Connect With Every NFT Influencer | Sell Out Project

If you go the extra mile, if you put in the extra work, you're gonna get better results, right? The ones that are willing to go the extra mile are gonna get extra mile results. And those that aren't, they're gonna get the similar results that everyone else is getting because they're not willing to put in the work. All right, so today we are going to talk about how you can get any influencer to collaborate with you for your NFT project. So my name's Eric Siu, creator of Leveling Up Heroes, which is a personal growth NFT designed to help you level up up every single day. So let us get into it. So I just came back from NFT LA and in the process of NFT Miami right now, and it's going straight into Bitcoin Week, and then I'm going to the TED conference, right? So conference season has officially started, and well, I'm gonna give you a hack that's been working really well for me over the years. So just to set the tone for this one, last Sunday when I threw this dinner, the week before I had spoken to Brett Malinowski, who's actually got a nice YouTube channel with about 125K or so subscribers. He's a YouTuber. He's got about 176,000 followers on Twitter. So I also had Matt Stefanina drop by, and he had over 16 million followers across kind of his socials right now. And then a handful of other kind of influencers that I was hanging out with. And so for this dinner, basically what I did was I just decided to curate a group of people. I picked a spot. And then we all got together and then in this case I decided to just foot the bill because it would be easier. But those of you that are just maybe starting out in your career right now, it really doesn't matter where you are. You don't need to be somebody, you don't need to have money for this. I've been throwing dinners for a very long time. And my point of saying all this is that when you are— your offer is really amazing, right? What I mean by that is amazing people and there's amazing food and you're curating it, you're doing all the work. Why wouldn't people take you up on that offer, right? And so, especially if you pay for the meal as well. And so when you do the work for them and it's a no-brainer offer, you're going to have amazing people show up, right? So what I, what I did was I put together a group of founders, creators, and investors. We had the Cameo CEO, Steven Galanis, come in as well and Shira Lazar. And so the reason I'm dropping all these names is not to say, oh my God, look at me. It's just to say, hey, again, if you are able to become the connector, you don't necessarily need to be an influencer. But if you're able to connect the people and you're able to provide value and then you're able to connect everyone in a chat group afterwards or maybe through an email thread, that connecting skill, nobody is going to be able to ever take that away from you, right? So the way I'm even looking at this right now, it's like, okay, what can I be doing for the Bitcoin conference? What can I be doing for NFT LA? What can I be doing for the TED conference, right? Thankfully, a lot of those, they have dinners kind of tied to them. But there's a reason why people do dinners all the time, because you can connect on a very intimate level. Now, I'll talk about what you need to do and some maybe some mistakes to avoid. Well, I'm telling you right now, you know, when we actually do our PFP drop in the next couple months or so, we're gonna be ready to go because a lot of people are— they've bought into kind of who I am as a person because they've gotten time to break bread with me. And the relationships, that's what really goes a long way. That's what really— that's kind of the asymmetric upside here because, you know, sure, a lot of people can reach out to these people, but when you have an actual relationship with them, it goes beyond just a very simple ask. It goes You know, you start to show interest in them, you start to understand who they are as people, what makes them tick, what else they're interested in, and you try to connect the dots there and you become an actual friend, right? That's kind of the hack with these dinners, right? Any way you can find a way to get people in person, whether it's through a podcast or through a dinner or having them come to your event, those certainly go a long way. And great people want to connect with other great people, okay? So, first thing that you want to do is you want to make sure everyone's at the same level. And so you can't have a group of other founders, creators, investors come in. Maybe they're all doing $100 million a year and then you have someone that coming, coming in and maybe they're like an intern, right? They're not at the same level. You want there to be kind of value add across the board. Maybe if most of the group is doing maybe 8 figures a year, which is more than $10 million a year, then you could have a couple of people come in that are doing 7 figures a year, right? But you don't want the gap to be too wide because the experience gap's too wide and then the value is not going to be there. And you want there to be kind of a somewhat equal exchange of value. Now, picking the spot is also very helpful because you set the time, you set the date, you set the people. Just make it very easy for people, right? And make sure that you're following up with people. I like using a tool like Eventbrite. That way you can collect everyone's information, you can email them as the event's coming closer, and that just makes it easier for everyone. Now, the other thing you can do too is what I'm probably going to start doing in the future is I'm probably going to start charging at least some type of fee. So, When you offer something for free, a lot of people don't respect it because even for this dinner, even we— even though we had about 24 people attend, last minute, like literally last minute, I warned people. I said, hey, look, 40— I need a 48-hour warning. Can you let me know ahead of time if you're gonna cancel? Because it's a pain in the ass if you are, you know, canceling last minute. And people still did that, right? And that's really annoying. But still, we managed to get another 5 people to replace them. So, my point of saying all this is that I'm going to probably put in like, I don't know, maybe $50 charge or $100 charge, something like that where there's at least a little bit of a sting, right? And you can even do this too, like, let's say you want to pay for it. Well, you can say, okay, everyone, I'm gonna take a $150 deposit which I will return to you after you come. If you do not show up, I will take that money, right? And that's also fair too. But here's the other thing, like, I have a lot of people come to dinner, they said that they're more than happy to pay for it, right? They really enjoy the dinners that we put together. And so, when you throw a dinner that you have everyone go around and introduce And I try to keep it to under a minute or so, just keep it very brief because some people might monologue for 5 minutes, 10 minutes or so and talk about their life story. And so your job is, if you're the organizer, you're kind of the moderator too. So you're going around, right? You're going around, you're listening to people, you're saying, hey, you're setting the format. Tell us what you do. Tell us who you are. Tell us one thing you can give to everyone and one thing you can basically, you can offer like one thing, your expertise or whatever. And then one thing that you would like to get. So as an example, I might say, hey, my name is Eric Siu. I'm a marketer, podcast— podcaster. I'm an investor. And what I'm looking for right now is I'm looking for more people for our marketing agency because we're looking to hire more community people, more, uh, PR people in the world of Web3. We are looking to hire more social media creators. We're looking to hire more kind of paid media people, right? And we are actually hiring for those for Single Grain. And then one thing I can give is, um, you know, any connections you need, uh, around business. I, I have some pretty good networks that I'm connected with. Or if you're looking to raise money for your startup, right? So that's, that's how I might, I might introduce myself. And then I usually like to start it off to set the tone, and then I'll choose the direction to pass it in. And I'll try to remember what everyone wants. And then afterwards, I'll connect everyone through a WhatsApp because you want to keep the connections going. So that's what you would do. Now, mistakes would be, again, you want to have people kind of at the same level. So not having people at kind of a similar level would be bad. Okay. And then the other part is, I would say the mistakes I made is not charging or at least making it painful for people that decide to cancel last minute. That would be a mistake as well. And the third one is throwing a dinner that's too big. So I've thrown dinners with 40 people or so, and then there's just no time for introductions at that point. And we just, you know, you kind of just let people just talk. But it's always way better with introductions because people have— they have a bookmark of who you are and they might come talk to you afterwards, right? And so, you know, these dinners don't need to be big. And again, I'm not saying you have to pay for it, but I'm telling you right now, if you go the extra mile, if you put in the extra work, you're going to get better results, right? The ones that are willing to go the extra mile are going to get extra mile results. And those that aren't, they're going to get the similar results that everyone else is getting because they're not willing to put in the work. But you just need to go a little further out and you're able to do this. Like, was I nervous as hell hosting my first dinner? Yes. Was I nervous as hell doing my first event? Yes. I think dinners are a hack, right? And then the next hack above that is throwing your own live events, okay? And maybe before even doing the dinners, the hack is to create some type of audience and interview people, right? And if you could get them in person, even better than that. But the name of the game, it doesn't matter if you're an introvert or extrovert. I'm an introvert, but the name of the game is connecting people and connecting with people in person because people like to do business with people, okay? So even though we're— some people want to become pseudonyms, they don't want to be known, The people that are gonna be out there, you know, knowing one another, that's never gonna change. Human beings— I mean, that's been kind of human existence for the whole time, right? We just need to be interacting with other people. So I'm not very sacred about, hey, this needs to be in the metaverse or whatever. I'm more so, hey, like, I just wanna do whatever is good for the people. And what's good for the people, eventually it will come back to me. And that's gonna get you all the relationships, every single relationship you want. Like, I'm amazed by some of these relationships that I have now. And it's because you focus on— or I'm talking about me right now. I focus on giving first. I focus on helping first. And I know that if you help others get what they want, you're going to get whatever you want. And that's paraphrasing from Zig Ziglar. So, let me know what you think I missed in the comments. Don't forget to hit the like and the bell button if you enjoyed this. Don't forget to subscribe as well. And we will catch you later. Bye.