NFT Marketing on FIRE with Arvin Khamseh: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought over 400 NFT brands. Some of the most notable sold out projects include San Vegas Casino Club, Women of Crypto, and Fragos. In today's foundation, we're talking about a lot of things, but mostly about how people don't think about the offers they have in their utilities. Think about how everything you do and everything you offer impacts your project as a whole and owe so much more. And a big thing for sponsoring today's episode goes to Arvin and our sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies, build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software, say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today.

1:07Arvin, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with? I think a lot of times people think that, you know, this idea of like fake it till you make it is like a really good thing to do. And in the NFT community, I see it as, you know, something that people truly believe in, you know, they, they don't have any followers, for example, on Twitter or discord or different places, they buy in a bunch of things. And then they're like, well, the rest of the people are going to just see it as success and then they're going to join me um and i truly believe that's not the way to do things it's the concept of like just being transparent um is uh way better way more effective uh to make your way all the way to success whatever that means um for whatever projects or even outside the nft world um that i would say it's probably the biggest thing that i I think a lot of people would disagree with me on that.

2:13Well, you heard those three letters, NFT, non-fungible tokens. So Fire Nation, we are talking today about NFT marketing on fire. So just give like your 30 second definition, whatever you've acquired thus far, Arvin, of what an NFT is, and then let's get down to business. Sounds great. So NFT, it could be a moment of time. It could be artwork. It could be audio. It could be an image. and essentially it's a it's actually registered in the blockchain of things as a piece of property and you can own it and you can trade it you can sell it and it can you can benefit from you know the value of it going up or down well you won't benefit from going down but you can you can benefit benefit from value with it going up.

3:07And it has a lot of use cases too. So I think initially, what people think of NFTs is really just expensive JPEGs, but you know, it has benefits like storing information with like high security, for example, for like athletes or like authors being able to have like hidden chapters of their book just through NFT and many, many other use cases. Awesome. And to be honest with you, if you believe in the project, you actually can benefit when it goes down is called dollar cost averaging. You just buy more of something that you believe in at a cheaper price. I do it all the time. So let's talk about specific strategies to grow discord, to grow Twitter communities.

3:48Those seem to be really the two places that NFT communities have just globbed onto, you know, all of the kind of community conversations happening on discord, all the public communications happening on Twitter. So what are the strategies if people want to grow their Discord, grow their Twitter communities that's going to help sell out their NFT project? Yeah, so I just want to give context to your audience. Even up until, I would say, beginning of this year, I would tell people, say, hey, go build your Discord three to five times the number of your collection size. So let's say if it's a 10 ,000 collection size, you would want to have a minimum of 30 to 50 ,000 people in your Discord.

4:29You would want to have at least 5 ,000 people on your Twitter and about half of that as whitelisters as well. And for people who don't know what whitelisters are, essentially, it's a function of, again, blockchain where your wallet, your crypto wallet is registered on this smart contract of the NFT project. So you're able to, you're essentially pre-approved to buy NFTs at an earlier date, typically, than other people. Now, those numbers have changed, though. So we no longer actually focus on, weirdly enough, we no longer focus on building a Discord to a large number. We're actually making it smaller and smaller.

5:11And we are focused on building closed Discords. So only letting highly, highly qualified people into the Discord. Reason for that is NFTs came out maybe in 2015-ish. Last year, about, I want to say, November or December of 2021, the search inquiries for NFTs actually surpassed cryptos. And now, when we're talking right now, there are about, I want to say, 500 NFT projects coming out every day. So if you think about all those people who are joining your Discord, they're also joining about 20, 30 other Discord servers as well. So we no longer want to focus on just taking people to Discord. But the so what we do instead is we have a we create a landing page where we have requirements on it.

6:06We say, hey, like you've got to follow us on Twitter. You've got to join our Discord and you've got to connect your wallet. So essentially we know that you're you're serious to actually buy the NFT at a later date. then once they've even done that then um we ask them to just tweet and say hey they've done that um they joined essentially our interest list and then once they've done that even past that we give them even more qualification um to say hey like do a bunch of other things maybe invite friends so on and so forth or engage on in our discord community then you become part of our whitelist community now so the focus used to be you know building twitter and discord to eventually get people to become your whitelisters now we just go straight to that we're just building a whitelist whitelist community and you know so you know large large um whitelist community as well but uh anyone who is in your discord and following your twitter is practically all those people who are very serious about your project now um that creates a lot of fomo it creates a lot of hype but it's also like it gives certainty to the founders of nft projects that they know they can going to a mint date knowing that they're actually going to sell out.

7:19And so as far as now how we bring the traffic, so I, this is also somewhat controversial. I like to do paid advertising because that's where my background is. You know, I was running ads for public companies, as for like investor relationship marketing, running, you know, managing 500k plus every month so that's where my background is that's where i have a lot of knowledge and experience in i brought it to the nft community as well um i understand there's some people who um you know they think that running paid ads maybe you know it's involved like it's like a red flag for the nft community um and i do wanna i do wanna mention that paid ads came way before nfts even were uh you know, they came to the world.

8:13Like the first advertising was literally like in ancient Egypt in 3000 BC. Someone was looking for, they wrote it on this, like they carved this ad where it was like looking for, someone was looking for their slave actually, like obviously years ago. And then in the ad, they said, if you find this person, and they described the person as well, So I said, if you define this person, I give you half a coin, half a gold coin. If you actually bring it to my shop, which is the best shop in town for best woven clothes, then I will give you an entire gold coin. And so he literally just advertised his like what we would call shield his his his actually clothing brand inside that ad that he was looking for for someone.

9:05And so ads actually, they have a huge history. We've been doing it. Any song that you think about, any brands that you just wear, if you go outside, you wear a specific brand. If you look at in the nature, the elk with their antlers, the flowers with the different colors, everything is to attract something and to advertise a specific attributes or quality. So I just wanted to give that context because there's a lot of people who think that way. And so what we do, we just run Twitter ads to that specific landing page I mentioned earlier. And then it's going to be highly qualified people because most people on Twitter are actually somewhat familiar with NFTs.

9:52And the most savvy NFT community is actually on Twitter versus any other social media platforms. So that's how we grow the community specifically. And we pay somewhere around$0.5 to about$3 to get someone go through this entire funnel, do all those steps. And so at the beginning, you pay closer to$3. As it grows and it becomes really hypey, you pay obviously less. So you pay closer to$0.5 for the additional people to come in and become part of your whitelist series, join your Discord, and follow your Twitter at the same time. So growing your Discord, growing your Twitter communities, Fire Nation, you just heard some value bombs.

10:33I want to talk next about the best practices to actually promote your NFT project when it comes down to it. Because, you know, I'll be honest with you, we read a lot of headlines in the world today, and we see that a lot of NFT brands are making a million dollars plus in a single day. So what are they doing right promoting their NFT projects to hit these home runs? Talk about those things. Yeah. So there are a bunch of elements that goes into it. So the art has to be great, obviously. So every NFT who is just, let's say, a mediocre art that they got it from, maybe computer randomized from and someone who like maybe on Fiverr who did it and maybe they didn't really pay attention to the details or maybe it was just not something that they really focused on.

11:23um now nowadays it's very important like maybe even last year you could get away with if your artwork was just okay but now it's very important the next element is the utility so that's also very important and it's increasingly becoming more important to actually have a a legit utility so i give you a bunch of bunch of examples so for example san vegas casino club their utility was you know we're going to give away 50 of the profit of the virtual casino to the holders of the nft wall street fam they have a product that allows people who are new to the nft world to find underpriced nfts of any collection in seconds right so by holding that nft you're going to have a specific benefit and that's very important last year you could get away with just having an fd cool maybe cool artwork and maybe a bunch of people following it and that was enough but this year is not and i've actually seen lots of projects this year who had great artwork um but no utility and also like great team they even had hype but um they hit all their numbers but then they didn't have any utilities and they weren't very successful so the elements that required for a successful NFT sellout is art has to be great.

12:47Utility has to be great. You've got to hit your numbers. So on your whitelisters community, for example, you want to have either same number as your collection size or even more. And then later on, you've got to like qualify them down. And then you've got to have hype as well. So if you have all the elements, but there's no hype around your project, this is really weird, But it's not like any other form of advertising. You only have four to six weeks to actually sell out a project. And so if the speed is missing, then you will experience that on the mint day as well. So if, for example, you see people joining your project, maybe 1 ,000 a day or 2 ,000 or more a day, you will experience the same speed on the mint day as well.

13:34So you see that people are minting fairly quickly. if you're getting if it's just like trickling down you're getting like two three members joining your project every day on the mint day you're going to experience the same speed as well as people minting fire nation i hope you're taking notes if you have any interest in the media space in the nft media marketing space because i'll tell you whether you're going to be doing your own project or buying into a project you want to make sure that hey if you're going to be doing your own project you're following these steps and these strategies but hey if you're just interested in buying a project, you want them to be following these strategies.

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17:44High level, join the revolution. So Arvind, we're back and you have experience in media buying. I mean, you've done up to$500 ,000 a month at times for public companies. So how do you incorporate that experience, that knowledge into NFT marketing? Cool. Yeah, just so people have context. So back in October 2021, there was an artist from Italy. He approached me. He said, you know, you have all this experience with public companies doing their investor relationship marketing, looking for short term and long term investors online. Can you sell out my NFTs? At that point, I was like, you know, we can obviously give it a go.

18:24So we use Twitter ads and we sold out his very, very small NFT collection in a week. and to me that was the beginning of understanding okay there's obviously a proof of concept where you can run paid ads and just get people interested in a specific NFT project but I think the the major I guess components of advertising when it comes to to NFT is just okay so understanding who you're targeting so let's say if if for example one brand is Wall Street Fam they're really focused on people who like busy, busy moms and busy dads who want to get into the Web3 of things. So for them, is a lot of the people who are getting interested in the project is all about people who don't know a ton about NFT.

19:14So they're more like newbies versus, let's say, a project that's just very heavily involved with DAOs and let's say staking, so on and so forth. maybe they're more qualified or more, I guess, NFT savvy people that are joining that project. So knowing who you're targeting is obviously very important. And then just figuring out where they're at. And with NFT communities at this point, Twitter is where most of them are at. So if you're doing Twitter spaces, if you're doing influencer marketing, where you actually want to find people is also going to be on Twitter. And then once you have something to show them and you have your messaging correctly, you know who you're targeting, then you target them and then you show them something that's of value to them.

20:06You ask them to make a small commitment that could be just joining your white list without buying anything. And then you give them value in your Discord. You show them more ads. You give them, you invite them to your Twitter spaces. You do collabs with other projects. You give them a lot of benefits of like, you know, being part of your Discord community. They get really interested in your project. And eventually you make that ask. You say, hey, so Mente is coming up in five days. And we want you to obviously mint out this entire collection. And they do. And so if you do all those steps, eventually they will do that.

20:45Fire Nation, listen to people with experience who have been there, who have done that, even if it's in different industries, because there's so much overlap. There's so much to be taken from all the different areas, the outside of the box thinking that comes along with that. And as promised before the break, we're going to talk now about the four things that we need to avoid in the NFT marketing space. Arvin, take us home. Yeah, so the first thing is we talked about at the very beginning is that you don't want to buy followers on Twitter, on Discord or on Instagram at all, like not even one person.

21:21And the reason behind that is that when you run ads or if an influencer looks at your channels or handles, they'll see that you have all these fake followers. And even investors look at your channels. Now they're becoming more educated. So they use software like SocialBlades and so on and so forth. And they're able to see how many fake followers or how many inactive followers you have. or just practically just looking at your engagements to see, okay, so you have like 50 ,000 followers on Twitter, but every time you tweet, you get like two likes. So they're going to find out that, hey, these are not real.

21:58And it just breaks the trust that's, by the way, right now at the current state of the NFT community, it's not already there. So you don't want to just make it worse. People are very skeptic. So you want to make sure you don't do any buying of followers. It will make your ads become more expensive. it looks bad it also breaks the trust and it's also just not something you need to do like you can just with there are ways to build your Twitter and Discord just like I shared earlier on you know just have a landing page run ads to it have like influencers maybe talking about your project and you can build it fairly quickly you really do not need to buy so that's that's one thing second thing is I found that people don't really think about the offers that they have in their utilities So, for example, there was this game where we talked about, you know, they're going to if you play their play to earn game and, you know, just have their NFT, then eventually you can just get a certain amount of points.

22:59Now, the mistake they had was that was unlimited. So you could make as many points as you could. And eventually you could actually own the entire game. um and then so that happened and many people ended up just owning the same same thing as everyone else and it was a complete mess so the point being you want to also think about like what you're offering in long terms because a lot of people just thinking hey if i just say something really cool and everyone gets excited to buy my project that's all good then later on we'll figure it out but then um you know it's good to just think a little bit ahead of time um just say okay OK, so now maybe we get a thousand people joining this project.

23:41But what if we get like one million people joining this project? What would that look like? Is this going to be sustainable? Is this project actually going to work out the way we propose it to work out? So that's the second thing. And then and that goes with even like giving royalties or other percentages, things like that. Like I've seen people sometimes give royalties and then people who are NFT holders, they get encouraged to actually sell NFTs or have other people sell NFTs. And their full price goes down. So you really think about like how everything that you do and everything you offer, how that's actually impacting your project as a whole.

24:15So that was the second thing. Third thing is, so as far as security, so almost, I would say the last six or seven projects that I worked with, they all got hacked. And I mean, Axie Infinity, I didn't work with Axie Infinity, but they got hacked for about 600 million. I want to say last week or the week before. Now, there are a lot of hackers out there in the community, in the NFT community. And so what people don't want to do is just have a very loose process for giving access on their Discord to every month. And if they don't have a company that's going to audit all their processes, especially the minting processes.

25:00And like I give you one example. there was one project recently that got hacked for 600k they lost um and what they did was they had all the the money um that was generated from the minting um on a hot wallet meaning on a meta mask and it didn't need any like multi uh signature uh to uh withdraw money from and so this hacker just came in and just stole essentially everyone's money. And so you just, so you either want to have like a really good security team that's just auditing your processes, or you, you know, you can just search around and, you know, if that's not maybe within your budget or whatever, you can just search around and find these checklists of things to do to stay protected.

25:47And then lastly, it goes, same technical issue with projects, websites actually failing. So this happens way more regularly than it should, where on the day where people do their private sale, their website crashes. Almost all projects I've worked with also happened. And there are ways to actually fix it. There are ways to prevent it. So the problem with that is not just a technical issue that you fix. The problem with that, a lot of newbies in the community, when something like that happens, first of all, they think you don't know what you're doing. But also, if, let's say, on a private sale, people trying to, let's say, mint your NFT, but they can't, not everyone is going to know that you're having an issue.

26:36That's why people are not minting. So they may be on their impression that no one wants to mint. And then that kind of becomes this spiral, like downward spiral where people just stop minting. And I've seen that many, many times as well. And so preparation on the website is just, you know, your website being perfect and fully functional, where like if you get enough hits on it, it won't crash. It's very important, not just because like, you know, it's just like a technical issue that you solve, but because it just leaves an impression for people that people are not, leaves an impression for your investors that people are not minting.

27:15And if that happens, they're not going to come and check to see why they're not minting. They just think like your project is not good. And so those are some of the things that I've seen that happens to projects. And it's just it's just very easy to and very simple to actually prevent. And so if they just do those and also obviously hit their numbers to have great, great art, great community. They have, you know, great utility that goes with their project. They should be able to sell out. Fire Nation, I love that we talked about the strategies, the tips, the tactics, but also things to avoid, things to look out for.

27:56And again, this is for both creators and someone that's going to get into these type of projects as an investor, as somebody that wants to just join the community for multiple reasons. Arvind, you dropped a lot of value bombs. What's the one single big takeaway you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from everything we talked about today? Okay, so just being really clear on the current state of the market. So just know that there are 500 projects coming out every day. That means the influencer that you're reaching out to, they probably get hundreds, if not thousands of messages. um and and so that means it's just a little bit harder to get influencers to do paid uh paid influencer marketing or even you know if you're going to give them nfts or wireless or whatever but it's just you got to account for those things and just understand what the current market is like also the current market is very skeptic it's not like 2021 they don't want to buy whatever they want to make sure uh that they're going to get an all right out of what they're buying so utilities is very important and then lastly with your marketing just again if you think about so many projects out there and everyone's joining everyone's discord now you gotta have a way to stand out and having a closed discord and just marketing it by qualifying people before they get into your discord that's the way that we found that has been working right now at this point maybe if you ask me in a month that may even be different but at this point these are the the strategies that are working.

29:26And so if people just use those and just be really clear on what the current state of the market is, they have a way better time and way better success in minting out their collection. Arvin, if Fire Nation wants to learn more about you, what you have going on, connect with you, give us a call to action how to find out more. Perfect. So if they want to read any case studies of projects that I was involved with in their marketing and they sold out they can go on sold out to nfts.io so that's s-o-l-d-n-f-t-s.io and then on all socials arvinknft so that's spelled as a-r-v-i-n-k-n-f-t you can find me on all socials and on twitter i'm most responsive so if anyone wants to dm me ask me questions or if they want to just that could get a roadmap of how to do marketing.

30:22I also have like a one-sheet roadmap that I can give them if they just DM me, say they came from, you know, Johnny Dumas' podcast. Yes, get that roadmap, Fire Nation. All it's going to take is a quick DM because Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with AK and JLD today, so keep up that heat. Head over to eofire.com, type Arvin in the search bar. The show notes page will pop up with everything we've talked about here today. I want to say one more call to action, Fire Nation. SoldOutNFTs.io. Want to repeat that for Arvin there.

30:58SoldOutNFTs.io to learn more. Arvin, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Arvin. In Fire Nation, successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals. That's why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days, step by step. Visit thefreedomjournal.com and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies?