Want to learn more about what NFTs are or how your company can benefit from NFTs? If so, read the previous articles in this series.
The process of creating NFTs
It may sound like a cliché, but it’s still true. You need to start with a plan, what do you want the holders of your NFT to be able to do? Or what value will your NFT generate for them and your business? After deciding on the general outline, it’s time to work through the following steps:
1. Strategy and Concept
Planning ahead is key for any project, including NFT projects. Make sure you have a general idea of what you want to achieve with your NFT project: what is your goal or purpose? Are you going to target a specific audience or everyone? Do you have any objectives you want to reach by creating your NFT collection?
2. Artwork
Create a visually appealing (or not) artwork to make your project stand out and/or show it’s connection to your company. This is done early as design often takes the longest to finalize. In fact, the design itself can be a form of utility because of the collectiveness of art.
3. Utility
Utility translates to value, so what value will your NFT collection bring to the people minting (buying from you directly by registering a NFT on the blockchain) and/or holding them? This can be access to closed communities or gaining a certain amount of crypto by staking (a crypto mechanism) them to generate actual (monetary) value. Make sure your utility is something people would want to queue outside in the rain for (figuratively speaking, of course).
4. Creation
Once you have created the artworks and utilities for your NFT project, you can start to set up everything for your minting event. This includes connecting the artwork with the metadata needed to register your project on the blockchain of your choice. This can be a tricky job that requires a developer with a certain Web3 skillset. Web3 is the successor of Web2 and enables a trust free online environment, more on this subject later.
5. Marketing
When you are done setting up everything you can focus on getting attention for your project. In NFT slang you want your project to be hyped, or for the person on the street, you really want people to start talking about your project. You can achieve this by marketing. Send out the right message at the right time, like sneak previews and announcements about collaborations. Don’t forget to start discussions about (upcoming) utility and, most importantly, interact with (not to) your audience through platforms like Twitter and Discord.
6. Minting
Once you've established all the above it’s time to (let people) mint your NFT. Minting is the process of registering a NFT on the blockchain, which costs a bit of GAS (i.e., the transaction fee you pay whenever you interact with the blockchain). The trick is to make your audience mint your NFTs instead of doing this yourself, so you don’t have to pay the initial minting GAS for your entire collection.
The easiest way to look at minting is to see it as a plane ticket sale. When you buy a ticket online, you also get a row and seat number. There will only be one ticket for this specific seat, making it unique. During the process of minting, you buy and register your NFT at the same time. That means the registered data on the blockchain shows everyone that you (or rather your wallet) has minted and acquired the NFT at the time of minting. The main goal at this stage is to sell all your NFTs, which is easiest when you have significant traffic because your project has a lot of hype!
7. Building
After minting comes building – community building! When your mint is over you want to keep (increasingly) interacting with your community. In other words, making your NFT community as good as possible, as well as building new or extra utility to keep people coming back, wanting more. This makes people want to join your community more (by buying your NFT), and pushes the price up as it creates buzz around the world. Building never stops because when it does your NFT project is likely decline in attractiveness, price, and holders. So, keep building or hire people to do it for you!
Need help? Let us know!
Following these steps will help you create a sale-ready NFT collection or single NFT. If you have questions or are struggling with certain points of the creation process, don’t hesitate to contact our specialists at Springbok Agency. We’d love to help you with (any part of) the process. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!