NFT launches are hard.
(but they shouldn’t be!)
NFT launches are hard. You need the perfect combination of marketing, hype, technology, and patience. No matter how smart you are, no matter how good you are, a fair bit of that is always luck.
We’ve already worked with some of the best in the NFT industry, like The Hundreds. We’ve launched our own projects (Gachapon), and we’ve got stuff on deck that’s gonna blow minds (WVRPS by WarpSound). We feel confident saying that we’re pretty good at this stuff so far. We’ve learned a lot about community, tech, and people and we’re still learning more every day.
Here’s a look at a recent project and some of the problems that arose, and how we solved those problems quickly.
Something that is hard, but shouldn’t be, are pre-sale or VIP lists. Pre-sale lists can help prevent gas wars but they add a lot of complexity to the project, from both a code standpoint and from an “explaining how this is gonna work to your customers” standpoint. Our first pre-sale list deployment was for a client called Rare Ghost Club. We weren’t 100% prepared for the code complexity, but we made it work and we learned a lot. The great thing about being early to a space is that there is a TON to be learned, and we’re all figuring this out together. So we wanted to share some lessons in the hope that our stumbles and solutions can help another team with a smooth launch.
That is what we learned:
Custom signature
Our first iteration of the pre-sale list was to generate a custom signature for each person who needed to be approved. This is a very clever solution, we thought. What we didn’t have was a clever solution for how to contact all those people and give them those custom signatures. Next option!
Allowlist in contract
The next iteration was using an allowlist built into the contract. This would work great and give us a minimal chance for error, but is a very inefficient use of Ethereum since it would cost around 10 ETH to add the addresses to the allowlist. This felt irresponsible and inefficient.
No one ever actually says “EUREKA”
The “eureka” moment happened when one of our very smart devs woke up in the middle of the night and figured out how to use the signature method (very easy to generate, hard to deliver) in a way that didn’t require the customer to deliver the signature themselves (suddenly, not so hard to deliver). It was the ultimate combination of the security and efficiency of the signature method and the ease of the allowlist method.
Did it mean that we had to rewrite the smart contract and create something completely custom for this project? Yes.
Is it amazing? Yes.
Is it perfect? Sadly, no. Because just when you think you’ve solved a problem, add people and see what happens.
Problem 1 — People are made of people
We now had to deal with the people who didn’t submit correct addresses and were trying to purchase but finding that their wallet wasn’t approved. For this we quickly set up a Google Form so that anyone who was having an issue could contact us and we could get them sorted out. The Google Form submissions definitely laid bare some of the problems with the original pre-sale list. Was our code great? Sure it was. But if you ever want to break some really good code, add people.
Some people submitted truncated addresses, some submitted BTC addresses, some just weren’t really sure what they were submitting and grabbed the first string of numbers they could find in their brand new crypto wallet. One kind soul was really lost and put his street address into the form. Still think we should have sent him flowers, but practical jokes were low priority at that moment.
This required just throwing our team at it, and we cranked through and set everyone straight as quickly as we could. This is where good customer service comes into play, and we’re not at all too humble to say that we kicked ass here and feel great about how our team took care of panicky, confused, new-to-NFT buyers during a highly anticipated drop.
Problem 2 — Everyone is new here
The next issue we faced was a significant subset of this community that just didn’t understand how a pre-sale list worked, or how they were supposed to get on it. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we still had dozens of people asking how to get pre-sale approved when there was only an hour left in the pre-sale. With such a massive swell of support from a fanbase that was completely new to buying NFTs, there was a lot of education happening quickly, and again our team did a great job educating and helping as many people as quickly as possible.
As more and more meatspace brands enter the metaverse, education and on-boarding should become an absolute priority. We watched an absolutely inspiring amount of this when we worked with The Hundreds on their Adam Bomb Squad launch. They spent weeks hosting live chat sessions in their Discord server and talking about how everything works, how to set up your wallet, what kind of scams to look out for, how to be safe and how to just generally have a smooth and trouble-free experience.
Moving forward with pre-sale lists….maybe.
While we definitely figured out how to properly handle a pre-sale list for any projects that really want one, our biggest takeaway from hours and hours of thinking about this is that pre-sale lists are not always the solution to your problem. There are a lot of hurdles to navigate with any NFT drop these days…gas prices, larger projects dropping, the ever escalating value of ETH, building your community, coming up with an idea that hasn’t already been pounded to death. There are so many other things that require your attention, really ask yourself: Do I actually need to push people here ahead of other people, or do I just need to push people here period?
Maybe a pre-sale list really is the solution for your project. Just make sure that it’s what you need instead of just what you saw someone else doing.
Onboarding!
We’ll also be prepping a checklist for clients to help them navigate the on-boarding process with their community. WAGMI only works if everyone knows how to make it! Onboarding to crypto and NFTs can be really difficult and confusing, and the space is currently rife with scammers taking advantage of all these new people. Protect your community with a robust onboarding plan, and never assume that your community knows everything they need. Better to over-communicate than to leave anyone out in the cold.
Prepare to fail
No matter how clever we are, we always assume that the next thing we do could very easily break and fail completely. We do our best to set expectations with our clients and our community that hey, this might go sideways but we’ll be right there to fix it. We stumbled a few times with Rare Ghost Club but in all instances we turned around solutions super fast, and we’re proud of our team for being on top of it. How you fail is never as important as how you fix, and we fix fast.
Can’t wait to show you our next project, or help you with yours. Hit us up if you have something interesting that we can help with!
