Web3 CMO Stories

Crafting Winning Strategies for the NFT Marketplace with Arvin Khamseh | S3 E44

February 20, 2024 Joeri Billast & Arvin Khamseh Season 3
Web3 CMO Stories
Crafting Winning Strategies for the NFT Marketplace with Arvin Khamseh | S3 E44
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Prepare to unlock the enigmatic world of Web3 marketing as we sit down with the virtuoso of NFT advertising, Arvin Khamseh. His journey from traditional marketing to the vanguard of the crypto space serves as a beacon for those navigating this new digital frontier. Through our discussion, we reveal the nimble tactics needed in a domain where marketing strategies have a blink-and-you'll-miss-it lifespan. Arvin's tenacity shines as he recounts how he weathered the crypto winter, maintaining his foothold and keeping his sights on the future tides of the market.

The road to launching a successful NFT project is fraught with challenges and demands a captain who can steer the ship with data rather than gut instincts. In this episode, we unearth the treasure trove of strategies essential for founders to reach the prized shores of a complete sell-out. From the perils of ego-driven decisions to the siren call of misleading success metrics, we illuminate the path our incubator has taken to achieve an impressive 81% success rate. This segment is a masterclass for founders, detailing the crucial judgment calls that can make or break a venture in the tempestuous crypto seas.

As we chart the course of NFT marketing strategies, we touch upon the significant shift in audience engagement, moving away from saturated markets to fresh territories ripe with enthusiasm for digital collectibles. We dissect the innovative approach to crowd marketing, which has surged as a potent force amid changing social media landscapes. Our episode is your compass to the evolving strategies that keep one's brand afloat and sailing ahead in the dynamic waters of Web3 marketing. Join us as we share our map filled with the insights and resources that have guided many to success in the ever-shifting world of NFTs.

This episode was recorded through a Podcastle call on January 10, 2024. Read the blog article and show notes here:  https://webdrie.net/crafting-winning-strategies-for-the-nft-marketplace-with-arvin-khamseh/

Ready to upgrade your Web3 marketing strategy? Don’t miss Consensus 2024  on May 29-31 in Austin, Texas. It is the largest and longest-running event on crypto, blockchain and Web3. Use code CMOSTORIES to get 15% off your pass at www.consensus2024.coindesk.com

Arvin:

If you go put your head under water at some point you have to give in. You have to come up and just breathe. You can't just keep saying I'm gonna will it because I said I'm gonna do five hours, I'm gonna do it. It just doesn't work. So the example in web three what I've seen a lot of times happen is, let's say, a founder, come in, grab the team and they're like we think we're gonna spend two months on this project.

Joeri:

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm excited to be joined by Arvin Khamseh. Arvin, how are you

Arvin:

Thank you for having me.

Joeri:

Happy to have you on the show, guys. If you don't know, Arvin and I will have a look at your LinkedIn profile. What I read on the headline is that you are a globally recognized NFT marketing expert 50 million plus sold out in crypto marketing, 81% success rate in web three marketing which sounds impressive too, and you're also into investor relationship marketing so all subjects. That is really interesting for my listeners. Arvin, this was a really short intro, so I give you also the floor, the opportunity to give a bit more, tell a bit more about your background and what you're doing right now.

Arvin:

Yeah, absolutely. I started with marketing specifically paid ads for, started with very small businesses, even startups, even local businesses, and then made my way into larger businesses, saas companies with lots of budget, then public companies with even way more budget, all the way to 500K months advertising spending. And then, around 2021 ish, I was introduced to NFTs, let's say, in a very supposed professional way. So some artists actually came to me and was like hey, can you use this paid ads that you could with just use it in in the web three? And no one done that at that time. And then I thought, okay, cool, I give it a shot. Didn't know much about it, but I told him. I said, look, if you just tell me what the product is, who your buyers are, what problem you're solving, blah, blah, blah, I'll be able to run some ads and then help you sell out. And so he sold out fairly quickly. And then that really was the, the proof of concept where I thought, oh, cool, so there's a something I know from a different vector, from a different industry, that I can bring to the web three. And then I brought it in.

Arvin:

Of course, strategies change. I think strategies in web three have a shelf life around two to three months, but we got really popular for selling out NFTs and then that's when, so that NFTs was born. And then, of course, that was the bull market. A lot of people were selling in a lot of NFTs. It was high P and he wasn't as hard to even sell NFTs.

Arvin:

To be honest, it was somewhat simple and at that time I remember a lot of projects will come in. Some of them didn't even know why they're there in the in the space, but they will come in. They had an idea, they had a promise they would sell out fast forward. We went to a bear market instead of changing our titles, becoming something else. Ai was that was big at that time during the bear market. So there was obviously the shiny opportunity of just completely switching and course correcting, going into something else, but we didn't. So we stayed on. We sit on inside the NFTs. Obviously, we expanded on working with tokens, with working with apps inside, with three web two companies wanting to come into web three, all sorts of things inside the web three. But that's all we've been doing and we continue to do so as we're approaching the upcoming bull run as well.

Joeri:

Yeah, it's lovely to hear that you see the. Of course, every time after a bull run, we have the bear market and then there is a bull again. That's how it goes. But of course, because of that, because of the market changes also you mentioned, the strategies are changing so fast. So how have you seen everything evolve since the bull market to the bear market? And, yeah, how have your strategies been?

Arvin:

adapted. This is a somewhat very exciting industry and sometimes very frustrating for service providers. So there's a side of my business that's about providing services, providing advising, consulting, source that, those kinds of stuff and I have my own collection as well. So I don't just talk about how to do a collection I have, I'm building my own as well on the side. So those are the two sides of it, I suppose, my business.

Arvin:

But everything that we've done since 2021 worked for, let's say, two, three months, and then we were to completely change the strategies. So, let's say, at the very beginning, it was all about community. Everyone was so excited. Let's just build a huge discord, community and then about a third of those people would buy the NFTs. Very simple, just because as long as you had some people essentially as long as you had eyeballs on your project enough eyeballs and a percentage of them would just buy. That was really just the short of it.

Arvin:

At the very beginning, I didn't know what's going to change. I thought that's it. I got into this and I just went full force, just thinking, oh, this is great. I just kept going, just doing that. I was like, no, this is amazing. But obviously I found out soon. That's not the case, we would have to keep changing the strategies. So later on we started doing something else. We started actually, instead of just building discord, we would then actually use influencers a lot more, and then that also didn't last more than two, three months Past. That we would have to change again. Then we started using influencers, community and paydads, and then that also stopped working and we changed that again to just paydads. That worked for a while. Then it stopped working as well. So essentially we had to keep changing the strategy, potentially because the narrative in the industry keeps changing.

Arvin:

It's not that just people. It's partly because people getting more sophisticated as they go through this supposed changes, but also partly because what they care about also changes over time. And it's very annoying, to be honest. Run a business every two, three months, all your processes become irrelevant, and then, if I am the one that coming up with these processes every time I team, we have to start again from just training them from scratch, and so it's not as simple as it looks, maybe from the outside. Like other businesses, you come up with a process and that process potentially that process has been around for years and then you just maybe perfected it. Maybe it's like an improved offer, maybe your offering is better or maybe you perfected certain things, but it's pretty much the same concept that you work with Versus.

Arvin:

For us, like every few months, we just literally have to just say, okay, what's special about the way it worked in the past? And then just take on, basically deconstruct the reasons why people buy inside the Web3, and then come back to the core and then just create something new with it. Just be like okay, so if that's true, if those there's certain concepts are always going to be true, right. So what? For example, what? Why people invest on something? That is, if they're going to be thinking, what am I going to make my money back? Right, or how long is it going to take for me to make my money back? And maybe two Xs, three Xs, something like that, right, so those concepts are always going to be the same. But then if we really go back to those kind of concepts that are just always true, then come back and just create another look for how we're going to market. That's basically been the game.

Joeri:

Yeah, it's challenging, of course, two, three months but so I imagine you should have good analytics in place and testing, and because if you change the strategy like that, it's not always sure that it will work. If you saw you, I guess you're your big data that you're using right.

Arvin:

That's actually a really good question. So I soon figured that out. I realized I was like, okay, and I didn't always have my own collection, so I couldn't always just test it on my own first. So then I realized I was like, okay, if that's the case where no one knows what's the next thing, what's the next solution, and everyone's just wondering about things In the bull market, no one was wondering. It was very simple. Right In the bear market, now everyone was wondering. I was like, okay, so what is the solution? How do we get the word out for this project? And just so, I guess, give it some insight.

Arvin:

You talked about analytics. Give some insight to people. So on Ethereum alone, it's somewhere around 150,000 collections. So long, let's say, half of that or a little bit more, maybe 80,000, 90,000 collections. So you have to be able to stand out right. So there's not that many. There's not that many wallets, active wallets online. So maybe there's 2 million, something like that, total and you've got to be able to actually sell to all of those same people and they've probably bought something in the past. Some of them, some of them maybe they haven't, but some of them they already bought, so they have their own experiences. So maybe they're salty, maybe they're jaded, and then you have to actually speak to that too. You have to speak to the previous experiences as well, and so the point is, the analytics of things is also something that's not really easy to calculate because there's no website. There's like maybe one or two websites out there that they actually produce the analytics of, for example, nonfungiblecom. I believe they do that, but the problem is you don't really have like there's certain things that they're interested to research and find the numbers, but it's not the same as what we would want to research.

Arvin:

I'll give you an example of that. So there was a strategy where we would do a lot of whitelist strategy. So for audience, if they don't know what whitelist are essentially, if you think about people who are somewhat privileged in making a purchase decision for your product whatever that is, that being at an earlier time, they buy it, or maybe at a cheaper price, or maybe they can buy more, so on and so forth. Or maybe they get some more benefits and maybe cheaper, so on and so forth. Now, for that, there was a platform at the time that everyone was using, and I was actually remember I was going speaking at different events and I was just telling everyone be like, okay, just use this platform. They have their own community as well. You can use their traffic, you can bring your own traffic there and, being able to actually do really well with your whitelist, let's convert them.

Arvin:

But then later on I actually had to actually calculate myself to see what percentage of that Whitelisters would actually become a buyer. At the very beginning in the bull market used to be like about 50 to 80 percent. As as we actually approached the bear market and inside the bear market, that percentage went down. He got to the point where somewhere around, let's say, 7% of people would buy. And it's not easy For anyone. If you, let's say, if you have 10,000 wallets that are Whitelisters and AR wasn't that big, by the way, that time, now you can upload things on on chat, GPT and just have it work for you. At that time it wasn't, so we had to actually manually do some of these things and figure out the analytics, because no one else knew that.

Arvin:

The answer to that question so how, what percentage of whitelist are gonna convert? So if you don't know the answer to that question, then you'd be like, okay, I have some whitelist there's. What does that mean? Is that enough? Is it not enough? Should I test it? I don't want to test it. I spend already, let's say, close to six figures building my collection inside the web 3. Or it could be any products really, maybe token or NFT or whatever that is. I don't want to test it. I want to know. Right, I want to go into the, that public sale, with confidence, knowing I have enough backers, I have enough people to buy it and buy it quickly, because that's another thing with web 3, you have to have people buy quickly from you.

Arvin:

So anyways, out of all those things, I kept doing these things on my own. Obviously, I had a team and they were helping me. But, and what I realized is it's not a one-man and it's not even a one-brand kind of thing, it's more of a lots of different. If you have lots of different brands all together, we would do certain experiments. We wouldn't have to. We wouldn't have to actually repeat the same mistakes of each other. We would actually be able to collect data a lot quicker.

Arvin:

So then I realized I was like, okay, I have all these brands that are advised. What if I pull all of them together and just have them talk, and so we would do a weekly call where everyone would just essentially bring their own information. They would do something, and I would rather them not doing the same thing, I would rather them doing different things. So we could quickly get to the solution and at the, at some point it gets to a. You get to a realization where you're like okay, I don't mind also trying out if we know it's like a team of people, we're all trying different solutions, where if one of us figures it out, then it's much better than me on my own just trying a bunch of things and potentially I could die in the in the web theory. Right, I'm not a money. I thought that would be the end of me.

Arvin:

But so that's what we did and we could come up with solution a lot faster because we could iterate and Come up with a theory between all these brands and then just say, hey, let's just do this. And bunch of people would like, let's say, do plan a, bunch of people do plan B, bunch of people do plan C, and then we will come up with essentially, so we will see plan a, we see, okay, why didn't work out. And then if someone just reads my case studies. It's like pages after pages are literally just come up with like, hey, we did this, and then this was the numbers, this is the percentage they convert it. This is we counted this many wallets came from this platform and then this is what the conversions are and this is what they say. The conversions are things like that, and then eventually you have enough data that you can make the best guess and Then you have that solution. At that time, you go with that solution for two months. It works and you have to start again and do different speech.

Joeri:

Is there not a difference also between the different markets? You have different industries, different niches.

Arvin:

Yeah, absolutely, and that's the thing, not so that's actually problem with. There are actually a lot of problems. The reason collections fail it's actually comes down to the individuals a lot of times I found. So one of those problem is that people don't do research. So they come in they see just NFTs on the surface. They look oh look at this project.

Arvin:

I personally feel their art is not as good as mine. Therefore, I'm gonna sell out even sooner than them and then, just based on that, I'll grab a team and just go and then no one questions me. Be like oh you sure, what is this based on? That's one way I found a lot of people actually have these judgment calls that's based on absolutely nothing, has no substance behind it. And then the other thing is sometimes I see, ego. So, for example, you can't fight the Nate nature. All right, if you go put your head under water at some point. You have to give in, you have to come up and just breathe. You can't just keep saying I'm gonna will it because I said I'm gonna do five hours, I'm gonna do it. It just doesn't work. So the example in web three what I've seen a lot of times happen is, let's say, founder come in, grabs a team and they're like we think we're gonna spend two months on this project. And then they have the team, they figured out the salary, everything, and then, let's say, one month in Bitcoin price shut up or went down the other way, and then things change radically. And then now they have to course correct. But then they didn't account for it and they couldn't. It's just, crypto is volatile Now, but they but this is what we're, founder, that's not experienced in web three would say. They would be like we said it's gonna be two months, therefore we don't care, on two months on the dot, we're gonna launch our project. And they wouldn't say but we don't, we're not ready, we're, we don't have enough white listers, we don't have enough community, whatever.

Arvin:

I've seen so many people be like. And then they start convincing themselves. They're like well, look, I have a lot of tickets on my discord, for example. Or look, a bunch of people shared meme arts for me. So that means like, a lot of people like me and there's a lot of Assumptions. That has no basis. And then they keep, and sometimes they will make me believe too. So I will.

Arvin:

I, as an advisor, I will listen to them, and they were very convincing. They'll be like oh, look like, this is so many people here and then, for example, like, on their discord, they will buy people. They will buy chatters, what's called the chatters. They'll buy chatters to talk on their discord and then they will forget. They will forget that they bought that and then they would count that as, oh, there's engagement on my discord. And then they will come to me and I wouldn't know right, they would tell me be like oh, look at this, there's so many people talking, we should be okay, and be like I guess we should be okay, let's go. And so that's it's.

Arvin:

I found that actually the judgment calls in as a, like a personal, as a as found Founders. That's way more important, just because it's so volatile and people need to really be factual and that's rare, like a lot of founders are not and so they make their judgments based and especially in crypto, because it's like shiny, some influencer talks about something and it's so exciting, and then they always host only their wins. They never say the last money. So that's the that's. I suppose that's the biggest obstacles for the founders. It's just them just looking at things and be like, ah, on the surface, that's what I feel like it is, and then not really like Digging deep.

Arvin:

Yeah okay, what is it actually?

Joeri:

They should look at it like a real business, like it will be deeper than not just on your surface, and then Bit all those challenges that you don't even know. What are you seeing at? You mentioned discord, all these chatters, but you don't know if it's real engagement or not. You mentioned 81% success rate, so I'm curious to understand how you define that and, yeah, what is success for you?

Arvin:

Yeah, so 81% of the projects that came to our incubator sold out completely, meaning they sold all their supply, and then the rest of them there's some around they sold some around 40% to 60% and then they Either stopped marketing which is that's its own conversation like why would you do that? But some would do that, don't be like I didn't sell out, I'm done. I know they would leave, completely, leave the web three space, literally pack their bags, which is it's. If you from outside you're looking at that, you'd be like why would they do that? But that's they would do that. Some people will literally leave and then some of them they still working on it. They're still just trying to sell the last, maybe 10%, 20%. So obviously we don't count those as success, just based on how web three sees it. Yeah, they see, it's all that success and if you didn't sell out, you're like dead it's not success?

Joeri:

Yeah, but even in the market today is not so easy. So I'm also wondering, because you mentioned is 81% as the bull market. Now it's difficult. So what is that? And still, the target to sell out you mentioned also. That's what you're about, your website about selling out. Is that still today Success? And what do you say to those projects that don't sell out what you advise them?

Arvin:

Okay, good, that's actually good, really good, like digging into that analytics, right. So I said we had way more projects during the bull run that we had in the bear market to begin with. So that percentage, if you look at it that way, that's probably skewed. And then we've, even during the bear markets, certain projects they built but they don't launch. So we don't even have as many, many people going into launches during the bear market. It's not, it's not it like a clear cut line, right. So we just do a total. That 81% is a total. And then, but something happens recently where. So I actually want, I always wanted to do my own collection and Last year I came up with some idea two weeks before the FTX happened and for people, maybe less thing, they don't know what we're talking about.

Arvin:

So just there was some exchange that just completely went like a wire and there was. So we were building on Solana and At that point, literally when About two weeks before if the X happened, we were building everything Websites, designs, and that's one of the mistakes also we made, because we built everything before, even like going to the market, and then. So, anyways, the if the X happened, solana went down and then we just ditched the project. We were just like, okay, fine, well, don't, we don't launch it yet. No, no one came into our community yet at that point, there was no one looking at it. But we just built all the art smart contract, which is a mistake, by the way. We built all those things before even building a community and then.

Arvin:

But then what happened was I noticed a lot of people were scared in the bear market, a lot of people. It's just actually more comfortable to just be like you know what? I wait for the better time, and so then I was like okay, if you guys all gonna wait, I'll do it, and so that's why I launched mine and in 28 days, I brought this new brand completely new brand from zero to about ten thousand on discord, 11,000 on Twitter and Good-sized community and also a lot of people talking, a lot of people Engaging with everything. We do that. In fact, some of our posts, even though we had 11,000 on Twitter, some of our posts had 200 300,000 views, and that specific one was because we're talking about who's behind Bitcoin. We collected evidence with AI and machine learning who we think is behind Bitcoin, so it just went viral and things like that. But, yes, been good. It's actually been good. But one of the reasons I started mine this time is because I just seen a lot of projects. They were just very scared, very shy to.

Joeri:

Exactly that's what I'm seeing and told you just before we started a lot of they just don't continue or they just go. They just don't want to take risk that. They feel bad, it's scary for them. Yeah, and then, of course, I'm wondering for your project. So what is it about? Is there? What is the utility behind? Because I'm seeing talking to businesses it's more about utility and less about the art, but maybe you have another vision about that.

Arvin:

Yeah, I, yeah, I would the context for that. I will preface that we're just saying not every you, not every collection needs to have a utility, and then not every collection needs to have a great art, and then some collections are just purely, I would say, nfts. It's just sometimes purely just used as a, as a, essentially a sort of self certifying of ownership. Sometimes it's just used for tokenizing, doesn't ?

Arvin:

So you can't just pull everything into one category, every product, because it did happen like after we just went through a rough time of bull market people promising things and never delivering on them, and then we went the other side of this spectrum where we're like no, everyone now has to come up with something of value and then everyone has to deliver on them right away as well. So I think that was a bit of needed some correction and I think it's the market has corrected itself. So now it's like clear, some people have retailed this, I'm done. So your question was what's my collections utility? So one of the things I noticed for myself During the bull market was I was seeing a lot of coins, I was seeing a lot of NFTs.

Arvin:

I didn't know how to read charts, I didn't know how to analyze the market, and my knowledge was coming from, like business and marketing. I didn't have a crypto knowledge per se and I saw a lot of opportunities that just passed me by, essentially, and I wanted to be more involved in certain projects. That was maybe new or maybe start-ups, or maybe they were at the very beginning, but I just didn't know which project, because there's so many of them and I didn't know how to, with confidence, to just say, hey, I can understand, look at this chart of this coin and say, hey, this has this potential, or maybe this coin doesn't have any potential, or this is what they've done, or they just did market making at this. That's why the price just went up like that or whatever. And so there was that. And then there was also a lot of alpha groups where I was part of, and then I was like watching a lot of people making money on shit coins or top 100 coins and I was like, okay, wow, like I don't have the time to understand it, but I wish I did. With that and also my co-founder, we sold out a collection together in the bull run and then we realized we were like, okay, this is a big deal, it's a big deal.

Arvin:

People don't know anything about trading essentially, and so the utility we created was we said, hey, what if we create a community that has not only just one trader expert, but lots of them, and then teaches people how to trade, read the charts and analysis everything, all from different styles, because people have different styles in trading. And then not only that, we also sometimes people don't want to learn. Okay, that's fine, but how can they use the opportunities in the bull market? Because it's fast, like it happens, and then it's gone. If you don't take advantage of it, it's gone.

Arvin:

We say, okay, we'll give them signals. We'll give them signals and we say, hey, here are the signals, go use it. And we show them how to use it. And then so just give you an example of what that's on. That's the other thing I've done is I've started actually delivering that utility before even we start selling one NFT, because, a we wanted to know how good we are in delivering it. B we wanted people to test it to understand. Okay, here's what they're going to get. That's the taste of their. I suppose that's the utility.

Arvin:

And then so we started delivering it and what we found is, for the one case study, someone we just recently had and this is all in the first four weeks, by the way of doing this, okay, we had this painter. This lady is 35 year old. She doesn't know anything about crypto. She comes into this community, she attends three workshops and then learns how to use signals. So we have videos for her. And then she was, and then so she doesn't want to, she doesn't want to come into this market. She also on market with, like, lots of investment. She wanted to try it out. See, with $44, what can she do? So she turned that $44 to about $300 in three weeks.

Arvin:

Now, for her, that is and it's nine signals, by the way and for her, that's what that opened up is, first of all, now I'm in this market that I didn't know about. I'm a painter, I didn't know anything about crypto. Now I know. What also opened up is the potential for making an income. Not saying she will be able to. Maybe she will never be a trader, maybe she even quits we don't know that but it's a potential for her to just say, okay, if I want to, I can spend time on my own reading books, coming to these workshops, using these guys' signals, and then make an extra income, maybe just pay my bills or go with travels, so on and so forth. So that is the. That's literally the promise.

Arvin:

And the reason we also came up with that as a utility is also because it's a bear market and we wanted to. People we know, people like right now, if I just say, hey, here's another game, for example. So okay, that's cool, I get to play a game, but why would I need to invest so much money, so much time to play some game? Okay, and so, just being very realistic, like what is it people really want right now if they want to invest and they want to make their money back? They want to learn their skill, they want to have a new opportunity to make money and other stream of income, so on and so forth. So that's why we created it to be that way, and I see the future of NFTs is just being more like business thinking in that sense, where it's okay, like, just be real. People want to make money, like how can we make it happen for them? And NFT just being a vehicle, just like a technology.

Joeri:

Yeah, I like the fact you know about the markets. You mentioned about the signals. This is a really good thing to do in the bear market, of course, to be in the market to buy, so then it makes sense to do this, so you really offer something to offer you instead of playing a game. It's a good moment now to be in there, because if you enter in the ball run, then it's like in the stock market Now. It's always better to be in the market when it's a low. You also mentioned yeah, it's, it went fast to Salat and to find all these people buying your tokens. But, of course, you need to have the audience. You need to be able to reach them. You mentioned a lot of, I would say, reach on Twitter, on X. Yeah, what were the strategies behind that? Did you already have a large following to be able because you had already built trust with them to be able to get them on, or how did you guys do that?

Arvin:

Yeah, I didn't use my following. In fact, I didn't tell anyone from my communities that I'm building a collection, partly because I wanted to later on show it to my people in my incubator, say, look, because if I did that then everyone would be like, oh see, like this guy already had a list, already had this, had that. I'm not the same. So, partly because of that, partly because I was also just like, okay, I want to make sure, like this is actually going to go up, this is going to work. This is crazy. At this time we're doing this and I didn't say anything to our people until we actually built the whole community and everything. Then I told some people. I said, hey, by the way, this is what we do, and plus, also, I didn't even have time to talk to our people, like we already had a community to talk to. So that's what it was. And strategy-wise, I think we're really simple things. We focused on just being real with ourselves, just asking critical questions and just say, hey, if we actually want to deliver something that people are thinking about, okay, they will probably care about that, and then so we would make threads about that and then we would ask, and then those threads were original this is on X, by the way, I'm talking about. They were original and some influences would literally just reach out to us, be like hey, can we post it? And I'm like, yeah, of course you can post it on your page for free. We didn't ask them to do it. They would do that and then it would get us like more and more people. I think the Just having these quests and kind of entertainment, like, for example, who's behind Bitcoin, I think that was a good angle. And If it's just all about hey, I'm gonna solve this problem and I'm sick, so logical and just so it all makes sense, it's boring and then, but if it's all this is weird. These guys went on and just figured out, for example, the person who's behind Bitcoin talks or writes in a specific way, and then they've collected all these data points and that shows like this specific person on these forums could be behind Bitcoin, because he also writes in that specific way with like evidence and screenshots and stuff like that. So it's just fun. Hey, honestly, we don't know, obviously, who's behind. We had some evidence and we've done the work to just create that content that's interesting for people and and so I think that has something to do with it. And then the other side.

Arvin:

I would say we also really focused on which countries they're still Interested in NFTs. So, for example, in us, or maybe even, let's say I would venture to guess to say English is speaking countries. They, literally, right before I actually started my collection, bloomberg, someone from Bloomberg Message me on what. I was like hey, do you want to talk about why NFTs are dead? I'm like, oh, thanks, you want me to talk about that. And so that was that's what's media pushing right. So it's like hard to fight against that, like we. If you come out and just tweet and be like this is so exciting to, let's say, us country, everyone's gonna be like, no, it's not, because that's what media tells them Right, so that's what they're thinking. And so we also went into specific kind. We picked some countries and we're like, okay, these countries looks like they now recently figured out what NFTs are, or maybe they're just like a little bit late to the game, but they're, they could be more excited right now than, let's say, the typical like us, uk, canada. So that was another big thing, big thing for us.

Arvin:

And then what we also use was crowd marketing. Now, crowd marketing was. It's not anything new, but we just use it, I think, in a really good way. We would have our community to. We will have them actually engage on every single post and they would get the algorithm work for us and, because they were the first one, quickly come in after every post we would do. They would just write and say something tweet about us, write about us, but what we tweet comments, all that then that was also just making other people feel like, okay, we can do the same and then also other people also find us and so I would say those are.

Arvin:

If I were to say what actually Worked out really well, I would say that's it and it's very different to how I was previously doing it. Previously, I used to do paid ads with promote tweets and People. By the way, no one in the audience has done it before. You would need to have a Certification to be able to do that, to be able to run ads on Twitter for crypto or, let's say, casino or specific, but they're like restricted financial categories essentially. But I used to do that. I used to do a lot of ads and for 20 cents per person, I would get a new targeted follower, specific countries, specific type of person.

Arvin:

But then One day, elon just decided to take that off. Twitter, like, that option of getting followers Specifically as a follower as an objective on Twitter just just disappeared. So then we had to come up with this new one, right? So this crowd marketing actually came from that. I just like, okay, I need something new. And then that's why we did that and it's very scary, by the way, just so someone may be one of venture into Web 3. Maybe there was already in web 2.

Arvin:

Imagine, like you have people, you advising clients, everyone, and you tell them, hey, all you have to do is just run some Twitter ads, pick the objective of the follower campaign and this is the sitting, this is the targeting, this is the, the type of fat copy graphics, blah, blah, blah. And then so you think this is the value, right, and then you give it to them and then they all using, and then it just stops With. No one gives you any notifications, no one gives you anything. And now you have to. You just left with people that they just thought they can grow following and Then now they cannot because that method is out of the out of the question. So, yeah, but we did come up with something and works and Still works, and I've been telling people I'm like it's probably gonna work for about two months and then something new.

Joeri:

Exciting. I mean, it was so good, so exciting, so inspiring to talk to you. I understand you are a lot Active on Twitter, on X. I think you're also only teen, but I'm not sure. If you're active there, where can people what would you, yeah, love where people go and find you and maybe learn more about everything you're doing, your collection and so on feel yeah?

Arvin:

if they want to just chat with me on my team, just on telegram, just send us a DM Arvin K NFT, so ARVIN K NFT, and then that's true for telegram, same thing on Twitter as well. So that's a DM. We're always respond. We may not be like too quick, but he always responds. And then websites of, obviously, so that NFTs, dot, io we have for free. We do a lot of research.

Arvin:

I spent a lot of time just writing what works for Someone and sometimes also what doesn't work inside this, so that case study, we write it and so people can just read it. They don't even need to talk to us if they don't want to. You can read it and then just say, oh cool, this is what worked, what did them work? And then on YouTube I go through those case studies in, I suppose, in a more of a visual way, and then Also post some of the, let's say, the speaking I do, maybe events or different places or some content that we create ourselves as well. So they can go on YouTube and that's NFT. At NFT marketing, they can find that as well.

Joeri:

Amazing. I will put all of those things, like we always do. We put them in the show notes. There is a blog article also about the zebra dots. If you're not listening in the car and you want to check out all the links, we show to check out the show notes on webdrie. net, which is actually Web3, but then in Dutch, but the website is in English. So thanks, arvin, it was really a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. So, guys, again, an amazing episode with a lot of knowledge bombs, a lot of value in this episode. So if you think this is really useful for people around you, be sure to share this episode with them. If you're not yet following the show, this is a really good moment to do and, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.

What's your background and current focus?
How have you observed the market evolve from the bull to the bear phase, and what adjustments have you made to your strategies?
Are you leveraging extensive data analytics to ensure the effectiveness of your strategy changes?
Isn't there a distinction between various markets, given their diverse industries and niches?
How do you define success, especially in terms of engagement on platforms like Discord, and what does an 81 percent success rate signify for you?
Is selling out still the primary focus, and what advice do you have for projects that don't achieve this?
Could you provide more details about your project? What is its purpose or utility? While some businesses prioritize utility over art, I'm curious about your perspective on this matter.
How did you rapidly sell tokens and attract buyers? Did you have a large following, or did you use other methods to build trust and engagement?