Crystal Frogs Mint

Ribbit! Mr. Roboto here, cofounder of Crystal Frogs! Let’s have a chat, you and me.

The last 24hrs have been a whirlwind of excitement, hard work, and the culmination of a literal year’s worth of grind from our entire team. It was not the dream-mint-out-instantly scenario we had hoped for, but it WAS immensely gratifying and special to see so many of you who minted and immediately connected with your Crystal Frogs.

I want to tell you that I am so so thankful to those of you that have already minted your Crystal Frog and there is still an incredible journey ahead of us that you are now a part of! You are our froggy family and you’re going to help us shape this cartoon we’re making and be an essential part of the creative process and the playful green community we’re building. You’re now a Crystal Frog and that means something! You’re a ground-up part of a community-driven cartoon led by an animator from Disney XD, Nickelodeon, and Amazon. We believe this is what the future of cartoon animation can look like, with NFTs allowing a community to drive the direction of a cartoon series while owning their own individual pieces of that cartoon’s IP and YOU are building that with us. THANK YOU! If you’re not a part of the community yet and this sounds like something you want to be a part of go mint your frog, our public mint is live!

So, let’s chat about how the mint is going. I’ll be real with you. We had some significant expectations for mint. We believe Crystal Frogs has amazing things to offer. We think our art fits in the same space as leading IPs in traditional animation and in the same space as blue chip projects. Take a look at our collection and then go check out Doodles, Cool Cats, or any other Blue Chip project that fits the vibe. Look at our animated trailer. Look at our silly animated gifs. I’m serious, check them out! I refuse to believe you’ll see what we’re making and not think “okay, that’s pretty cool”.

And we had a lot of reasons to believe that the mint was going to be an incredible success aside from our IP itself. We dropped our trailer and officially launched our project on March 1st. Here’s a list of reasons we felt we would mint out:

• 3500 people joined our Whitelist.
• We gained 10k Twitter followers over these 2 weeks. Actual followers, not bots.
• We gained 2k Discord members. Again, actual members, not bots.
• We landed collabs with blue chip NFT projects like Project Godjira, Cool Cats, Doodles, and more.
• Our trailer received 2k retweets.
• Our animated Crystal Frogs gifs received 80 million views on Giphy.
• The general vibe of the community was excited and engaged. Our discord was active and a real community was forming before our eyes.

And we did all of the above with $0 in marketing. Our team is not a team of corporate robots. We’re not wealthy degens. I am a graduate student in Creative Writing. Our co-founder is a professional 2D animator. Our dev is a protocol engineer for SuperRare. We’re just people with an idea we believe in fully that we want to make happen and we’re giving it our all to make it happen. NFTs are one of those rare spaces where if you have a good enough idea and a good enough team, you can gain the support of a community and crowd-fund something special.

However, yesterday we did not mint out. As of writing this post, we have sub-500 frogs minted. So, what went wrong?

Here’s a list (in no particular order) of the things that I feel went wrong:

• Mint coincided with extreme market volatility and extremely high gas prices. Many people were waiting out the gas prices and as a result, the initial hours of the mint had weak numbers, resulting in the appearance of a failed mint for many that came to the site and did not see many others minting.
• We provided 24hrs for our WL to mint. As I said, our team members are not degens. We do have some on the team (look at you CTRLRoss, Blurr, and Dub, wink wink) that encouraged us to shorten the window of time for WL so as to provide a sense of urgency to mint. I did not want to do that. I wanted to make the mint process easy and not stressful for the people on our WL. But, unfortunately, we learned that a slow-burn mint often kills the momentum of the mint.
• We did not further capitalize on our whitelisted members. We assumed that by joining the whitelist, joining the discord, and retweeting our trailer, people on the whitelist would have engaged enough with the project to follow through with minting. We were anticipating somewhere between 30%-60% of the people on our WL minting. Less than 3% did. I believe that had we given our marketing funnel one additional step of forcing these people on the WL to engage with the discord in a meaningful way we could have activated these people to become full supporters.
• The pre-reveal incubation crystal did more harm than good for the project. We initially wanted the incubation crystal to last throughout WL and begin right at Public being available. But, it became clear that there was not a sense of excitement or fomo in minting an incubating crystal.

Perhaps the biggest failure on our part during all of this is how we handled our mint not meeting our expectations. We scrambled to change the momentum back in our favor. We changed from a 24hr Whitelist to 12hrs suddenly, rushing out the public mint page. We hastily revealed the crystals at a time that did not match the timing we had announced they would reveal prior. We should have been prepared for the mint going this way instead of scrambling. I apologize for that. I suppose all I can say is that I genuinely believed we would mint out or at least get close to minting out. So did our team and our community members.

Lastly, I want to address a very specific concern that came up. We had a community member come into the chat and post this screenshot with an accusation that we as a team were scamming the community:

So let’s talk specifically about the free frogs that were minted. These mints being discussed are all labeled “Free Sale”. You may audit our transactions yourself. This mint phase was also included in our contract.

Two years ago, I began my NFT journey on a small blockchain called Proton. It was a lot of fun and I made a lot of friends there. I had a cute little pixel collection called Pals and at a certain point a friend and I made a collection called Crystal Frogs. That collection on Proton had about 30 holders and consisted of non-generative art that was hand drawn. We had a tight little community and we tried doing an interactive sort of thing where we’d tell stories using characters from the project in our Telegram chat. My friend stepped away from the project and another friend I had met through Proton and I started discussing him coming on board for helping with the project. That friend was Dave, our co-founder and the animator for Crystal Frogs. We dreamed up what you see as Crystal Frogs today and let our Proton holders know that we’d be halting what I was making there on Proton to start this dream version of Crystal Frogs with Dave at the helm of the more ambitious art direction and interactive cartoon series idea. But! We let them know they would be getting free frogs when the time came, as thanks for being a part of that original ideation. We followed through with that promise and a significant portion of the frogs from “free sale” are from these genesis holders. And I will also say that the wallets are mostly fresh because these holders come from Proton and this is most of their first time interacting with ETH. This accounts for somewhere between 50–100 frogs. These are real people lol you can come say hi to them in our Discord. One of them even happened to mint our extremely rare 1/1 Hopper!

There are other free frogs the team minted as well! We ran giveaways throughout our marketing for free frogs. We minted those frogs ourselves to airdrop for giveaways. There are about 50 frogs we minted from the team that accounts for that. We have already airdropped those out. And then there are team frogs themselves — each team member minted about 5. And lastly, when we decided to close the WL mint early, we minted an additional 50 frogs to airdrop for free in the event that people on the WL were upset that we ended the WL mint early.

When the community member came to our discord accusing us of scamming the community I banned him. I regret that because I believe I poured gas on his fire. Candidly, I had slept 8hrs in the past 48hrs, as I was dedicating every moment of my life to ensuring the success of this project. It hurt to have someone come in and be so aggressive and unkind to something we have all worked so hard on. But, I wish I had just talked it out with him.

So, What next?

We still have a lot to look forward to. We don’t have to mint out for this project to succeed. We have an incredible team in-house. Just go check out our trailer and you’ll see what I mean. We can still make some amazing things! Of course, as more people mint that will expand what we can do with the project, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had along the way.

Will we transition to a free mint? There are no plans for that at this time. We stand by the mint price of 0.03ETH. When you buy a Crystal Frog you are buying the IP of a piece of art made by an animator who has worked with brands that you grew up watching as a kid. You’re buying a piece in one of the first truly community-driven cartoons ever. It’s the price of admission to joining the community of people building this cartoon series, as you will be helping shape the cartoon, and narrative direction, and involving your NFT in the series itself. The funds from the mint are essential to building a great cartoon series and we fully stand behind the price and are immensely grateful for those of you who have already minted your frogs!

Over the next few weeks, we will be rewarding our initial holders. We will be creating new marketing content and building a marketing plan that accommodates not fully minting out. We will build this community frog by frog, mint by mint. We are so excited to have you on this journey with us.

And if you’re not a part of the community already, hop aboard!

RIBBIT!

-Mr. Roboto and the rest of the Crystal Frogs team