The 3 Things You Must Have to Sell Out Your NFT Project in 2022 With NFT Expert Arvin Khamseh

I could see how there's a huge similarity between how NFT pages are set up and then also like an investor deck in the web3 space, which is different to the web2 space. We're actually accountable for everything ourselves. Really getting clear on your utility. Have a great story round it and just getting people excited.

Welcome back to the Mindvalley podcast, folks. Today we're going to be talking about NFTs. I'm going to share why we need to be paying attention to NFTs, but I'm also going to share a couple of cautionary tales, including a big mistake I made. I want to be really vulnerable here. And our guest today is one of the most brilliant minds in the field of nft. So today we're going to be discussing some really interesting things. What are NFTs? And here we assuming you have a basic understanding of it, because they've been all over the news the past one year, but we're going to go deeper into how to understand if you should be dabbling in NFTs, whether as an investor, as an art buyer, as someone buying an NFT because of the utility it gives you. And we're also going to share some case studies on how you can use NFTs for everything from raising funds for a charity to actually raising money for your business. There's going to be some interesting case studies here. The intent of this podcast is not to give you more or less, try to talk you into an investment opportunity or tell you where to put your money. Rather, we are talking about NFTs here as a tool, not as something speculative. Because if you've been paying attention on the day we're recording this podcast right now, Bitcoin hit a massive low. People have lost billions of dollars. Bitcoin was 57k a almost 18 months ago and now it's 20,000. Right? A lot of people lost a lot of money. So we're going to talk about the difference between cryptocurrencies and NFTs, if you're not aware, and why, while there is risk in the crypto market, NFTs are a different beast. They actually serve a really unique purpose. And if you can understand what NFTs represent, you start to open your eyes to whole new ways of doing marketing, running a business, building community, fundraising, and even how the web is evolving into Web three. So our guest today is Arvind Kamse. Arvind has worked on hundreds of NFT projects, over 400 NFT brands he's consulted with and his agency has had partnerships with Reddit, Twitter, Quora and Meta. His two largest NFT projects, Sands Vegas Casino Club and Meta Legends, both sold out. Sold out. The SANS project made 5 million in 20 hours. The Meta project made an astonishing 10 million in 20 hours. He also helped Women of Crypto hit number one on IC Tools and OpenSea. So he knows this world. He understands this world. And today we're going to be going into a fascinating conversation with Arvind on the field of NFTs and what it means to you. So, Arvind, welcome to the mindvalley podcast.

Thank you for having me.

So, firstly, how did you get fascinated by NFTs? How did you get into this industry?

Yeah, so, actually, so when I was a kid, I was trading cards, like soccer cards. And so I got the concept. As soon as I saw the cyberpunks especially and NBA top shots, I realized there's something to this. Like, I can see it has, like, real life values. And, like, people have been collecting things, like the collectibles industry, that's not new at all, have been around for a long time. In fact, I actually read somewhere last night that even the first NFT wasn't even Cyberpunk. Back in 2017, someone else actually came up with a NFT a few years before that. And then for some reason no one talks about it, but then there was an interview, like, somewhere that was found. And this guy, he apparently he actually came up with the first NFT before everyone.

Do you remember what that NFT was about?

No, I actually just started reading about it last night. And.

So I think it may be Homa Pepe. So Homa Pepe. So Pepe Pepe is a meme. He's a frog. And so one of my, like, literally, Peter Kell, who is a mindvalley partner, he actually lives below me here in Estonia. He was at a workshop on NFTs, I think, in 2015 or 2016. And this is. There was this digital card for sale. It was called Homer Pepe. So it was a picture of that meme, Frog Pepe. It had an association with Homer Simpson. And there was an error in the card. Minute was spelled M I N. Well, the word minute was spelled wrong. And so this digital card was being sold as a collectible. And Peter bid $29,000 and he bought it. And his friends told him, you're such an idiot. Absolute idiot. He then tried to sell it. No one would buy it from him. And he thought, all right, guess I guess I am an idiot. Last year, Peter sold that same card for $250,000. That's a pretty good ROI, right?

That's crazy.

Yeah, that was one of the first, first NFT sales. But can you imagine someone paying $250,000 for a digital collectible card?

100%. It's fascinating. So the, so I actually started with trading myself. I didn't Even know what NFTs are and I got into trading like I remember even my sister. So she was working. So she was at the time, she was 19 year old and she was working at retail store, you know, going part time college and part time working, making thousand bucks a month at this like part time retail store. And then she got into NFTs. And then second month in she made 20k in a month. And then, and then I was like, whoa, this is very different. So this web3 space is very different to everything I've seen before. And some of the NFTs that I actually traded myself, if anyone is familiar, like Alien Friend, I was buying them for about 500 bucks and then I would sell them for about 10k. Now of course the price for them and so many other NFTs have dropped significantly as you alluded to earlier on. Even Bored Apes and blue chip collections, they're very low, which is good for some people if they want to just support the artists and they've never been able to. And it's also just if they want to get into blue chip collections, they've never been able to now sell at a discounted price. But yeah, that's how I got into it as well. I started actually trading first and then I realized at some point I said oh wow. So this is very interesting. And at the time I was working with public companies doing their investor relationship marketing and I could see how there's a huge similarity between how NFT pages are set up and then also like an investor deck. And then so I thought about it and I was like, okay, so I'm actually going to do this as an example. I did this for some artists in Italy back in 2021 and then he sold out his collection. And then that was a proof of concept for me where I thought okay, so everything I learned in investor relationship marketing with public companies is actually relevant. I can apply it to this. And then I started working with hundred brands that month and then a hundred brands another month and so on and so forth.

That's amazing. And it's been a wild ride. The last year has been crazy for NFTs. So Gary Vaynerchuk this launched something called Veefriends and Gary Something I really respect about Gary is he jumps on every new social media trend and then masters it. Right. Whether it's TikTok and in this case NFTs. And Gary said something really interesting. He's like, when something new emerges, what I'm going to encourage you to do is to just block out 50 hours and go really deep because you're going to get an advantage over everyone else. And that's what Gary did. He blocked out 50 hours. He looked at the NFT market and he thought, wow, I could do something here. And so he launched we friends and I believe he sold $250 million worth of Veefriends collectible cards. And the story doesn't end there. So when you sell an NFT you can allocate 10% as like as a transaction fee that goes so somebody who buys your collectible card, if they sell it to someone else, you can get 10% of that sale. Right. What is that called?

Royalties. Royalties.

So in the interview I remember Gary saying that in a good, on a good night he will make a quarter million dollars in his sleep from royalties. He said Veefriends was my ipo. Everything I've done led to this. Veefriends was my ipo. So really interesting nature there. No matter what you want to say about NFTs, there is a lot of money being made. And now what we are starting to see is the bubble has collapsed because NFT prices are down 92% from their peak as the bubble has collapsed. Now you're starting to actually see some really cool real utility of NFTs. What are your thoughts, Arvind? How would you explain NFTs to someone? And what would be your advice around this industry?

Yeah, so the great. And by the way, I do own One of Gary's NFTs. The grateful tuna. Yeah. So I actually like his project. I like what he does talking about the NFTs as well. And that's one of the reasons I just know his grit. I know his just his motivation behind doing things online and that's, that's one of the reasons I actually support them. So the NFTs are non fungible tokens, meaning they not they cannot be duplicated, which is different to a fungible token. So Bitcoin or dollar like a banknote that you would have, that's a fungible token. So if I give you a banknote and you give it back to me like another, another dollar, it's the same thing. It's just $1 versus NFT. There's only one version of it that cannot be duplicated. And so it could be a form of an audio, it could be in the form of a video, an image. In fact like last year I can talk about the evolution of that. But like last year we had all sorts of animals profile pictures of NFTs. This year that has changed. So we're now going away from that. And, and so anyways it could be a form of an audio video and it's stored on the blockchain of things. So now majority of NFTs were also on the Ethereum blockchain. That's how it started. But now we have them on Solana and other platforms like Polygon. Other platforms as well. I would say it's probably the two major blockchains are Solana and Ethereum and then we have Polygon and a bunch of other ones, not so much. And then just so people, people have some ideas about just on Ethereum there are about 80,000 collections and then that went up from 40,000 so last year. So it's going up beginning of this year we got to a point where we were getting like 500 new collections every day entering the market and so that's good. But also that changed things and I actually got to observe that. So for example, back in November 2021 all we have to do, like all we had to do for selling out of NFT project was just building a huge community and then 30% of those people would buy the NFTs. So I used to even tell people say hey, build a discord of let's say three to five times your collection size. So let's say if it was a 10k collection size, we would build a discord of at least 30 to 50,000 people. 30% of those people would buy the NFTs. And that was the end of that and sold out a lot of projects just like that. It was great. It was very exciting because some of these people that I worked with, not to name but they never made money online. They've literally like this is their first time ever getting into things online and then in a matter of four to six weeks they would make like five, six million dollars, which is even like for me who've, you know, I've been in the marketing industry for almost 10 years. That's something I've never seen before. So that's very, that's like, that's fascinating. That's, that's why it got me really excited into this. And so that was last year and I guess this even searched inquiries for NFTS back in November last year surpassed like cryptocurrencies. So cryptocurrencies from 2009, people knowing about them, all of a sudden NFTs just had more searches than the cryptocurrencies. And then what's really interesting, I think so we had a lot of people from different countries, obviously in the audience. They're listening and interacting right now. It's really different in different countries. So the number one as far as the search inquiries for interest on NFTs is actually right now is actually Singapore and then there's like China, Hong Kong. So you would think us, because of everything that you see on the media, like Gary Vee, you see people talking about NFTs, a lot of people are from us, but you would think the US is really high up. It's not high up. It's actually the 10th space on the top in the top 10. It's literally the bottom. Plus also it has gone down. It was actually number eight in the entire world and then went to 10, which I believe the reason for is again, last year was heaven in the NFT world. Everyone was selling out collections. Like, I remember this specific brand, Frogos. We sold that in seven minutes and all we had as far as utilities was we just literally one word. We told people we're going to have some staking and we're going to have something in the metaverse. That's all it was. And we sold out and it was like, awesome. But this year this is not the case. And I can tell you what's working this year as well. But what's really interesting is that a lot of the people who last year got into a lot of different projects, they started talking about, I guess some projects weren't really delivering on their promises. So they started talking about how things are not going so well on Twitter. And then that's one of the reasons actually US interest has gone down instead of actually going up, even though more people from us actually getting to know what NFTs are, the interest level as far as like the searches is actually going down. And so. But then again, like I've, like I said, like I was speaking at different countries, like for example, Cyprus, different countries, there's a lot of conversation about NFTs and like how they can be incorporated.

Okay, so actually what you're sharing is fascinating, but let's look at some of the counter arguments. So Cecilia, who is live with us in the chat, wrote this comment and I'd love for you to address this. Cecilia said, there are people that Say it is a scam, it is a Ponzi scheme. How can someone defend the NFT world?

Yeah, and I'm really big on, not in an emotional way, but I'm really big on actually defending NFT world because I've just seen what it has done for a lot of people, including myself. And so there are definitely projects out there that they don't deliver on their promises. Right. So we're seeing a lot less of those right now because it's not a shiny object anymore for people. That's like one of the best thing that actually happened to this market. A lot of times people would just come in thinking of this is a cash grab project and they're going to just make a bunch of money and then leave and not really deliver on the promises. But now that has changed because they know it's actually difficult. Like it's not really easy to sell out. So they don't just come in if they don't have a real plan to actually deliver. And in fact like I'm actually seeing great projects coming out where they're working on their projects for like two, three months before even talking about it online, which is really cool. So, so one of the things is we so in the, in the web 3 space, which is different to the web 2 space, we're actually accountable for everything ourself. So we can't really blame people and say hey, they've done this to us because we're actually part of the whole, the I guess NFT industry ourselves. So one of the things I would say, first of all there are lots of projects that they have delivered on their promises. They're still staying all the way on top on the like for example, let's say on OpenSea Marketplace or any other marketplace, people are still happy with what they're getting. They're continuously talking about how it had changed their life and so on and so forth. And then there are some projects that they didn't. Right. So and again, because I work with so many projects out of the 400 projects I got to see two rugle projects myself. So one of them, the reason they actually now, not to justify what they've done, but the reason they actually didn't deliver on their promises just because these guys are not really like business savvy people. So they didn't, they weren't successful with their launch and they were, you know, their, the promise was they would deliver on their roadmap if they, everyone bought their NFTs and not everyone bought their NFTs. So they couldn't deliver on their promises and then they started hiding. Now, not the best strategy to do if something is not going your way. But I noticed the root cause of a lot of problems in the NFT world is actually not having enough resources, not having enough knowledge. So people just don't know. A lot of times there are artists, developers, they're getting into this, they want to get their world to the world for their art, for their project. They're not really business savvy people and they don't have the resources typically they don't have investors. So they're bootstrapping things and then one day it's not successful. That's. Well, they can't deliver on their promises and then it leaves the. Leaves a really bad impression for people just, you know, calling them a scam. So not again, not to justify what people have done, because a lot of projects did that. But if you're actually looking to see why that happened, I got to be with a lot of these projects, like on a daily basis on zoom calls and just talking to them. So I know they're like real people, real cool people too.

But just let's talk about some of your projects, right? Because definitely they are scams in the NFT world, they are scams everywhere. You, you know, if you're buying a used car, they are used car salesmen who are shady and are gonna overcharge you. They are scams there. But it doesn't mean that cars are cars as a thing is useless or something you should stay away from. So I'd love to hear about some of your projects like the Sans Vegas Casino Club or Meta Legends. Let's talk about Meta Legends. What exactly was that? And how was this project able to generate 10 million in 20 hours?

Yeah, so that's true for all of these projects. Literally what we would do, we would run ads. Now metalligence, there were a lot of paid ads that we ran. So in fact we were running 10k plus a day on advertising, specifically on Instagram, Twitter, different places. And I can give a strategy to your folks if they want to do this even right now, what works right now. But in the past, that's what it was. We would literally build a community. So we would get people excited to go to this landing page where people would learn about the utilities of the project, see who the team members of the projects were and then what the art looked like. Really, those were the biggest things back then. Things again have changed and I can tell you what's, what's new. But that's that's what it was. And then people will go to, to join a Discord again. Back in the day, there weren't that many Discord servers. So when people would join a Discord, they would actually participate in your Discord servers as well. Now everyone is part of at least 30 Discord servers. So. And they're all muting the Discord servers. So you can't just do that and, you know, rely on that.

So, so we need to define Discord for people. Discord is a, Is. Is an online discussion board. It's basically an app. Very useful, very raw, relatively primitive, but it does the job. It's an online discussion board.

Yeah. And actually even for Discord, so it has a. I believe it has a limit of 250k. And we headed for one of the projects. And that also needs to go through a change. So as the industry is changing and like a lot of people joining different Discord servers, that's, that's got to change as well. And actually one of the projects recently, like Goblin Town, they launch their project without a Discord just because they realize this. There's just no point, just so many people.

When one launches a project without a discord, how do you. Okay, so a key thing about NFT is, right, is to.

Is to.

Is to get on the launch list. And Discord is basically the launch list. I read somewhere that 70% of the. The profits made in any NFT project basically go to the people who are the early buyers in the launch list.

Yeah.

So the white list. But people who are not on this white list or in scenarios like this one where they are not using Discord, what are they using? How are they staying connected with the potential buyers?

Yeah, exactly. So that's actually interesting because that happened with another brand, okbirds as well. So I believe it was either okbirds or the other one, the no Okbirds, but they didn't have a Discord. And so people just didn't have a place to talk, which is what they're used to, especially the NFT savvy folks. And then so they started actually doing Twitter spaces. So people don't know Twitter spaces are just like Facebook lives. As you see since 2009. So there's an audio version of the. I guess those live streaming. So people just got into these. So the community themselves, not even hosted by the actual founders of the communities. So the community themselves, they actually got into these Twitter spaces. One of them for Nook Bears, I remember, like they actually hosted a Twitter space for about three days in A row. So they wouldn't sleep, they would just talk on this, on this Twitter space nonstop. Right. And so this is just a level of, I guess, camaraderie that they were creating for themselves and then just getting themselves excited about the project. So again, just to go back to your question, so in the past it was three to five times number of collection sites on Discord that you would create. You would actually make it with paid ads and influencer marketing. And again, influencers back then were very helpful too because there weren't as many projects versus now because there's so many projects. Let's say find an influencer and talk about 10 projects this month and then 10 projects next month. At some point you'd be like, okay, so which projects do you want me to invest in? So many projects. So, so back in the day was paid, paid ads, paid influencers. Now that has changed to really mostly focus on paid ads and pr, so, and PR being like a publication. So like tier one, tier two public. So that's really what's really working right now. Of course there are other things like collaboration, so on and so forth as well that people do, but those are the two things that are mainly what I use for actually building communities. And then as far as how people making money if they're not whitelisted. So the Goblin Town specifically, they actually, their NFTs were actually free. So all you had to do was just to pay for the guests to actually get in. And then it's really interesting because again this, this is a very different type of narrative that they created, which is very important now. It wasn't important back then. Right now the narrative, the story behind your project, why you got into this, why you're doing what you're doing in this industry, those are very important things. And so it was, the narrative was like, you know, they're tired of all these Discord servers grind where you would have to go do so many things to be able to be part of the whitelist community of a specific project. And I said we're not going to do any of that. You just, you just come in and just actually, you know, get, get your NFT and that's it. But in the past and for people who want to know what white listing is is, essentially you would give your crypto wallet address to the, to the project, they would include it in the smart contract and then you would be pre approved to buy the NFTs at an earlier and typically at a, like a, I guess reduced price as well. And then you would Go on the secondary market. So maybe like Magic Eden or Opensea, place like that and you would be able to sell it or buy it buy on a secondary market as well. But the reason that you were saying a lot of people were making a lot of money from the whitelisting was because it wasn't saturated. So whitelisting wasn't a thing that everyone was doing. So now what we do for whitelisting we actually tell people say, hey, like for example, one of the projects like Faro Gods, they, they did, they asked, they asked people to pay $50 in the form of ETH to be able to be part of their whitelist. Right? So we're trying to change that, change that concept of just grinding on a discord. Let's say do bunch of things like invite your friends, do this, do that and to be able to be part of whitelist and so to actually be sure that people are really interested. So in the past it was all about whitelist, but now it's not as much because everyone has whitelist. And again, if you're part of 30 different wireless communities, then which one would you buy? Right? You only have so much money, so that's why that's not so Arvind question to you.

So looking at NFTs right now, many of the most popular NFTs like bored apex or Cryptopunks, prices have dropped obviously, right? Because of the market that we are in. Is this a good time to be investing in these type of premium NFTs?

Yeah, so there's a bunch of different ways to think about this. So people buy NFTs because they just got into the market, they just want to try it out, right? So there's that type of person, There are people who buying NFTs because they want to support the artists, they want to support the project. So let's say if a project is actually, for example, I believe it was no okay burst that they wanted to do something with with regards to like mental health or frog was I worked with, they wanted to plant trees and save frogs. So sometimes people just want to actually support. They don't care if the money aspect of the, I guess the profit aspect of the project is not going to be there, right? So they just want to support. So in that case, because the price specifically for Ethereum has gone down, the price of the NFTs itself has gone down. This is actually a really good time to actually go in and actually if you want to support projects, support artists, support developers, support a specific mission, which are plenty of them. By the way, in the NFT space. Really good time to actually do that and at a discounted price. Right. So that's just, that's great.

So I just, just want to give a, give an example of this. So I grew up in Malaysia and I read a news article about a Malaysian artist that was, you know, mostly not really getting appreciated for her work. And then she launched her work as an NFT and all of a sudden she became a celebrity and as an, as you know, artists, artists typically don't make that much money. But all of a sudden this artist from my home country was successful. She was all over the press and I really wanted the support. So I went and I bought one of those NFTs and I think it cost me about a thousand bucks, but I was just so happy to see someone from my country doing well. I wanted to do what I could do to support. So that's one of the reasons why some people buy NFTs. I know I'm probably not going to make that money back. To me, it was just honoring my culture.

Exactly. And then there's the other aspect of it where a lot of people wanted to buy into these blue chip collections. Maybe like Bored Apes or even reference used to be almost like what, 20 the flow price was to be like 20 20e and then now it's like 5 I believe. So people who wanted to just get into these blue chip collections because of monetary values, because of the util, all the NFTs that are getting airdropped to them because all the events they get to attend, all the cool people, maybe it's just the status, maybe they just want to just show off their. Gary V Was at some point talking about how just like your LinkedIn, you may be showing off your wallet to people and just that would show what kind of person you are as well. So whatever reason that is. But now it's actually a lot cheaper. So you can actually buy and you would, you would. Now again, this is speculation, but a lot of these blue chip collections, they have so much money that it's really hard for them to actually leave the nft. So they're able to support themselves without actually getting investors involved. So that's how, again, personal opinion, that's how I actually think about that they're going to stay.

So let's now talk about utility NFTs. Right? So we've spoken about NFTs as collectibles and there is, I mean, for people who think, okay, that's a Ponzi scheme, I mean collectibles are collectibles. There is people buy things for. People buy things because they're collectibles. When I was young I used to collect comic books, right? I remember paying premium prices for the right Spider man comic book. And I didn't see that as a Ponzi scheme. I did it because I absolutely frickin loved it. So, collectibles aside, let's talk about utility NFTs. And you're giving us an example of a really interesting company in Romania that used a utility NFT and was able to raise 8 million. Let's talk about that.

Yes. So that's really cool. So this is what I actually suspect to see over the next 6 to 12 months actually if someone listens to any of the podcasts, I said like beginning of this year, I literally predicted that, I called on us, I said over the next three to six months this will happen. And it's happening already. So public companies, even the small companies, they're getting into the NFT world because it has other uses than just purely just trading NFTs. And I told you what they are. So one other example than the one that you said before, I forget is SaaS companies, a lot of software as a service companies. They actually tested to see if they introduce NFTs to, to sell and distribute their service. They actually make more money. So they literally experimented. They make more money than they would do without NFTs. And then this company is.

Could you give an example, could you give an example of what that looks like?

I can't remember, but if people literally just go on YouTube, there's a guy who actually calculated for the company exactly what they were making prior and then what they made after they introduced NFTs. And he's done it for a bunch of projects and he literally was just like making the argument saying, look, this is the future of actually SaaS. So you can actually use NFTs to actually be able to make more money. Now this specific example in Romania is the one that I was consulting them live on a stage is this company that they provide. Now if I find the name of the company there's so many of these works with, I forget, but what they provide is a beauty services across Romania, the entire country. Now if you think about first of all, the NFT audience is typically actually males, so 80% of them males and they're age 25 to 41 majority of them. Now we've got, you know, older, we've got younger people, like they're like 12 year olds buying NFTs. And then you don't even know. Right? But there's. So there's obviously those anomalies, but that's what typically is. Now what this company did, which is to my surprise, it's a very, very bold move to come and actually launch a collection to the female audience. And what they've done is so let's say you as the female audience of them, you would go get the beauty services as you would like on a maybe monthly basis or every few months. Let's say if it's your hair that you do, maybe it's your nails that you do regularly, whatever beauty services that you do, and you would do it through the app or you would go to their physical store and you would actually get the service as you would. And you've done that before NFTs even existed or even if you don't know anything about NFTs, you would still do that. So this company came up with this idea that they said, hey, what if after. So and by the way, I worked initially when I was in the, when I got into marketing, I worked with a lot of beauty companies as well. I actually helped them go from like complete, like a startup to like, you know, offering multiple locations and so on and so forth. So I'm very, very aware of like how that works. They're giving discounts to, to their buyers is a really great incentive. It's a very simple idea to just actually attract females and just say, hey, like if you, for example, if you book it now, you also get like 10% discount. If you bring your friend, you maybe get another 10% discount or blah, blah, blah, right? So they took this concept and they said, hey, what if after someone bought a specific service from us, let's say hair highlight, we just tell them, hey, if you want to actually get discount because you're going to do this again, you're going to do other beauty services with us again. What if we just gave you additional discount? What you have to do for that? You would have to buy into the VIP package that we have now. The VIP package is actually nft. So they would explain that nft over the phone conversation they would tell. Now I don't know how they would do it exactly, but over the phone conversation they would tell, first of all, they talk about the benefits of it. They say, hey, you would get a lot of discounts. You would get to go to real life events, maybe educational events, blah, blah, blah. But the whole point is you get discounts, which is what they really want because they're like, we're going to be using this regardless. So if you can get discounts, that's awesome. But also there are only going to be 8,000 of these VIP packages. So if you actually buy into this, given that there are millions of females just in Romania alone now, they're going to expand internationally too. But given that there's so many people that they want this, eventually this is going to be an investment for you where you can pay back all these spending that you've had on yourself, your body, which you would do regardless. Got nothing to do again with NFTs, right? And so very interesting idea because the whole concept of actually making NFTs really valuable is the rarity. So they're scarce. And then they realize they're like, well, if we just create like 8 thousands of them and there's so many females we have, then this is going to be an investment. So first of all, they want to hold onto these NFTs to get the discounts and then eventually, let's say over a year, they can sell it to someone else or over whatever timeframe, they can sell it to someone else for a higher price. And. And then they were able to raise about $8 million in doing so. And I think that's really like, when I think about NFTs in the small businesses, large businesses, that's what I think about as far as distribution, as far as building community, as far as actually getting your services to people in a new way, that's what I really think about. And I 100% think that has a future, which is regardless of, you know, cryptocurrencies, price going up, bored ape's price going down. Like, whatever happens, that's going to happen.

The utility of NFTs is really what fascinates me. So we did an experiment recently and it actually failed. But I want to share my failure so that people understand this. So I wanted to apply NFTs to raise money for Ukraine. And so we had around 22 artists submit beautiful artwork in support of Ukraine. But the timing went off. Right. By the time we got the project up, the war was already old news. And what had happened is that the NFT market had already tanked. But the interesting thing was this NFT was not just an artwork to raise money for Ukraine. It came with a utility. But here's the mistake I made. The utility was so powerful, so good that it seemed almost hard to believe. Basically, if you got this NFT and the starting price was 0.5 Ethereum, so maybe it was about a thousand, a thousand bucks. If you got this nft, you got five lifetime Mindvalley memberships. So a lifetime Mindvalley membership is five grand. You got five of that, so one for you and four for like members of your family or your friends. You got three tickets to Mindvalley's big event in Estonia, each ticket worth $1,800. And you got dinner with me and a Mindvalley author. Those dinner seats, you cannot buy them. This is huge. Total value of that is around $34,000. But this was set up as an auction with a, with a very minimum price of 0.5. And we emailed everyone in the mindvalley list just to see would people get it because the value was so huge. It's an absolute no brainer. People didn't understand it. People did not understand the utility. And so the winning bids, so we had a particular closing date and the winning bids were about $1,000, $1,100 on average. So we raised $26,000 for Ukraine, but the people who put in that,100, they basically got $34,000 worth of value.

That's amazing for them.

But the audience, the people, the Mindvalley audience did not get it. Now I take accountability for that. The whole, whole reason here was we just wanted to test the responsiveness. But yeah, it sounded so too hard to believe that this was real. But these NFT winners, I'm actually personally having dinner with each and every one of them.

Yeah, I would also say something that, I don't know if that helps, but so Picasso family, they, so everyone knows who Picasso is. They had their collection and then after they launched it, they didn't sell out. And then the person was responsible, they came to me and they were asking about like, what could have they done differently? You would think the Picasso art is so great. If you just duplicate that art, everyone would buy it. Right? That's not the case. This is to show, and I mean it's really similar to the example you're talking about. This is to show the Web2 audience, the people that the average person who's not really into the NFT space, regardless of how amazing the offer is, how amazing the art is, if it's not done in a web3marketing way, you can't sell that. And so that's why actually a lot of projects now, again, in the past this wasn't as visible as it is right now, but a lot of projects, they even build a community that have amazing utilities too and no one buys it. And it's just because the way that's done it's different to what the Web3 space expects it to be. So I mean it is like too hard to believe that's true too.

Yeah. Because the Web3 community is actually a relatively small community. I was reading the stats and the number of actual active accounts on OpenSea and it's not that many. Do you recall what it is?

Yes. So the. I believe it's about 1.5 million the total. Now I don't know if that's just OpenSea or the total. And I believe like on a monthly basis there's somewhere around like the buyers are somewhere around like say 40,000, 50,000. So it's actually not a ton. Right. And so now a lot of people also, just because of all the hacks and everything, they don't connect their wallet anymore. So they disconnect it immediately. So that's also just kind of messing up all those stats like people, people relying on. But to, to actually think it like web3 space is like a. It is, it is a very small, it is a very small community. Plus also they're very jaded because of all these things that happened over the like, you know, beginning of this year. Like a lot of projects they drug pulled. And so actually one of the things I tell people projects to do right now is to not only just target the Web three people, but also target Web two people. But in a way that's different than what most people think, which is people would think, okay, so web two people, if you just tell them about the NFTs, they would just go buy it again. Celebrities I've talked to, they've done that, no one buys it. So the way I like, I'm sure you're familiar with product launch formula back in 2000. Yeah. So what I like to do is to actually educate web two people to first of all get into web three, understand the whole concept of cryptocurrencies, digital currencies, NFTs, and then let them know why they need to buy your nft. So it's a very elaborate process to actually get these people to come in to do this. And the reason that the beauty company in Romania, they were doing it really well is just because they were doing it on a phone conversations. They would literally have these people that just continuously talking to people that don't know anything about NFTs and just tell them, hey, look, you want the NFTs, I mean, you want the benefits, which is the discounts and blah, blah, blah, and then this is what you have to do and connect your wallet, do this do that. And then you would buy the NFTs. But it's very different to just like a, let's say, influencer with lots of followers. Just go in and just say, hey, here's my nft. And then people just rushing into buying doesn't happen. It takes time for people to actually understand what it is and then understand why your NFTs. But what I also tell people is that the cool thing is once they do, if they don't know anything about NFTs and they buy your NFTs, they're going to be your customer for life because you just introduced them to this new universe that they never knew anything about.

Absolutely, absolutely. So what would be your advice for people who want to start exploring the NFT space? What would the first thing you would encourage them to do?

Yeah, so I actually like projects that they, so I like projects that actually have. They have a utility and then they come up with a artwork for it. Now again, that's different. Like if there's an artist that wants to do things, then of course they can just sell their art and then just find a utility for it too. That's fine. But for people who are not like artists and they kind of in between, they're like, well, we're not really good with arts, we're not really good with utilities. I would want them to focus on the utility. They will come up with an amazing product. And this is why again, a lot of times projects that already were selling things in the web 2 space, and then when they come into the web 3 space and they bring that utility and they just add an art to it, they can be successful. It's just because people will buy their NFTs regardless of whether it be in the form of an NFT or not in a form of an nft, they just buy it for the utility. And so I'm actually launching one in the fitness world myself, like launching a collection in three weeks. And so the concept is just really getting clear on your utility, have a great story round it and just getting people excited. Now one of the things I tell people right now to do is start delivering on your utilities as early as possible. So instead of just doing the typical thing we used to do last year, which would be like, hey, let's say if we sold out, then we start building this game, we start doing this, we're going to have this coin launch and so on and so forth. No, just launch a, let's say, collection of, let's say 300 to 500 NFTs and start delivering something now that does two things. First of all, out of all these collections that are out there that are trying to be successful, you already are successful because you just sold that one. So that distinguishes you from a lot of other projects. That's first thing. Second thing is your offering is going to be very strong because you actually started delivering on things versus all these other people who are just promising things. And so, so those are the very important things. And then there's another element to this where I call it hype now. Not to be confused with just like fake hype where like you know, just telling people, oh, this is going to be so amazing, blah, blah, blah. No, it really like the concept is like having more demand than there is supply. And you need to create that in the web3 space. Example of that is like if you think about you going to it, let's say Adidas store, you want to buy a T shirt right now. If you go and see it, if you like it, you buy it. If you don't, maybe you don't buy it right now, but maybe you come back six months down the line and you buy it in the web3 space. That's not the case. If you bought it on the days that the main thing is happening, you bought it. If you didn't, that's done right. So that really needs to be communicated to people. That it's a timeframe based thing. So the way we do that is I would take people to a specific landing page where people would say, follow Twitter, join Discord, connect their wallet for whitelist. And then once they've done all of those things and give their email, especially email too, that's one of the things I've realized lately that's working way better than Discord and other things, which is really weird because it's a web2 thing. But anyways, they do all of those things and then we ask them to actually tweet to say this is happening. So they tweet about what they've, what they've just done. And then if someone goes and actually just like looks up, for example, Wall Street Fam on Twitter and so that's a brand. And then they just type out in the search, Wall Street Fam, like for example, Premium. They see there are thousands and thousands of people who tweeted that they've joined their whitelist. And one of the cool things about that is that it just creates a lot of like anticipation, a lot of excitement for people. And then we just like did a video of it and showed it to People as well say, hey, look, you can just scroll down, you can see all these people wanting to do this, so on and so forth. So the concept is really this, have a great product, have a great utility. If that's the. If you just want to get into the NFT space, if you're an artist, then obviously your, your art is going to be the most important things. And if you can find a utility for it, then that's awesome too. And then you got to build a community, you got to build hype, and then you got to also be really relevant as far as your narrative to what's happening right now. So if you're just doing all the old things that was happening last year, it's not going to work out, right? So you need to actually be relevant. Right? So for example, just think about like Goblin Town when they said we're tired of all these, you know, discord, grind and like getting on like whitelist communities, so on and so forth. So if you can create something that's just like distinguishes you from other projects and you're really relevant, then you'll have more, you have more chance of actually being, being successful in, in this whole industry. Plus also think about the whole concept of, at the end of the day, it's not just about like making money right away. You can. So in fact, actually if someone goes to actually sees the stats on how much money has been made on the secondary market on OpenSea versus the primary, it's actually 80% versus 20%. So majority of money is actually been made on the secondary market, meaning on the marketplaces after the launch versus the launch itself. So if you didn't make money first launch, it's okay, like you can do another one and you can do multiple ones. Plus if your pricing, especially for now, it could be like a lot cheaper than, let's say what you would do last year. Last year was maybe like somewhere around like 500 to $800. That was like average. This year is not like 0.06. Ethereum is the average price right now.

I see, I see. Well, thank you, Arvind. Thank you. Thank you for taking us on this journey. I think this is going to be one of many different podcasts we'd have on emerging technologies and Web3. So thank you for joining us. I'm actually going to reach out to you to share with you and get your thoughts on mindvalley's NFT project for next year. But thank you. This has been a really delightful conversation and I'm glad that we got acquainted of course.

Thank you for having me.