The NFT space is highly opportune and rich for the taking. Today, we’ll tell you how NFTs have evolved and marketing Insights from NFT marketing expert Arvin Khamseh.

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MARKETING IN NFTs with Arvin Khamseh

Participants:

• Nadja Bester (CEO & Co-founder of AdLunam)

• Jervis Pereira (CMO at AdLunam)

• Arvin Khamseh(NFT marketing expert)

While we wait for the audience to settle in, let's catch up on some of the latest NFT news happening around the industry over the last few days. There's an NFT project called Arts Monk that has used the AI behind Google Cloud neural networks to transform all 10,000 bored ape yacht club NFTs into AI generated art. Now, depending on which pocket of web3 you find yourself in, this has been a topic that there's a lot of chatter around over the last few days, weeks and even months. The role that AI art generation is going to play in the NFT space as in art in general. In this case, the collection sold out almost instantly. If this is a topic that piques your interest, I have a very special sneak peek surprise for you in the form of a guest speaker on a soon to happen future episode.

Definitely look out for when that announcement drops. A recent tweet by the co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin has suggested the use of stealth addresses for ERC 721 tokens in order to better balance this tension between transparency and pseudo. Anonymity implication being that such an add on could increase fees to five to 50 times the east transaction. Depending on what is most important to you, is it privacy, is it low cost? You might be in two minds about this suggestion and then I'm very excited to see fractionalization of NFTs making news headlines. Of course, AdLunam, this is something that we focus very heavily on fractionalization of our NFT investor profiles and for sure something that is going to be more and more of a hot topic as we continue building in this web3 space that we all find ourselves in. In this case, Crypto Punk 3042, originally sold for $16 in November 2018, was recently acquired in June 2022 by Unique Network for $82,000.

This particular NFT will now be fractionalized and the ownership will be shared between more than… are you ready for this? 56,000 addresses that have signed up. There's some real exciting developments happening in terms of this very unique feature that non fungible technology has to offer. All right, so it seems like the room is filling up very nicely as always. Let's get the show live and on the road.

Hey, web3 world. This is Nadja Bester from AdLunam and you are listening to the Future of NFTs, the show that looks beyond current NFT use cases to what Non Fungible Token technology is evolving into. All this as seen through the eyes and built by the minds of the fascinating guest speakers we speak to each week. AdLunam is building the industry's first IDO platform with a Proof of Attention allocation mechanism. The reason that we deep dive into NFTs each week is because as I mentioned, we as a company are shaping as well the future of NFTs through our Engage to Earn model which is powered by dynamic NFT investor profiles.

This is significant because it allows the top most engaged retail investors to fractionalize IDO and private sale allocation that they receive. Today is our fourth episode where we are bringing you yet another fascinating guest on this new series that we have going on the future of NFTs. So far we have covered the fusion of music and art NFTs, Inclusivity in Art NFTs and NFTs in gaming. So catch any of those shows on your favorite podcast streaming platform. We are live with the show every Tuesday and our sister show Diving into Crypto is live every Thursday. For sure, if you want to know what the pulse is in this industry and on these topics that we cover each week, join us because we speak to thought leaders and change makers in this game changing industry to get the latest and the greatest on what is going on. Speaking of latest and greatest, today we are getting real.

I am discussing marketing in the NFT space with today's guest Arvin Khamseh. Arvin is an NFT marketer with a prolific client portfolio. Feast your ears on this. He has worked with over 400 NFT brands, so you can bet that he's seen and done it all. He's been involved with numerous multimillion dollar 24 hours sellout projects and he's helped projects reach number one on Icy Tools and number one trending on OpenSea. In addition, he's also the CMO at Yeti Secret society. If that's not all, as a thought leader, Arvin's regularly quoted in major media outlets like Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine and USA Today, and he makes a frequent guest appearance on Crypto podcasts like ours and including Jordan Balfour's The Wolves Den. He also speaks regularly at industry events around the world. I believe that we are in for a real treat today as he shares his experience and insight with us.

I'm sure our conversation today is going to stir up quite a lot of questions for you in the audience, so I will be opening it up to questions at the end. A bit of a housekeeping note because we are trying to be a respectful of time, we generally keep this through an hour and no more. We don't always have the opportunity to ask everyone's questions, but definitely if you do have one, put in a speaker request or message your question to the AdLunam Twitter handle adlunam Inc. Okay? With that, it seems we have a full house. So let's do this. Arvin, Are you ready?

Yeah. You're breaking up a little bit. I guess you guys show me some emojis if that's not just me.

She should be back in a minute. In the meantime, we're just going to chill and see that she gets back in the room. If she has any technical issues, I will take care of the show.

Right on. Thank you for letting us know.

No worries, Arvin. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, those of you that are inside the room, I know that you have access to those reaction buttons, so please feel free to use them. You know that there's so many features that you can change colors and you have options. Exercise them now because you're going to go in for a heck of a show. Of course, Arvin has so graciously agreed to join us on this program today, so we're excited to have him, as well as learn so much from the marketing genius that he is.

Brief interruption so that there is no confusion about why I’ll sound decidedly more masculine for the remainder of this episode. When it comes to technology, that famous line by Dickens that it was the best of times and the worst of times seems to apply because due to a Twitter spaces bug today, where the episodes for this podcast is recorded live every Tuesday at 03:00 p.m. CET, I unfortunately had audio issues. JP, the hosts of AdLunam's other podcast series, Diving into Crypto, which I highly recommend tuning into for a whole other experience of Web3 thought leadership was kind enough to host today's interview with Arvin. Cheers to teamwork and a huge shout out to the amazing AdLunam team who proved daily that not all heroes wear capes. Although I totally think we should make this company policy so cape designers, get in touch. Without further ado, here is the rest of the conversation.

Gentlemen, without further ado, I believe that Nadja is going to be joining us soon, but till the time that she does, let's get the show on the road. This is JP from AdLunam Inc. And, of course, today we are talking about the future of NFTs with Arvin Khamseh. Am I saying that right, Arvin?

Yes, you are.

Awesome. Arvin. I'm going to let you introduce yourself, but before that, I'd like to make an announcement, the reason why we're doing the show and what this is about. At AdLunam Inc. we are, of course, focused on bringing the future of NFTs, the trends of what NFTs are, what most people are seeing about them in the space and how they're actually, in so many different ways, changing the landscape that it is today. In addition to that, the reason that we started this show was not just to bring it to focus, but because there's so many interesting projects out there that do need experts as well like Arvin, that we have as a guest speaker today. We have so many of these options where we wanted a platform to be able to share this with everybody else in the Web3 space. All right, so one more point.

Views that I expressed on this program belong to that of the speaker. Please note that all of this is for education purposes only. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together and make some noise. I know you're on mute and you can only listen at this point, but put your hands together, scream, and let me hear you welcome our guest today, Arvin Khamseh. Arvin, welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you so much for having me. Just a quick background. I started marketing about ten years ago. Majority of what I've done, my specialty is in the paid advertising. I did that a lot with two companies. I started with small companies and then went all the way to lots of public companies running 500K a month advertising for public companies, specifically for investor relationship marketing, where I was finding short term and long term investors online for them. A lot of that is actually transferable in the Web3, which is why I was one of the, I would say few people who brought a lot of paid advertising and somewhat that could be controversial for some people into the Web3. I worked with 400 plus NFT projects. Some of them sold out, some of them are actually increasing their flow price right now.

I saw one today that the flow price actually has gone up, which is really cool in the bear market. As far as the, I guess projects I work with, I consult them, I have a program where people take anything they need as far as building the project, refining their utilities, selling out and increasing the flow price, I help them with that. Also some projects, I'm their CMO as well. Currently. There's one where I'm a CMO. It's called Yeti Secret Society. Yeah, give it back to you, JP.

Amazing. I mean, that's quite a resume for somebody in your position in an industry that's so young. I'm certain this journey must have been exciting, Arvin.

Yeah, of course, sometimes people ask me how I’ve worked with so many projects. One of the reason was just my approach that I brought from Web2, which was the emphasis on paid ads and paid influencers that was very different to a lot of other people. And so people got excited for that. Also, just to let you guys know, maybe November and December, when I would say was the peak for cryptos and then also for NFTs was happening. I was sleeping probably 2, 3 hours a day just taking calls with clients. It's unusual to have to work that much. It was a good time to do that.

These are certainly exciting times. NFTs have really kicked off in terms of the market cap, in terms of the trends, in terms of where you're seeing them even retail app. It's a whole new fad in the world today, right?

100%. It's actually interesting because on these Twitter spaces, a lot of times we get really excited about NFTs. Sometimes we get passionate discussing things. I was holding a space the other day for bitcoin maxis to talk about why they don't like NFTs and why NFTs are completely useless. We were basically debating them. I was obviously for NFTs, and I had some people who were for NFTs and then, of course, majority of the bitcoin maxis, they were essentially just saying, well, bitcoins, there are no NFTs on bitcoin and so therefore we can't have it. I say that just puts things into perspective. At the end of this day, there are a lot of people who've gotten to know what cryptos are, but that's still a very small proportion of the total population. That is maybe somewhere around the 5%, 10%. Now, even those search inquiries for NFTs have surpassed cryptos as of November last year.

It's still like NFT population is a sub population within crypto, so that's even smaller. It's also interesting that a lot of people also got into cryptos because of NFTs. It's not always the other way around where people learn about NFTs, then learn about cryptos, then learn about NFTs. Sometimes actually,it’s the other way around. It has actually contributed more people coming and learning about cryptos as well.

Well, certainly there's always multiple ways in which you can enter an industry and hey, if NFTs is the gateway, then NFTs is the gateway, right? Yeah, fantastic.

Just to add to that it's actually one of the main reasons I was talking to a lot of people in the crypto world, especially people who are bitcoin maxis and just bitcoin only type of, I guess, attitude when they say, oh yeah, we don't need NFTs, then we really want to have people adopting Bitcoins like NFT is actually bringing a lot of people into this industry, into the web3, but, yeah, I'll give it back to you.

No, fair enough. There is all that access interest that wants to get into it. So, yes, I'm with you on that. On the same front, what was your entry into the NFT space? I mean, what was it for you? Did you see something fancy? Did a friend get you into it? Tell us that story.

Yes, so I learned about crypto back in 2016. A friend of mine, Nick, he sold everything he had, including his car, and he had a nine to five job. He wasn't like a typical entrepreneur or anything, so that was actually very extreme for him to do that. Anyways, a few years after that, I called him and I was asking about how his work was going, and he told me, what work? I was like, what do you mean? He goes, well, he's just traveling and just doesn't need to work as much. That got me excited to crypto. I learned about first of all, obviously crypto has been, I guess bitcoin has been around since 2009, but the concept of like in 2016 was obviously still pretty new to a lot of people. I liked the concept that there was something new that a lot of people were taking advantage of benefiting from.

A few years later, maybe beginning of 2021 or end of 2020, I actually started following people online who were talking about it.One of the major things I was doing at the time was working with an advertising agency and running ads for a Fortune 100 company. There was a conversation we had in one of the meetings where just like, someone brought up who was like, hey, there are these things called NFTs and people buy I think it was like NBA TOPSHOTS they brought up. It was the cyberpunk that I learned about and I kept looking at it and I was just looking, just following the trend, just seeing how the prices were changing, how people were talking about it. I couldn't believe that I guess, how much of a growth people these projects would have, and then finally decided to just buy a bunch of NFTs and flip them.

I made some money from those and then until, I want to say October 2021, where one of artists from Italy, approached me and said if I could actually use paid ads. At the time it was Twitter ads to sell out his very small collection. In a week he sold out his collection. That was a proof of concept for me to understand. Okay, so a lot of things I've done with public companies with their investor relationship marketing. Just like the creating the deck is pretty much like an NFT website, for example. A lot of things was transferable and then I had some results and I thought, okay, cool, I'm going to actually basically just have a gig up and just tell people I can do this. I had a rush of people coming to me to help them with projects.

Wow, this is quite a transition, right? I mean, you certainly look at something and the acceleration from the journey that you've shared with us is phenomenal. I mean, if you had an artist sell out in a week on a platform where empty is a concern, using paid ads, that's really brilliant. That being said, we can expect that this craze happens during series or times of hike. Right now we've seen success over the last two years, but in sync with the crypto winter, right, sales have slowed down massively urban, and some people believe that this rise was just high and nothing more. What's your thought on the state of NFTs and where that stands today?

Cool. Just give people some perspective and also numbers. First of all, as far as the projects I was working with in November and December, marketing looked like essentially building a large Discord server, and 30% of those people would buy the NFTs. It didn't matter if the projects had an amazing utility, it didn't matter if they were a Dodge team, it didn't matter if they had a business plan, and it didn't matter if they had money. Honestly, nothing mattered except just having people on a Discord server. If you had enough people in your Discord server, people were just very trusting of everything that people would say. Not many people maybe been rugged at that time, and so everything was exciting and lots of projects were selling out regardless of the size of the collections. Obviously, starting from January this year, things started to change. I want to say maybe was the worst time when the lunar crash happened.

Now just to give people some numbers so they can understand the sales wise, between 20 to 21, I believe it was doubled. That's why everyone was super excited. The search inquiries for NFTs in November 2021 surpassed Cryptocurrencies. People were like, okay, this is the most exciting thing right now, the most trending things right now happening. In January, I want to say around January time, the number of wallets we had, I don't know if this is just an Ethereum or both Ethereum and Solano, but still it gives people some references. We had about 1.5 million wallets that were buying NFTs, and then by, I want to say, June, and there's a company I do a lot of spaces with where we actually go through these data in more details and they actually have a dashboard and everything. To get an exact number, just come on those spaces so you can get a better sense, but just give you a reference point.

By June of this year, it went to somewhere around 500K, so almost half of those. Now it's possible some people have more than one wallet. That's actually very possible, but again, it still gives people a reference point to know, hey, from 1 to 1.5 went to about 500. So about a third or half. Yes.

Wow, that's a steep decline going from such a high number. That's almost as the large number of coins. When you track losses against any of the tokens that are trading, you're going to see those numbers. It's also to some degree expected, wouldn't you say?

Yeah, okay, so I have a portfolio in crypto and NFTs as well, and I and every other person that I knew, and were all heavily invested. We all got hit. I remember just to give you like I want to say, in May of this year, literally, there was a time I opened one of my wallets, and the Ethereum that I had, it was half of what I had in that wallet. It was a significant amount that I lost. I've never had that much loss in such a short amount of time. I think it was like from a few days that I was looking at my wallet. The experience of that was so strange that I remember I was actually speaking on a stage in Cyprus, and then once my talk was done, it was this weird feeling of so it wasn't just crypto, by the way.

It was NFTs as well. NFTs dropped somewhere around like 40% to 70%, like all of the NFT sales and also flow price and everything. It was so strange of an experience for me. I remember literally after my talk was done, I didn't even look at people. I just looked down and just walked off the stage just because I was feeling so embarrassed about the space. I just felt like the space completely just crumbled. All these NFT projects that they had a lot of hopes and a lot of dreams, they just got wiped out. Like, the Wallace was obviously showing a lot lower numbers than it was previously showing. So it was a really weird experience. The cool thing that came from that was because a lot of projects went out. It also signaled the new projects that were coming in. At the time, I want to say maybe in January or February of this year, it was about 500 projects entering the market every day.

So it slowed down that growth significantly. It slowed down the growth, especially from people who weren't serious. Let's say e-commerce people who were like, okay, we've done the product. Now it's just like NFTs, let's get a fiber artist, let's get a community manager, let's just make a bunch of money, right? It slowed down the influx of people who didn't really have big or maybe long term plans with NFTs. In that way, it was actually really cool. Once we got over the painful experience, it actually was one of the best things I believe happened. Now we're seeing a lot of innovation, a lot of cool projects coming out. In that sense, it's actually pretty cool.

Of course. Can totally understand that part. I mean, sometimes you don't need diamond hands, you need a diamond stomach.

Yeah, just give people, I guess, a reference on that too. I would say between me and my friends, each of us maybe lost just ballpark at least like 200 to 500K. That happened over literally, like in a few weeks. We still obviously positive, like, we've done well in the Web3 and still do. It still was a very painfully weird experience to just go through that. Also people talk about people they do wealth management, they talk about it's great to have some losses because you learn how to manage better, not encouraging people to lose. I'm just saying it does give you perspective on what to do. Also it was somewhat unexpected to some extent what happened, but hey.

Yes, that’s just what the market teaches you .I appreciate the honesty because this is the honest part about it, right? I mean, you have to be prepared that these times of adversity are going to come. If you only have seen a bull run, never experienced a bear market, you're not going to understand the asset for what it truly is. Right, exactly. Yeah. That being said, it leads me to an interesting thought, right, given that these fluctuations come in, there's obviously that loss aspect, but NFTs still hold strong because people do love art. What do you think that the future and evolution of NFTs are going to be from its current manifestation Arvin?

The phase for NFTs that were just PFPs has already passed. You don't see PFP projects coming out as much. What I mean by that just profile pictures that typically don't have utilities or the equivalent would be having utilities that are just copied from previous years projects that's also essentially not having utilities because you're just not going to deliver on them, there’s no innovation, it's just boring and or not solving any new problems all of that. For that reason there's already been some evolution that we just came pretty fast as well. In terms of art, also there was an evolution. 2D art, I would say pixel art is not seen as much anymore on Solano. We still see it, but then again, just give people reference to Ethereum versus Solano as well. The latest number of collections that was counted, I believe it was Q1 of 2022, which was about 100,000 collections on Ethereum and about almost half of that on the Solana blockchain.

Now we have other blockchains too, like Polygon and XRP and so on so forth, but those are the major ones and that's the number of collections we have so far. Just so people have some insight into that. Going back to your question, so what's the evolution? A lot of times right now, projects coming out, they've changed their mindset from making money to deliver on promises. To either be able to deliver on promises without having as much money or getting funding from VCs, getting funding from angel investors, maybe money out of their own pocket, or having some revenue generating business model that they can deliver on promises without having the mint go through. Because a lot of projects weren't selling out during the bear market. That is a very big difference where last year we would see projects coming out and just say hey, trust us on Doc's team with very little information about what we're going to do.

Just trust us, we're going to do something great. People would actually trust them and give them lots of money essentially by buying the NFTs. They would either deliver or not deliver. Now we've gotten to a point where I guess we're going mostly in that direction, where first of all, projects need a lot more money to be able to survive the bear market, but also need more money to be able to deliver on some promises at least to show that they are a project that people can trust. So they need to show some proof. There was a period of time where projects went to the phase where they would do smaller collections. Went away from 10K collection sizes to smaller, maybe 300, 600, 1000 supplies. Now I remember June, so I have these group calls with people in my SOM program, it's an incubator program. Every week people would tell me they feel like no projects is selling out.

Now there were projects that were selling out, but people were obviously feeling the pressure that the sentiment of the Web3 market was not very excited about buying. Went in the direction of not many projects even continue with their minting or closing their minting and just saying, hey, we're just going to wait. People didn't know how long to wait. Is it going to be a month? It going to be a few weeks? It going to be ten months, twelve months, 15 months? How long will you wait? What if things change so significantly that your art, for example, is completely irrelevant by that time? You would have to spend even more money to create new art. Those were the challenges that came about. Now where we are right now is you see projects that are the blue chip collections, the top on the Magic Eden. They're actually raising a lot of money.

They're merging with other companies and then also just buying companies. They have a lot of money and they also spend a lot of money on acquiring people. For example, when NFT NYC happened, doodle alone, like the Doodles, the project, they spent so much money on just producing events. One of the members of my program, actually went on to talk to some of the, I guess, event producers of the events that were happening during the NFT NYC. Some of these events were a million dollar, $1.5 million type of events that people would spend just so people are entertained and awareness for the projects. Now if you think about that, to say every project could do something like that before they're maintained or even after they maintain, that's just not a realistic thing for a lot of projects. Then a lot of projects started to actually hold them back.

Now where are we going? I give all that context so people can kind of see the evolution of things. Where we're going with things are essentially projects that have a lot of money, projects that have a great team, that are doxed and also have a proper business model. They are very involved in the web3 space and also have a great way to onboard not only web3 people, but most importantly web2 people to buy their NFTs. They're going to be a lot more successful. With that, companies from web2, are trying to now take their space into the NFT. I said that actually if people go and watch my video, like interviews on YouTube or podcast, I literally said back in November, I said, I happen to know some of the companies, some of these large companies, they already prepared, for example, LinkedIn ads to tell people about what NFTs are or what web3 is about.

Now we're seeing, for example, a company like Tiffany and Co. From a web2 company. They just entered web3 without having any presence in the web3 market, connected themselves to a very well-known blue chip collection, cyberpunk. For people who don't know, the price was at 30 Itz. They made about $12 million and completely sold out, I believe sold out very quickly. I don't know what their flow price is. I still need to actually go and look. That's to say now companies, they are actually entering the market. These are not most of the time the small companies. Most of the times are actually larger companies. They're entering the market. With that, the game for utilities is going to change because now in the past, the competition for having an amazing utility wasn't there. People would just say, hey, we're going to have some utilities and then they would be successful.

Now web2 companies, they've had these utilities that they've been selling and serving people with for sometimes 100 years, and then they want to bring that into web3 space. If your project is just going to just give merch in the metaverse to some potential investors, then that type of utility is not going to be very attractive anymore. We're heading in a direction that the emphasis on utilities is obviously going to be very important. Also, on the other hand, I always say this, where I like artists, or whether it be musicians, painters or whatever, sometimes I don't know how they're going to be able to be successful in the web3, where a lot of emphasis on the utilities, but that's also going to take its form. So in the past, they're digital artists. They've been doing this, I guess, digital arts for the past 20 years, way before even NFTs came about.

When the NFT hype was happening, they came out and they had very little utilities, which was comfortable for them, and they could still sell out. Now there's obviously a huge emphasis on that. I think what we're going to see is some art is going to pull back on actually having collections out or there's going to be maybe less stigma around collections not selling out within five minutes or within 24 hours. In other words, we're going to see projects that have them mint open for the year. Not that's any different, but that's possible to be observed.

Well, I have an easy answer for those of you who are wondering, if you want to transition out of web2 to get to web3, build successful NFTs, if you want to win, call Arvin right On, because

You can have that one. I see that as a marketing professional, of course, this is certainly something that is your challenge on a daily basis, right? How do you put it out there in the way that somebody wants it? I'm glad that you touched upon the point about the vanity aspect of entity selling out like 5 seconds flat, right. It's a fantastic phenomenon when it happens, but there's no discounting of the artist's expression when it doesn't happen. There's still that expression. There's still that element out there that should get to people. That actually leads me to another thought, right. What are some of these projects or artists doing? Really? What are some of the things that they should be doing better?

This is very obviously interesting as far as like, okay, who is doing the right things?

Right?

I give an example of Goblin Town, this project that now I don't know the artist at all. I actually haven't looked to see that person isn't even stocks for people to know who that is. The project came out and they were really clear about the sentiment of the market. They said something like in their story. The narrative was something along the lines of we're going to have no roadmaps, we're going to have no discord ride, no white list, none of those stuff. Also the minting is going to be free. At the time that happened, a lot of people were just so tired of, like I said, there were 500 projects coming out every day. A lot of people were tired of having to mute 30, 40 discount service that we're part of. When these guys said, hey, we don't like that, we’re going to have none of that.

People got really excited in the web3 space.Web2 people, didn't even know what they were talking about. Web3 people, got really excited about that, and that's who they were targeting. So that's two points right there. One is the narrative, the other one is the targeting. Targeting is important because you're usually going to have a bunch of targets. One is going to be your web3 people. There are people who are investing in NFTs to trade them. We can get specific about that too. Like we have degens and non-degens and so on and so forth. Anyways, we've got the web3 people and then we've got the web2 people. Now web2 people, sometimes they're interested in just the art. So they want to collect the art. Sometimes they're interested in just the utilities. Sometimes they're interested in all of them too, but I guess all of their features as well.

To give examples of one when they were just interested in utility, let's say there's an NFT project that revolves around comic books. Comic fans will be one of the targets. Not necessarily that they have to be versed in what NFTs are not necessarily liking the actual art, but they just like comic books. Anything that NFT project promises the holders of the NFT, they're just going to be interested. They're going to onboard themselves somehow into that project. The targeting is very important and for people who are the projects who understand that they're having a better time in actually selling their NFT, so branding their NFT in a way that makes sense. I give you guys another example. Actually, I'm looking to launch my own collection on Solana. I was on a Twitter space and I actually pitched this idea to Solana people. I said, hey, I'm thinking of launching this collection.

I have my friend who is a former Mr. Canada and we're thinking of doing an NFT where it allows you to essentially get fitness programs and coaching and everything from this bodybuilder so you can be a bodybuilder too. In theory that may make sense, but in reality, majority of the web3 people are never going to get into bodybuilding. To understand that concept, it's very important to just know your web3, I guess, audience who they are, right? So that project would never make sense. We obviously find it and change it to something that would make sense. I'll launch it in a few weeks so you guys see it. It's very important to have a very clear understanding of the market and then the story is very important. The story, for example, Goblin Town talks about. I guess the narrative talks about that the story for, let's say, Board Apes, so it was essentially, as Nicole.

The CEO for Yuga Labs, describes it, she said that they were two, I guess the two founders, and they were writers, so they didn't really have artwork. They thought, okay, what if they would do a collective art and where people would actually create the art? They thought, well, if they do that, everyone's going to draw penises. They thought, okay, where people would draw penises, that would be bathroom stall and that would be in a dive bar. Or maybe that's a yacht club and maybe it's a yacht club in a swamp. That's how that scene was formed in their mind and they were able to actually convey that scene, that messaging. If you guys go to their website, if you look at the image that they have, that's what they're trying to show. That's very important for projects to understand the elements. These images that you see, they're not just random.

So successful projects understand these things. They paint the scene, they have a narrative, they know who they're targeting, their artwork is great, the utilities are great. There are a lot of factors, but those are some really important factors that projects that are doing right. They are able to distinguish themselves and get people excited to APEN and buy their NFTs.

Well, spot on. Arvin, you're absolutely right from the thought process of having the utility and function by understanding your audience, which is extremely important. Just the same classic example you gave the idea that you had about the NFT with Mr. Canada and yes, web3 people may not be as much into fitness as people from other industries, for example.

Right?

So, yes, understanding your audience is certainly one of those things that projects have to understand if they're going to create an offering for somebody else. What are some of the other things you see as an absolute must do for projects to incorporate NFTs into either their business or utility alerts?

What does it must do for them to sell out the project?

Yeah, for them to have that kind of demand where there are successful NFT projects at the end of it.

Yes. I have this idea it's made up. It's kind of funny. I have a lot of these theories around how things should be and then sometimes I write about it too. These are like hypotheses, right? There's no books about this, didn’t go to school for NFT marketing. Just like how I said earlier on, I said we used to make discord surveys essentially three to five times the number of supplies to sell out. That's a number I actually came up with. It's funny because I've actually had people talking to me and then when I tell them be like, hey, I think this is the number of discourse that is fine for us for this project. They'd be like, no, it has to be three to five times. Where did you get that number? That's like a made up number I literally just came up with.

I'm going to give you guys a hypothesis that it's made up. It's just based on my experience with working with projects. This is what I'm seeing. The hypothesis is that every project needs to go into tourist spaces and they need to do somewhere around 100 tourist spaces, like different tour spaces. Now this is again completely made up, but at least and even if they don't do that, even if they strive to do that, this does a few things for projects. One is that it allows them well if they're a team. Sometimes they're just like a one man show. I guess that doesn't apply in there. If they're a team, they actually really understand the team itself. They understand the project, but they also understand how things work within their company. These are one of the things we didn't talk about as far as the evolution NFTs.

They're going the direction of actually being treated like startups, just like how one out of every ten startups are successful. If this is just going to be like that too, so they're going to be treated like that. Anyways, going back to what I was saying, they do these spaces and then they get to actually have that flow with their team. It actually helps projects really understand the projects themselves. Also it's very important because people come on these tourist spaces, they grill them intentionally or not intentionally, and they get to refine their projects. They make it really good. The problem with a lot of projects is that they go build a huge community, they don't have any contact with the community and then they go to the midday and they get surprised what people are not buying. Now all this time everyone had all these objections, they were just not listening, right?

It's very important to obviously be on these tourist spaces, being contact with people right from the very front so you can fix all the problems. Another factor that's very important is that there are conversations about brands in Twitter spaces and that's actually a very limited number of Twitter spaces out there right now. If you actually master that, it's almost like a street cred where you've now achieved this badge of honor that you can actually launch an NFT project in the web3 space, right? So you have earned your respect. Again, this is obviously just take it as something that I've seen this working, not so much of there's a science maybe behind it. Maybe there is, I don't know. That's another factor that's very important with Twitter spaces. And then also obviously just organically. A lot of people get to so just like how in the web2.

We had, for example, in 2001 or maybe 2000 with this guy called Jeff Walker. He came up with this idea of product launch formula. He would just say, okay, so instead of the old school calling someone and just keep explaining your offer to them. Now for those people, maybe making connection, maybe keep explaining your utilities. Or what problems your NFT is solving or why it's good for people to buy instead of explaining that so many times over the phone conversation. What if you could just do all those objections and what you're actually explaining into a bunch of videos and just feed it to people and then people would buy all your stuff. So that was cool. It is a very old thing, actually, in the web2 space, and a lot of people use it. Now, in Twitter spaces, it's a very similar concept.

People come in and usually you get the same people, they just come in and they get nurtured through these twitter spaces with you in a sense that they learn different aspects of your project every time they come on these twitter spaces.

Right?

That's one of the reasons I do these Twitter spaces myself, because I want people to get to know me, get to know how I work with people. Those are some of the very important things that twitter spaces allow people to do. Plus, I mean, somewhat important for a lot of projects out there, especially the ones that don't have as much money to spend, is that they're free, right? You can get lots of people actually come in organically without you spending a time to actually listen to you. So that's awesome as well.

Certainly you give people a platform and if they know how to use it well, it's certainly something that's a tool that should be in everybody's toolkit, any marketer’s toolkit.

Exactly.

To comment a little about what you're saying, I think your theory is based on very sound fundamentals, right. With Twitter spaces. You take a project, you're going to the market, you're creating that connection, the entire team begins to understand what exactly it is that they're solving. What is my project? What am I about? What do I stand for, most importantly? Filter down to Simon Cynic says the why am I doing this?

Right?

So, yeah, I think Arvin, at some point you're either going to have a PhD, a thesis, or a book that you can do with this.

Do you know what? Why I'm not doing a book is that this stuff changes so rapidly. I'm so afraid by the time I thought I write something and by the time I publish it becomes irrelevant, very mad. But I'm eventually going to do that.

Well, maybe you can start a quick case study and turn those into an NFT. Who knows, right?

Yeah. It's been literally my mind, but things changed so rapidly. Literally, there's this running joke with some of the people, like I do this stuff with that if we take a day off, we're going to behind eight years. That's how fast this industry is going. That's been one of the reasons I've held back on, actually. I read articles and there's going to be one article on Entrepreneur actually coming out probably next week about paid ads in the web3 space. The book thing, I just been holding back big time.

Well, that's certainly something to look forward to. Of course, Arvin certainly looking forward to your launch as well. That being said, however, I do have one question for you, which I'd like you to share with us and the audience today.

Right?

That is what is your favorite NFT and why?

Okay, so I'm biased right now, so I'm bullish about Yeti Secret Society because I'm their CMO. The reason I like them By the way, you can see, like, some of these things I just talked about, I'm doing it with obviously them. The reason I like it is because we have money. We have essentially VC money for the next ten years. All the promises that we have on our roadmap is already been paid for. The Yacht Club, the giveaways that we talked about. We haven't started talking about it, so I'm not going to say what they are, but they're pretty massive, and it's very different to a lot of people, a lot of projects out there where they say they have these big goals and then you have to wait until the minting happened. The cool thing about this project is that you don't have to like, we actually don't rely on minting happen.

So cool team. I really love my team. If you come on any Twitter spaces with us, literally, you can see really good lives, good people. So those are some of the reasons.

Yeah. Okay. So, yes, I know that there is a bias, but thank you for sharing that because it's a narrative of the project that's there, and you shared with us the insight. It's the team that's actually making the magic happen. So that's absolutely fantastic. Cool. I will take you up, I will pick you up on that offer to come and meet your team at some point in hopefully the near future. Right?

Cool.

Alright, so, Arvin, we do have one of our listeners in today, I believe it's Ray, who had raised his hand to ask a question. Ray, if your hand is still raised or if the host could share with me what's the question that Ray had for us today. Go for it.

I think they need to ask for permission to speak first.

Yeah, I don't see him listed as a speaker, but oh, there he is. Ray, go for it. Oh, boy.

Okay.

Looks like Ray is also bitten by the same bug. There should be some way he's connecting again.

Okay, DM your question to JP or AdLunam or just read it. You can do that too.

Thank you. Thank you, Arvin. Yes. All right, so if there's anyone else in the room that has a question that they want to ask, you can use these channels. Either tweet to AdLunam Inc, to Arvin or to JP. It's all good. Or raise your hand and we can give you the opportunity to ask your question right away to Arvin Khamseh.

Yeah, honestly, it's like so much information. Sometimes it takes people to process things. Don't worry, you can always ask it later if you guys wanted to.

Okay. Yeah, that's it. Okay, Ray is back in the house. Ray, go for it. Unmute, you can ask your question. Cherokee is up next. Otherwise, Cherokee, if you'd like to go first, whoever's got the fastest fingers, you can unmute and go ahead and ask your question. Okay.

All right.

Cherokee, your voice is coming in a little broken.

Yeah, maybe it's like a Twitter thing. Sometimes Twitter is like that. Everyone has issues.

Oh, exactly. Sometimes it's so nice, it's not funny.

Yeah, trust me, guys, these guys, they're not asking difficult questions and we're doing it to them. It's just actually, Twitter is doing it.

Yeah.

Well, Cherokee, what I'd recommend is if you can tweet in your question, we can ask it before the show because we got a minute before we have to wrap this up. So let's move that one along. If not, if you can tweet it, we will ask Arvin that question, or you can ask it to him directly on his Twitter handle and we can have answer back for you, Arvin, to keep the show moving. I got to ask, what is your message to the audience that's listening in today and the ones that are going to listen to this down the line?

Honestly, biggest thing I would say, go hard on innovating and just being bold and do things that you may get a lot of pushbacks for, but eventually it's really good for this space. If you start thinking about solving problems instead of talking about everyone else on Twitter as we do, I think those two things are very important for this space. It actually is helping the growth of not only the NFT space, but then the web3 space in general, and then also the crypto community, too. I'm really big on advocating for crypto as well. Literally, yesterday, I just couldn't access a bank card and I had to wait for an hour and then realized I have crypto. I can just go to a crypto exchange and I cashed it out in like, 2 seconds. Crypto is just a very useful application for a lot of people in their life.

Anyways, the point is definitely go and do things that other people haven't done. Like Tiffany and Co, they came up with the 38th mint price with yeti. We're doing a four ETH mint price. Do things that you may not know exactly how to do it, but then if that works out, then you've just done something new for people to learn from and do. Create great things and deliver on your promises. All of those.

Thank you, Arvin. Those are truly words to live by, ladies and gentlemen. Those of you that are tuned in today. Thank you so much for coming in. Arvin, it's been an absolute treat listening to you and learning so much from your insight, your experimentation, your spirit of adventure and no fears. Thank you, Arvin, for being here today.

Yes, thank you so much for having me.

Hey, it's been absolute fun. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm JP from AdLunam Inc., tune again same time next week to learn more about The Future of NFTs with our guests on the show who share their insight about what's happening in the NFT space. For those of you who do not know, we also have a show called Diving Into Crypto that's there on Thursdays at exactly the same time in. To everyone in the room, have a great day. Cheers.

I hope you enjoyed the very interesting discussion we had today about marketing and NFTs. Be sure to follow Arvin on Twitter at ArvinkNft and to you at home or wherever in the world you are as you're tuning into this. Thank you for spending this time with us today. I trust that Arvin's behind the scenes insight on marketing in the NFT space has made this time well spent. Catch you again next time for another episode of The Future of NFTs, brought to you by AdLunam. Cheers.