5 basic mistakes that kill your project
- Buying fake followers
No matter it is about Twitter, Discord, Instagram or any other platforms, having fake followers, commenters is considered to be red flag for most of the NFT community. It seems an obvious choice for many (unfortunately) to buy likes, followers, even comments for a few hundred dollars and one may think that there’s no way of being caught. However, fake profiles are more simple to detect than you think. Fake solutions result in significantly lower engagements relatively and there are several easy-to-use softwares available on the market that provide a comprehensive analysis about profiles. This destroys your credibility, never do that!
If you believe in your project and it has a real use case, or excellent art, or anything that is worthy of people’s attention, they will come to you and walk with you through the door of success! Be patient.
2. Wasting your money on poor-performing “influencers”
Ads are crucial to success. As a founder, seeing the relatively fast success of many NFT projects, you will think at some point (probably at the beginning) that a few hundreds, even thousands of dollars spent on Twitter promoters and influencers will ensure a 10k-20k+ community instantly, which you can build on. In the past, we thought the same and we failed.
Twitter promoters with 50–100k followers are mostly working with bots, these promoters are good for starting to build your community (so people can already see hundreds of Discord members or Twitter followers), but won’t ever bring you great conversions. While promoters cost 75–200 USD (a retweet for example), you have to be cautious with influencers where thousands of dollars are into play. Especially on Instagram, there are many so-called NFT influencers with 1M+ followers showing off their expensive cars, cribs and some cash earned in the crypto scene. They share a story about you for at least 10k USD, but believe us, it won’t bring you anything.
Influencers are very important stakeholders of the community and you need to work with some of them. But always ask a friend, the community about their experiences when you’re about to pay them money! Or check our detailed guide on how to choose and work with influencers!
3. Setting a too high price and a too high supply
Historically (if we can use this term for such a young industry), mint prices range between 0,01–0,3 ETH with the notion that 0,3 ETH is considered to be relatively high. It’s impossible to set a range as clearly there are projects that have a huge reputation in the community thanks to the artist, the creators or any other element.
Also, focus on your supply. Earlier, projects set their supply (a.k.a. the number of NFTs they distribute) at a high number, around 10,000 was a general target. Today, it is less and less the case, because it is almost impossible to sell and has a wrong message that the founders may just want to have your money. Unless you’re sure that you’re building the Apple of the NFT industry, don’t set a high supply! To give you the context: a collection of 10,000 NFTs with a price of 0,1 ETH means that you evaluate your project to be worth 3M USD at the time when there is nothing you can show except a few sneak peek from your collection.
The key is to evaluate your industry, the team’s ability and reputation and the competition when setting the price and the supply. Introducing more sale rounds with different prices is also an option with the aim of rewarding early supporters.
4. Fake roadmap
It’s simple: be honest with your plans and don’t promise irrational milestones! Today, 90% of the NFT roadmaps include the buzzwords “metaverse”, “web3”, “P2E Game”, “land sale”, “integration” with any other working space and so on with fully unrealistic deadlines. If you really build any of the above, it’s worth giving details in your roadmap, so that people can see you have strong plans. You want a strong and committed community, not a bunch of idiots, so set your plan accordingly.
5. Anonym team
This is a tough question. We give you the perspective and you decide. Many successful NFT projects started their journey with an anonymous team, some of them are among the biggest success stories (for example BAYC). Generally, why should the fact that we don’t know the team be a red flag if they deliver their promises?
The answer is accountability. The crypto scene has seen too many successful attempts to scam people and get away with the money and no one has been held accountable. Not to mention that we are sure you’d put your hard-earned money more likely in a project whose team members are real enough to have a beer with;)
It’s up to you, but our advice is that if you are not wanted by the FBI, don’t give a reason for people to skip you and your project. There are thousands of NFT collections out there, and it’s rapidly growing. The investor will quickly move on and find another NFT project that may fulfill his or her needs better.
We don’t tell you that all of your potential followers will check the identity of your followers or do a comprehensive research. But build your project in good faith, avoid the avoidable mistakes and do better than most of your competition.
