How to build an NFT team, defining your NFT values, and more - NFT Journey pt 1

Today we are going to be talking about how to build an NFT team from scratch, how to create the right core values, and much, much more. And the format, the way this is going to work moving forward is we're going to use a journal format. So this is going to be a reflection of maybe a last day or the last couple of days or perhaps a week. And that way I can continue to tell a story and share my experiences. So hopefully you can learn and hopefully you can grow as well, because we're all trying to just level up and get better every single day. But first and foremost, My name is Eric Siu and I'm here to help level up the world. And we have a cool project called Leveling Up Heroes, which you can follow @LevelingUpNFT on Twitter. So let's get into it because a lot of the stuff that I'm working on right now has to not only tie in with the, the business— our main business is the agency Single Grain— but I'm really head down on the NFT project right now. So, well, something that I'm very excited about, and I'll talk to you a little bit about the project too so you have some context. But first, I want to address the topic around How to build an NFT team from scratch. Okay, so if you take a look at this post, I'm just gonna kind of recap real quick what's going on here. So basically, I'm building in public on Twitter, and I'm just like, man, you know what? It might make sense to just build in public on YouTube, and then also this will push over to the podcast too. You know, when you think about different groups like YPO or EO, there's this whole protocol called Gestalt where you're not trying to give advice directly, but you're sharing experiences so people can kind of take it and go from there. So. can see this is a— it's a very small team for the NFT project over here. And the difference is I'm not using the resources of my full-time business, right? We have multiple people here, uh, 2 other people that aren't pictured, but I am— I put together a team of mercenaries. We do have, uh, kind of one full-timer that's working on, on this one. Um, her name is Kathy right here. You know, basically what we do is with this team, we meet on Mondays at 8:30 PM Eastern, right? And the team's all around the world. I mean, Cash here is from India, and then Zeness here is, I believe he's in Malaysia. He might correct me if I'm wrong. Eric here is in LA. I'm in Miami right now. Cathy is in Malaysia, but she usually lives in San Diego. And then Jeremy here is in New York. So I have people from kind of all around the world, and that time tends to work for us. But A, you gotta be very serious. Like, your team members have to be serious enough about the project where they're willing to wake up, you know, early in the morning and crank on this stuff, right? 'Cause they're excited about this stuff. So if you're gonna build a strong team, you gotta figure out, hey, how engaged are they? How excited are they about the project? And then go from there. Because we had someone on the team a little earlier who we could tell wasn't that engaged. And then when we started to get to the bottom of it, it turns out this person didn't really wanna work on the project. So we had to move on from that person. So, you know, when it comes to building a team, what's really important is thinking about the X factor. So the X factor when it comes to NFT projects, these are really your community managers, right? So for us, I mean, we focused on getting community managers that have worked on projects such as World of Women or VeeFriends, right? And you wanna look for people that have experience 'cause you don't wanna, you don't have time to train it from scratch. Especially a lot of us right now, we're kind of working on these NFT projects where it's just like, you know what? It's not our full-time thing, right? So we got to figure out how to balance it. And so you want people that have been there, done that, so you don't have to kind of hold their hand and get them to carry the load. And you want people that are very enthusiastic too, right? We have strategists on the team and project managers on the team. The project managers, that's gonna be the day-to-day. Those are the ones that are going to be the detail-oriented ones that will carry things forward. And then you got to have a Web3 developer as well that can help with the smart contracts, right? So community managers, there's different types. You want to have mods as well. And then as the community builds, then you can start to get these people and build out the team. But really, this team of really 7 or 8 of us, this is the team right here. And, you know, as we launch, as things get busier, then we'll start to build out the team more. But you really need kind of a launch team to get going on this, right? A lot of people come to me. You know, there have been publicly traded companies that will come to me. or people that have been very successful with business in the past and they'll hit me up and they're basically looking for help launching it. And where I'm at right now is I want to make sure that we do a really good job with ours before we start helping a bunch of people with theirs. And the reason for that is because if you're going to help someone with a service, you want to make sure that you can do a damn good job because everyone's just trying to— it's a cash grab, right? And it's really hard to build up a reputation over the years. It's also really easy to lose it. In a couple of minutes. So you want to be very mindful about who you end up helping if you haven't done it yourself. And also like who you end up hiring, especially if they haven't done it themselves, right? You're looking for people that have been there, done that. That's kind of hiring 101. And when you're looking to hire people, it's not how do you do it, it's who can do it the right way. So I'm gonna go back to my screen over here. And you know, for us, there's a couple things that we do. So we run off of a methodology called Traction, which is the entrepreneur's operating system. And so for us, in 1 hour or even 90 minutes or so, we'll cover kind of the key things here. You know, what are the personal successes, right? Because we We want to build rapport, especially if we're all remote. We want to learn about people's lives so we can talk about these things later. So-and-so went to a wedding, so-and-so did this, they maybe they got a dog or something like that, right? These are all things that we can tug on later to deepen the relationships and that's important. And I didn't think that was important earlier in my career and, you know, I couldn't be more wrong because if you're going to work with people, you better make sure that you build a relationship with them. Now, the other item here is headlines. So you want to be talking about kind of the You know, customer, employee, vendor headlines. What are the updates? What's new? What's going on? Is someone new joining us? Is someone leaving? Are we launching a social token? Like all these things are kind of, they go into the headlines, right? And each of these sections over here, this one goes for 5 minutes. This one goes for 5 minutes as well. And then we kind of go into the issues, right? And the issues, this is known as IDS, which is identify, discuss, solve. And so we point out the issues, right? And, you know, we talk about, okay, how do we want to price this? How do we want to deal with presale? You know, what's the feedback right now? You know, how do we want to deal with, if we're going to do this Dutch auction, How do we want to deal with things? Which is why we were like we agreed on creating a code of epicness, right? Which means like if you don't follow kind of our our core values, we're going to boot you from the group. These things are all solved in these meetings. If you don't have these meetings, if you're not catching up periodically or frequently, then you're going to be in trouble. And we're actually increasing the frequency of ours in the next couple weeks. We're leveling up NFT. You can follow on Twitter leveling up NFT. Well, basically what we're doing is we're going to try to meet two times a week, if not more than that. We're always talking on WhatsApp. We're we're into Slack as well. And I know some of you might be like, why would I do it in Slack? We have a Discord. But Slack, you know, it's on the business side, we pay for it, right? And what I will say is Slack is, it's a better user experience or UX when it comes to trying to just get stuff done from a business standpoint. And then we use Asana and we also use something called Threads, which is great for kind of a, it's like a message board because Slack is a little too fleeting. Okay. So, you know, a couple of things here. I mean, we talk about being consistent, right? Because it's really, if you as the leader, you're not holding your team accountable, you're not, you're not trying to push things forward. Nobody else is going to want to do that, right? So it's really on you to kind of stay on top of things, ask questions, keep things moving. And when you do these meetings, you know, we're trying to disagree. We're not trying to agree all the time, but we are going to disagree and commit. So that's what it is. You got to move quickly, you know, hire slow, fire fast. And you know how I found these people? It's a combination of asking around. It's a combination of lurking on Discord. It's a combination of lurking on Twitter as well. And that's how I found these people, right? You can also find these people on LinkedIn as well. Search the Twitter profiles. You can use a tool like Followerwonk. So that's the bit on, on how to build an NFT team from, from scratch. And, you know, I want to talk about how you can separate yourself from, from the pack. pack as well, because a lot of people are launching these NFT projects and they haven't defined what their core values are or what their mission is, right? And so I just did this the other day. Actually, I tweeted this yesterday. So it's really important that if you're going to create something, you have to define what it actually is and why now. And so, you know, for us over here, we're trying to make it very clear, right? We're trying to connect like-minded people that look at life as a game. And the main differentiator for us is really the live event component, right? Because for me, I've learned over the is that it's just when you're trying to build community or you're trying to be a part of a community, to me, Zoom is much more of a transaction than it is— even if you meet with someone for 5 minutes in real life, it builds an actual relationship. And so, you know, a lot of people talk about community. I've really only seen Bored Ape Yacht Club do it really, really, really well, but I haven't seen some other ones do community well, right? And by the way, the NFT projects that I'm a part of, like Cool Cats or World of Women or VeeFriends, like these are all community, right? And you can see over here, like, you know, we're basically— I'm posting right here, like, Look, we've actually been there and done that when it comes to throwing dinners, throwing events and things like that. And then defining our core values too, like what we will accept and what you won't accept. So when you are running a business, it's important to define your core values because people, people are not always going to align and you can hire and fire based on these core values, right? And ideally you don't have more than 3 because it keeps it very simple. You start to have like 10 or so, it starts to become really unwieldy. And we try to keep them actionable, right? So hopefully this will give you some ideas. If you ever decide to build a business or decide to build an NFT project at all, defining your core values is important and they might change over time. Right. But the core thing is just helping people understand that, hey, you know, we actually fire and we hire based on these. So for us, I mean, one of them is to keep leveling up. Right. So, you know, my whole mission is to level up the world. I'll never accomplish that in my lifetime. But, you know, that's what it is. And so, you know, we're aiming to get 1% better every single day. So you versus you. Right. And if you're— if you don't align with that, then maybe you shouldn't be a part of this group because it's freaking called Leveling Up Heroes. And be open-minded is another one. So strong views held loosely. Be curious. Ask a lot of questions. Be a learner. Be trying to get better all the time, right? Kind of related to number 1. Own your wins and losses. So we're looking for people to be accountable to each other. We're looking for people to help each other out. We're looking for people to celebrate their successes, but also celebrate the losses too and get better from them, right? Because we often learn more From from our losses, success is a lousy teacher. Defaulting to action. So we want people that are action takers, not you know people that are gonna just you know become professional students and learn learn learn learn learn and never do. We want people that do. We don't want people that if they run into a wall, they're just gonna kind of sit there and and wait. We want people that are gonna do and and make something of themselves, right? And so that's what the community is is all about. So that's what the project is all about too. And so you know we kind of talk about the different utility here. You talk about why us? Why now? It's again. It's important to write this somewhere. It's, you know, memos are very important. You know, using Twitter is important because it's kind of native to crypto right now. And we talked about the 3 different access tiers we have for leveling up heroes, right? So one's for founders, creators, investors. Again, you can learn more at Leveling Up NFT on Twitter. Then there's only 345 of those, right? And on the unique side, there's 1,234. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 5, right? It's kind of all leveling up. These are for kind of aspiring business owners or people that want to grow faster, right? And we provide the resources to help you get there. There's courses and things like that. There's a community in there. And then finally, there's the magical tier, 12,345 that are available. And these are for people that want to develop the right habits and the mindset to learn long-term. And again, it's all about community. So, my point of saying all this is that, you know, if you're going to create anything at all, you got to define what you're trying to do, what you're trying to accomplish, how it's going to be different than what other people are doing. And then you got to figure out who's going to be the right team for this. And then you just got to be able to execute very quickly. And, you know, our drop's coming in the next 8, 9, 10 days or so. And we're excited about it. I mean, you know, in the next episodes, we'll continue to talk about the journey, not just on this project, but also around kind of business as well. And, you know, if things go well, we're going to be building a very vibrant community and there's going to be a nice ecosystem here. And, you know, I can see myself working on this for the rest of my life. You know, the Warren Buffett quote is, if you can't see yourself hanging on to a stock for 10 years, then don't even hold it for 10 minutes. Right. One final thing I want to call out, too, is, you know, I spent some time with one of my friends yesterday, actually, and he's building an NFT project. He's very successful in the crypto world. And, you know, even his project has a lot of utility that's coming with it. He's like, oh, we're going to build a game. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. So we're going to see the bar collectively be raised for building any type of NFT project in the future. Just the art alone, you know, I think there's gonna be one kind of— that's gonna be one segment. But if you're a business or if you're looking to kind of build something for the long term, you know, art is one piece of it. But beyond that, like, what other utility are you gonna add? What other experiences are you gonna add for the long term? So that is it for this piece. Please don't forget to hit the subscribe and the like button because it helps us grow. And if you enjoy this, let us know in the comments what you'd like to see more of, what else you'd like to see me share, what you liked, maybe what you didn't like as well. And We will catch you later.