In the third post in his series of posts about NFT marketing, our MD and Co-founder Darryl Sparey talks about the numbers that make a successful NFT project, and how he’s trying to achieve them. And how sometimes, numbers aren’t as “hard” or definite as they might seem.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate”. The last words of Rutger Hauer’s replicant Roy Batty in the seminal sci-fi film Blade Runner. It has been praised as perhaps the most moving death soliloquy in modern cinema. It poetically conveys all the complex themes of the film – what does it mean to live and to experience life? What are we, if not the sum of our experiences, sediments of moments in time that make the foundations of who we are, but are so fragile that they can all just be washed away, like tears in the rain? Well, I’ve seen a few things in my time too, from the birth of my two beautiful children to Bournemouth playing in the Premier League, but few sights in life give me as much pleasure as changing a field in a multi-page, linked model spreadsheet, and seeing, through formula, all the other numbers change in the document. Eat your cyborg heart out, Roy Batty.
As with the most important things in life, like a business plan, a wedding list, a monthly budget or the cataloguing of your comic book collection, the humble spreadsheet is the go-to Swiss Army knife of applications. It enables you to commit a plan to digital paper, but, through formula, create a model which can be flexed based on changing numbers.
It’s not by coincidence that an economist, people who regularly deal with the messy business of forecasting future numbers, is widely attributed to have said “when the facts change, I change my mind”. Any forward forecast needs to be able to have data points which can be tested and then updated as the rubber of sales, marketing and communications activity hits the road of the prospective customer base. Or, perhaps even more aptly, as the poet Mike Tyson once famously said of the planning of pugilistic endeavour: “Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth”.
And there are numbers literally everywhere you look in marketing an NFT project. We have the headline target of needing to sell 10,000 generative pieces of art. To do this, we’re aiming to create a 5,000-strong pre-sale list of supporters of the project who get lower Ethereum network transaction costs (often called “gas fees”). To achieve that number, we’re hoping to get 10,000 followers of our Twitter account for the project, which we’re hoping to convert into 1,000s of engaged community members on our Discord server. And we’re hoping to do this in 40-ish days. Those are some hard numbers indeed!
This sounds like a challenge. But let me give you some “inside baseball” on how these numbers are calculated. The target sale price of each of the 10,000 pieces was calculated on the price of Ethereum (ETH) in December 2021. It has been +\- 51% in value since the planning for this project started. Therefore, the final sale price of each NFT may be anywhere between 0.01 and 0.1 ETH each. The usual rules of digital marketing apply, whereby all conversion rates essentially end up boiling down to about 2%. If that held true of our pre-sale list, wouldn’t we need 100,000 engaged users to sign-up to potentially buy our digital wares? What conversion rate should you apply to a project like this? And what is the maximum number of NFTs you should allow one person to buy? Too many, and you’ll end up with ownership concentrated in the hands of a few people, and a resulting lack of liquidity in the after-market. But cap the number too low, and maybe it will take much longer than anticipated to sell the full range, and therefore incur greater marketing costs.
I’m sharing all these numbers with you to illustrate a point. As a business we believe in hard numbers (the clue’s in our name). But, with all these different input numbers, the end results can vary wildly based on how far you flex them, and in what direction. Accurately predicting marketing budget and PR resource allocation is clearly a real challenge. What DO we need to be successful, and are we making the right assumptions? Time will tell…
What I do know, as I write this right now, is that I’ve seen things. I’ve experienced challenges (and not just ones related to marketing and communications) that many wouldn’t believe, and I’ve come through all that OK. I may not have seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, but I’ve experienced my fair share of fires that needed putting out from a communications perspective. And, in the fullness of time, the minor day-to-day strains of managing a project like this will be washed away, like tears in the rain.
If you want to follow my journey into learning more about NFTs and how to market them, I’ll be posting about this regularly to this blog, and I’m tweeting about it using my (not evil) alter ego Darkly Spray. Maybe you could check out the Pandimensionals site too. And maybe even do me a solid and buy a couple of NFTs?!
