Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Market Place Development
Market Place Development
@digitalflowercg
Welcome!
Wow! You made it and are reading my ‘Ultimate NFT Project Launch Guide’! Thanks. 🥺
It means you might be thinking about launching your own NFT project or are just curious about what I
think is a good NFT launch. Either way, enjoy! Any feedback is appreciated! Now.. let’s get into it!
This document is a work in progress! Probably there’s stuff missing, but I plan to extend the content
over time and improve it based on everyone’s input!
1. Values
2. Preparation
3. Launch
4. After Launch
1. Values
Before starting any project you need to understand the people you are building it for. You need to
understand what they value, what they are looking for. Let’s start with the values:
Trust & Transparency
The first step to a successful project is to gain trust. In my opinion the best way to do this is to be
transparent about everything. Who are you? Why did you decide to do this project? Which skills do you
and your team have? It’s actually really similar to a startup pitch in front of investors. I believe for long
term success possible buyers need to believe in your team and after that in the possibility that the
community as a whole will make the project a success.
Although I think transparency is one of the best ways to gain trust, please be aware that being not
anonymous also brings risks with it.
In addition to the transparency about yourself, people who invest in the project always expect vision
from the creators and a specific roadmap. If you lack this vision, they won’t be in the project for long or
won’t even buy one single NFT.
It is okay if you have not figured out every single step of the future, but you should show that you have a
long term plan for the project. If you can show them that you plan for years or even decades instead of
months, they will take you and the project more seriously.
One of the core values of the current communities is the ability to have an impact on the project. As a
creator you shouldn’t decide everything on your own and just tell the community about them. Always
LISTEN to your community. Of course you can and should have an opinion of your own, but only if you
listen to the community and collaborate with them, they will push the project forward, invest their own
time and market it on social media.
If you get these things right, success will be imminent unless you fail in the execution of the project. So..
how to prepare, launch and grow a project? Let’s dive into it!
2. Preparation
Before you can launch your project, you need to do a lot of preparation. Let’s cover the tasks you should
check off your to do list!
Utility
Before working on anything visual, ask yourself: What will people be able to do with your NFT? I strongly
believe that future projects need to offer more utility than “just” an artwork to look at. Any NFT project
that wants to be successful needs to think about utility first, the artwork follows.
1. Token-as-a-Ticket (e.g. VeeCon)
Artwork
When you know which utility you’d like to offer to your community, it’s time to think about the visual
artwork. You can find a collection of current projects in my Avatar Twitter List. I have to say that it feels
like we have reached a certain point of saturation of these random trait generation avatar projects.
That’s why I encourage you to choose utility first and then decide on the artwork. Try to be original and
not just copy & paste one of the other avatar projects!
Categories:
Unique Avatar Projects:
Dedicated Topics:
3. many more, too many to list. I recommend checking out one of the platforms that list all
projects in order to get a proper overview. For
example CryptoSlam.io, OpenSea.io or Rarity.Tools.
Technology
Alright, well done! You decided on the utility and artwork style of your project. But how will it all come
together?
4. How will you integrate the chosen utility into the NFT?
Depending on the utility you want to provide, you might need to find new technological
solutions, e.g. if you want to make your NFT into a real life ticket to a conference, you need to
think about how the verification process will work!
Team
So far, so good! You know which kind of utility you will offer, how your NFTs will look and how they will
be implemented! One of the most important things is now to build a team, if you don’t have one
already.
There are some essential roles you should consider for the core team. You probably won’t need for
every task a separate person as everything will be rather agile anyways. Especially tasks that are related
to community management, social and partnerships can be handled by one person, but the more the
merrier. You can also involve the community early on for community moderation.
I suggest to think about the following roles for the team core:
1. Visual / 3D Artist
2. Blockchain Developer
3. Community Manager
5. Partnership Manager
1. Legal Consulting
Finances
Great job! Next up is the calculation of costs and your revenue streams. This is also the time to think
about the purchasing costs of your NFTs.
2. Hosting
You will need to host a website, get a domain name. The usual cost for any project.
3. Salaries
You should put aside some of your NFTs for your team, early supporters and for giveaways. You
can also promise your team a share of the generated revenue, but in the end they will need to
pay their rent. Unless it’s a passion project and you have a full team already or experts are
offering their help for free, you should plan on hiring a core team and reaching out to relevant
freelancers.
4. Marketplace Royalties
Although it’s not a direct cost, please be aware of the royalties marketplaces make you pay. For
example OpenSea takes a 2.5% cut on any sale that’s done on their marketplace.
5. Donations
Similar to marketplace royalties, please consider doing good with the money you receive. It
could be a donation to offset the ecological impact of your blockchain transactions or it could be
somehow related to your project, e.g. SuperYeti fights human trafficking in Nepal and India.
Many projects take a share of e.g. 2.5% of the generated revenue or choose a specific amount
they plan to donate at certain thresholds.
Pricing
Alright, you know about your cost structure and revenue streams. Now you need to dig into defining the
pricing of your NFTs. It should allow people to get into the project easily, but it should also be enough to
cover your costs.
2. Bonding Curve
If you choose to use a bonding curve, early adopters will be able to buy your NFT really cheap
and the more NFTs that get sold, the more expensive they get. The formula for bonding curves is
rather tricky, as you don’t want your NFTs to become so expensive that nobody can afford them
anymore.
4. English Auctions
The usual auction style everyone knows is called “English Auction”. This is usually only feasible
for your project if you have few NFTs to sell and your buyers see upfront what they get.
5. Dutch Auctions
In comparison to the English Auction mechanic, there are Dutch Auctions whose term originates
from the tulip mania from the 17th century. Instead of bidding on top of each other, the price
starts at a certain price and goes down until one buyer decides to buy. This also works only if
your buyers know what they buy. You can check VeeFriends for an example.
Next to the sale type, you need to decide on the amount of tokens you want to give away and your
pricing structure. Let’s do some example calculations. I’ll do revenue only, of course you’ll have to do
your own calculation including the costs.
Roadmap
Alright, we have covered A LOT already. As mentioned before the roadmap is essential to show potential
buyers if you plan long term and if you have a vision for the project. You don’t need to know all details
and every single step the project will take, as it should be done also in collaboration with the
community, but you should be able to outline the most important milestones.
Website
Every project needs a website. Before the launch this is your flagship to demonstrate your ability to
deliver. If the website isn’t working or not looking great, how should the community trust you with
delivering a highly complex blockchain project?
Contentwise you can use the website to showcase the artwork people can expect, describe the utility,
show the roadmap and the team that is working on the project.
Social
In order to raise awareness, share content and interact with people you need a social presence. Most
commonly in this space the chosen platform is Twitter. Instead of just tweeting randomly, I recommend
to create some type of content strategy for your Twitter. You don’t need to stick to it perfectly, but it
should give you or the people who will manage it some guidelines to stick to.
Community Relationship
Which style of communication and which kind of relationship do you want to build with your future
community? Will you write tweets like texting with your best buddy or in a more serious and
professional style?
Content
1. Project Updates
It’s always good to give a behind-the-scenes look. It will help you with building up trust.
3. Raising Awareness
In the end people have to discover your project before you can explain it to them and gain trust.
There are many ways to do that, many projects do giveaways with a Retweet mechanic, others
do collaborative giveaways with other projects, in which you qualify if you join both Discord
servers.
Next to posting content I highly recommend connecting with people and influencers. Talk to them, ask
for feedback and make yourself approachable. Join Clubhouse rooms and Twitter spaces and talk about
your project. The NFT community values this presence a lot and it increases trust by a lot if you are there
and answer any questions the community has. Next to joining other spaces and promoting your project,
you can also host your own room. I recommend doing this in collaboration with an existing NFT
community or relevant hosts in order to reach a wider audience.
Community
A healthy community is key. The platform of choice for many current projects is Discord. The most
important things to get right in your server:
1. Onboarding
Set up a proper onboarding process, including Bot blockers.
2. Channel Setup
Create pre-launch specific channels to give people space for discussions — most importantly a
channel for feedback and suggestions!
3. Moderation
Define your community rules and clearly communicate them. Feedback should always be
welcome, but insulting behavior or active FUDing without reason should lead to a ban. Give a
few members, who you either know personally or who are very active early on and seem to be
capable, moderation rights. But be careful! Anyone you give this, will automatically be seen as a
spokesperson for the project, so you should give them a proper briefing before giving the rights,
so they know the answers to the most important questions. The worst thing that can happen is
that fake news is spread because one of your moderators sends a wrong statement.
3. Launch
Aaaaalright, it’s launch time! 🥳 Will your project take off or not?
Reveal
If you have a project which shows the NFTs upfront, there won’t be any reveal necessary. If you’re doing
a project with random trait generation, you need a reveal mechanic. The success and hype around this is
massively important.
1. Instant Reveal
If you’ve got everything ready (smart contract deployed + artwork done) you can offer an instant
reveal. This means as soon as someone purchases your NFT, they’ll see the traits they got and if
they got a rare one. This mechanic works nicely as people might immediately purchase one after
another until they get a rarer one or one they like.
Social
Twitter
During your launch and reveal you need to be super active on Twitter. Reply to tweets that mention the
project, respond to questions and retweet people who bought your NFT.
Community
At this point you should have at least a few hundred people in your Discord server already. As soon as
your NFTs are in the wallets of your community, you can start to hand out roles.
1. Creator
2. Core Team
3. Moderators
4. Owners
a) split by amount of tokens (e.g. different roles for holding 1, 5 or 10 tokens)
b) split by traits (e.g. if you have different animals, you could cluster by animal race,
e.g. VeeFriends who cluster by bird, mammals, etc.)
c) based on duration of holding (e.g. day 1 holder, longterm +1 year holder, etc.)
When you create these new roles, you can also create specific member areas, which are unlocked based
on these roles. Furthermore you can also create channels for trading, sales and whatever your project
needs. You can also consider adding some bots, like a listing and sales bot from OpenSea.
4. After Launch
Good job! Your project was a success, you are sold very quickly — but now the real work begins! You
need to show your community that the decision to trust in your project was the right one!
Implementing Feedback
If you get certain feedback and ideas from the community, you should at least reply to the important
ones. I encourage you to regularly do community polls for token holders. You can do this either inside
Discord inside member specific channels or use a platform like Snapshot to do polling.
Price Observation
Watch your floor! The floor can tell you how the hype around your project is evolving. If it moves down
people are selling more than buying, if it moves constantly up, you’re probably doing everything right.
Some projects buy up the floor if it is below the initial sales price, redistribute them to the community
through raffles or even burn them to decrease supply. You can definitely do this, but in my opinion there
are better ways to work around this. I strongly believe that if you build a solid project, you won’t need to
do any of this.
Tackle Fraud
Fraud is the worst thing that can happen to your project and especially people who buy into your
project. The most “common” thing you will have to deal with are OpenSea project clones.
2. OpenSea Verification
One of the best ways to protect yourself and your community is to get a blue checkmark on
OpenSea. This will only be possible when you reach a certain amount of sales and generated
revenue, but should be easy if your project takes off.
There are different platforms you should get your project on. Here’s a short list:
2. Cryptoslam.io
Cryptoslam tracks all sales of the biggest NFT projects, including different historical graphs and
leaderboards for the most successful projects.
Social
At this point your social channels are mainly there to keep the discussion going, observe active and
critical voices and react to their comments if necessary. You should join some audio rooms after the
launch to show that the project isn’t a rug pull (aka scam). Of course it’s important to get actual work
done and work on your project, but it’s equally important to care about the community and the
reputation of your project.
Execution
If you have reached the execution stage, well done! You hopefully have a vivid and healthy community,
giving you valuable input about the project. The floor of your NFTs is slowly but surely rising. Now it’s
time to deliver! As this is really specific depending on the project you are planning to create, I won’t go
into detail here. Basically it’s all about delivering on the promises you made to your community.
Thanks!
Thank you for checking out my ‘Ultimate NFT Project Launch Guide’. If you are reading this, you made
the first step to a successful project launch! 🚀
I appreciate any feedback! Feel free to add comments in this document or get in contact with me on
Twitter!
In the following and last section you can find some tools for brainstorming, taken from the Miro
template section.
S.C.A.M.P.E.R.
S.C.A.M.P.E.R. is a brainstorming method developed by Bob Eberle, an author of creativity books for
young people, who introduced it in his 1971 book SCAMPER: Games for Imagination Development. In
this clever method, you’ll find 7 different questions to encourage and inspire your team to approach a
problem through 7 unique filters. By asking your team to think through a problem using this framework,
you’ll unlock fresh, innovative ways to understand the problem you’re trying to solve.
Substitute
Combine
Adapt
Eliminate
Reverse
Walt Disney is famous for dreaming up and executing some of the most ambitious creative projects of
our time. The Disney Creative Strategy was inspired by his approach to projects. This creative process
bridges the gap between imagination and reality. Use the Disney Creative Strategy template to
brainstorm ideas that balance dreams and their execution.
To prepare for a Disney Creative Strategy exercise, divide the room into four parts. The first part is for
dreaming and imagination, the second is for realism and planning, the third is for critics, and the fourth
is for out-of-the-box thinking. Dividing the room sets the stage for what is to come, preparing the team
to switch from one framework to another.
Perceptual mapping is a powerful diagrammatic technique. To create a perceptual map, you must first
draw two or more axes. The axes display your company’s product, brand, or service relative to your
competition. Many marketers and product managers choose to use different size circles to represent
sales volume or market share of competing products, though this is optional. You can then ask
participants to rank competing products relative to each other along these axes. The resulting map gives
you insight into how customers feel about competing products in a given market.