It seems like I just woke up — and NFTs are in the spotlight. It’s even crazier than most of us from the early days would ever dare imagine. I have to admit that I had already given up on them a little over a year ago, in all honesty. What was love at first sight turned into oblivion for me. A couple of wrong (and overly enthusiastic decisions) can go a long way in the crypto world.
The Romance
My romance with NFTs started with an idea around a blockchain certificate as proof of people completing an online course. I even quit my full-time job to do this. Back in 2017, Blockcerts were the gold standard for blockchain certification, but the advent of Cryptokitties and ERC-721 offered a new perspective.
I got in touch with William Entriken, the lead author of the newly proposed non-fungible token standard. I built a team that was on a mission to disrupt the blockchain space by bringing NFTs into every possible vertical. We did a successful $10M ICO with some of the industry’s best investors and advisors. A team of 30 people started building and exploring different verticals (we even issued a KYC non-fungible token for our token sale). 0xcert was a fantastic story — until it wasn’t.
Nobody expected two things to happen in the months after our successful token sale: a bear market and me leaving the company. While I was good at building products and teams, I realized that I could not manage people’s expectations closest to the company and align on the long-term vision. Money tends to make this more complicated.
However, at the time of my departure, I had complete confidence the team would fulfill the promises made. I knew they were technically superb and could efficiently deliver that part. I planned to get out and start the next best thing, which would sit on top of the framework and fix the last mile problem. I had a vast network and believed that NFTs would be mainstream very soon. Everything would play out perfectly in the end.
The Reality
Life has a funny way of delivering painful lessons. But that’s the only way to learn!
After my departure, I realized the bear market was here to stay, and people were not that fond of NFTs with their portfolios wrecked. Nevertheless, I pushed forward. My next venture was veebo.
I became obsessed with data around the new generation, and it took a couple of months before we had gotten to a clear value proposition and a brand. Veebo was to be a marketplace to create and sell digital merchandise to digital natives or Gen Z-ers. Think of it as Shopify with the blockchain layer built-in, but not visible to the user. Along with selling physical inventory, you’d now have the ability to create and sell digital collectibles. The blockchain activity would happen seamlessly behind the scenes. It could plug into existing Shopify or Magento stores to drive additional revenue with existing fans. I loved it!
I invested some of my own money and put my fundraising hat back on to start working my contacts in Hong Kong, Finland, Malta, Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, UK, and Austria. I attended events, met investors, influencers, and a horde of awesome people. With the ICO craze over, I opted to raise equity in the company. Dublin’s Akasha Foundation (founded by Ethereum co-founder Mihai Alisie) soon recognized the potential and invited us into their incubation program. We raised some funds, but I was up against a wall of misconceptions.
Here’s a typical conversation I was having.
“But it’s just a sticker. I can copy-paste the sticker, right?”
“Yes, but you don’t own the sticker if you do that.”
“Why would I own the sticker?”
“It’s a collectible memorabilia from your favorite streamer on Twitch.”
“Ok.”
“Yeah, and there’s only 50 of them, and there’s a probability they go big in the future.”
“Ok.”
“Yeah, exciting, right?”
“But — you can still copy-paste it… right?”
All this time, the bear market was pounding all my prospects. Veebo did not complete its funding, and eventually, I had to borrow money and take a consulting gig in the digital marketing industry to put food on the table. I was leaving crypto and NFTs behind.
The romance was over, and reality had kicked in. I cracked under pressure.
All those people were right! How can a jpeg be worth $1,000 if you can just copy-paste it, right? And I had just spent everything I had to try and build this. How stupid was I?
The Clout
I first pitched Clout.art about a year ago. Everyone was talking about tokenizing art. My problem with that was that you have to be a creator and an “artistic creator” to succeed with art. If you’re a musician, you can’t go on selling drawings on OpenSea — you sell music. But what if you’re an influencer? Does that qualify as art? So you’re not painting, designing, making music, but you have people following you.
So what kind of content do you need to create? Answer — none. It’s all there already. And it’s even better than the contemporary digital art pieces in the oversaturated market we see today!
Over the last couple of years, as an influencer, you have already built your art inventory. It’s your Instagram profile. Every photo was carefully taken (even upwards of ten times to get the best one), filter applied, every post curated, every hashtag mindfully added.
On the other side, your fanbase validates your work. Two thousand likes mean it’s ok. Ten thousand likes mean it’s incredible! They are the ones who put clear metrics on all the content you’ve already put out there. And guess what’s happening with that super-hyped post from 2018 right now? Nothing. It’s just there. It had its 15 minutes of fame and has since faded away into obscurity.
We’re all artists in some form and, looking at Instagram, most of us have been extremely busy artists over the last ten years. Instead of doing the next art piece with a famous digital artist and sell that as an NFT, why not just mint one of your moments into an NFT?
This idea captivated me, but I didn’t see how it could happen — until I did.
Jack Dorsey’s first tweet sold for $2.5M. The emotional rollercoaster I experienced with that news was insane. Tokenizing tweets was so close to what I was thinking about building. I was happy to see I was right but was furious to miss out on some of the action. I had been convinced NFTs wouldn’t take off. But they did. People I shilled NFTs to last year, even people I couldn’t persuade to get in, were now ahead.
It was a clear sign that I needed to revive this. I put together a small team and started working on an MVP. I showed it to a handful of people, and I remember one of my close friends (now also an advisor) saying: “You do realize the only way to make this fly is to build a creator economy around this? That’s the future!”
Next chapter
Building a token-based product after being a part of an ICO that didn’t end up as everyone expected is beyond hard. Things go awry for a plethora of reasons and I’m most grateful to have stayed in touch with the key people from the early days that still trust and support me.
This is what I do and will keep on doing. Take what’s out there and build the best team and product possible.
For me personally, the only difference this time around is that there is no more romance, and the reality check is over.
Clout.art is just the beginning of what creator-driven social networks will look like in the future.
Learn more about Clout.art and the team on our website.
Got questions? We’re happy to answer.
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About Clout.art
Clout.art powers the creator economy of the future by turning the most valuable content, such as your most successful Instagram posts, into unique NFTs. As a microservice, a marketplace, and a staking platform, Clout.art is where creators and fans come together to create, grow or exchange social capital through the $SWAY token.
