in April 2023 there was this one nft project that started the roll out of an aggressive marketing campaign they were one of the best highly funded nft project that the space had ever seen with backers like binance lab they started rolling out the marketing and around a couple months into the campaign they were faced with a very difficult decision it was summer 2023 and the market was looking bloody there was no liquidity it almost felt like everyone in the space had left and there was no one there were very little people left in the nft
space that project was faced with a very difficult decision either launch regardless of market conditions or postpone the mint until better Market sentiment the latter decision ended up being picked the project marketing or the project launch was paused indefinitely and a couple months after maintaining the community maintaining the presence in the space that project found itself in a very promising position around Q4 of 2023 between October November December the nft space saw a targeted Bull Run in the gaming ecosystem every single gaming project was pumping everything was selling out and that one project Overworld found
itself at the perfect place at the perfect time to become the most anticipated and most hyped nft Market launch of 2023 this right here is the story of Jeremy horns the founder of Overworld having helped Overworld launch on the Twitter spaces front and having closely worked with Jeremy horns during that period of time there was one thing he said and he keeps repeating the difference between web 2 and web 3 is that in web 2 80% of your results are dependent on your product and 20% % are dependent on the market in web 3 it's
the inverse 80% of your results are dependent on the market and only 20% are dependent on the product and this right here ladies and gentlemen this story illustrates the first trait of all the successful nft project Founders that have had the opportunity to work with patience they understand that if they were to succeed to the level that they aim to succeed they want to be sailing during a time during a climate where the wind is pushing against their back as they are sailing their boat not with the wind pushing in front of them and they
understand that by deploying patients they have the ability to properly time the market and the reason I shared this with you is it is so common for me to see nft Founders have to launch in bad market conditions because of a lack of patience because of urgency and often times because of pressure from the investors that they have to launch and guess what ends up happening more often than not I I've seen it not only on the market but I've seen it from the over 100 nft project Founders that I've had the honor of working
with the founders that are rushing their launch the launch never ends up going the way they had hoped or the way they had expected it to and this right here ladies and gentlemen is the number one trait of successful nft Founders patience the second trait of successful nft Founders is that they are well spoken it is no surprise that web 3 is a speculative ecosystem most people who invest in Brands today that buy into nft projects are not buying into the state of the present they are buying into the promise of the future they're buying
into what this brand ought to be and not what the brand is today any brand you can think of Bard apat Club isuki pudi penguin they are willing to invest tens of thousands of dollars because they believe that this brand has the ability to become bigger tomorrow than it is today and who most of the time ends up selling the vision of that brand it's the founder in the top projects that I've seen the founder is the one carrying the flag leading from the front and rallying the community behind to join them on that Journey
one founder that we are working with right now Julio from Pixelmon during one of the interview that we've had together with Julio one thing that stands out about him is that he has a very clear vision of what the space ought to be and how with Pixelmon they intend on getting there the main narrative behind pixel somon is the idea of Ip licensing the way they are tackling the IP route is one that is new and Innovative and that's how they are trying to reshape the way community and brand interact together through the usage of
their fractionalized IP as they are building it and as a Founder one thing I would invite you to develop is what I call the V framework which stands for vision execution and team at all stages with your communication as you are speaking on the podcast so on the Twitter spaces to your community on X as you're making the posts and the tweets about your brand yourself and the product you need to be selling these three things at all time the vision where do we want to go the execution how do we intend on getting there
and number three the team why should you bet on this vehicle versus the other one that we are going to be the team that is able to execute on that vision and it is a trait of a Wells spoken founder that has the ability to properly communicate that and to properly Inspire and rally a community around their brand so that is the second trait of a successful founder they are well spoken the third trait of a successful founder is that they understand storytelling and lore building between where you are today and where the project wants
to go the vision and the execution exists a canyon and how do you sell the community on the idea of the future beyond your words it is through storytelling and through lore one great example I can think think about is another team we have very closely worked together Persona I have a very successful highly performing case study that I filmed about the Persona how they went from a toz launched their nftc project and ended up raising $5.5 million and were arguably until today mid 2024 they were the hottest nft project that launched this entire year
one of the things that they mastered was storytelling the way they were able to embed every one of their characters the way they were able to mesh their trailer alongside the profile picture of the nfts the way they were able to give identity and to sell that Persona is not just an NF project Persona is the future of digital identities on the internet how they were able to do it through lore building and through identity all of a sudden made their brand more human and all of a sudden allowed them to get the Buy in
from the community even before the mint was out and even now even today have an nft project with a very healthy floor price after launch and have a raving community of people that are changing their profile picture from their old community that they were part of that maybe they lost conviction and to Persona we're seeing more people rocking personas we're seeing more thought leaders becoming Persona ambassadors why because they were able to get the Buy in from the community and one of the ways they were able to do this is by having a strong understanding
of lore building and storytelling one book I'll recommend to you which I personally Dove deep into was the art of the tale it's an incredible book that I would invite you to read blue book on Amazon you you could find it wherever you look for your books and it is one of these books that is going to teach you what the storytelling framework looks like and it's going to show you how you can adapt that to your brand to your messaging and to your public speaking initiatives as you are out there rolling out your brand
and rolling out the marketing of your nft project the fourth trait of successful nft founders is that they command respect we've all seen it if you've been in the nft space you must have experienced it it is this weird dynamic in the nft space where all of a sudden you build a community that is going to act as your trampoline to help Propel your brand forward we've seen this with pudy penguins I call it the community arbitrage strategy pudgey penguin built a strong Community they launched at Amazon which allowed them to make over a million
dollars on their first day of launch at Amazon this big case study allowed them to rank number one on amazon.com in the kids toy and accessories they took that case study applied to be listed at Walmart made it into Walmart and now they are all of a sudden a household brand and on their way to becoming a household IP how were they able to do this if you reverse engineer all the steps the community was a trampoline for them the community is an asset and often times the community knows that they know internally that as
a brand as a Founder you need us and here's an interesting one the moment the community has too much leverage all of a sudden they are going to optimize for the short-term pump and their short-term results the short-term floor price increases and often times short-term activations do not lead to long-term gain one of the founders that I look up to the most and it's an example we already brought up which is Jeremy from Overworld Jeremy from Overworld is the type of founder who has leverage in the dynamic with the community he has Decades of exper
experience building games he has the connections in web 3 he is The Mastermind behind Overworld and the way he speaks the honesty through which he talks with the community I remember in one of the Twitter spaces that we did with Jeremy postm he was asked Jeremy what type of community activation initiatives you have in in plan for Overworld he very bluntly said he was like Community is not something I'm going to be focused on there's not going to be any in real life activations the community is going to get access to the Overworld and the
exterior ecosystem but do not expect games Raffles and short-term Community activations other Founders had they said that would have been eaten alive by the community but Jeremy was able to say that because the community knows that they need him more that he needs them Overworld is going to thrive as an ecosystem I have no doubt with or without the community and the community wants to be on board so the fourth threat of a successful nft founder is you need to know how to command respect not only through the way you address the community not only
through the way you show up but also through your medals through your background achievements pick any project you're going to notice often times the downfall of that project is when the community lost respect to the founder because either the founder fumbled their way or they were unable to either command respect in the first place or to continue commanding that respect the fifth trait of successful nft Founders is that they are Innovative they don't follow of the meta they shape the new meta but often times the way they shape the new meta is by evolving the
current meta that already exists I can give you countless examples of that but again I want to pick the examples that are of highest impact one of these being Persona with their Quest platform during the marketing launch of persona the social farming meta was heating up portal was launching and what portal introduced to the market was mass Market social farming anyone and everyone who mentioned portal on the timeline were entitled to receiving points which they then were going to be receiving airdrops for these points the timeline was rampant with engagement farming with social campaigns with
people farming portal what Persona did is they saw that social farming was something that people were open for and that people were engaging in and what they did is that they adapted the meta in a very organic very high quality and in a very branded way within their platform I I talked about this during the case study that I did about Persona however in a nutshell what you had access to with a very beautiful aesthetic Quest platform where you connected to your Twitter and you engaged in Social farming campaigns that were very related to Persona
join the quest our challenges lack and repost this piece of content and that's how they were able to take the social farming meta innovate on it in a way that was branded but was still in line with the meta they didn't go too far enough where all of a sudden they had to reinvent The Meta but they were just Innovative enough to all of a sudden they were able to create what in the eyes of the market was something new something unique and something that was packaged in a new different way social questing is not
new it's a Remnant from the old bull market I remember on Discord there used to be quests where all of a sudden anyone who does art challenges or art designs about the project would be entitled to get whiteless Persona took that and applied the point system to it and all of a sudden having the quest platform become the Catalyst to the phenomenal marketing launch that was the project trait number six of successful nftd Founders is that they are hardworking man and I hate the fact that I have to say this is that lazy Founders do
not have space in web3 because they're not going to succeed and the market is not going to reward them we've worked with all the best teams that have succeeded to the best of their ability these were the hardest working teams that we've ever seen Jeremy from Overworld being an example juliia from Pixelmon the spike and the Persona team one example that I can think about is Pasqual from blood Loop blood Loop if you don't know is an incredibly well resected successful web 3 game that have received over $4 million in funding from Mega companies like
Avalanche and what really stood out about Pasqual is that his tolerance to hard work was so high man we were working with Pasqual on Twitter rolling out amplifying the brand reach through Twitter spaces and appearances on different Twitter spaces through our Network and Jude when I would tell you that whatever opportunities we sent pasal hey Pasqual we have these five spaces that you can speak on in the next week he would take all of them and ask for more even one day there was an overlap that happened it was was funny pascali ended up finding
himself on two spaces at the same time and although it was a blunter on a scheduling we had invited him we were organizing a space for him and at the the same time he was invited to another space from a third party and it was not well coordinated within the two parties and all of a sudden pasquali found himself on two different spaces and he attended the two one from his phone one from his laptop and even on the spaces that he was hosting blood Loop the project was the host of the spaces he was
on joking about it like guys I'm so sorry guys I'm actually on two Twitter spaces right now can you repeat the question and that proves to show that he could have either canceled any one of these spaces or just not shown up but but he was on these two because he understood that this was missed opportunity and and this is what I will tell you nft Founders are more like lions hunting then marathon runners running they Sprint for very short intense bursts and then they feast or they rest and that's how I've seen most of
the nft teams that I've worked with the founding team goes on a Sprint of hard work 10 Twitter spaces every single week be there do that reply engage on the timeline be everywhere talk talk with the investors network with the people but these are all in very short brds of time and then after a big launch after a big mint out there's a bit of a of a breather that happens and then boom onto the next Activation so if you think that as an nft project founder this is going to be a smooth sailing quiet
ocean it won't be hard work is required and it is no surprise that the teams that have succeeded to the highest level are all the highest working teams trait number seven of successfully nft Founders is is that they are financially literate and I actually have a story for you which is not a good story one of the teams that was part of our program they were through multiple reasons including investor pressure they were not patient with the launch of their nft project they were rushing into the launch and they had a set deadline and they
were willing to hit it at all costs and what this ended up causing them is to over spend in ways that are unbelievable under marketing I remember I was once having a meeting with the founder and I was was like dude are you sure you are about to spend $50,000 on a news publication are you sure you want to do this what are the actual results that you're going to get from this campaign the team listened to Our advice ended up moving forward to it they ended up burning sixf figure marketing Budget on influencer campaigns
PR campaigns trying to be everywhere at all time and they rushed the marketing in I think under 60 days the mint did not go as planned and sadly they ended up finding themselves in a negative situation the mint was not profitable they were not even able to recoup on the expenses that they put in place and this illustrates the importance of being financially literate understanding number one that patience you might have to indefinitely push the launch of your project do you have the ability to properly invest your marketing budget your development budget in a way
that allows you to survive for long enough as well as have enough liquidity that way when the time to launch is right you have the necessary means to properly roll out a marketing push financial literacy one of the more important traits of successful nft founder trait number eight of successful nft Founders is that they are very good networkers do you ever wonder how do some projects launch the very first tweet and all of a sudden that first tweet gets tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Impressions these were all from the connections that that
founder had built along the way that allowed him to be able to tap into his connection and launch the first post of their project and all of a sudden knock it out of the Park the way it works is very easy I'll summarize it to you very simply because I both am on the receiving end of these connections so I receive people asking me for these favors and number two I am part of brands that execute on their connections and the way it works is very simple man you have a lot of friends in the
ecosystem you have a lot of people that you know that are willing to support your ecosystem once you are ready to launch your first post you publish it and you go through a round of telegram messages where you send that to everyone you're like hey buddy really enjoyed our conversation two weeks ago here's the first tweet that I told you about or here's the official launch of the project that I had told you about they just dropped the message like this or even ask I would really appreciate if you can engage with that and just
with that one round of messages for free they have the ability to kick off the campaign with high-profile people engaging with the marketing campaign of their project I've seen it again and again I've seen it countless of times I've received a lot of messages like this I'll take a screenshot of one of them I'll blur the names just so you get an idea of what it looks like and the only way for you to build out your context on telegram is through number one being someone worthy of being networked with so having a personal Brand
number two is by actually having the patience to network reach out to people hop in a call with them and understand what is the people the person that you're speaking with once and how you can be the vehicle to that no one's going to hop on a call with you just especially high-profile people they're not going to hop on a call with you unless they see value in it and as a good networker you have the ability to position yourself as someone deemed of value to the person you're speaking with and as someone that has
the ability to provide to give what the other person on the receiving end wants from that interaction so this is trait number eight of successful Founders they are very good networkers they know how to connect with people and they know how to keep people close to them at all time even though they haven't spoken with that person for month just reactivating those connections having often times the patience of doing that that is a successful trait of successful networkers trait number nine of successful Founders is that they are Visionaries one of the big reasons why a
lot of big Brands come into web 3 and fail on the launch is that they come with an empty Vision they are an empty vessel that almost looks like they are trying to extract money out of the ecosystem and just go back to what they were doing in web 2 and the brands that were able to succeed to the best of their abilities I can think about Forbes web 3 one of the projects one of the teams that we are very closely working with I have an interview with man on the website one thing Forbes
was able to do well compared to a lot of other big web 2 companies that entered web 3 I'm not going to give examples a quick Google search will show you all the failed launches is that Forbes web 3 came in with a Clear Vision of how they want to use nfts to build the future of media to build the future of community in a way that makes sense and is aligned with what the industry ethos that we are in that we all understand it didn't just come in and be like here's a digital collectible
of our Forbes magazines no that doesn't work and the web through Community can just feel it when you are an empty vessel trying to extract they just feel it the best teams and the top projects all come in with a very strong vision and for you to build out a vision you need to be a Visionary you need to study and you need to sit down what is it you're trying to build why do you need nfts or web3 technology or tokens to bring that Vision to life and going back to all the things the
traits we spoke about before how do you communicate that with people one good resource that I have for you is building a story brand by Donald Miller it is a book I've personally read and I often go back to the book teaches you how to come up with the origin story of your brand that allows you to connect with your prospect and stand out in the sea of all the other brands that are also competing for the same attention and the same liquidity the same the money from the market you're trying to go after so
building a story brand by Donald Miller very good book it is going to equip you with all the knowledge you need to create craft that vision and package it nicely into a beautiful origin story and trait number 10 of successful nft Founders is that they are proven executors going back to the V framework the team the T people in web 3 Bet On teams of great vision is great a great idea of how the execution is going to be made is great but it takes a team it takes proven capacity of delivery for people to
raise their hand and be like I want into this project whatever project I name you whether it's Overworld with Jeremy Horn Jeremy Horn has a decade of dominating in the free-to-play mobile gaming he used to be at Ubisoft and has overseen the launch of games that have in total gross over $100 million in Revenue the team behind Persona they were high level within the Ubisoft ecosystem Julio from pixelon with liquid X the company name that owns the whole entity he also has a very rich background in VC in web 2 every single project you look
at and you're like man I would love to achieve this height of project these are all teams that are worthy of people's money and people's attention so the first question I would ask myself if I was an nft founder is how do I become someone worthy how do I become a proven executor that can show the world that hey I have the resume to bring to life what is it that I'm promising you and let your resume speak for you if you're watching this you probably do not have the resume that a lot of these
builders that I talk about have and guess what so did I I'm still early in my career just like a lot of you watching this and the goal is to become someone worthy and I'm documenting my journey as I go whatever past achievements I had in web 2 no matter how small or big they were whether it was failing on most of my businesses or whether it was as big as building communities to millions of followers back in web 2 I use those as I document these Journeys I document the lessons that I learned from
those and I show them to you so so you can learn from them and I document my process to becoming a somebody so if you are a nobody try to become a somebody become a master at a certain skill become an expert in your specific industry document your path to becoming a somebody and all of a sudden one day people are going to look up to you and be like this is someone I want to bet on or this is someone I hope to become one day so trait number 10 of successful nft Founders is
that they are proven business operators and executors so this was it ladies and gentlemen the 10 traits of successful web 3 and nft Founders they are patient they are well spoken they understand lore building and storytelling they command respect are Innovative are hardworking financially literate are good networkers Visionaries and finally they are proven executors my name is Leon buot and it was an absolute pleasure sharing this time together I shall see you very soon cheers
