I bet that even if you do not know what NFTs are word-for-word, you have certainly seen this abbreviation somewhere in the news. It was probably something like: “the NFT picture of the trashiest trash can was sold for a quazillion US dollars”. Yep, don’t be surprised - everything is possible in the modern world. Even if people were laughing crypto off and calling it names like “nonsense” or “scam” a few years ago, now those people either have a couple of Bitcoins on their wallets or are actively diving deep into this area.
The same goes for the NFTs. If a few months ago they were seen as dumb pics that people buy God-knows-why, now everything is changing with the speed of Starlink’s Internet. Celebrities buy NFTs and rush to boast about it on Twitter, while huge communities launch their own collections in the blink of an eye.
Our own NFT project - Artozo - has started its development stage 7 months ago. Its main thing, for which there are no similar solutions on the market, is the unique referral system. In short - you invite your friend onto the platform and earn a % of each of his/her transactions. Apart from that, people, who will be invited by your friend, will become your partners on the 2nd line and, consequently, will earn you money as well. Our referral system has 10 lines in total. In addition, we offer a general toolset as any NFT platform would and we have no plans to stop there. Just join our Discord or visit our website and see yourself.
Launching an NFT project. Where would one start?
“As you name the boat, so shall it float”. Specifically, whichever blockchain you choose will result in how you launch. This is one of the first and most important decisions at the very beginning of the project.
In fact, nowadays there are 4 major blockchain networks for NFTs: Ethereum, Polygon, BSC, and Solana. We decided to move on with the latter because of the speed, low fees, and low memory requirements - generic points, but really crucial benefits that made our eye on the Solana network.
Next step - website development. Perhaps, most people will agree that this is the most complicated and demanding stage (confirmed by our 25 y.o. developer with gray hair sitting next to me as I am writing this article for you). If you take into consideration developing the variety of features in addition to the referral system, a total of 7 developers and testers were involved to make everything shine and not miss a single bug (lol). Even now, when we are proud to declare that we are on the finish line, we decided to completely revamp the looks of the website. Hey, don’t judge! We are always looking for new solutions, which would be pleasing to the eye.
Some chatter about legal stuff
Of course, simultaneously, we were taking care of the legal part connected to the company and the platform.
It is no secret that there are a lot of scams in crypto. One of the distinct features of Artozo is the legitimacy of the project.
A bunch of important points that need to be taken care of before you start something like this:
Invest in properly organizing the legal component of the company/project. This always translates into the security and legality of your business, the safety of your users, and any market relationships you might have.
“Legal matters” means “a lot of money” in every language of the world. Be prepared to invest a minimum of $30k and even a bigger equivalent in hours (probably the same as the technical development process). This stage of the project helped us prepare the main comprehensible document about our project in gitbook - some people call it “a whitepaper”, “a blueprint”, etc.
Localization of all the project’s content, as well as the gitbook for all language options of your target audience, is also key. Simply put - translate everything into the main languages, which your potential users speak. At the moment we have 3 language options at Artozo: EN, CH, and RU. However, others are also in development.
Gathering the “dream team”
The next stage requires putting together a group of people, who are itching to conquer the NFT sphere by your side. A marketer, social media manager, graphic designer, PR manager, copywriter, performance marketing manager - only a basic number of titles you must have associated with your LinkedIn. Of course, depending on the amount of work to be done, you can take 2 social media managers or 2 designers - all up to you.
Should we also mention the obvious? Every employee not only has to have a creative vision but also he or she has to be literally waking up and going to bed with the only thought of disrupting the whole NFT market. Try to gather not only professional but like-minded people, who can be easily put together by a single goal and not only the contract with the same company name. That is the main variable in the complex formula of success.
As for the socials…
When choosing social media for your promotion purposes, you will need to take 2 main factors into consideration - localization and the niche.
After analyzing the market, we have chosen the following platforms: Discord, Twitter, and Instagram. Moreover, we were also keeping an eye on Reddit and Quorra.
Our goal set for social media was to build a community around the Artozo platform. The basic task was to gather the initial audience and start scaling after. Let’s briefly walk through the socials and tricks we resorted to.
Discord
At the moment, this platform has the biggest influence on the NFT field and is perfectly suitable for building communities around the world
The special feature of our Discord is the following - you can invite each other to our server and automatically become partners on the 1st line (earn money from each other’s transactions). It is because we tied Discord invites to our website and the referral system (the one we mentioned prior). Simply put - you invite somebody to our Discord server and earn money. Perfetto!
The first thing to do is to organize the channels in an understandable manner because right after a user joins the server, he/she needs to learn all the features and opportunities the platform provides. This is where we come in to help
If earlier Discord was about mass DM messages through which you could quickly gather an audience, now the platform added hidden captchas practically everywhere and additional services that provide complex verification procedures. This is why tools for mass usage are not effective anymore
We concentrated on giveaways on Twitter and collaborations. Thanks to those, we were able to gather around a 10k-sized audience
In addition, we were actively testing various PPC ads. To give you an idea, the Price-per-Lead from Facebook ads was higher than $4, which is incredibly expensive. Therefore, at that point in time, we decided to put those PPC ads aside
It is really important to maintain communication with followers in Discord - for this, there are various chats. You are going to need both “chatters” and modders in order to make sure your chats are active 24/7. They will throw different topics in, lighten discussions and bring news to the conversation. We also recommend creating a team of “chatters” only after you gain an active audience of 5-10k users. Before that, there is hardly a need, as you can manage to do it yourself.
The main platform that assists in gathering the Discord community
Giving Whitelist places away and working with influencers are proven to be the most effective tools for gathering Discord audiences. However, one of the tough parts is finding influencers with high-quality followers. For that, you will certainly need to devote a lot of time to due diligence using open sources and special services that evaluate audiences. Moreover, you always should check the comments and retweets of those you want to work with - oftentimes even the best services won’t be able to tell the difference between bots and real audiences, so you need to develop an eye for that. Dishonest bloggers can take a couple of hundred bucks for a tweet and then just drive bots your way. They will say they brought you more audience and practically they won’t be wrong. However, I am sure I don’t have to mention the quality and outcomes of such a partnership
Twitter shilling is one of the tools being actively promoted by a lot of marketing agencies. Frankly, this is just spamming the comments with tags of your Twitter account. This is similar to “commenting” on Insta and helps attract new people. Here it is important to choose the right tone of voice/copy and find proper pages you will comment
Perhaps, the most effective instrument of working with the Twitter community is content. We increased the number of tweets to 7-10 per day and started interacting with the audience. Sometimes, usually once a day, we leave a link to our Discord - this helps organically attract at least 10 people a day to the server.
Now we have 30k+ followers on Twitter and 12k+ on Discord. We are focused on building the community and that is why a lion’s share of our budget and resources is devoted specifically to the channels/activities we mentioned above.
What has our work been like since the 24th of February?
We have a team of IT specialists and marketers from all over the world - the UK, Turkey, Moldova, China, India, etc. Nevertheless, the biggest part of the team and our founders are Ukrainians.
02/24/2022 is the date when the life and the work processes of most people from the team changed dramatically.
It took more than 2 weeks to help our people evacuate the heated regions and make sure everybody is safe (if “safe” is the right word in the country, against which the full-scale war was started).
Even today some of our specialists are located in cities, where residential buildings suffer from bombings and air raid sirens are howling regularly. A lot of our people are also involved in volunteering. Nevertheless, each and every one of us knows that the success of our project is not only our success but also one of Ukraine.
What is going on with the project now?
Our Presale started on the 14th of April. During this stage, you have a chance to be the first to invite friends and get more rewards in ARTZ tokens.
You will get an allocation of $50 after buying a key and will be able to get ARTZ tokens for the lowest price possible. Every time, when you invite someone and they buy a key using your referral link, you will get an additional allocation of $50.
After the full launch of the platform, we will organize airdrops of precious prizes among the first users.
In general, even if we made you at least a tiny bit interested in our project, you can learn more using the following link: https://docs.artozo.com/
Moreover, we invite you to visit our website, Discord, Twitter, and Instagram. We truly have tons of decent NFT content and our audience grows by the minute. Therefore, you have a chance to join us before we reach 100k (and a million shortly after). After some time you will be able to tell your friends that you were with Artozo right from the very beginning.