away, you know, Discord roles and all that, right? So these are just an example of some of the collab partners that we had. So you can see Alien Friends, Doodles Alpha, Fortune Friends Club, Y Whales. Illuminati, Knights of Degen, WoW Alpha, 8 Shin, Capsule House. So my point of saying all this is that we did a really good job with collabs in the last 7 to 9 days leading up to launch, but I think we should have done it for the last 4 weeks leading up to the launch, and that would have been a lot better. A lot of this stuff is driven by FOMO. A lot of this stuff is driven by hype, and that's just how life is too, right? People want to go to the biggest parties. They want to hang out with the coolest people. And so— You know, that's what it is. I personally don't get a lot of energy from that type of stuff in real life, which is why I didn't put as much emphasis on it until we decided that we had to delay the launch by 2 weeks because we hadn't built up the collabs that we wanted. So I would say instead of 1 week before, blitzing 4 weeks before on the collabs and hitting them hard, right? And the next thing I would say too is, you know, when I think about the team that we built, right? So you can see here, this is part of our team, right? And I would say, you know, we have more people on the team too, but sometimes Sometimes when you put something together, not everything is going to work out. And usually when you hire people, you're lucky if you get it right 50% of the time. And so what I would say is understanding that some people are not necessarily a fit for the team, and that's okay, but also firing very quickly so they can move on to something that they're more excited about and let them just focus on that, right? And not, not try to take their time away from that. So I'll say firing fast, right? Hiring slow, firing fast. And in this case, you got to move very quickly in this world. Also not doing enough spaces, not doing enough podcasts, not doing enough content in general, whether it's on YouTube or pushing our email list more. I think we could have done more there. And this is coming from a marketer that doesn't really like to push that hard, but I think we could have done more there. So I think doing a— maybe doing a Spaces every other day or maybe even doing one daily. You know, interviews are always helpful too, just to build the audience that way and just to prime them so they can hear your voice and they can understand where you're coming from. And also taking control too, right? Because in some cases on, you know, trying to rely on somebody else to Um, set these things up for you. You might as well take control yourself and say, hey, like, you know, I'd like to be interviewed or whatever. Um, and when you do these collabs with people, maybe you can even pitch to them, say, hey, can we do a Twitter Spaces or can we do a Discord AMA, right? Um, but ultimately just putting yourself out there to the world. And, um, I think we did, we did a pretty good job with the Blitz at the end, but I think these are just a couple things I would say if we're to go back in time for leveling up heroes, this is what we'd fix. Um, and we have, you know, future drops coming too, and I highly recommend just following Leveling Up NFT on Twitter just to learn more about it. Let me know what you think. Let me know if there's any mistakes that you made or any other mistakes you've seen with other projects. Drop it in the comments below. Don't forget to hit the like and the subscribe button if you enjoyed this video, and we'll catch you later.