Mr. Block Community Update — Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going
The purpose of this article is to update on the plans for Mr. Block, share some insights into our journey thus far and how we’ve handled building out this venture. Mr. Block has always aspired to transparency and collaboration with the community and after a few weeks to regroup after a long first half of the year, you can read more to understand the history of the venture, key learnings and our plans going forward.
Mr. Block was officially founded in February of 2021 but had been in the ideation phase for almost a year before that, along with the ecommerce storefront being operational years prior. Having spent countless hours sharing our passion and knowledge for crypto with friends, family and clients, we conceived a way to help educate and onboard members to the crypto ecosystem at scale. This came in the form of a dashboard and user content application that was under development for about 9 months.
Our aim and mission has always been to build an educational onramp that onboards new user participation within the crypto community. We felt that the tools in place today were not sufficient for newcomers and enthusiasts to stay up to date on all things crypto. We built the Mr. Block brand as one that would be friendly and approachable, along with a suite of products and services consisting of NFTs, media, and aspirations to deliver a consumer-based application for the community, geared towards quality content, education, career and investment opportunities.
Our App
As non-technical founders, we recruited developers and technical leadership to build this product with us. This proved much more challenging than expected, having worked with 3 separate teams in an attempt to build and ship our knowledge hub App. We had also contributed and raised money from investors to build this educational platform which proved even more costly and time consuming due to the nature of the backend infrastructure, coding languages, and many complications to the app and cross-functional work.
We learned A LOT about the data providers in the space, the importance of integrating technical leadership directly to the team, project managing effectively to reduce burn rate, and more.
In December of 2021 we made the decision to stop incremental investment in our ecommerce business line, focus entirely on the application build and implement an NFT strategy as part of our business to jump start our community growth and raise funds that could be repurposed for community value and development of our app. It is an obvious risk to diversify focus as a startup but we made the decision intentionally with the belief in the potential for strong upside benefit.
We were. and still remain, most excited about some of the utility-based use cases that our NFT can be leveraged for like authenticating to our core application through your web3 wallet as an NFT holder (NFTs-as-Software). Delivering on concepts like these would really make an impact on maturing the library of use cases for NFTs in the industry.
NFT Sale
The target date for NFT sale was March of 2022 which provided an extremely short runway from January. We ran every play in the book to try and be successful in a short period of time without compromising our ethics or integrity. It became obvious the market was not friendly to conducting an NFT sale at that time and we had not given ourselves enough time to grow our community and create brand awareness. We decided to push the NFT sale out to June of 2022, which required significantly more funding and effort, including further staffing our team.
Leading into the Blocks NFT mint that took place on June 24th, 2022, the team at Mr. Block had been working diligently for months on product, community, and educational development through the Mr. Block brand channels. We are proud to have grown our social following by 500% and our community membership by over 90x in less than 4 months! Authenticity over celebrity!
During the mint itself, we experienced some issues claiming our collection on OpenSea which was damaging to our mint participation. We also had many reports of community members trying to mint, but failing. This did not coincide with the transaction records we saw on our smart contract and was likely due to known bugs or workflow errors that we documented in our community library.
Issues like this caused confusion to newcomers and our existing community and we apologize for this as this could have been better handled. But as Blocks do, we admit when we make mistakes and kept pushing .
Ultimately, only a couple hundred Blocks were minted during our first weekend, which was well below our worst-case forecast. We anticipated a mint rate consistent with others in the industry, but ended up with one that resembled a web2 marketing conversion rate — this was probably more realistic anyway, but hindsight is 20/20.
We spent the weekend of the 24th analyzing the results. This was an extremely difficult time emotionally, to have not met the expectations we set for ourselves having worked so hard for months yet also feel like we let down our community members. It was really encourage to have a handful of very supportive community members encourage us through this time and for that we are eternally grateful. This introspection did lead to a few realizations and learnings we hope can be passed on to others with similar aspirations:
- Technical issues during mint could have been better mitigated through increased diligence and preparation. This is on us and we own that responsibility/outcome
- We offered the mint through our own mint site, a select number of marketplaces and only with metamask wallet, but these options could have been expanded to increase our potential community size. Even so, the market remains quite challenging
- The indicators of success we relied on were activity indicators (e.g. community participation was strong), not conversion indicators and this mislead our prediction of success and drove an inflated level of confidence in the amount of tokens we would sell
- Under the pressure of a deadline and extremely limited resources, our entire team experienced burnout and we made many mistakes in how the project was promoted. We realized how important it was to self promote actively across similar-minded communities and fully realize the only way for quality community building is through organic, long-term growth. We are proud of what we achieved in a short time.
- More than anything, timing is the most important factor (and the least controllable one). The second-worst time to conduct our mint would have been March (when originally planned) and the worst time would have been June (when we actually minted). sad lol.
Building a startup venture is extremely hard. We faced many challenges that we thought would be better suited to share with our community to take as a learning experience for other Blocks. We remain convicted about the blockchain industry, bullish long-term and passionate about helping others discover their own opportunities in the space.
Going Forward
Considering where this puts us from a funding and resource perspective we have the following plans for our community:
- A complete re-inventorization of our ecommerce product line
Inspired and designed by our NFT artist, Blockheady, this includes an improved workflow/ordering experience along with fresh new apparel and merchandise that appeals to a broader audience for our storefront www.mrblockshop.com - Revamped content & education
You can expect to see a frequent stream of quality content across our social channels as we continue to be a go-to resource for community members to stay up to date on industry intel, breaking news and other longer form content. - Updated NFT utility and discord engagement
Our NFT mint will remain open for the foreseeable future until ⅓ of the collection (1,111 tokens) is sold, at which point the mint will be closed after an additional period of ~2 weeks. This will allow us to institute the L2E (learn-to-earn) initiatives that have been shared amongst our community.
Additionally, we’re working through technical workflows for how the existing NFTs can be used for value against our ecommerce business line and content/education initiatives. This will include a more interactive relationship with our community members in discord that will give our neighbors a chance to collaborate on art, design, content, research and more.
As we seek to gain profitability across our original business model, we can then look to increase investment in these areas to further improve the experience of our community and the Mr. Block neighborhood. A big THANK YOU to our community members, investors, friends and family for all your support thus far and we look forward to seeing you around the neighborhood!
