merlox
Registered Member
- Feb 9, 2016
- 62
- 64
This is my personal journey towards creating a profitable crypto company without doing any of the grunt work such as: coding, marketing, designing, managing the communities, etc.
Background
The reason I'm forcing myself to delegate all the "working" tasks of the business is because I'm the type of person that doesn't trust others and wants to do everything by myself. I've had success in the past from 2 projects. One was profitable (more than 300k dollars), the other was not (ended up losing -30k dollars).
However in both cases I was doing 99% of the work. From coding, to writing the press releases, to managing the community, social medias and even doing the designs. That's no way to do business. Part of the reason, besides money management that my first business is on hold until a solution to the money problem is found.
As a CEO my job is to delegate all the tasks. Could you imagine Jeff Bezos coding the AWS platform by himself? Or him writing articles for SEO purposes to rank his business? His time is far more valuable than that. He gets people to do the grunt work. He focuses on strategy and planning that must be executed by others.
This is gonna be an NFT collection since I'm quite familiar with it and have experience launching these types of projects. The goal is to have a profitable launch, making more money than the amount spent on it. I made the mistake twice of wanting to hit it big and get 10 million from the project, that made me lose a bunch of money since my expectations were too high. Now my only goal is to be profitable. If I make 1k USD more than the amount I spent into launching the project I will consider it a success.
Restrictions
- All the work must be outsourced. Paid when it makes sense, unpaid when a partnership or internship works.
- Spend up to 5k USD in total.
- Focus on strategy, test ideas, growth methods and explore what works for other NFT projects.
- No paid ads, or paid influencer posts. Unless the influencer has an real, loyal and engaged community and requires less than 500 dollars for a promotion. I wasted way too much money on fake influncers that fake stats and have no engagement.
- Launch the NFT collection by the end of this month (April)
- Fast hire and fire processes to filter out people that are inneficient or incapable of doing the right work.
Detailed explanation
I have a starting budget of 5k dollars that I'll use when required. However my idea is to hire interns, whether paid or unpaid, to do mosts of the tasks.
The main focus is gonna be towards community building since that's the number 1 aspect where I'm not good. And the first person I'm gonna hire is gonna be a recruiter to get as many workers as required. Since the pay won't be high for them, I expect to require a lot of people. Some will be discouraged by the low pay, others won't be as good as the job requires them to.
The marketing aspect will be the focus. Growth hacking to put ideas to the test since, in low-budget environments, it's all about being creative and going viral with organic posts and unique approaches unlike businesses that have big recurring budgets where they can constantly spend X amount of money every month to bring new customers from paid ads.
That's why the growth hackers or marketers will get a bonus for bringing real members to the community. Say at 100 active members, they get 100 dollars. Another reason why SEO is out the window. The results are too slow. It may be considered when the business is profitable.
Plus, by forcing myself to spend up to 5k USD I'm not required to succeed as big, I made that mistake in the past where I spent more than 50k USD in a business that didn't produce even half of that investment. It also forces me to be creative and harsh with where I put the money.
Launching an NFT collection is all about growing a dedicated community. A discord with 1000 active members can sell out an entire collection in minutes, I've seen it happen. Even if it doesn't sell out, it can be profitable. That's why it's very important to bring dedicated people.
All the return will be invested in yield farming to generate a passive 10% to 20% from the amount raised. That way the business has a constant income that keeps it alive. This only applies if it makes at least 100k dollars since otherwise it wouldn't be enough to sustain at least 1 worker. Why do this? Because most NFT and crypto projects (unlike what some people think) die because they lack a constant income stream.
They may get 1 million dollars but if that money is used to market the project and hire people it won't last long unless it is profitable in its first year. Staking it for passive income is a far more stable strategy long term. At least in theory.
The motto is to test a whole lot of strategies to reach out as many people as possible through partnerships, referrals, viral content and the likes. Workers will be incentivised to be independent and creative to find unique ways to think outside the box since my creativity only goes so far.
I'm thinking long term. If this initial NFT mint goes well and we have enough money to sustain the project, my goal is to keep building and growing by creating play-to-earn games, improving the designs, launching more collections like bored apes did with their many similar collections and keep it expanding as far as it can go. Axie and bored apes proved that NFT businesses can be extremely profitable.
Current progress
- I already spent 550 dollars designing the NFT collection, 100 more will be required to make some final touches.
- I partnered with a marketing manager that I've worked in the past for a 50% 50% split. We'll see how it goes. He has a lot of workers and ways to grow the community. He will only get his 50% split if he does a successful marketing strategy, if I find a way to grow the community myself I'll keep it all the profit.
- The website is ready, the discord is setup. All that's required is to grow the community, which is arguably the hardest and most expensive step.
Tasks
- Get a VA to hire people for me by posting on several platforms. Focusing on interns, do posts for unpaid, paid internships and co-founder positions. Different people want different types of jobs so I'm using the widest net possible to get the most people. You never know who's gonna be a genius. The VA will be paid from 3 to 5 dollars an hour or a fixed 400 to 500 a month salary.
- Prepare a list of growth hacking methods to put to the test. The 1 page marketing plan book was a game changer in understanding how to take full advantage of the people in the community and I want to put it into action.
- Setup a promotion plan for social media including tiktok, youtube, twitter and others. Tiktok has the highest virality factor. Accounts with no followers can get millions of views if they content hooks people up fast and get them to share the video.
- Setup giveaways. Some people fake giveaways where they end up rewarding an account they own, others are legit and reward many members. It's all about seeing what works.
- Setup partnerships by contacting other NFT projects and influencers.
Strategies
- When it comes to tiktok, I'll get someone to find the most viral NFT posts and re-create them for our NFT project. Repeat what already works.
- Get paid first, deliver later. The sooner we get the money the better. That's why there will be NFT pre-mints where people buy a ticket anytime to guarantee their mint for a lower price. They are token NFTs that can be replaced by the final NFT during the mint. Important to not show how many tickets have been sold until there's a good enough number for conversion purposes.
- Focus on referrals. Referrals are HUGE when it comes to community growth, people bringing other people is how grow goes parabolic. That's why there will be big rewards to incentivise people to invite others. I've seen it happen.
- Test different community platforms. Discord DMs are getting more and more expensive. Yes, discord has many NFT communities there, but DMs cost money and are getting harder to land. I want to test Slack since it's an untapped source of high net worth people.
- Improve discord token generation. If you aren't familiar with discord, sending automated DMs are done with a token which is an access key to send DMs. They are very valuable because they allow you to contact people and people pay good money for them. I wrote my own token generator but it's not finished yet, I'll find someone to improve it and reduce token costs.
That's it as the first update, stay tuned to see how it goes! I promise to update you until the end. I won't reveal the name of the project since that could affect the results and I'm not here to promote it. Let me know any strategies that you guys have tested!
Background
The reason I'm forcing myself to delegate all the "working" tasks of the business is because I'm the type of person that doesn't trust others and wants to do everything by myself. I've had success in the past from 2 projects. One was profitable (more than 300k dollars), the other was not (ended up losing -30k dollars).
However in both cases I was doing 99% of the work. From coding, to writing the press releases, to managing the community, social medias and even doing the designs. That's no way to do business. Part of the reason, besides money management that my first business is on hold until a solution to the money problem is found.
As a CEO my job is to delegate all the tasks. Could you imagine Jeff Bezos coding the AWS platform by himself? Or him writing articles for SEO purposes to rank his business? His time is far more valuable than that. He gets people to do the grunt work. He focuses on strategy and planning that must be executed by others.
This is gonna be an NFT collection since I'm quite familiar with it and have experience launching these types of projects. The goal is to have a profitable launch, making more money than the amount spent on it. I made the mistake twice of wanting to hit it big and get 10 million from the project, that made me lose a bunch of money since my expectations were too high. Now my only goal is to be profitable. If I make 1k USD more than the amount I spent into launching the project I will consider it a success.
Restrictions
- All the work must be outsourced. Paid when it makes sense, unpaid when a partnership or internship works.
- Spend up to 5k USD in total.
- Focus on strategy, test ideas, growth methods and explore what works for other NFT projects.
- No paid ads, or paid influencer posts. Unless the influencer has an real, loyal and engaged community and requires less than 500 dollars for a promotion. I wasted way too much money on fake influncers that fake stats and have no engagement.
- Launch the NFT collection by the end of this month (April)
- Fast hire and fire processes to filter out people that are inneficient or incapable of doing the right work.
Detailed explanation
I have a starting budget of 5k dollars that I'll use when required. However my idea is to hire interns, whether paid or unpaid, to do mosts of the tasks.
The main focus is gonna be towards community building since that's the number 1 aspect where I'm not good. And the first person I'm gonna hire is gonna be a recruiter to get as many workers as required. Since the pay won't be high for them, I expect to require a lot of people. Some will be discouraged by the low pay, others won't be as good as the job requires them to.
The marketing aspect will be the focus. Growth hacking to put ideas to the test since, in low-budget environments, it's all about being creative and going viral with organic posts and unique approaches unlike businesses that have big recurring budgets where they can constantly spend X amount of money every month to bring new customers from paid ads.
That's why the growth hackers or marketers will get a bonus for bringing real members to the community. Say at 100 active members, they get 100 dollars. Another reason why SEO is out the window. The results are too slow. It may be considered when the business is profitable.
Plus, by forcing myself to spend up to 5k USD I'm not required to succeed as big, I made that mistake in the past where I spent more than 50k USD in a business that didn't produce even half of that investment. It also forces me to be creative and harsh with where I put the money.
Launching an NFT collection is all about growing a dedicated community. A discord with 1000 active members can sell out an entire collection in minutes, I've seen it happen. Even if it doesn't sell out, it can be profitable. That's why it's very important to bring dedicated people.
All the return will be invested in yield farming to generate a passive 10% to 20% from the amount raised. That way the business has a constant income that keeps it alive. This only applies if it makes at least 100k dollars since otherwise it wouldn't be enough to sustain at least 1 worker. Why do this? Because most NFT and crypto projects (unlike what some people think) die because they lack a constant income stream.
They may get 1 million dollars but if that money is used to market the project and hire people it won't last long unless it is profitable in its first year. Staking it for passive income is a far more stable strategy long term. At least in theory.
The motto is to test a whole lot of strategies to reach out as many people as possible through partnerships, referrals, viral content and the likes. Workers will be incentivised to be independent and creative to find unique ways to think outside the box since my creativity only goes so far.
I'm thinking long term. If this initial NFT mint goes well and we have enough money to sustain the project, my goal is to keep building and growing by creating play-to-earn games, improving the designs, launching more collections like bored apes did with their many similar collections and keep it expanding as far as it can go. Axie and bored apes proved that NFT businesses can be extremely profitable.
Current progress
- I already spent 550 dollars designing the NFT collection, 100 more will be required to make some final touches.
- I partnered with a marketing manager that I've worked in the past for a 50% 50% split. We'll see how it goes. He has a lot of workers and ways to grow the community. He will only get his 50% split if he does a successful marketing strategy, if I find a way to grow the community myself I'll keep it all the profit.
- The website is ready, the discord is setup. All that's required is to grow the community, which is arguably the hardest and most expensive step.
Tasks
- Get a VA to hire people for me by posting on several platforms. Focusing on interns, do posts for unpaid, paid internships and co-founder positions. Different people want different types of jobs so I'm using the widest net possible to get the most people. You never know who's gonna be a genius. The VA will be paid from 3 to 5 dollars an hour or a fixed 400 to 500 a month salary.
- Prepare a list of growth hacking methods to put to the test. The 1 page marketing plan book was a game changer in understanding how to take full advantage of the people in the community and I want to put it into action.
- Setup a promotion plan for social media including tiktok, youtube, twitter and others. Tiktok has the highest virality factor. Accounts with no followers can get millions of views if they content hooks people up fast and get them to share the video.
- Setup giveaways. Some people fake giveaways where they end up rewarding an account they own, others are legit and reward many members. It's all about seeing what works.
- Setup partnerships by contacting other NFT projects and influencers.
Strategies
- When it comes to tiktok, I'll get someone to find the most viral NFT posts and re-create them for our NFT project. Repeat what already works.
- Get paid first, deliver later. The sooner we get the money the better. That's why there will be NFT pre-mints where people buy a ticket anytime to guarantee their mint for a lower price. They are token NFTs that can be replaced by the final NFT during the mint. Important to not show how many tickets have been sold until there's a good enough number for conversion purposes.
- Focus on referrals. Referrals are HUGE when it comes to community growth, people bringing other people is how grow goes parabolic. That's why there will be big rewards to incentivise people to invite others. I've seen it happen.
- Test different community platforms. Discord DMs are getting more and more expensive. Yes, discord has many NFT communities there, but DMs cost money and are getting harder to land. I want to test Slack since it's an untapped source of high net worth people.
- Improve discord token generation. If you aren't familiar with discord, sending automated DMs are done with a token which is an access key to send DMs. They are very valuable because they allow you to contact people and people pay good money for them. I wrote my own token generator but it's not finished yet, I'll find someone to improve it and reduce token costs.
That's it as the first update, stay tuned to see how it goes! I promise to update you until the end. I won't reveal the name of the project since that could affect the results and I'm not here to promote it. Let me know any strategies that you guys have tested!
what platform will you be using out of interest, Ethereum?
