The NFT Market Must Expand Or Die
Or: Why We Built an NFT CRCMS.
NFT CRCMS. Holy 💩 that is a lot of letters.
Last month, after a year of toiling in the NFT salt mines and smashing into the same pain points with each client project, our team at Brovember Rain, along with the good fine folks at Code Particle, decided to build a Web3 Creator Platform for NFT projects. To be fair, our entire team comes from the creator economy, where the term “Web3 Creator Platform” inherently makes sense, but how do we explain the Creator Platform concept to someone from another industry? Well it’s sort of a mashup of a CRM and a CMS but for NFTs. An NFTCRCMS.
Our product is called DropMint (for now). We are finalizing an MVP for our current clients, and are raising money to turn that product into a v.1. And, because we’re raising money, I’m going to link to our sizzle deck and analyst deck an obnoxious number of times in this text. You’ve been warned.
Now, here’s why we’re building it.
Problem: The NFT market must expand or die.
On average, only 42000 unique wallets buy an NFT of any sort on any given day. And only 360,000 total unique wallets have ever held an NFT as of January 2022. I’ve seen some stats that say there are a million global HODLers, but still, that is a tiny number. If we remove a couple big P2E games and adjust for the fact that many wallets have redundant ownership and/or are owned by a non-human entity, it’s safe to say that all of those massively successful NFT community projects you’ve heard about are owned by the same 10–50,000 people (combined).
In a B2C sense, Web3 adoption is not expanding. The NFT market, in particular, has not achieved investor-class escape velocity. It has become a very small closed loop. And the cause of this is, as it usually is, a combination of carelessness and greed.
There are so many barriers to entry. Some of them are obligatory, some of them are intentional, and some of them are sentimental. But whether real, contrived, or just perceived, they exist. And it seems as though no one else is trying to punch holes in them.
Here’s the thing. You’ve probably never driven a Bugatti Veyron. Bugatti only ever made 450 units across all models of the Veyron. There’s an excellent chance that you’ve never seen a Bugatti Veyron. During the production run of the Veyron, however, Honda produced millions of Civics. I’d bet dollars to donuts you’ve seen one of those…probably driven one too.
We want to help the web3 Hondas of the world build and maintain web3 Civics for you to drive.
Problem: We need better and easier ways to provide value.
In addition to market hurdles, there is also market resistance. Most people have no interest in blockchain technology, web3 or NFT programs because they have never seen any of these things provide value to or improve the lives of anyone they know.
Most celebrities, IP owners and brands that experiment with NFT projects today are doing so as a toe-dipping exercise. We know from experience and client feedback that there is mass interest in moving fan clubs, loyalty programs and crowdfunding to a NFT-based solution, but the current friction is overwhelming, the current workflow is confusing, and the adoption curve for fans seems steep. So brands experiment, see only edge-case adoption, and cut bait.
In order to make sense in web3, rather than addressing the margin of a fandom that may also collect NFTs, creators and brands will need to provide value for their entire fandoms. And to do that, they will need to:
A) Build and manage NFT projects using their current workflows and personnel
B) Build web3 (token auth) solutions that integrate their current communication channels and present fans with incentives they already want and value…AKA “hit em where they live”. Let’s be honest…we do NOT live in a web3 world. We live in a web2.5 world and that world needs products like DropMint to make our web3 fantasy a reality.
By focusing on onboarding entire communities and facilitating long-term engagement services, DropMint will help creators deliver maximum value to devoted fans, over the longest possible timeline. That’s right, we’re bringing back DAU, average engagement and ARR. We’re doing the boring stuff.
Problem: Nobody is doing the boring stuff.
Community, like a love affair, isn’t about the occasional grand tentpole gesture. It’s about all the little, mundane, trivial things you do every day to show people that you care and that you are in this together. It’s about uniting around shared passion and rowing in the same direction, all day, every day, stroke by stroke.
That level of community can’t be fabricated overnight, can’t be done without care, and can’t be done by a group that has no shared affinity other than profit. It has to be real. And this is why participating in most NFT projects today is such a short term, lonely and ultimately hollow experience. The moon is a lonely place.
Everyone in NFT world gets so caught up in the hype, the eyeball melting, apeing, flipping, masters-of-the-universe, zero-sum bullshit that no one even thinks about sitting together and doing boring things for a long time. Even when it’s not a rug, it’s a rug.
So I suppose what we’re building here is less “Wen moon” and more “How Earth”. How do we make this cool new technology work for us all in a tangible way and at scale?
As the late, great Popa Wu said:
“We gotta keep it real with reality and reality gon keep it real with us”
