Thread by @chriscantino

How our community grew from a .2 ETH mint to a 6.9 ETH floor in three months. 🧵

Fact: There is too much noise in the NFT space for new entrants to succeed without a moat.

So many projects are in it for quick cash grabs, and provide only the shallowest guarantee of future value.

If you want to build for the long-term, pay attention to what we’ve learned.

Bake the Value In

Many projects promise vague “utility”—something like “access our alpha channel” with no quantifiable value.

Others promise only speculation. The issue is, collectors have little incentive to hold tokens that don’t moon.

Here’s how we solved this problem. 👇

With @CPGclub, we launched with three concrete promises of value.

1) A base of 50+ mentors who agreed to support our community of emerging web3 voices
2) Deal flow access for investors
3) Digital and local events

These offerings allowed us to:

-create quantifiable value on day one
-host discussions that reflected value for NFT holders
-create content to share back onto social
-leverage the networks of our generous mentors
-demonstrate that we were building a platform beyond NFTs

Another unique mechanic: we gave mentors an additional free token for them to share with a mentee of their choosing.

This seeded the community organically, improved the project’s diversity, and was another clear demonstration of our value proposition to incubate web3 talent.

We effectively decentralized the project by leveraging existing networks. This derisked our project by distributing points of failure.

And most importantly, we made it clear that the value in our NFTs was baked in. Less emphasis on speculation, more on community and education.

Don’t Pump the Mint Price

From convos we had, we understood people were willing to pay 1 ETH+ to mint. It was tempting to price it high, but we anticipated three issues:

1) some people would be priced out
2) our community would lack diversity
3) we might not sell out

So, we chose to price it at .2.

The result? Our project sold out in an hour, the floor ran up to 3 ETH, and we had an inclusive community base.

Sometimes it’s more about the accessibility you’re offering that matters—not how much you can extract per transaction.

Keep Building

Instead, of focusing on the floor, our community put our heads down and started building.

Here’s some of the value we’ve created since. 👇

-big investments in web3 x consumer startups
-DAO + NFT + brand incubations
-early access to partner NFT projects
-local and digital events
-onboarding more mentors
-private feeds of curated wallet activity
-airdrop databases
-subchats for devs, defi, media operators
-much more

A side effect: stories about these conversations and products we're building leaked on Twitter, driving interest.

We learned that by honoring our members and sharing their contributions, that it creates a marketing flywheel.

When your community wins, ring the f*cking bell.

Furthermore, we started taking content from members (e.g. Twitter threads) and bringing them into the group. This kickstarted more energy to build products and dive down deep rabbit holes.

So much more powerful than the typical floor talk that happens in “communities.”

Through this whole process, deep relationships have been formed. People say their membership has paid off in multiples—not just in monetary value, but in education, friendships, and networks they’ve established.

The best part is, it’s the community creating 100% of the value.

Btw, when real community forms like that, signs of memes begin to appear.

Themes, symbols, and common language that repeats over time.

Once you recognize these, start creating memes and sharing them with the world. They’re a vital form of marketing, and help the community bond.

Trust, your community will tell you everything you need to know. Reward them for providing feedback, shout them out, and show everyone how their contributions are informing decisions at the highest level.

R&D 🤝 Marketing 🤝 Product Dev 🤝 Community

Also, this is important… when your project starts taking off, keep things grounded by giving back.

For example, CPG pulled together to review hundreds of applications for a holiday campaign that minted a dozen passes to new members who missed our mint. 12daysofcpg.club

I’m more excited about what comes next than anything we've built to date, and I can tell you... all the value is being created by our members.

It sounds simple, but the best thing you can do to foster enduring value is to resource your community—they have everything you need.

Thx for reading fam. For more tweetstorms on NFTs and community, follow along with me @chriscantino.

@cpgclub ❤️‍🔥